Worlds Apart (4 page)

It would be an interim marriage, of course. He didn't want June as a permanent wife, and he didn't think it fair to ask her, at seventeen to make a decision at a moment's notice for the rest of her life.

"We must do it now," Rog insisted, "because the longer you leave a thing like that the more difficult it is. People vote for a thing not because it's good or bad but because it's been going on for twenty years. They vote for the status quo just because it's the status quo."

"True," Alice admitted. "That's one way of looking at it. There's another way. This way: you're power-mad, Rog. You see how you can rule Lemon, hence Mundis, hence the human race, hence the galaxy. You can be the most important living thing. That's it, isn't it?"

Rog didn't seem interested. "Let's stick to the flaws in the Constitution," he said.

"Oh, we know all about /them/. But the answer is still the same. I'm not marrying Fred." She went on quickly before Fred could speak: "Not yet."

"Not yet? That means you will when what happens?"

"How would I know?" She grinned. "When you do something, Rog, damn you. I don't know what, but I expect you'll do it."

"You mean you'll do it when I show you good and sufficient reason, and can promise you it's safe?"

"I suppose so. I mean, I expect that's what I mean."

Rog grinned in return. They respected each other, he and Alice, and neither was likely to underrate the other. Having been, always, the leading boy and the leading girl among their contemporaries, they had spent their whole lives now in competition, now in alliance, now in a secret understanding, now at war. Rog didn't have to marry Alice to cement their understanding -- nothing could, break it.

He climbed to his feet. "All right," he said, and raised his voice slightly. "June!"

Everybody turned and looked at June. Taken by surprise, she put her chin up and came a step forward. Rog liked that. In a girl who would always be quiet and reserved, it was a good sign that when something startled her she came to meet it instead of retreating from it.

"Never mind me, folks," he said. "Go back to your necking or whatever you were doing. June, let's take a walk, shall we?"

June went pale. Rog wasn't really throwing his weight about. He had made a sort of preliminary announcement, and now everyone knew that Rog Foley was just about to ask June Smith to marry him. There was a buzz of talk as Rog took her arm and they went out. June was glad to get out in the open, even if that was a step nearer a proposal that was going to scare the life out of her.

It was obvious to her as to everyone else that Rog could have any girl in Lemon. It had never occurred to her to work out what she would do if he asked her to marry him.

It was flattering but terrifying. It was like being acclaimed as a heroine -- but having to commit the act of heroism first.

It was the kind of thing that didn't happen to June Smith.

5

Mundan night was the only spectacle on the planet which transcended the Terran variety in grandeur. Mundan air was usually clearer than Earth's. When one raised one's eyes to the night sky, the stars exploded in one's face. They were bright and clear and warm, a million little fires burning in the fabric of space.

Mundis had no moon, but often at night a glorious orange star would compensate for a dozen moons. The orange star wasn't a star at all, but Secundis, the sun's second planet. Brinsen's Star was a small sun, practically invisible from Earth, though the distance was oniy fourteen light-years. It hadn't been seen until the first observatory had been set up on the moon, clear of Earth's fog of air. Then very little attention had been paid to it, for it was a thing among the new glories that the lunar observatory revealed.

It wasn't until a century later, when Earth was dying, and Venus and Mars were soon going to be dying, and the first interstellar flight was absolutely essential, that the astronomers checked the predictions of the chemists and physicists and said yes, it seemed they were right in suggesting that there was an Earth-type planet going round Brinsen's Star, though no one would ever see it even from the moon, and that even if it didn't have conditions close enough to those of Earth to support human life, very likely the second planet had. It was possible that both planets would be suitable; highly probable that one at least of them would be.

The Mundis had never investigated Secundis. One planet was more than enough. It would be centuries before the Mundans, for all they knew the only human beings left in the galaxy, would be interested in another world.

From the surface of Mundis, Secundis was usually a splendid sight. It was always predominantly orange, but it was shot with yellows and pinks and rubies and crimsons which changed as one watched. And Secundis had two satellites which shared in the spectacle. Secundis was occasionally less than eight million miles from Mundis, as at present, and it was considerably larger than the first planet.

