Hawthorne looked out the transparent wall of the wardroom. “It’s good to be back,” he said.

  “Get that,” said Shorty McClellan. “From wine and women competing in droves for the company of a glamorous interplanetary explorer, it is good to be back. This man is crazy.”

  The geophysicist, Wim Dykstra, nodded with seriousness. He was the tall swarthy breed of Dutchman, whose ancestral memories are of Castilian uplands. Perhaps that is why so many of them feel forever homeless.

  “I think I understand, Nat,” he said. “I read between the lines of my mail. Is it that bad on Earth?”

  “In some ways.” Hawthorne leaned against the wall, staring into Venus night.

  The cetoids were playing about the station. Joyous torpedo shapes would hurtle from the water, streaming liquid, radiance, arch over and come down in a fountain that burned. And then they threshed the sea and were off around a mile-wide circle, rolling and tumbling. The cannon-crack of bodies and flukes could be heard this far up.

  “I was afraid of that. I do not know if I want to take my next furlough when it comes,” said Dykstra.

  McClellan looked bewildered. “What’re you fellows talking about?” he asked. “What’s wrong?”

  Hawthorne sighed. “I don’t know where to begin,” he said. “The trouble is, Shorty, you see Earth continually. Get back from a voyage and you’re there for weeks or months before taking off again. But we…we’re gone three, four, five years at a stretch. We notice the changes.”

  “Oh, sure.” McClellan shifted his weight uneasily in his chair. “Sure, I suppose you aren’t used to—well, the gangs, or the corvées, or the fact that they’ve begun to ration dwelling space in America since the last time you were there. But still, you guys are well paid, and your job has prestige. You rate special privileges. What are you complaining about?”

  “Call it the atmosphere,” said Hawthorne. He sketched a smile. “If God existed, which thank God He doesn’t, I’d say He has forgotten Earth.”

  Dykstra flushed. “God does not forget,” he said. “Men do.”

  “Sorry, Wim,” said Hawthorne. “But I’ve seen—not just Earth. Earth is too big to be anything but statistics. I visited my own country, the place where I grew up. And the lake where I went fishing as a kid is an alga farm and my mother has to share one miserable room with a yattering old biddy she can’t stand the sight of.

  “What’s worse, they’ve cut down Bobolink Grove to put up still another slum mislabeled a housing project, and the gangs are operating in open daylight now. Armed escort has become a major industry. I walk into a bar and not a face is happy. They’re just staring stupefied at a telescreen, and—” He pulled up short. “Never mind. I probably exaggerate.”

  “I’ll say you do,” said McClellan. “Why, I can show you places where no man has been since the Indians left—if it’s nature you want. You’ve never been to San Francisco, have you? Well, come with me to a pub I know in North Beach, and I’ll show you the time of your life.”

  “Sure,” said Hawthorne. “What I wonder is, how much longer will those fragments survive?”

  “Some of them, indefinitely,” said McClellan. “They’re corporate property. These days C. P. means private estates.”

  Wim Dykstra nodded. “The rich get richer,” he said, “and the poor get poorer, and the middle class vanishes. Eventually there is the fossilized Empire. I have read history.”

  He regarded Hawthorne out of dark, thoughtful eyes. “Medieval feudalism and monasticism evolved within the Roman domain: they were there when it fell apart. I wonder if a parallel development may not already be taking place. The feudalism of the large organizations on Earth; the monasticism of planetary stations like this.”

  “Complete with celibacy,” grimaced McClellan. “Me, I’ll take the feudalism!”

  Hawthorne sighed again. There was always a price. Sex-suppressive pills, and the memory of fervent lips and clinging arms on Earth were often poor comfort.

  “We’re not a very good analogy, Wim,” he argued. “In the first place, we live entirely off the jewel trade. Because it’s profitable, we’re allowed to carry on the scientific work which interests us personally: that’s part of our wage, in effect. But if the cetoids stopped bringing gems, we’d be hauled home so fast we’d meet ourselves coming back. You know nobody will pay the fabulous cost of interplanetary freight for knowledge—only for luxuries.”

