Donald A. Wollheim (ed) (3 page)

It would have been inaccurate to call Carrie
depressed, but on the other hand he would have hesitated to say that she was
happy.
Restless.
That was the word. She shifted from painting
to writing, cheerfully admitting that she wasn't much good at
either,
and from night-life in Los Angeles to long morning
horseback rides across the desert. She seldom complained, and she never
interfered. She seemed, somehow, to be waiting, always waiting, without
knowing just what it was that she waited for.

They had both wanted children, but the
children hadn't come. They had toyed with the idea of adoption, but had never
taken any concrete steps in that direction.

"I saw Van today,
Carrie," he said finally, lowering his book.

"Oh?" She added a dab of yellow to
the brown of the sand. "Is he still alive?"

"He'll
go on forever. I wish I knew what he was after."

Carrie squinted at the painting. "Well,
we don't know, and that's that."

"It's a funny deal, Carrie. I've set
this whole thing up with his money and his determination. I've spent ten years
of my life on it, and I
still
don't know why he's doing
it."

"You could always quit, Keith. We could
haul the old sailboat out again."

"No, baby.
I can't quit this time." He hesitated.
"Carrie, Van wants us to go to Venus for a year to get the feel of what's
going on there."

Carrie put down her brush and turned around, eyebrows arched. "You
mean, in
person?"

"In person.
To Venus."

"What else happened today—war with Sweden?"

"This
is on the level, sugar. He wants us to go."

Carrie came over and perched on the edge of
the couch, almost birdlike in her smallness. She kissed him, pleasantly. She
lit a cigarette and looked around her at the books and paintings and friendly
walls. "When do we leave,
hon
?"

"Do you
want
to go? You know what Venus would be like. It's a long way from everybody
and everything—"

"I think it might do us good,
Keith," she said slowly. She ran her slim fingers through her pale blond
hair. "I'd like to

go
.;

"You'd have to go to school for a while, baby."

"I'm willing." Her blue eyes
suddenly glowed with an unexpected, surprised hope. "Keith, you know what
you were always saying about this Dark Age of ours? Well, I've often thought
...
I mean—"

He looked at his wife and smiled. "You've thought that
we're
caught in
out
culture, too," he said.
"We're stale. I've thought the same thing. But somehow we just drift on—it
isn't easy to break away."

"We
can,
Keith. I know we can."

She wanted this. She wanted it desperately.
Keith himself wasn't sure, but he kept his indecision well disguised. He
kissed his wife.

"We'll see, baby," he said. "We'll see."

The next few months went by in a hurry.

Carrie was busy being indoctrinated into the
Halaja
culture pattern, but Keith Ortega had too much time
on his hands. After he had thought himself into the same hole about one hundred
times too often, he went back to see Vandervort.

The Old Man, looking like a flushed, bearded
gnome preserved for eternity in a stifling burial vault, seemed glad to see
him, but slightly apprehensive. He was worried again, fretting over details.
"To what do I owe this honor of this voluntary visit, Keith?" he
boomed in his too-loud voice, pouring out a glass of exquisite but unwelcome
brandy. "You haven't changed your mind?"

"No,
Van. We're still going."

"Good. Splendid!" The pale blue
eyes in the red face darted nervously around the enormous room, lighting here
on a vase, there on an ancient statuette, somewhere else on a rosy fireplace.
Despite the terrific heat, his skin was dry and Keith knew that it was cool to
the touch. The loud voice tried to fill up the room. "Well?
Anything wrong?"

That was unusual directness for Vandervort,
who was usually more subtle than he appeared. Keith took advantage of it.
"Nothing's wrong, Van, except with me."

"Oh?"
The Old Man hauled himself to his feet, heedless of his doctor's instructions,
popped a pill into his mouth, and washed it down with brandy.
He
pad-padded
across the rich brown
rug.
The vein pulsed in his neck, feeding his brain with blood.
"Well, well? Scared? Worried?"

Keith
took out his pipe, filled it, and lit it. The blue smoke curled up through the
damp heat and filmed across the ceiling. "I'm worried about
you,"
he said.

"Ah,"
said Vandervort, sinking into his chair again and pouring more brandy.
"You fear I may die and leave you in
an
. . .
um-m-m . . . uncomfortable position? Is that it?"

"No. It's your motive I'm worried about,
Van."

Vandervort narrowed his eyes to slits
"That doesn't concern you, Keith."

"I think I'm entitled to know."

The Old Man seemed to shrink in his chair,
looking smaller than ever. His white beard quivered slightly. Almost, he
looked—what was the word?
Afraid?
What could James
Murray Vandervort be afraid of? "Your salary has been good," he said,
his voice not quite so loud as before.

"I had money before
I
knew
you. The money is secondary."

The pale blue eyes opened. "Why did
you
take the job, Keith?"

Keith Ortega hesitated. Well, why had he? Or
did he know, really? "The ideas were mine," he said, feeling for
words. "I thought it would be interesting. I guess I was bored." He
smiled. "Maybe I
wanted
to rock the boat a little."
The words did not satisfy him.

