It is doubtful that he realized that he had traveled other than — that first lap in — the traveling case to White Sands. He took up his new routine without noticing the five months clipped out of his life; he took charge of the apartment assigned to the Vaughn family, inspected it — thoroughly, then nightly checked it to be sure that all was in order and safe before he tromped out his place on the foot of Charlie’s bed and tucked his tail over his nose.
He was aware that this was a new place, but he was not homesick. The other home had been satisfactory and he had never dreamed of leaving it, but this new home was still better. Not only did it have Charlie — without whom no place could be home — not only did it have wonderfu] odors, but also he found the people more agreeable. Iii the past, many humans had been quite stuffy aboul flower beds and such trivia, but here he was almost nevei scolded or chased away; on the contrary people were anxious to speak to him, pet him, feed him. His popular. ity was based on arithmetic: Borealis had fifty-five thou. sand people but only eleven dogs; many colonists were homesick for man’s traditional best friend. Nixie did nol know this, but he had great capacity for enjoying the good things in life without worrying about why.
Mr. Vaughn found Venus satisfactory. His work foi Synthetics of Venus, Ltd. was the sort of work he had done on Earth, save that he was now paid more and given more responsibility. The living quarters provided by the company were as comfortable as the house he had left back on Earth and he was unworried about the future of his family for the first time in years.
Mrs. Vaughn found Venus bearable but she was homesick much of the time.
Charlie, once he was over first the worry and then the delight of waking Nixie, found Venus interesting, less strange than he had expected, and from time to time he was homesick. But before long he was no longer homesick; Venus was home. He knew now what he wanted to be: a pioneer. When he was grown he would head south, deep into the unmapped jungle, carve out a plantation.
The jungle was the greatest single fact about Venus. The colony lived on the bountiful produce of the jungle. The land on which Borealis sat, buildings and spaceport, had been torn away from the hungry jungle only by flaming it dead, stabilizing the muck with gel-forming chemicals, and poisoning the land thus claimed — then flaming, cutting, or poisoning any hardy survivor that pushed its green nose up through the captured soil.
The Vaughn family lived in a large apartment building which sat on land newly captured. Facing their front door, a mere hundred feet away across scorched and poisoned soil, a great shaggy dark-green wall loomed higher than the buffer space between. But the mindless jungle never gave up. The vines, attracted by light — their lives were spent competing for light energy — felt their way into the open space, tred to fill it. They grew with incredible speed. One day after breakfast Mr. Vaughn tried to go out his own front door, found his way hampered. While they had slept a vine had grown across the hundred-foot belt, supporting itself by tendrils. against the dead soil, and had started up the front of the building. —
The police patrol of the city were armed with flame guns and spent most of their time cutting back such hardy intruders. While they had power to enforce the law, they rarely made an arrest. Borealis was a city almost free of crime; the humans were too busy fighting nature in the raw to require much attention from policemen.
But the jungle was friend as well as enemy. Its lusty life offered food for millions and billions of humans in place of the few thousands already on Venus. Under the jungle lay beds of peat, still farther down were thick coal seams representing millions of years of lush jungle growth, and pools of oil waiting to be tapped. Aerial survey by jet-copter in the volcanic regions promised uranium and thorium when man could cut his way through and get at it. The planet offered unlimited wealth. But it did not offer it to sissies.