Worlds Apart (24 page)

Pertwee nodded. "Is there any hope," he asked, "of the moderate elements among you taking over?"

"None whatever. Moderates among us, as you can guess on what you've seen for yourself, are pushed down and out and finally grounded. Base One is full of broken moderates."

"Any chance, then, of help from the women among you?"

"No." Phyllis spoke contemptuously. "They're told they're dirt, and they /are/ dirt. Any improvement in their position they must be given. They won't take it."

"Why is Corey so certain of victory?"

"Because we are bigger and stronger than you can possibly be, and because for him there can't be anything but victory, ever."

"Even a partial failure would depose him?"

"Yes, and Sloan would be commodore. That would be better for you. I should also be higher. Mathers would fall with Corey."

"Has there been any scientific advance among you?"

"Since leaving Earth? I wouldn't know. Yes, I would -- if something made us stronger we would be told. No, I don't think so. Among us, further efficiency in the old methods is sought -- not new methods. Now I want to ask something. You are the only people who know Clades and Mundans. What are the chances?"

"I don't know. I wish I did. I don't think anyone will know until the test comes. It must come, I suppose? Corey won't treat with us?"

"Not if we are clearly stronger. If you'd had an impressive force, perhaps. But now that your people have been on the run a fight is probably inevitable."

There was something unreal about the conversation. Pertwee felt as if he were reading someone else's words. Phyllis was too businesslike. One looked for, and failed to find, some trace of weakness, humor, humanity.

They had been given shirts and slacks, and the labor of climbing the hill had made them warm. Toni still occasionally touched her sagging belly unbelievingiy, and looked enviously at Phyllis, whose figure was as trim and supple as ever. Toni had hardly said a word since she landed on Secundis, so disturbed was she. Toni wasn't vain, but her attractiveness was a known, necessary part of her existence. Secundis she hardly noticed.

Pertwee had been noticing it. It was very nearly a beautiful world. Perhaps, when one was used to it, it would be beautiful. What it lacked, principally, was light. There was no sparkle about it. Its air envelope was so heavy and dense, its clouds so thick, the sunlight that filtered through so weak that the Secundis landscape was lowering, overcast, its mountains dark, menacing masses, its forests black and forbidding. Yet even so, it was a world of size and variety and grandeur, compared with Mundis.

On the two worlds, Mundis and Secundis, there should be two flourishing, friendly settlements, patiently building up again what had been destroyed on Earth. Instead there were two groups preparing to fight, like the two last men alive battling for the honor of being last man alive.

It was all the Clades' fault, of course -- and yet . . . wasn't it also the fault of mankind? Wasn't it a fault in every human being, a fatal flaw that was bound to mean the end of man this time, next time, the time after?

The Clade display was probably very impressive, but Pertwee didn't see it. He was staring gloomily at the ground at his feet.

3

The birth and growth of Freedom was one of the most spectacular triumphs of human history. Most notable about the job was the smoothness and deftness of the operation, each thing ready just as a place was prepared for it, nobody waiting for anything, nobody rushed.

First most people were busy making tools of one sort or another; with unlimited power that was often just a matter of deciding what one was going to be doing, and working out what kind of mechanical assistance one would need. Cutting and shaping and polishing stone or iron was no more difficult than patting butter into shape, Carrying the products was a job for the new trolleys and trucks that appeared overnight. Material was never a problem. One used what was at hand, and by the time something better was needed, more was there.

The trolleys were a case in point. At first they were crude platforms on fixed axles, riding on solid wheels, each needing one of the six power-units to run it, though it was like harnessing together a team of horses to draw a pin out of the ground. Presently the hexum-powered engines couldn't be spared for this menial task; they were replaced on the trolleys by little electric motors driven by batteries charged by one of the engines. The motors, put together on a trial-and-error basis by Dick and Bentley and their helpers, often burned out at first, but soon they whined happily and smoothly whatever they were called on to do.

