Part 2

"You made it clear enough. They misinterpreted our behavior and were shocked out of their self-righteous puritanical skins."

She shook her head. "Shocked, yes--but not enough to have rushed us through a ceremony that under ordinary circumstances would have required days of preparation. There must have been another reason." Suddenly she glanced up through the foliage at the sky. "It is growing dark."

There was no longer any denying the fact. The roseate radiance of the youthful afternoon had transmuted to a sort of gray murk; moreover, the air had grown appreciably colder. Gordon stood up. "I think we'd better be on our way," he said. "It's going to rain."

* * * * *

A good three hours passed, however, before he felt the first drop. He and Sonya were in the hills now, and the ridge was far behind them. The rain was gentle, but it was persistent too, and both of them were soaked before another hour had gone by. "We will go to my ship," Sonya said, brushing back a rain-wet strand of horse-chestnut colored hair from her forehead. "It is much closer than yours."

Somehow her offering him shelter in a Soviet ship did not strike him as being in the least incongruous. And when, a moment later, he slipped his arm around her waist, that didn't seem incongruous either. And when she permitted it to remain there, even _that_ didn't seem incongruous. For some crazy mixed-up reason life seemed singularly devoid of incongruities all of a sudden. And amazingly forthright and simple.

The rain was extremely penetrating--so penetrating, in fact, that it penetrated his skin as well as his clothing. And it had a curious lulling effect. No, that wasn't the word. A curious soporific effect. No, that wasn't the word, either. Well what word was it, then?

He couldn't call it to mind till after they reached Sonya's ship and were standing at the base of the Jacob's ladder. By then it was too late. By then he was gazing softly down into her eyes and she was gazing softly up into his, and the world was well on its way toward being well lost.

He tried to force himself to step back and regard the situation with the cold and objective eye of a scientist, to evaluate this strange and wondrous quality that fell in the form of rain and to tie it in with the Venusians' motivation in marrying him and Sonya posthaste. In vain. All he could think of was the tune she had been humming by the brook and the hole he had seen in one of her cheap cotton stockings. And then she was in his arms and he was kissing her rain-wet lips, and Washington and Moscow were forgotten place-names on a map that had no more meaning than the paper it was printed on.

The rain continued to fall. Softly; gently. Insistently. It sang soft songs in the leaves. It murmured; it whispered. It laughed.

* * * * *

It did not cease till morning. After starting back to his ship, Gordon mentally rehearsed the report which he and Sonya had agreed to send to their respective headquarters. It described briefly how they had been captured and released, but discreetly made no reference either to the wedding ceremony or to the rain. They had unanimously agreed that the situation was complicated enough without complicating it further.

He had gone less than half a mile when his collar began to press against his throat. Thereafter the pressure increased with every step he took, till finally he came to a semi-strangled stop. It was as though he had reached the end of an invisible leash.

The pressure lessened after he backed up a few paces, went away altogether after he backed up a dozen more. There was only one explanation. The metal from which his and Sonya's collars--as well as those of the Venusians--had been forged, possessed magnetic properties unknown to terrestrial metals, and the attraction between objects fashioned from it grew progressively stronger as the square of the distance between them _increased_. Either the Venusians had disciplined this attraction so that it was limited to objects fashioned from the same stock, or the ore from which the metal was processed was naturally subdivided into small magnetically independent veins. Gordon did not know which was the case, but there was one thing he did know; when the Venusians married you, they meant business.

He began retracing his steps back to Sonya's ship. Halfway there, he saw her running toward him. Her white face told him that her collar had been giving her a hard time too, and that she had arrived at a conclusion similar to his own. "Gordon, what are we going to do?" she gasped when she came up to him.

"We'll get them off someway," he reassured her. "Come on--I've got the necessary tools in my ship."

He tried all morning before he gave up. The collars were impervious to his best shears, and his hardest file failed to scratch their surface. Using his acetylene torch was out of the question.

* * * * *

He sat disconsolately down on the ground several feet from one of the landing jacks. Sonya sat down beside him. "We won't be able to go back at all now," she said. "Neither your ship nor mine can carry us both, and there's no way we can occupy more than one of them at a time."

Gordon sighed. "I suppose we could radio for help," he said presently. "But if we did we'd have to tell them everything that happened. I'm afraid they'd be sort of skeptical about the rain. Of course, we could leave that part out--but I'm afraid they'd be skeptical about the collars too. In fact, I don't think they'd even believe us. They'd simply jump to the conclusion that we've fal--that we don't want to return and would order us back on the double the minute maximum juxtaposition occurred. No, if we radio for help, we've got to have a good concrete reason for doing so--one that they'll be able to understand and believe."

