Part 1
EXILE FROM VENUS
By E. HOFFMAN PRICE
Earth was a world of murdering savages; bleak and desolate; contaminated by deadly radioactivity. Only Craig Verrill's atavistic stubbornness--and a rash promise, made in fury--could have brought him back to that perilous birthplace of Man....
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories May 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
The solicitude of Linda's voice, the seductiveness of her perfume, her very presence as they sat in the artificial twilight of the Domes of Venus, tempted him to abandon his plan to sail at once for Terra, venture among the savage Terrestrians, and get possession of that enormous ruby they called the Fire of Skanderbek.
Linda was long legged and supple waisted, with dark eyes and gold-bronze hair, and very white skin. Her cheek bones were just sufficiently prominent to keep her face from being too regular; and there was a perceptible dusting of tiny freckles which accented the irregularity, adding a piquant touch. These were natural, and a rarity that had existed only in fable for the past six-hundred years, for the glow-lamps and the occlusive Venusian atmosphere seemed to combine to make the freckle almost impossible. However, though the cosmeticians had driven the Board of Science frantic until they had devised a process for artificially imitating Linda's unique flaw, this distinction had not spoiled her.
"Never mind what I said, last night," Linda pleaded. "We were all angry, you and Gil and I. No sense at all!"
"But I promised," Verrill said stubbornly. Which helped--a little--to sustain himself against backing down from the rash venture for which he had not a bit of taste.
He had an angular face, narrowish, with the bony structure well accented. His nose was prominent; his hazel eyes were intent and impatient. He was lean, muscular, and all in all, just the sort of Venusian to go on such a crazy venture--yet he didn't like the idea at all, now that he had had time to consider.
"Let's forget it all, Craig! Rubies aren't important enough. The one Gil brought me from that trading-post of Terra isn't--wasn't--"
Verrill said sourly: "That's what makes me feel so foolish about it. He brought you a souvenir, and I grabbed it from you, flung it into the lake, and pasted him. What for?"
"Oh, Craig, who _cares_! Gil was lording it over you. I was too smug and pleased with the gift to realize how far he was going. Oh, all right, of _course_ you were wrong! But what of it?"
Verrill shook his head. "I fairly shouted myself into it."
"I don't want you to go."
"I know you don't. But too many of our friends were within sight and hearing of the whole mess. Sooner or later their attitude would make you unhappy about a man who talked big, and then backed down."
* * * * *
His insistence widened Linda's eyes. The civilized Venusians were always ready to take the sensible, the expedient way. Had they been otherwise, had they not been the descendants of sensible Terrestrian ancestors, they would have been included in the devastation which had left all but small and widely scattered patches of Terra uninhabitable for the past seven-hundred years. Rather, those who today were Venusians would have been struggling savages, scraping out a living in some uncontaminated area.
Verrill's was an almost Terrestrian stubbornness; something primitive and atavistic, very much like that queer quirk which made some Venusians return to their native Earth to set up trading-posts, where they bartered with the barbarian tribesmen for tobacco and wines, spices and jewels and perfumes, all manner of luxuries which Venus did not offer.
Linda made her final appeal: "Leaving all this, to scramble around in that terrible waste and desolation--oh, do be sensible!"
Her voice, and the kiss that followed it, made Verrill at once aware of what generations of Venusians had taken for granted. He looked across the gardens and the lake, and up at the prodigious span of girders. The original purpose of the structure had been to house a military outpost that was to have outflanked a comparable one on Luna. In the years just before The War, engineers and scientists had been sent from Terra to build those enormous domes, plastic-sheathed and air-tight, to exclude the raging dust-storms and the overwhelming concentration of formaldehyde which made up most of the natural Venusian atmosphere. Rather than rely on any system depending upon chemically prepared oxygen, they had established gardens, orchards, fields of plant-life which liberated sufficient oxygen to maintain the required balance.