The silence of Mundis was relieved, for June and Rog, by the noise of the cattle close at hand and the muffled chuf-chuf-chuf of the steam engine which worked twenty-four hours a day pumping up water from an underground spring. The sounds of cattle brought fourteen light-years to a world which had never had animal life of its own didn't seem in the slightest strange to them. The cattle were much more at home on Mundis than they had been in space. The horses and pigs and sheep had never taken to free fall.

The hens had. For a few generations the hens had become once more birds of the air, flying gracefully and competently about their pens on the spaceship, as if they had been created for free fall. There was no opportunity to see what real birds would have made of it. The Mundis carried none.

Rog wondered whether June would like him to get it over with, or to allow her to think, to get used to the idea that Rog Foley was going to propose to her -- to get used to Rog Foley. He decided that if she wanted him to hurry she could hurry him, but if he rushed the affair she could hardly stop him. So he took her arm and just walked.

"It's funny to think of all the other birds and animals and insects Earth had," June ventured, for something to say. "Thousands of species, and only a few given a chance to live."

"There were too many," said Rog. "Hundreds of different kinds of cats alone, without considering other animals."

"Yes, but the other ark took two of everything, and every animal had a chance."

"That just couldn't be done this time. Anyway, June, what seems to me more important than the end of a lot of different kinds of animals is the end of the different kinds of men."

"Of men?" June echoed, stopping abruptly.

"Haven't read about that? Yes, black men, red men, yellow men, brown men -- and the corresponding women."

"But they weren't really . . . "

"Yes, they were black, red, yellow, and brown. It's in the records. But there's nothing about why there's none of them here. Nobody knows. I asked John Pertwee about it. He said nobody told him about it, and now we'll never find out how it came about."

"It's just as well we're all the same, isn't it?" said June diffidently. "I mean, we don't agree so terribly well as it is, and if there were a lot of different races represented . . . "

"True enough. But I wonder what a yellow man's point of view on it would be. I wonder if the whites fought off the yellows and blacks, or refused to let any of them go in the Mundis, or if the other races were big enough to agree that only one should go."

"They'd have to be big for that."

"Wouldn't they? Imagine half a dozen different races of men coming together and agreeing it would be better for the future of mankind if only one of them went forward. One to represent them all."

"I hope it was like that!" exclaimed June.

"So do I. I'm afraid it's hardly likely. I expect the whites were just tougher and stronger and further advanced, and brushed off all the others. If it really /was/ agreement -- if the blacks worked so that the whites could carry on the race -- there should have been some record of it, so that we'd know about it . . . "

There was silence for a while. Then June said: "But no one would care, Rog. Except a few like you."

Rog turned in surprise. There was a strange warmth in her tone. "Too few of us have any imagination," she said. "We don't see the other point of view. The old folk don't see our problems. And I suppose," she added reluctantly, "we don't always see theirs."

It was strange love-making. But it /was/ love-making. June wasn't gasping with admiration and saying how strong Rog was, but she was talking herself into admiring him a little more.

Rog looked down at her. He could see her quite plainly in the starlight, though every shadow was black. The contrasting light made her skin white, the pink of her ket gray, and the cherry jet black. She was lovely. He said so, tentatively.

But she still wasn't ready. She moved on rapidly, and he had to hurry to catch up with her. She talked quickly, nervously, of Toni and how she became a different person when she sang; then she remembered that Rog had been married to Toni and changed the subject hurriedly. She talked of Dick, the first person she thought of.

"Yes, Dick is a genius," Rng agreed dutifully. "He has to understand without demonstration, without experiment. And yet, really, he's more a practical man than Bentley. I think when Dick's in charge of the lab we'll really begin making things again."

"But we are making things!" June was rather indignant, for she spent hours each day weaving cloth. The Mundans had no money, but the Council doled out work that had to be done all the same. Otherwise the supply of eggs and meat and bread might stop; unless you happened to bake bread, when it would be the supply of eggs and meat and cloth.

