Worlds Apart (9 page)

"Quite right, too," said Toni, who still didn't see anything attractive in the lines of a skirt. "I notice no one ever brought them back, once there was gravity again."

"No, the habit of sixteen years was too strong. 0h, one or two of the women wore them again for a while in the early days of New Paris. But never enough of them -- the girls who did felt conspicuous. Personally, I'm rather sorry. I still think a pretty girl is prettier in a plain frock or a neat blouse and skirt than in any of these space-designs."

"They're not space-designs. They're right for Mundis."

Pertwee laughed. "Never argue on questions of history with a man who helped to make it, Toni," he said. "For this is history, after all. Do you really think blinkers are reasonable garments to wear in a planet's gravitational field? Curved flaps held up by starch and what must be will power, I suppose. No, but they're reasonable enough in a spaceship, where things tend to stay put given the slightest help. And do you know why nothing anybody wears hampers the waist? Because in space you swim from the waist. Up, down, forward, back, side -- all directions are the same, and if you want to get anywhere you push off from something, keep your legs together like a tail and curve smoothly from the waist when you want to turn."

"All that's very interesting," T~n/observed. "Why did I never hear it before?"

"Because you didn't ask. You youngsters never do ask. I only know one of your generation who has a really omnivorous curiosity -- Rog Foley."

Mention of Rog made Toni uneasy. She didn't like secrets or barriers of any kind between people. Particularly she didn't like having even a little secret from Pertwee, as if she were in some sort of ailiance with someone else against him. So she told him frankly that if Rog hadn't put the idea in her head it would never have occurred to her to run away with him. She told him that Rog had admitted it was one of his schemes to undermine the Constitution. When she had told Pertwee all she could remember of what Rog said, she sat back and looked at him anxiously. Though she hated secrets she knew that sometimes it was risky to admit certain things. People just wouldn't understand.

But Pertwee merely pondered calmly. "Interesting," he said. "You know, Toni, I've never considered myself on one side of the Gap and you youngsters on the other -- you know that. I like Rog, and in a dispute I'd be just as likely to be on his side as the other. And yet . . . "

It was getting dark more abruptly than usual, for all round them hills made walls that cut off the sunlight.

"I could still take command in an emergency," Pertwee observed. "I've been voted into a lot of positions of responsibility since the Mundis took off. But if there's no emergency, I'm happy in a back seat. Rog isn't. He has to make an emergency, find something to do, something to build up, something to knock down . . . Sometimes I think what we really ought to do, on this world which will never have a real emergency, is hang Rog -- "

"Hang him!" exclaimed Toni, sitting up abruptly.

"Or shoot him or poison him," said Pertwee equably.

"Oh." Toni lay back on the grass again. "You were just joking."

"I was not. He's a born leader in a community that doesn't need a leader. So what does he do? Leads. But since he had only Lemon to control, he cuts it into two, at twenty-one, and leads one side of it against the other."

Though Toni had once taxed Rog with the same thing, she felt a curious urge to defend him. "And yet you say you're for him! That doesn't sound like it."

"I don't know. Half and half. But Rog isn't our concern at the moment," he said briskly, dismissing the, subject. "We should be feeling a sense of accomplishment."

"Why?"

"Because the colony has existed on Mundis for twenty-two years, and it's been left to us to find the first lake."

Toni agreed and accepted the change of subject contentedly. Water had never been a real difficulty. There was no need to make reservoirs to trap the rainwater -- there were natural reservoirs not far underground. The steam pumps at Lemon brought up enough water for the whole colony, and the supply was practically unlimited.

Still, it was good to know that in at least one place on the planet there was water in abundance, out in the open. It had been beyond Toni's imagination, until she saw it, to picture a body of water so vast and deep that Lemon could be sunk beneath it and lost forever.

She lay in Pertwee's arms and watched the stars twinkling in the dark surface of the water. She noticed one in particular, a bright, fat star, an especially cheerful star. She turned her head and looked at it direct.