This was to have been simply a garrison. According to plan, it would have played a decisive part in the final clash for Terrestrian supremacy. Meanwhile, there had come to be little difference between the rival dictatorships, except in the wording of their slogans. The Anglo-Capitalist Bloc had borrowed all the kinds and twists of regimentation of the rival bloc. The difference finally became one of flavor rather than principle.
A cool-headed few, in command of the Venusian garrison, had seen that neither side could win; that there would be only mutual and total destruction. The warfare became more and more atrocious; and the Anglo-Capitalist Bloc drifted further and further from the sort of organization that the Venus garrison, in no immediate danger, could contemplate defending with enthusiasm. Thus, when one day the Lunar Base radio complained of attack by suicide-ships and then went abruptly silent, the Venusian Base, which might have been expected to cry "Geronimo!" and leap into the holocaust, instead underwent a short and violent revolution in which the ardently military were disposed of. Then, stubbornly intending to survive chaos and idiocy, the Venus Base folded its hands and sat out the fatal clash that ended The War and virtually the whole of Terrestrian civilization with it....
After several centuries, the Venus Council risked an exploration party to Terra to see whether the globe was becoming fit for human habitation again. Large areas had, of course, through natural processes become decontaminated; there were scattered colonies of survivors--farmers, herdsmen, hunters, armed with clubs, spears, and other primitive weapons. Contact was made, communication struck up, trade--of considerable importance to both--established; and, after the ten years which this took, the Venusians were left with very little inclination to colonize Terra. Life under the domes was comfortable, with controlled climate, law and order, science and art. Comfortable, civilized, and sensible. While Terra--
"_Be a sensible Venusian_," was what Linda meant. "_Don't go looking for trouble when you can do better without. Don't be a typical Terrestrian!_"
The whole clash of the previous night had been silly. Irritated by Gil Dawson's giving Linda a ruby as a souvenir of his official inspection-tour of the Council-controlled Terrestrian trading-posts, Verrill had flung the trinket into the lake. After a brisk fracas in which Dawson had finally wearied of getting up, only to be knocked down again, Verrill had shouted to Linda and to most of Venus that he'd get her a man's-sized ruby, the Fire of Skanderbek. She, thoroughly outraged, had told him and Dawson that by Heaven she'd not be the prize, either of a brawl or a souvenir-finding contest. To make it good, she had concluded by telling Verrill that he'd be far better occupied if he got the Venus Council to assign him to one of the committees for improving the living-standards of the Terrestrians, and won the Fire of Skanderbek as a token of their gratitude.
But however earnestly she besought him to forget it all, Verrill was just as unhappily determined to go through with it. "I can't back down. Dawson will surely take a crack at stealing the Fire himself--and that would make it tough for me. And for you."
"Oh, let the fool try!" she cried, desperately. "He'd never come back from the territory of those wildmen."
Verrill shook his head. "He might come back. Even though I did give him a trouncing, he's anything but a clown. You wouldn't accept the Fire of Skanderbek if he offered it--but he'd give it to someone else, and then--well, a lot of women do dislike you! There's nothing I can do, except to beat him to it."
And so, Verrill went to do as he had to do.
* * * * *
The space-freighter veered from her course only a little; instead of landing in the sun-blasted plain at the foot of the mountains into which Verrill was to go, she launched a crew-boat which took him to the trading-post at the foot of barren limestone bulwarks.
Dawson was not at the post. But while a head start was a happy omen, Verrill knew that it had its limits, since his plan to ingratiate himself with the barbarians until he could seize the fetish-ruby and return to the post involved so much time that the gain of hours or days meant little.
Ingratiate himself--steal the Fire of Skanderbek--and get out--infinitely simpler than Linda's suggestion, probably an utterly impossible one, of deserving it finally as a gift. His first look at the bearded mountaineers convinced him that no amount of do-gooding could ever move them to gratitude.
Those lounging in the compound of the fortified trading-post wore homespun pants and sheepskin jackets. They fairly clanked with trade daggers, trade pistols, and trade hatchets; some carried trade muskets, and some had the new repeating rifles. Their tanned and hairy faces and bitter eyes made it plain that looting and robbing, brawling and mayhem and murder were their very breath of life.