Sonya managed a wan smile. "I--I can just see myself standing before the Council of Ministers, blaming what happened on the rain," she said.

Gordon laughed, "And I can just see myself standing before a congressional investigating committee, explaining about the collars." He began to feel better. A situation that could lend itself to humor could not be wholly hopeless. "Here's what we'll do for now," he went on. "We'll radio back the report we agreed upon, and then we'll go on with our work as though nothing is wrong. Sometimes problems solve themselves; but just in case this one shouldn't, and we can't go back, we'll build a cabin so we'll have some place to live."

Sonya's eyes sparked like a little girl's. "Let's build it by that little brook," she said. "Where--where we first met."

"Fine," Gordon said.

* * * * *

During the ensuing weeks, they spent their mornings gathering data and their afternoons working on the cabin. They took time out to analyze a sample of rain water, but it evinced no unusual qualities. Gordon was not surprised. Shortly after landing, he had tested a sample of Venusian water for drinking purposes, and with the same result. Clearly, the quality that had undermined their inhibitions originated in the cloud-cover, and evaporated soon after it reached the ground.

After the cabin was finished, they began going on afternoon-hikes into the hills, tramping through idyllic woods, talking and laughing, exclaiming now and then at unexpected patterns of flowers, starting at sudden rainbow-flights of birds. They saw but few Venusians, and the few they did see ignored them. One afternoon they found a fern-bordered pool beneath a white-skirted waterfall, and after that they came there every day to swim. Sonya's skin darkened to a deep gold, and looking at her, Gordon sometimes found it hard to breathe. Every so often the sky darkened, and rain fell; but the rain was superfluous now. And as for the invisible magnetic chain that bound them together, that had been supplanted by another invisible chain that was ten times as strong.

And yet the original one still remained, and the problem it represented grew more and more acute as their scheduled departure-times approached. They desperately needed a good practical reason to give their respective governments for not returning to Earth--and quite providentially at the very last moment (though it seemed anything but providential at the time) they discovered that they had one. Or rather, Sonya did. On the morning of the day she was scheduled to undergo the rigors of acceleration, she regarded Gordon shyly across the little breakfast table he had built. "I--I am going to have a baby," she said.

* * * * *

The news, when it arrived in Moscow, had something of the impact of a hydrogen bomb, and when it leaked through a hitherto unsuspected crevice in the Kremlin, there was a sort of chain-reaction throughout the entire Soviet Union. It was at this point in his political career that the Soviet premier discovered a universal truth: people the world over, whether they be communistic or capitalistic, have a very large soft spot in their hearts when it comes to babies.

That spring, Venus outshone herself, and hung in the evening sky over Moscow somewhat in the manner of the star over Bethlehem. The premier had a haunted look on his face when he appeared before the Council of Ministers. He was not alone. The Ministers had haunted looks on their faces too. What did you _do_ when you had to cope with a forthcoming space baby who would be half capitalist and half communist and who was already adored by the whole world? The premier did not know. But there was one thing he did know: in the last analysis, any party is the people, and while you can con the people into believing that black bread is white bread and that caraway seeds are caviar, you cannot con them into believing that a child conceived on the Planet of Love by a Russian girl and an American boy is anything other than a harbinger of peace.

So in the long run, what the premier did was the only thing he could have done. He arranged a summit meeting with the president of the United States and the prime minister of Great Britain, and for the first time in history, the East and the West really got together. The threat of war could not, of course, be totally eliminated at such short notice; but a number of aggravations that could precipitate a war could be eliminated--and were. This accomplished, the three leaders drew up plans for a super three-man spaceship to be built posthaste by the best engineers the three nations could supply, and unanimously agreed that the pilot would be English, the obstetrician, Russian, and the nurse, American.

It has been said that after the meeting the Soviet premier and the president of the United States got together and began thinking up names. This is extremely doubtful. Anyway, if they did, they were wasting their time, for Sonya Mikhailovna and Gordon Andrews had already taken care of the matter. The name they chose is well-known today--except, perhaps, by those for whom this history has been recorded. Which brings us back to the aforementioned news bulletin. In common with most news bulletins, it has about as much poetry in it as an old shoe, but its message shines forth with a radiance that excels even the radiance cast by the star over Moscow.

_Geneva, Switzerland, September 11, 1996--The young Russo-American ambassador-at-large, Pëtr Gordonovitch Andrews, announced this morning that his peace plan has been accepted by all major and minor powers, and that the war that has threatened mankind for the past half century can no longer occur._

THE END