"Jack," she murmured. "I've never noticed that one before, have you?"

Pertwee turned his head lazily. She felt the arm that held her suddenly go stiff. He jumped to his feet, looking round to get his bearings -- over the rim of the valley where the sun had set, along it to get the line of north and south.

"Yes, it's a new one," he said in a hard voice. "At least, it's an old one with its power stepped up. That's the sun, Toni. /The/ sun. The sun that used to waken me in the mornings when I was only a year or two younger than you are now."

"But what. "

"I don't know what's happened. We knew Earth was going to be destroyed, but not that the sun, too, was going to blow up. It doesn't really matter what caused it -- something did, and we can see with the naked eye that Earth's gone. Maybe that's the history of all novas -- a so-called intelligent race develops atomic physics."

He dropped to the ground.again. "Oh, well," he said philosophically, "it only proves what we were taking for granted anyway."

He saw that Toni was not really very much interested. Her sole concern was the effect of the affair on him.

That was another thing in which the founders and their children had always differed, he realized. The older people had said openly that Earth was destroyed and Mundis was the last hope, the last stand of the human race.

But they never quite believed it~ They had continued to hope that by some accident, some freak, radioactivity would suddenly decide not to be dangerous and Earth would he there, green and lovely and safe, if ever they went back from Mundis.

The young people, on the other hand, with no fixation on Earth, no particular feelings about it, believed what they were told, and counted Earth out of their calculations. Earth was not, as it would always be to the founder colonists, /home/. Home was Mundis. The young people called themselves Mundans. They were human too; they had no idea, as the founders had, that the only real place for humans was Earth.

No, this would mean nothing to the youngsters, Pertwee realized. But it meant a lot to the people who had been born on Earth.

4

Bentley sat in his chair as before. He had even arranged that Dick and Rog and June would come along and hear more of the story of Earth that had led up to the story of Mundis. They would have been there now -- if last night a new star had not suddenly blazed in the sky.

The Council fell into a panic -- at least, the founder colonist part of it did. This was final proof of the utter deadliness of atomic power. Not only had it destroyed Earth, but Earth's very sun. Probably the region where Earth had been was now filled with gases at a billion degrees centigrade. Bentley didn't think it worth while to deliver a lecture as a physicist. In any case, obviously Earth no longer existed in any recognizable form.

Mary came out and joined him. "You think they should have let you go on as you planned, don't you?" she said.

Bentley shrugged. "This makes no difference," he said. "It was fourteen years ago, anyway."

Mary was silent. Bentley realized with a slightly hurt feeling that for the first time they were not in agreement.

"You think they were right to forbid me to tell the young people any more?" he asked.

"Yes," she said quietly.

"In heaven's name, why? I only meant to tell them a little more of the truth. So that they would see for themselves that it was unwise to meddle with atomic power."

"Won't they see that for themselves, now?"

"Not without some explanation."

Mary sighed. "I never believed explanation was so very important," she admitted.

"But tell me," asked Bentley doggedly. "What difference does this make?"

"That we know it's up to us now."

"Well, weren't we working on that basis anyway?"

"Of course, but . . . " She tried to put into words what she felt in her heart. The words wouldn't come. She shook her head and left him.

Bentley's hurt grew. So even Mary was going to go around moaning, apathetic, because what they had expected for so many years had happened,

He tried to work out what had happened, and when. They had left Earth thirty-eight years before. The sun had blazed with furious new energy only last night -- that was, fourteen years ago. Earth itself must have been quite dead for most of the intervening twenty-four years. Had someone deliberately blasted the sun, or could Earth have disintegrated, finally, with such violence that it triggered the sun in doing so?

There might have been some way of finding out if someone had been on duty at the observatory the night before. But the first notice they had had of the nova was when Jessie Bendall saw it when she went out for a breath of fresh air, and everyone dashed out to see it too. They didn't have enough people to spare, trying to fill in time, to have someone constantly in the observatory. Its telescope, in any case, was only the one they had taken from the ship. It showed a large area of the sky in no great detail.