They spoke the international language which had developed sufficiently to come into common use around 2200 A.D. English, while a nightmare of contradictions to baffle a foreigner, had offered these advantages: next to Chinese, no other language was so free of inflections; and it could so readily assimilate all manner of foreign words. Thus, since the tone-deaf Occidental had not been able to master the simplicities of Chinese or other Mongolian tongues, the Asiatics had taken up English, with which had been blended Arabic, Urdu, Malay, and a good deal of Western European; and, while seven centuries of Venusian isolation had made the speech of the people of the Domes diverge from the original international Terrestrian, Verrill had not too much difficulty in making himself understood.
"This black bag," he told a group of the caravan men, "will interest Ardelan--that's your chief's name, isn't it? Let me go into the mountains with you to talk to him."
"You're crazy," a craggy faced fellow with drooping moustaches and hard blue eyes told him, levelly. "You think I'm crazy."
Verrill laid out three daggers. He picked one up, jabbed it into the top of a table cluttered with heaps of goatskins, dried apricots, raisins, and bags of coriander seed. He bent the weapon until the grip touched the table top. He released it. It snapped straight up, with a fine, high pitched _spang_. He plucked a dagger from the mountaineer's belt, drew the other weapon from the table, and slashed them edge to edge.
He cut shavings from the mountaineer's weapon. Then he stropped his own blade on the palm of his hand for a couple of strokes, and next ran it along his arm. The hairs toppled as he cut them free; there was no drag at all, the edge was so keen.
"Mine are not trade daggers," he said. "Bet you the three that Ardelan will listen to me, and not throw me out."
The Terrestrian's eyes gleamed. "What do I put up for a bet?"
"A pair of those boots you're wearing. Put my knives in your belt now. If I lose my bet, they're yours. If I win, you're welcome to them anyway."
So the caravan men fitted him out with garments and boots like their own; and Verrill went into the mountains with them.
II
The trail snaked along precipices and wound past narrow, hidden valleys. At the foot of a cliff lay the shell of a space-cruiser which had been telescoped from its original six-hundred feet to a bare two-hundred, though much of the nose had melted from the impact against the rocks. Gnarled oaks and junipers reached up from a riven seam of the shell. The metal had not rusted. It was merely tarnished to a slate gray. It was a mine of such metal as could have furnished all manner of implements for the Terrestrians--but they did not know how to exploit it.
Finally, Verrill was looking down into narrow, upland meadows where sheep grazed. There were barley patches. His eyes felt as though they were full of sand. The snow-white glare from cliffs, and the dust which rose in yellow puffs at every step, made the way a torment for one accustomed to the paradisiacal clime of the Venusian Domes.
Each day's march brought the donkey-caravan within sight of alternate trails, guarded by mud-brick towers, where armed men were stationed to watch the moves of hostile neighbors. The return, even without pursuit, would be dangerous.
At last they came to Ardelan's mud-walled houses, huddled on a rocky shelf which overhung a fertile valley. The settlement was surrounded by a wall of earth and stone, and had escaped contamination because no one would have bombed a 12,000 foot range of limestone peaks except by mistake.
When the trading convoy filed into the tangle of flat-roofed houses which surrounded a hard-packed central square, women, children, and dogs came out, each in full voice. The procession kept straight on toward the entrance of a two-storeyed building. Half the ground-level was a stable; the rest, a courtyard where Ardelan and a handful of armed companions lolled under an awning of black goat-hair.
Terrestrian faces were no novelty to Verrill; but this time, being a stranger among them--instead of merely a spectator seeing a handful of them, half defiant and half uneasy in the strangeness of a trading-post--he saw what he had never before noticed. They tended toward height and ranginess, prominence of nose, angularity of face; yet behind this likeness was a shadow-pattern of racial differentiation. There were differences of flavor, rather than of outright form. The flare of a nostril, the shape of an eye, the fullness or thinness of lip--a thick necked one, here and there, suggested that, generations back, there had been among his ancestors a blocky Mongol from Central Asia.