  Dykstra shrugged. “What of it? The economics is irrelevant to our monasticism. Have you ever drunk Benedictine?”

  “Uh…yeah, I get it. But also, we’re only celibate by necessity. Our big hope is that eventually we have our own women.”

  Dykstra smiled. “I am not pressing the analogy too close,” he said. “My point is that we feel ourselves serving a larger purpose, a cultural purpose. Science, in our case, rather than religion, but still a purpose worth all the isolation and other sacrifice; If, in our hearts, we really consider the isolation a sacrifice.”

  Hawthorne winced. Sometimes Dykstra was too analytical. Indeed, thought Hawthorne, the station personnel were monks. Wim himself—but he was a passionate man, fortunate enough to be single-minded. Hawthorne, less lucky, had spent fifteen years shaking off a Puritan upbringing, and finally realized that he never would. He had killed his fathers unmerciful God, but the ghost would always haunt him.

  He could now try to make up for long self-denial by an Earthside leave which was one continuous orgy, but the sense of sin plagued him notwithstanding, disguised as bitterness. I have been iniquitous upon Terra. Ergo, Terra is a sink of evil.

  Dykstra continued, with a sudden unwonted tension in his voice. “The analogy with medieval monasteries holds good in another respect too. They thought they were retreating from the world. Instead, they became the nucleus of its next stage. And we too, unwittingly until now, may have changed history.”

  “Uh-uh,” denied McClellan. “You can’t have a history without a next generation, can you? And there’s not a woman on all Venus.”

  Hawthorne said, quickly, to get away from his own thoughts: “There was talk in the Company offices about that. They’d like to arrange it, if they can, to give all of us more incentive to, stay. They think maybe it’ll be possible. If trade continues to expand, the Station will have to be enlarged, and the new people could just as well be female technicians and scientists.”

  “That could lead to trouble,” said McClellan.

  “Not if there were enough to go around,” said Hawthorne.

  “And nobody signs on here who hasn’t long ago given up any hope of enriching their lives with romantic love, or fatherhood.”

  “They could have that,” murmured Dykstra. “Fatherhood, I mean.”

  “Kids?” Hawthorne was startled. “On Venus?”

  A look of exultant triumph flickered across Dykstra’s face. Hawthorne, reverting to the sensitivity of intimate years, knew that Dykstra had a secret; which he wanted to shout to the universe, but could not yet. Dykstra had discovered something wonderful.

  To give him a lead, Hawthorne said: “I’ve been so busy swapping gossip, I’ve had no time for shop talk. What have you learned about this planet since I left?”

  “Some promising things,” said Dykstra, evasively. His tone was still not altogether steady.

  “Found how the firegems are created?”

  “Heavens, no. That would scuttle us, wouldn’t it—if they could be synthesized? No…you can talk to Chris, if you wish. But I know he has only established that they are a biological product, like pearls. Apparently several strains of bacteroids are involved, which exist only under Venusian deep-sea conditions.”

  “Learn more about the life cycle?” asked McClellan. He had a spaceman’s somewhat morbid fascination with any organisms that got along without oxygen.

  “Yes, Chris and Mamoru and their co-workers have developed quite a lot of the detailed chemistry,” said Dykstra. “It is over my head, Nat. But you will want to study it, and they have been anxious for your help as an ecologist. You know this business of the plants, if one may call them that, using solar energy to build up unsaturated compounds, which the creatures we call animals then oxidize? Oxidation need not involve oxygen, Shorty.”

  “I know that much chemistry,” said McClellan, looking hurt.

  “Well, in a general way the reactions involved did not seem energetic enough to power animals the size of Oscar” No enzymes could be identified which—” He paused, frowning a little. “Anyhow, Mamoru got to thinking about fermentation, the closest Terrestrial analogy. And it seems that micro-organisms really are involved. The Venusian enzymes are indistinguishable from…shall we call them viruses, for lack of a better name? Certain forms even seem to function like genes. How is that for a symbiosis, eh? Puts the classical examples in the shade.”

  Hawthorne whistled.

  “I daresay it’s a very fascinating new concept,” said McClellan. “As for myself, I wish you’d hurry up and give us our cargo, so we can go home. Not that I don’t like you guys, but you’re not exactly my type.”

