“Whatever government has the foresight—if all the governments on Earth cannot get together on it. I am not greatly concerned about that. Regimes and policies go, nations die, cultures are forgotten. But I want to be sure that Man will survive. The cost would not be great—comparable, at most, to one military satellite, and the rewards are enormous even on the crassest immediate terms. Consider what a wealth of uranium and other materials, now in short supply on Earth, would become accessible.”

  Dykstra turned to the transparent wall. The storm had reached them. Under the station caissons, the sea raged and struck and shattered in radiant foam. The deep, strong force of those blows traveled up through steel and concrete like the play of muscles in a giant’s shoulders. Rain began to smash in great sheets on the deck. A continuous lightning flickered across Dykstra’s lean countenance, and thunder toned.

  “A world,” he whispered.

  Hawthorne stood up again. He leaned forward, his fingertips resting on the table. They were cold. His voice still came to him like someone else’s. “No,” he said. “Absolutely not.”

  “Eh?” Dykstra turned almost reluctantly from watching the storm. “What is wrong. Nat?”

  “You’d sterilize a living planet,” said Hawthorne.

  “Well…true,” admitted Dykstra. “Yes. Humanely, though. The first shock wave would destroy all organisms before they even had time to feel it.”

  “But that’s murder!” cried Hawthorne.

  “Come, now,” said Dykstra. “Let us not get sentimental. I admit it will be a pity to destroy life so interesting, but when children starve and one nation after another is driven to despotism—” He shrugged and smiled.

  Jevons, still seated, stroked a thin hand across his book, as if he wanted to recall a friend five hundred years dead. There was trouble on his face. “This is too sudden to digest, Wim,” he said. “You must give us time.”

  “Oh, there will be time enough, years of it,” said Dykstra. He laughed. “First my report must go to Earth, and be published, and debated and publicized, and wrangled about, and then they will send elaborate expeditions to do my work all over again, and then they will haggle and—have no fears, it will be at least a decade before anything is actually done. And thereafter we of the station, with our experience, will be quite vital to the project.”

  “Shucks,” said McClellan, speaking lightly to conceal the way he felt, “I wanted to take a picnic lunch and watch the planet go up next Fourth of July.”

  “I don’t know.” Jevons stared into emptiness. “There’s a question of…prudence? Call it what you will, but Venus can teach us so much as it is. A thousand years is not too long to study everything here. We may gain a few more continents at the price of understanding what life is all about, or the means for immortality—if that’s a goal to be desired—or perhaps a philosophy. I don’t know.”

  “Well, it is debatable,” conceded Dykstra. “But let all mankind debate it, then.”

  Jimmy Cheng-tung smiled at Hawthorne. “I believe the captain is right,” he said. “And I can see your standpoint, as a scientist. It is not fair to take your lifework away from you. I shall certainly argue in favor of waiting at least a hundred years.”

  “That may be too long,” warned Dykstra. “Without some safety valve, technological civilization on Earth may not last another century.”

  “You don’t understand!”

  Hawthorne shouted it at them, as he looked into their eyes. Dykstra’s gaze in particular caught the light in such a way that it seemed blank, Dykstra was a skull with two white circles for eyes. Hawthorne had the feeling that he was talking to deaf men. Or men already dead.

  “You don’t understand,” he repeated. “It isn’t my job, or science, or any such thing I’m worried about. It’s the brutal fact of murder. The murder of an entire intelligent race. How would you like it if beings came from Jupiter and proposed to give Earth a hydrogen atmosphere? My God, what kind of monsters are we, that we can even think seriously about such a thing?”

  “Oh, no!” muttered McClellan. “Here we go again. Lecture Twenty-eight-B. I listened to it all the way from Earth.”

  “Please,” said Cheng-tung. “The issue is important.”

  “The cetoids do pose an embarrassing problem,” conceded Jevons. “Though I don’t believe any scientist has ever objected to vivisection—even the use of close cousins like the apes—for human benefit.”

  “The cetoids aren’t apes!” protested Hawthorne, his lips whitening. “They’re more human than you are!”