"Good.
Splendid.
Has it over occurred to you that maybe I just might want to see what would
happen? Maybe
I'm
bored. Give a man a few billion dollars and
he's still a man, Keith."

"I'm not questioning your
humanity." Keith puffed slowly on his pipe. "But
I
can't buy that story about your just being curious. I've watched you too
closely, Van. This is more important to you than life itself. Why, Van,
why?"

Vandervort looked away, into the filled
emptiness of the great room, and said nothing.

Keith Ortega watched him closely. The Old Man was one hundred and five
years old. Like Keith, he had no children. He had poured a billion dollars into
the secret Venus project, and he had turned into a fanatic. What was he after
on Venus?

Keith knew the old boy fairly well. He was
certainly not just a humanitarian idealist; he cared very little about the
human animal one way or the other. He wasn't after commercial gain—after so
many years, business bored him, and at best he regarded it as a means to an
end. He was most emphatically not a dreamer.

"Maybe," Keith said finally, to
break the long silence, "you want to kick man upstairs to the stars. Maybe
you believe in destiny."

The Old Man laughed his booming laugh, his
red face flushing with the strain. "Maybe I do, Keith," he chuckled.
"Maybe I do."

There was more talk, but it was singularly
unproductive. Early in the morning, without finding what he had come for, Keith
said good night and left. The Old Man stayed in his chair in the too-hot room,
smiling a little, his eyes nervously peering into the shadows, sipping his
brandy.

Keith lifted his copter and flew toward home,
with the lights of Los Angeles below him and a full moon above him. The' night
wind, deflected by the vents, was fresh and cold in his face. High over
bis
head, the freight lanes were shadowed with ships.

The violet sign floated in the air: DON'T ROCK THE BOAT.

All the way home he thought of Old Man
Vandervort, sitting alone in his
castle,
and the
simple question whispered through his mind:

Why?

Some questions, fortunately, were easier to answer.

Keith Ortega had answered some of them to his
own satisfaction a long time ago. He had written a book, with the somewhat
melodramatic title of
The
New Age of Darkness,
and
the book in a sense had led Vandervort to the idea of the Venus project. The
book had been widely read, and was generally regarded as possibly correct and
certainly amusing.

No one took the book very seriously—which tended to confirm its thesis.

No one but Vandervort.

It was about the planet Earth.

What was the book about?

The story of Earth was a familiar one. After
a million years or so of bashing in each other's brains with bigger and better
weapons, the human animal had finally achieved a fairly uniform, stable,
planet-wide civilization. He had done it out of sheer necessity, just a cat's
whisker this side of nuclear extinction, but he had done it.

By the year 2050, the dream of One World was
no longer a dream.

The
human animal was living on it.

In his understandable haste, however, he had overlooked a few basic
points.

One civilization had taken over from many
diverse civilizations. Given the facts of history, it could not have been
otherwise. An essentially Western culture, due to a running
headstart
in technology, had spread itself thickly around the globe. It had taken root
and prospered wherever it had touched. It had swallowed and digested every
other way of life on the planet Earth.

There
was One World, and there was peace.

A standardized, uniform, flourishing,
world-wide civilization.

The
human animal began to breathe more easily.

There was a joker in the deck, even though
his laugh was a long time in coming. One World meant one culture pattern.
There had been no orchestration of differences, but simply an almost complete
obliteration
of differences. When man was in a hurry, he
took the quickest available shortcuts.

It was a good culture pattern, by and large,
and the human animal was better off than he had ever been before. It was a
lifeway
of plenty, a culture of unlimited technological
resources, a philosophy founded on the dignity of man.

Earth
became a paradise—
literally,
there was a paradise on
Earth. The jungles and the deserts and the arctic wastes, when they were
needed, were converted into rich, green land. The power of the sun was
harnessed, and harnessed cheaply. Vandervort Enterprises made
a
thousand fortunes from solar power, but they delivered the goods. The
culture flowered.

The worlds of the solar system were briefly explored, written up, and
ignored. Both Mars and Venus, contrary to early semi-scientific guesses, were
found to be habitable.
Habitable, but not very palatable.
Mars was an almost waterless desert, and Venus a strange jungle world that
never saw the sun. With the untapped resources of Earth ready and waiting in
the back yard, the other planets were not worth colonizing.

One
thing about Paradise: nobody wanted to leave it.

The
human animal stayed home in droves.

He had a good thing on Earth. It was up to him to appreciate it, to
protect it, to cherish it. The new golden rule was: DON'T ROCK THE BOAT.

The uniform culture pattern, the framework
for human existence, filled out. Every culture has
a
potential beyond which it cannot go. Every culture has
a
stopping point. It can achieve its values, attain its goals,
follow
every path that is open to it. When that happens,
whether in Greece or Rome or Stone-Age Australia, the culture exhausts itself
and begins merely to repeat what it has already done. Throughout history when
a
civilization reached its climax and leveled off, there was a new,
fresh, vital culture somewhere else to take up the slack and go off in
a
new direction, jolting the old civilization out of its rut.