  “It will take a few days,” said Dykstra. “It always does.”

  “Well, just so they’re Earth days, not Venusian.”

  I may have a most important letter for you to deliver,” said Dykstra. “I have not yet gathered the crucial data, but you must wait for that if nothing else.”

  Suddenly he shivered with excitement.

  -3-

  The long nights were devoted to study of material gathered in the daytime. When Hawthorne emerged into sunrise, where mists smoked along purple wafers under a sky like nacre,” the whole station seemed to explode outward around him; Wim Dykstra had already scooted off with his new assistant, little Jimmy Cheng-tung of the hopeful grin, and their two-man sub was over the horizon, picking up data-recording, units off the sea bottom. Now boats left the wharf in every direction: Diehl and Matsumoto to gather pseudo-plankton, Vassiliev after some of the beautiful coralite on Erebus Bank, Lafarge continuing his mapping of the currents, Glass heading straight up to investigate the clouds a bit more…

  The space ferry had been given its first loading during the night. Shorty McClellan walked across a bare deck with Hawthorne and Captain Jevons. “Expect me back again about local sundown,” he said. “No use coming before then, with everyone out fossicking?”

  “I imagine not.” Jevons, white-haired and dignified, looked wistfully at Lafarge’s retreating craft.

  Five cetoids frisked in its wake, leaping and spouting and gaily swimming rings around it. Nobody had invited them, but by now few men would have ventured out of station view without such an escort.

  More than once, when accidents happened—and they happened often on an entire planet as big and varied as Earth—the cetoids had saved lives. A man could ride on the back of one, if worst came to worst, but more often several would labor to keep a damaged vessel afloat, as if they knew the cost of hauling even a rowboat across space.

  “I’d like to go fossicking myself,” said Jevons. He chuckled. “But someone has to mind the store.”

  “Uh, how did the Veenies go for that last lot of stuff?” asked McClellan. “The plastic jewelry?”

  “They didn’t,” said Jevons. “They simply ignored it. Proving, at least, that they have good taste. Do you want the beads back?”

  “Lord, no! Chuck ’em in the ocean. Can you recommend any other novelties? Anything you think they might like?”

  “Well,” said Hawthorne, “I’ve speculated about tools such as they could use, designed to be held in the mouth. And—”

  “We’d better experiment with that right here, before getting samples from Earth,” said Jevons. “I’m skeptical, myself. What use would a hammer or a knife be to a cetoid?”

  “Actually,” said Hawthorne, “I was thinking about a saw. To cut coralite blocks and make shelters on the sea bottom.”

  “Whatever for?” asked McClellan, astonished.

  “I don’t know,” said Hawthorne. “There’s so little we know. Probably not shelters against undersea weather—” though that might not be absolutely fantastic, either. “There are cold currents in the depths, I’m sure. What I had in mind, was—I’ve seen scars on many cetoids, like teeth marks, but left by something gigantic.”

  “It’s an idea.” Jevons smiled. “It’s good to have you back ideating, Nat. And it’s decent of you to volunteer to take your station watch the first thing, right after our return. That wasn’t expected of you.”

  “Ah, he’s got memories to soften the moment,” said McClellan. “I saw him in a hostess joint in Chicago. Brother, was he making time!”

  The air masks hid most expression, but Hawthorne felt his ears redden. Jevons minded his own business, but he was old-fashioned, and more like a father than the implacable man in black whom Hawthorne dimly remembered. One did not boast of Earthside escapades in Jevons’ presence.

  “I want to mull over the new biochemical data and sketch out a research program in the light of it,” said the ecologist hastily. “And, too, renew my acquaintance with Oscar. I was really touched when he gave me that gem. I felt like a louse, handing it over to the Company.”

  “At the price it’ll command, I’d feel lousy too,” said McClellan.

  “No, I don’t mean that. I mean—Oh, run along jetboy!”