There was no rubber for tires; rubber trees wouldn't grow on Mundis. The finality of that made the finding of something else to do the job easier -- it wasn't a substitute for rubber that was sought, it was something to do the various jobs on a world which would never have rubber. Plastic was the answer as far as insulation was concerned, plastic and varnishes; plastic was tried for the tires too, and soon a truck was fitted with big clumsy tires of a dirty yellow color, plastic on a cloth base. They weren't very successful, but other tires replaced them, pneumatic and non-pneumatic, thick and thin, hard and soft. Eventually there were two candidates left in the field, a tough, springy non-pneumatic job which would have been perfect but for the fact that no satisfactory method had been found for ensuring it wouldn't go on fire when the friction was great enough, and a pneumatic tire which needed an air pressure so high it was rather hard. But by this time the problem could be considered solved, as far as it needed to be solved at the moment. There were no tire companies in opposition, trying to make a living.

Meantime the steering on the trucks had become more delicate and springing, ball bearings and nuts and bolts began to appear (earlier all joints had been permanent). As the roads improved, speeds of more than seven miles an hour seemed desirable, and the electric motors came off and went back on, quite prepared to drive the trucks at anything up to twenty miles an hour now.

There was no hold-up, because only the founder colonists had preconceived ideas about what was possible, how, why, and where. Occasionally one af them wasted time trying to do something that couldn't be done yet; the youngsters left cranes and bulldozers and glass lenses and steel girders and oil refining until they came naturally. At first the old people were completely certain that their experience of civilization and technology and engineering and machines was going to be invaluable, and the young people, at last, would really appreciate them and see how much they knew . . .

What happened was the founder would say: "See, it used to be done this way," and the youngsters would watch, at first with interest and then impatiently, as the older man found he didn't have the things he used to have at hand, things weren't available, he had forgotten the trick, the new materials didn't behave as the old ones had. Then the young Mundans would take over and do the thing unscientifically, without finesse or grace or the professional touch -- but they'd /do/ it, ignoring the founder colonist's protests that that wasn't the way. Often it wasn't the way. Things fell down, or apart, and had to be put up or together again. The second time they were generally done better, for no one had time to do jobs three times.

The best work was done by old and young people in collaboration, like Dick and Bentley. The older people would explain in general how the job used to be done, and the young people would either agree that that was a good way to do it, or shake their heads and say they'd try something else. The young Mundans, after all, knew Mundis. They weren't concerned about how things had been done in Chicago or New York or London. It required little or no thought for them to work out what was available to them at any time, while the old people, in thinking of a device which had once worked, were inclined to forget that there was now no gasoline or rubber or asbestos or whatever it was. Even after twenty-odd years on Mundis the founders were inclined to forget that a certain essential ingredient was missing. The youngsters didn't have to think. Without examining a plan in detail they would say: "What are you going to do about the so-and-so?"

And the truth was that nobody could do anything about the so-and-so, just yet. So the thing had to be done another way, if at all.

The old people would have held themselves up again and again trying to do things which couldn't economically be done yet -- the economics being time and trouble. But the youngsters wouldn't have got nearly as far as they did without the experience of the old people.

Three men had more to do with the building of Freedom than anyone else, They were Abner Carlass, Fred Mitchell, and Bob Foley.

Abner had never seen a city except on the pictures in microfilm. But he had always wanted to plan the greatest, most beautiful, gracious, friendly city ever, and he regarded the fact that he had never seen a town as his greatest asset. He knew the theory of town planning, he knew what towns needed and somehow had to have, and he had planned all his life, for fun, over the problems that were now dumped in his lap.

Rog was quite dictatorial over Abner. Hard things were said about Rog; there were frowns and angry whispers and even open threats. But Rog was insistent that Abner in every particular was to have his own way, unhampered by the old people's experience of other cities and the young people's enthusiastic but impractical advice.