The guards, instead of presenting Verrill, explained him as though he had been some trade article. Ardelan, listening, studied his visitor with entire impersonality, as he might have scrutinized a basket of fresh ripe apricots to see how they had endured being hauled so far.
"What's in the bag?" he demanded, abruptly.
"Medicine. I am a doctor."
"What for? People die anyway."
"A doctor," Verrill explained, concealing his dismay, "is not to keep people from dying. He is to make it more agreeable for them until they finally have to die."
Ardelan addressed his henchmen. The answers summed up to this: that if nothing much ailed a man, he'd get well by himself, and if something really incapacitated him, it would of course be something so serious that he could not last long at the best.
Ardelan digested this wisdom, then asked, "Verrill, can you make knives like these you gave that man?"
"I am a doctor, not a blacksmith."
"Can you make guns or cartridges?"
"No."
"Can you fight?"
Verrill glanced uneasily about, as though Ardelan might be on the point of selecting an opponent to test the stranger's claims. And, having read Verrill's face, Ardelan snorted, and not waiting for a reply, demanded, "Then what are you good for?"
"To treat the sick," Verrill repeated, with growing sense of futility. "To bind wounds. To set broken bones."
"Look at us. We've done very well."
"I can do better."
"Can't work, can't fight! Good for nothing but doctoring. Bad as a priest! Lock him up; I want to think this over."
The guard hustled Verrill and his medical case into an empty granary. They slammed the door and rolled a boulder against it. It made no difference whether or not he could shove the door open; there was nowhere to go if he did get out. He could not find his way back to the trading-post except over the way which his escort had brought him: a guarded way.
* * * * *
In the half-gloom, Verrill noted that the wall had been cracked by earthquakes. These cracks gave him hand and toe holds, to climb up until he could catch the rough-hewn timber which supported the roof of brush and clay. Lying on the crown of the wall, he could look out through rifts in the roof.
Herdsmen were driving their flocks in from distant slopes. Others drove donkeys laden with brush. Verrill was appalled by the ever present evidence that Terrestrian life was a matter of digging, scratching, and enduring the elements. The stark emptiness of the sky worried him; he was accustomed to the perpetual twilight and impenetrable clouds of Venus.
Well away from the settlement, and outside the wall, was a small, squatty cube with a small tower at each corner. The structure was backed up against an overhanging cliff, and was unapproachable except from the walled town. The precipitous ending of the shelf guarded the whitewashed cube more surely than if it had been within the town wall.
The open doorway was so large in proportion to the structure itself that surmise made Verrill's pulse hammer. That must be the shrine where the Fire of Skanderbek was kept.
Toward dusk, drums rumbled and trumpets of ram's horns bawled hoarsely. Men carrying tightly bound bundles of brush marched in procession toward the whitewashed cube, and chanted as they went. When they came to the place, they filed in, each coming out with his faggots ablaze.
They returned to their houses. Before long, Verrill's captors brought him a bowl of mutton stew, and leathery cakes of bread. "They couldn't have cooked this stuff so soon," he reasoned. "It must have been cooking all the while, on fires already lighted. That procession was fire worship."
He sat there a long time after he had licked the gravy from his fingers. A shocking business: meat so plentiful that it was fed to a prisoner, and yet the barbarians knew nothing at all about cookery.
The town swarmed with flies. Vultures perched on the walls and watch-towers, waiting to clean up the garbage and offal flung from the houses. The community well had a nasty taint from surface drainage from the stables. Verrill, after a bad night's sleep, spent the morning deciding that when pestilence did break out, he would need his medical supplies for himself.
The women, shapely and graceful, gathered about the well to fill the earthenware jugs they carried balanced on their heads. They chattered mainly about the outsider, giving most emphasis to his looks, though devoting certain speculation to his possible usefulness, and probable destination.
"Kwangtan," they all agreed, "wants him killed or sent away."