  “Wait a minute,” said Dykstra. He moved from his vision of lightning, toward Hawthorne. His face had lost its glory. It was concerned. “I realize you have opinions about this, Nat. But after all, you have no more evidence—”

  “I do!” gasped Hawthorne. “I’ve got it at last. I’ve been wondering all day how to tell you, but now I must.”

  What Oscar had shown him came out in words, between peals of thunder.

  At the end, even the gale seemed to pause, and for a while only rain, and the brroom-brroom of waves far below, continued to speak. McClellan stared at his hands, which twisted a die between the fingers. Cheng-tung rubbed his chin and smiled with scant mirth. Jevons, however, became serenely resolute. Dykstra was harder to read, his face flickered from one expression to the next. Finally he got very busy lighting a new cigarette.

  When the silence had become too much, Hawthorne said, “Well?” in a cracked tone.

  “This does indeed put another complexion on the matter,” said Cheng-tung.

  “It isn’t proof,” snapped Dykstra. “Look at what bees and bower birds do on Earth.”

  “Hey,” said McClellan. “Be careful, Wim, or you’ll prove that we’re just glorified ants ourselves.”

  “Exactly,” said Hawthorne. “I’ll take you out in a submarine tomorrow and show you, if Oscar himself won’t guide us. Add this discovery to all the other hints we’ve had, and damn it, you can no longer deny that the cetoids are intelligent. They don’t think precisely as we do, but they think at least as well.”

  “And could doubtless teach us a great deal,” said Cheng-tung. “Consider how much your people and mine learned from each other: and they were of the same species.”

  Jevons nodded. “I wish you had told me this earlier, Nat,” he said. “Of course there would have been no argument.”

  “Oh, well,” said McClellan, “guess I’ll have to go back to blowing up squibs on the Fourth.”

  The rain, wind-flung, hissed against the wall. Lightning still flickered, blue-white, but the thunder wagon was rolling off. The sea ran with wild frosty fires.

  Hawthorne looked at Dykstra. The Dutchman was tense as a wire. Hawthorne felt his own briefly relaxing sinews grow taut again.

  “Well, Wim?” he said.

  “Certainly, certainly!” said Dykstra. He had grown pale. The cigarette fell unnoticed from his lips. “I am still not absolutely convinced, but that may be only my own disappointment. The chance of genocide is too great to take.”

  “Good boy,” smiled Jevons.

  Dykstra smote a fist into his palm. “But my report,” he said. “What shall I do with my report?”

  So much pain was in his voice that Hawthorne felt shock, even though the ecologist had known this question must arise.

  McClellan said, startled: “Well, it’s still a nice piece of research, isn’t it?”

  Then Cheng-tung voiced the horror they all felt.

  “I am afraid we must suppress the report, Dr. Dykstra,” he said. “Regrettably, our species cannot be trusted with the information.”

  Jevons bit his lip. “I hate to believe that,” he said.

  “We wouldn’t deliberately and cold-bloodedly exterminate a billion or more sentient beings for our own…convenience.”

  “We have done similar things often enough in the past,” said Dykstra woodenly.

  I’ve read enough history myself, Wim, to give a very partial roll call, thought Hawthorne. And he began to tick off on his fingers. Troy. Jericho. Carthage. Jerusalem. The Albigensians. Buchenwald.

  That’s enough for now, he thought, feeling a wish to vomit.

  “But surely—” began Jevons. “By now, at least—”

  “It is barely possible that humane considerations may stay Earth’s hand for a decade or two,” said Dykstra. “The rate at which brutality is increasing gives me little hope even of that, but let us assume so. However, a century? A millennium? How long can we live in our growing poverty with such a temptation? I do not think forever.”

  “If it came to a choice between taking over Venus and watching our civilization go under,” said McClellan, “frankly, I myself would say too bad for Venus. I’ve got a wife and kids.”

  “Be glad, then, that the choice will not be so clear-cut in your lifetime,” said Cheng-tung.

  Jevons nodded. He had suddenly become an old man, whose work neared an end. “You have to destroy that report, Wim,” he said. “Totally. None of us here can ever speak a word about it.”