Bentley ran over in his mind what he would have told Dick and the Foleys, given the chance.

He had meant to explain how it became too late on Earth to do anything but allow a few people the opportunity to escape. Atomic energy had made interplanetary travel easy -- too easy, from one point of view, for when it came to the point of evacuating Earth it was impossible to evacuate people to any habitable planet in the solar system. Venus and Mars were soon going to be dangerously radio-active, as Earth already was. There was no time to use the enormous power of the atom to make any of the other planets habitable.

Besides, somehow, that didn't seem to be the solution. A lot of time was wasted, early on, because the scientists recognized the danger of atomic power and tried to find a way of survival without using it.

There was none. The only means of escape was by using the very thing they were escaping from.

So a ship was built. Tae power of the atom would drive a ship out of the solar system, out to the stars at a speed not much less than the speed of light. A ship had to be made that would get somewhere habitable.

There, fortunately, astronomy was able to help. It had recently been practically proved that the first planet of Brinsen's Star, only seventeen million miles from it, was another Earth. No one had seen the planet. From direct evidence, no one could say with certainty that there was a planet there. But from indirect evidence not merely the existence of the planet but almost everything else about it could be confidently postulated.

The Mundis was made and sent out. No one who went on it knew anyone else. None of those who went knew the methods of selection. In fact, the last few weeks before take-off were somehow blurred. That wasn't surprising. It was a time of the greatest possible emotional stress. Everyone must have left someone dear to him.

All the eggs were put in one basket. Everything the colonists needed to make a new world was put on board the Mundis.

The journey. Bentley hadn't worked out what he would have said about the journey through fourteen light-years, if anything. He would probably have passed over it lightly. It was nothing to the young people, that time of suspense, hope, fear, and regret. They knew how it had ended. They would never understand what those sixteen years had been to the founder colonists. And why should they? It was an old, dead story.

Bentley looked up as a shadow appeared beside him. He saw Rog Foley. Alone.

He brougt his mind back from the past. "Didn't they tell you?" he asked a little blankly. He still wasn't entirely in the present. He had left a part of him being shot through space at very little less than the speed of light.

"Tell me what?" asked Rog, dropping on the ground beside Bentley as before.

"That it was off. That I couldn't tell you any more."

"Oh. That." Rog looked up into Bentley's eyes. He didn't seem to find it any disadvantage being in the inferior position. "I heard that, yes. But only you know what you're going to tell me."

Bentley became fully alert. "You didn't bring the others," he observed shrewdly.

"No," said Rog, giving nothing away.

"Do you expect me to go against the Council's ruling?"

Rog answered with another question. "Did you agree with it?"

"No, I didn't. But disobeying it is another matter. I'd tell you if I trusted you, Foley."

"Well, that's plain enough, anyway," said Rog agreeably. "I like you, Mr. Bentley. I think you and I could get on, if we really had a chance. Anyway, I'll tell you what I'm going to do. But first I'll tell you why."

He gazed thoughtfully at the grass in front of him.

"It's been said that I'm power mad," he observed. "It's been said by people on both sides of the Gap. The last person who told me that was your daughter. But I don't think she really meant it, for she's backing me.

"I don't believe I'm power mad. I don't want to have such power that I merely have to say a thing and it's done. But there's one thing I won't stand for. I'm not going to leave power in the hands of people who are jittery. Who won't make up their own minds. Who can't keep the community together. Who have failed and are going to go on failing."

He looked eamestly up at Bentley. "Don't you see? Since John Pertwee was stripped of office, stupidly, we haven't had a government. We've had a Council that could be swayed by fear, or a fiery appeal, or a little push by someone like me. Well, I may be young, Mr. Bentley, but I can see when things are wrong, I'm going to do something about it."

"War?" asked Bentley bluntly.