"Yes, but only the things we must make. Doing only the things you must do isn't living -- just existing. The old people are to blame for that. When they could, they didn't explore, found no mines, set up no machines -- "

"They made the pumps and the looms!"

"The things they had to make. They didn't dig for stone or coal or iron or nickel -- "

"How do you know these things would have been there if they'd dug for them?"

Rog laughed. "Well, certainly they'll never find them if they don't. Besides, you don't really look for anything in particular, at first. You just look, and see what you get. If you don't find iron, you get copper or silver or tin . . . "

Just as he was going to carry on the discussion, he had one of his flashes of insight. Though June would keep putting off his talking about him and her, she really wanted him not to take no for an answer, and sweep her off her feet.

"June, listen," 'he said. "You know why we're here."

She seemed to know that by turning her head just a fraction her face was in black shadow and Rog couldn't see her expression. "Yes," she whispered.

"It's only interim marriage I'm suggesting," he said softly. "It's not irrevocable. You needn't feel you're going to be tied to me forever."

"How serious are you? Do you already mean it to be only a few weeks? Have you planned that?"

"I think," said Rog with the gift of compelling sincerity that was one of his most useful talents, "I mean it forever, June."

June said: "I'll marry you, Rog."

There was silence for ten seconds.

Then as he was reaching for her shoulders to turn her lips to his she turned abruptly. "Let's go back and tell them."

Rog understood. She wanted time to realize it now. Dick congratulating her, people talking to her, Rog standing with her in other people's presence, so that she could gradually begin to believe it.

He was right, but only half right. For when Dick had been staring at her bent head, puzzled, earlier in the day, she had been thinking that same wild, fantastic thing: perhaps that evening would be the evening of her life, and Rog Foley would notice her as something more than Dick's kid sister, and . . . But she hadn't gone further than that. That made it all the more difficult, now, to accept the impossible truth.

She was Rog Foley's wife.

II

1

It was just an informal meeting at Jessie Bendall's house. It wasn't an Inner Council sitting; but the fact remained that Jessie was the President of the Council since John Pertwee had been stripped of office, and Brad Hulton, Jim and Mary Bentley, Tom Robertson and Henry Boyne were all Inner Council members. It was a gathering of the leaders of the founder colonists, however informal.

"I'm sorry we have to hold this meeting," Mary said. At fifty-four she was better-looking than her daughter. Alice had vivacity and youth and a certain piquancy of feature, but Mary, alone among the founder colonists, was left with some of the regal beauty of maturity, end none of the youngsters had reached that stage yet. "We're going behind our children's backs, reaching our own conclusious independently, and then voting in a block at the official sittings. That's the unpleasant truth, isn't it?"

"Yes, said Robertson vehemently, "because they re doing the same adjective thing!"

Boyne winced and closed his eyes in protest. "Clean thy mouth, infidel," he muttered. But he was careful to say it so that Robertson couldn't hear him.

No violence of expression could stir Mary to answering violence. "And whose fault is that?" she asked quietly. "Who brought them up? Who told them all they know?"

There was no reassuring answer to that. The parents of the past, in other circumstances, could blame a thousand influences for things they considered wrong in their children, or other people's children -- films, shows, books, newspapers, schools, teachers, comic sections, advertisements, graft, poverty, alcoholism, the color bar, the Democrats or the Republicans. Blame wasn't so easy to dole out now. Everything that had influenced the children had been instituted or promulgated or permitted by the founder colonists as a group.

Except: "The Gap is what's at the root of this trouble, and that wasn't our fault," Jessie Bendall remarked.

Everybody's thoughts slid back thirty-eight years. No, nobody had consulted the people who were actually to leave the dying Earth. They were told practically nothing about it. They had no choice about anything, not even the world they were going to. They could go or not, that was all. They were all sixteen, hardly more than children. They hadn't selected each other.