  And now Hawthorne wanted to weep, but could not. There was a barrier in him, like fingers closing on his throat.

  Dykstra drew a long breath. “Fortunately,” he said, “I have been closemouthed. No hint escaped me. I only trust the Company will not sack me for having been lazy and produced nothing all these months.”

  “I’ll see to it that they don’t, Wim,” said Jevons. His tone was immensely gentle beneath the rain.

  Dykstra’s hands shook a little, but he tore the first sheet off his report and crumpled it in an ashtray and set fire to it.

  Hawthorne flung out of the room.

  -7-

  The air was cool outside, at least by contrast with daytime. The squall had passed and only a mild rain fell, sluicing over his bare skin. In the absence of the sun he could go about with no more than shorts and mask. That was a strangely light sensation, like being a boy again in a summer forest which men had since cut down. Rain washed on the decks and into the water, two distinct kinds of noise, marvelously clear.

  The waves themselves still ran strong, swish and boom and a dark swirling. Through the air shone a very faint auroral trace, barely enough to tinge the sky with a haze of rose. But mostly, when Nat Hawthorne had left lighted windows behind him, the luminance came from the ocean, where combers glowed green along their backs and utter white when they foamed. Here and there a knife of blackness cut the water, as some quick animal surged.

  Hawthorne went down past the machine gun to the trading pier. Heavy seas broke over it, reaching to his knees and spattering him with phosphor glow. He clung to the rail and peered into rain, hoping Oscar would come.

  “The worst of it is,” he said aloud, “they all mean so well.”

  A winged being passed overhead, only a shadow and whisper.

  “The proverb is wrong,” babbled Hawthorne. He gripped the rail, though he knew a certain hope that a wave would sweep him loose…and afterward the Venusians would retrieve his bones and take no payment.

  “Who shall watch the watchmen? Simple. The watchmen themselves who are of no use anyway, if they aren’t honorable. But what about the thing watched? It’s on the enemy’s side. Wim and Cap and Jimmy and Shorty—and I. We can keep a secret. But nature can’t. How long before someone else repeats this work? We hope to expand the station. There’ll be more than one geophysicist here, and—and—Oscar! Oscar, where the hell are you, Oscar?”

  The ocean gave him reply, but in no language he knew.

  He shivered, teeth clapping in his jaws. There was no reason to hang around here. It was perfectly obvious what had to be done. The sight of Oscar’s ugly, friendly face wouldn’t necessarily make the job easier. It might even make it harder. Impossible, perhaps.

  Oscar might make me sane, thought Hawthorne. Ghosts of Sinaic thunder walked in his skull. I can’t have that. Not yet, Lord God of Hosts, why must I be this fanatical? Why not register my protest when the issue arises, like any normal decent crusader, organize pressure groups, struggle by all the legal proper means. Or, if the secret lasts out my lifetime, why should I care what may happen afterward? I won’t be aware of it.

  No. That isn’t enough. I require certainty, not that justice will be done, for that is impossible, but that injustice will not be done. For I am possessed.

  No man, he thought in the wet blowing night, no man could foresee everything. But he could make estimates, and act on them. His brain was as clear as glass, and about as alive, when he contemplated purely empirical data.

  If Venus Station stopped paying off, Venus would not be visited again. Not for a very long time, during which many things could happen…a Venusian race better able to defend itself, or even a human race that had learned self-control. Perhaps men would never return. Technological civilization might well crumble and not be rebuilt. Maybe that was best, each planet working out its own lonely destiny. But all this was speculation. There were immediate facts at hand.

  Item: If Venus Station was maintained, not to speak of its possible expansion, Dykstra’s discovery was sure to be repeated. If one man had found the secret, once in a few years of curiosity, another man or two or three would hardly need more than a decade to grope their way to the same knowledge.

  Item: Venus Station was at present economically dependent on the cooperation of the cetoids.

  Item: If Venus Station suffered ruin due to the reported hostile action of the cetoids, the Company was unlikely to try rebuilding it.

  Item: Even if the Company did make such an attempt, it would soon be abandoned again if the cetoids really did shun it.

