“They’ve found none yet,” I assented. “But I can speak with no authority. I went purely as a touristand a glorious trip it was.”
“It must be wonderful to be so many million miles nearer the sun,” he said. It was the sort of plain remark I had often heard him make. On others’ lips it might have sounded platitudinous; in his quiet tones I caught a note of sublimity.
“I shall never get to Venus,” he said. “There’s too much work to be done here. You must have seen some marvels there, Rog!”
“Yes … Yet nothing so strange as an elephant.”
“And they’ll have a breathable atmosphere in a decade, I hear?”
“So they say. They are certainly doing wonders … You know, Jubal, I shall have to go back then. You see, there’s a feeling, ersomething, a sort of expectancy. No, not quite that; it’s hard to explain” I don’t converse well. I ramble and mumble when I have something real to say. I could say it to a woman, or I could write it on paper; but Jubal is a man of action, and when I did say it, I deliber-ately omitted emotional overtones and lost interest in what I said. “It’s like courting a woman in armour with the visor closed, on Venus now. You can see it, but you can’t touch or smell or breathe it. Always an airtight dome er a space suit between you and actuality. But in ten years’ time, you’ll be able to run your bare fingers through the sand, feel the breezes on your cheek… Well, you know what I mean, er sort of feel her undressed.”
He was thinking1 saw it in his eyes”Rog’s going to go all poetic on me.” He said: “And you approve of that-the change-over of atmospheres?”
“Yes.”
“Yet you don’t approve of what we’re doing here, which is just the same sort of thing?”
He had a point. “You’re upsetting a delicate balance here,”
I said gingerly. “A thousand ecological factors are swept by the board just so that you can grind these waters through your turbines. And the same thing’s happened at Owen Falls over on Lake Victoria… But on Venus there’s no such balance. It’s just a clean page waiting for man to write what he will on it. Under that CO blanket, there’s been no spark of life: the mountains are bare of moss, the valleys lie in-nocent of grass; in the geological strata, no fossils sleep; no arncebae move in the sea. But what you’re doing here…”
“People!” he exclaimed. “I’ve got people to consider. Babies need to be born, mouths must be fed. A man must live.
Your sort of feelings are all very wellthey make good poemsbut I consider the people. I love the people. For them I work…”
He waved his hands, overcome by his own grandiose visions.
If the passion for Progress was his strength, the fallacy in-herent in the idea was his secret weakness. I began to grow warm.
“You get good conditions for these people, they procreate forthwith. Next generation, another benefactor will have to step forward and get good conditions for the children. That’s Progress, eh?” I asked maliciously.
“I see you so rarely, Rog; don’t let’s quarrel,” he said meekly. “I just do what I can. I’m only an engineer.”
That was how he always won an altercation. Before meek-ness I have no defence. But hostility ran like a sewer below the level of our conversation.
The sun had finished another day. With the sudden dark-ness came chill. Jubal pressed a button, and glass slid round the veranda, enclosing us. Like Venus, I thought; but here you could still smell that spicy, bosomy scent which is the breath of dear Africa herself. On Venus, the smells are imported.
We poured some more wine and talked of family matters.
In a short while his wife, Sloe, joined us. I began to feel at home. The feeling was only partly psychological; my glands were now beginning to readjust fully to normal conditions after their long days in space travel.
J-Casta also appeared. Him I was less pleased to see.
He was the boss type, the strong-arm man: as Jubal’s under-ling, he pandered wretchedly to him and bullied everyone else on the project. He (and there were many others like him, unfortunately) thought of the Massacre as man’s greatest achievement. This evening, in the presence of his superiors, after a preliminary burst of showing off, he was quiet enough.