  Hawthorne and Jevons stood watching the spacecraft taxi off across the water. Its rise was slow at first—much fire and noise, then a gradual acceleration. But by the time it had pierced the clouds, it was a meteor in reverse flight. And still it moved faster, streaking through the planet’s thick permanent overcast until it was high in the sky and the clouds to the man inside did not show as gray but as blinding white.

  So many miles high, even the air of Venus grew thin and piercingly cold, and water vapor was frozen out. Thus absorption spectra had not revealed to Earth-bound astronomers that this planet was one vast ocean. The first explorers had expected desert and instead they had found water. But still McClellan rode his lightning horse, faster and higher, into a blaze of constellations.

  When the rocket noise had faded, Hawthorne came out of his reverie and said: “At least we’ve created one beautiful thing with all our ingenuity—just one, space travel. I’m not sure how much destruction and ugliness that makes up for.”

  “Don’t be so cynical,” said Jevons. “We’ve also done Beethoven sonatas, Rembrandt portraits. Shakespearean drama…and you, of all people, should be able to rhapsodize on the beauty of science itself.”

  “But not of technology,” said Hawthorne. “Science, pure ordered knowledge, yes. I’ll rank that beside anything your Beethovens and Rembrandts ever made. But this machinery business, gouging a planet so that more people can pullulate—” It was good to be back with Jevons, he thought. You could dare be serious talking to the captain.

  “You’ve been saddened by your furlough,” said the old man. “It should be the other way around. You’re too young for sadness.”

  “New England ancestors.” Hawthorne tried to grin. “My chromosomes insist that I disapprove of something.”

  “I am luckier,” said Jevons. “Like Pastor Grundtvig, a couple of centuries back, I have made a marvelous discovery. God is good.”

  “If one can believe in God. You know I can’t. The concept just doesn’t square with the mess humanity has made of things on Earth.”

  “God has to leave us free, Nat. Would you rather be an efficient, will-less puppet?”

  “Or He may not care,” said Hawthorne. “Assuming He does exist, have we any strong empirical grounds for thinking we’re His particular favorites? Man may be just another discarded experiment, like the dinosaurs, set aside to gather dust and die. How do you know Oscar’s breed don’t have souls? And how do you know we do?”

  “It’s unwise to romanticize the cetoids,” said Jevons. “They show a degree of intelligence, I’ll concede. But—”

  “I know. But they don’t build spaceships. They haven’t got hands, and of course fire is impossible for-them: I’ve heard all that before, Cap. I’ve argued it a hundred times, here and on Earth. But how can we tell what the cetoids do and don’t do on the sea floor? They can stay underwater for days at a time, remember. And even here, I’ve watched those games of ‘tag’ they play. They are very remarkable games in some respects.

  “I swear I can see a pattern, too intricate to make much sense to me, but a distant pattern notwithstanding. An art form, like our ballet, but using the wind and currents and waves to dance to. And how do you account for their display of taste and discrimination in music, individual taste; so that Oscar goes for those old jazz numbers, and Sambo won’t come near them but will pay you carat for carat if you give him some Buxtehude? Why trade at all?”

  “Pack rats trade on Earth,” said Jevons.

  “Now you’re being unfair. The first expedition rafting here thought it was pack rat psychology, too—cetoids snatching oddments off the lower deck and leaving bits of shell, coralite, finally jewels. Sure, I know all that. But by now it’s developed into too intricate a price system. The cetoids are shrewd about it—honest, but shrewd. They’ve got our scale of values figured to an inch: everything from a conchoidal shell to a firegem. Completely to the inch—keep that in mind.

  “And why should mere animals go for music tapes, sealed in plastic and run off a thermionic cell? Or for waterproof reproductions of our great art? As for tools? They’re often seen helped by schools of specialized fish, rounding up sea creatures, slaughtering and flensing, harvesting pseudo-kelp. They don’t need hands, Cap! They use live tools!”

  “I have been here a good many years,” said Jevons dryly.

  Hawthorne flushed. “Sorry. I gave that lecture so often Earthside, to people who didn’t even have the data, that it’s become a reflex.”

  “I don’t mean to down-grade our damp friends,” said the captain. “But you know as well as I do that all the years of trying to establish communication with them symbols, signals—everything has failed.”