And day by day, week by week, people came to accept Abner's ideas and see that Rog had been right.

Fred Mitchell had never been very important in the Mundan community, just a youngster who could build a good house and someone who had better be consulted about every important building that was going to be put up, in case it should fall down again. Fred wasn't impressive when he was giving his advice. He wasn't too good on reasons, but he would say he wouldn't do it that way and he thought maybe this wall had better he stronger but there was no need for such a heavy partition and did this room have to be so long and narrow? If he couldn't get his ideas across any other way, he would do the thing, and that would explain it.

Right from the early days of New Paris when people wanted a house that would look like a house they would talk to Bob Foley. His house in New Paris, still, was not only the best-looking house but the one that would last longest. He would grumble when people came to him, but not so much as when they didn't, and really it was the one pleasure of his life to get a piece of paper and build a house on it, placing cupboards and doors and windows and lavatories in the best, the /only/ place for them to be, and wander around later and see it was being done properly.

The two young men and the old man didn't confine themselves to one branch of building a city, nor did they try to do everything. Not one of them was in a union, so it didn't matter if Bob Foley was caught with a trowel in his hand or if Abner drew a complete plan of a house or Fred put up a house without a plan at all. If they were town planner and architect and builder they were also, all of them, men who liked to know what they were doing and why they were doing it and what they were working with.

They respected each other because they were good at their jobs. You had to respect someone who did something you needed in your job, and did it well, and admitted you did your job well too.

Rog left them pretty much alone. He knew his limitations. Alice wandered around, naturally enough, as Fred's wife, and saw what was going on, and told Rog. That worked better than Rog himself being called on for suggestions and making the wrong ones or not knowing any to make, good or bad. He thought he would know a good city if he saw one. But he had no delusion that he was the man to build it -- he merely believed that he was better than anyone else at finding the people who would do it well.

4

Bentley and Dick were the busiest men in the settlement, naturally. Everybody was using machines, but hardly anyone pretended to understand them. That was coming, gradually. There were three main classes. People like Rog and Alice and Abner and Jimmy Doran would use machines, quite well, aware of their purpose but not of their principle. Others like Fred and Brad and Mary Bentley, of all people, would tinker with them, driven by sheer curiosity and their own mechanical aptitude, and would soon handle them with a new confidence born of a knowledge of what made them tick. But only Dick and Bentley, so far, had the gift of creation. A few others showed signs of it, no more. Only they could assess the demands of a job and visualize the machine to do it.

At first they had to make the machines too, after making the tools with which to make them, after wresting the material to make the tools from the earth with raw power, after finding out how to apply the raw power usefully. But soon other workers took over. New skills in the Mundans weren't really developed, merely uncovered. Soon others were not only carrying out the plans which Dick and Bentley laid down, but coming to them with plans of their own almost worked out, needing only a few minutes' thought on the part of one of them to be practical projects.

It was Fred who planned and made the first drill, practically on his own, in the free time he could find from building, twelve hours a day. It could bore into rock and it could clear ground flat and it could dig enormous holes. The day it was in operation Fred started making a derrick.

And for the first time Fred was more important than his wife -- a lot more important. He didn't think of it like that. He was far too modest. But he did expand a little and developed a swagger and expressed an opinion more readily now that it occurred to him for the first time that it was worth while having an opinion.

Alice was pleased too. No woman likes to be always apologizing to herself and to everyone else for her husband. That would obviously never be necessary again. Fred would never have Alice's brains, but Alice would never have Fred's mechanical aptitude, and for at least a few months that counted more.

Alice wasn't idle, of course. Rog was still technically directing operations, and she helped him. But really they were helping and co-ordinating rather than directing anything. She was impressed by the way Rog could postulate and inspire and start a colossal effort and then step aside coolly and look on while others continued with the work. He took all responsibility and shared it out carefully, precisely, brilliantly. Only when it was clear he had made a mistake did he take any responsibility back.