From what he could piece together from the various relays of women he overheard, Verrill concluded that Kwangtan was the keeper of the shrine; and that medical practice was the monopoly of old women, who cooked up herbs. These potions, plus Kwangtan's incantations, kept the community in health.
The drowsy silence of midafternoon was broken by an hysterical screeching and screaming. Before Verrill could arouse himself from the stupor of half suffocation, the door was jerked open and several men pounced for him.
"You, with the medicine! Work for you. Bring the black box!"
* * * * *
They hustled him to a house where several old women were shaking and back-slapping a boy of three or four. The kid's mother, one of the few redheads in the colony, was wailing at a pitch that made Verrill shiver. A beetle-browed young man with a wiry beard squatted on the floor, looking helpless. All he did was repeat, "Get Kwangtan!" And no one paid him any heed at all.
At the sight of Verrill, one of the old women laid the child on a sheepskin spread on the floor. The child's face was gray. His lips were bluish. His eyes bugged out. He wheezed agonizingly. It made Verrill's skin twitch, just to see the little fellow's losing battle for breath. He was slowly choking. With all voices suddenly stilled at Verrill's approach, the sound became all the more ominous.
In his utter perplexity and dismay, Verrill hoped that what he heard was the death-rattle which would relieve him of the task about to be forced upon him. The absence of Kwangtan, the holy man, told him the story: that wise fellow was not going to lose any prestige by tackling something he could not handle.
"What's wrong?" Verrill asked, with a show of assurance.
"You're a doctor," the kid's father snarled. "Do something."
"He swallowed an apricot seed," the child's redhaired mother said. "It's stuck, we can't shake it out, he's choking. Get it out, you blinking fool!"
The kid's father drew and cocked his pistol. The dry click chilled Verrill to the heart. He remembered an old story of an emergency operation at a trading-post. The yarn had given the Venusians quite a thrill.
Ardelan stalked in. He nodded his approval of the man who had a pistol trained on the doctor. "Stranger, do not make any mistakes. Kwangtan has warned us."
Verrill had a raft of Venusian specifics for just about every known ailment; he had counted, however, on nothing of the sort which now confronted him--had looked forward simply to giving the savages pills, and swabbing them with antiseptics. As he knelt, he fumbled helplessly with the instruments in the case.
"Do this right," Ardelan said. "Or he shoots."
Verrill loaded a hypo with a local anaesthetic. The glint of metal, and the sudden end of the child's gagging as the injection stilled his struggles, nearly cost Verrill his life. Ardelan's big hand knocked the pistol out of line as it blazed, and the slug scorched Verrill's cheek and pounded a chunk out of the wall.
"He's not dead," the chief said, "Not yet."
A splash of antiseptic.
Then, nerving himself, Verrill made a slit in the throat. There was not much blood. He got the apricot seed free. With haggling jabs, he took a couple of stitches. He taped and bandaged.
Then, shoulders sagging, he settled back, trying to keep from toppling to the floor. The kid's lips were no longer bluish. He was breathing freely. At last he blinked, cried out, and reached for his throat.
"He's brought him back to life!" the redhead cried, and snatched up the boy.
* * * * *
Verrill crumpled. He toppled, and sprawled. He was, however, conscious, and when he heard what the mountaineers were saying he realized that had he done it intentionally, he could not have done better than collapse.
One said, "He's left his body for awhile to fight off the devils, so they won't come back to hurt the kid."
Verrill muttered and mumbled until, satisfied that his act had been up to their expectation, he sat up. Again, he faced a pistol, but this time it was presented butt foremost.
"Take it, doctor. It's yours," the kid's father said.
And now Kwangtan, the fire priest, joined the group.
His deep-set eyes blazed fiercely. His face was sunken. His hands were like parchment drawn over bones. He wore white pants and a white shirt. His beard and his shoulder-length hair were white. For a moment, Verrill thought that the old fellow was a veteran of The War. His age made him fantastic in a colony where men over forty were scarce, and those over fifty, rarities; though old women were more than plentiful.
Verrill declined the gift of the pistol. "Give it to the holy man," he said. "I did not come here for pay."