  Item: Venus would then be left alone.

  Item: If you believed in God and sin and so forth which Hawthorne did not, you could argue that the real benefactor would be humankind, saved from the grisliest burden of deeds since a certain momentous day on Golgotha.

  The worst of this for me, Hawthorne came to realize, is that I don’t care very much about humankind. It’s Oscar I want to save. And how much hate for one race can hide under love for another?

  He felt dimly that there might be some way to flee nightmare. But the only path down which a man, flipperless and breathing oxygen, could escape, was back through the station.

  He hurried along a quiet, brightly-lit corridor to a stairwell sloping down toward the bowel of the station and down. No one else was about. He might have been the last life in a universe turned ashen.

  But when he entered the stockroom, it was a blow that another human figure stood there. Ghosts, ghosts…what right had the ghost of a man not yet dead to walk at this moment?’

  The man turned about. It was Chris Diehl, the biochemist. “Why, hi, Nat,” he said. “What are you doing at this hour?”

  Hawthorne wet his lips. The Earthlike air seemed to wither him. “I need a tool,” he said. “A drill, yes—a small electric drill.”

  “Help yourself,” said Diehl.

  Hawthorne lifted a drill off the rack. His hands began to shake so much that he dropped it. Diehl stared at him.

  “What’s wrong, Nat?” he asked softly. “You look like second-hand custard.”

  “I’m all right,” whispered Hawthorne. “Quite all right.”

  Hawthorne picked up the drill and went out.

  The locked arsenal was low in the station hull. Hawthorne could feel Venus’ ocean surge below the deckplates. That gave him the strength to drill the lock open and enter, to break the cases of explosive and lay a fuse. But he never remembered having set a time cap on the fuse. He only knew he had done so.

  His next recollection was of standing in a boathouse, loading oceanographic depth bombs’ into one of the little submarines, Again, no one stirred. No one was there to question him. What had the brothers of Venus Station to fear?

  Hawthorne slipped into the submarine and guided it out the sea gate. Minutes later he felt the shock of an explosion. It was not large, but it made so much noise in him that he was stunned and did not see Venus Station go to the bottom. Only afterward did he observe that the place was gone. The waters swirled wildfire above it, a few scraps of wreckage bobbing in sheeting spindrift.

  He took a compass bearing and submerged. Before long, the coralite city glowed before him. For a long moment he looked at its spires and grottos and lovelinesses, until fear warned him that he might make himself incapable of doing what was necessary. So he dropped his bombs, hastily, and felt his vessel shudder with their force, and saw the temple become a ruin.

  And next he remembered surfacing. He went out on deck and his skin tasted rain. The cetoids were gathering. He could not see them, except in glimpses, a fluke or a back, phosphor streaming off into great waves, with once a face glimpsed just under the low rail, almost like a human baby’s in that uncertain light.

  He crouched by the machine gun, screaming, but they couldn’t understand and anyway the wind made a rag of his voice. “I have to do this! I have no choice, don’t you see? How else can I explain to you what my people are like when their greed dominates them? How else can I make you avoid them, which you’ve got to do if you want to live? Can you realize that? Can you? But no, you can’t, you mustn’t. You have to learn hate from us, since you’ve never learned it from each other—”

  And he fired into the bewildered mass of them.

  The machine gun raved for a long time, even after no more living Venusians were around. Hawthorne didn’t stop shouting until he ran out of ammunition. Then he regained consciousness. His mind felt quiet and very clear, as if a fever had possessed him and departed. He remembered summer mornings when he was a boy, and early sunlight slanting in his bedroom window and across his eyes. He re-entered the turret and radioed the spaceship with total rationality.

  “Yes, Captain, it was the cetoids, beyond any possibility of doubt. I don’t know how they did it. Maybe they disarmed some of our probe bombs, brought them back and exploded them. But anyhow the station has been destroyed. I got away in a submarine. I glimpsed two other men in an open boat, but before I could reach them the cetoids had attacked. They stove in the boat, and killed the men as I watched…God, no, I can’t imagine why! Never mind why! Let’s just get away from here!”