Louis and Irma were repairing a turbine-driven tractor, when Dieter excitedly put in his appearance. “It’s ready!” he shouted, standing in the entrance of the shed. “We’re going to start!”
From under the tractor, Louis stuck out his head. “What’s ready?” he demanded sourly.
“The corn. We’re going to harvest it. We’ve got all the equipment down there; Vivian’s hooking it up.” Dieter danced up and down with frenzy. “You all have to pitch in—this stuff can wait. I rounded up Frank and Syd; they’re on their way. They’ll meet us along the route. And Garry’s tagging along.”
Grumbling, Louis dragged himself out from under the tractor. “It isn’t corn. Stop calling it corn.”
“It’s corn in the spiritual sense. It’s the essence of corn.”
“Even if it’s dark green?” Irma asked, amused.
“Even if it’s purple-striped and silver polka-dotted. Even if it stands ninety feet high and has lace-embroidered pods. Even if it spurts ambrosia and coffee-grounds. It’s still corn.”
Louis stood wiping his forehead. “We can’t come until the tractor’s working.” It was fifty miles to Dieter’s place, across rolling country. “I think we need a new ignition coil; that means back to the ship.”
“The heck with it,” Dieter said impatiently, “I’ve got my dobbin cart—we can all fit in that.”
The dobbin cart and the dobbin itself waited quietly. Louis approached cautiously, his eyes narrow with suspicion. “What do you call it?” He had seen the animals a long way off, but never this close. The dobbin was mostly legs, with immense flat feet like leather suction cups. A matted pelt, ragged and uneven, hung over it. The dobbin’s head was tiny; its eyes were half-shut and indolent. “How’d you trap it?” he asked.
“They’re tame enough, if you have the patience.” Dieter climbed up into the cart and grabbed hold of the reins. “I’ve taught the hell out of this thing. They’re sort of quasi-telepathic; all I have to do is think what I want, and off it goes.” He wrinkled his nose contemptuously. “Forget that tractor; you can’t keep it running anyhow. This is the vehicle of the future—the dobbin cart is the coming thing.”
Irma got gingerly into the cart beside Dieter, and after a moment Louis followed. The cart was crude but solid; Dieter had laboriously constructed it during the last four months. The material was a now-familiar, heavy bread-like plant fiber that rapidly hardened on exposure. After it had been aged and dried, it could be cut, sawed, polished, and stained. Occasionally, migratory animals gnawed the material away, but that was the only known hazard.
The dobbin’s vast flat feet began rhythmically to pound; the cart moved forward. Behind them, Louis’ cabin dwindled. He and Irma had single-handedly built it; a year had passed in which much had been accomplished. The cabin, made of the same bread-like substance, was surrounded by acres of cultivated land. The so-called corn grew in dense clumps; it wasn’t really corn, but it functioned as corn. Bulging pods ripened in the moist atmosphere. Around the base of the crop, insects crept; predators devouring plant-pests.
The fields were irrigated by shallow trenches bringing water out of an underground spring that spilled up to the surface in a hot, bubbling torrent. In the warm, humid atmosphere, almost unchanging, virtually hothouse in its stability, four crops a year were possible.
Parked in front of the cabin were half-assembled machines carted from the wreckage of the ships. Gradually, Irma was reconstructing new implements from the remains of the old. The fuel pipes of the ships were now sewage drains. The control board wiring carried electricity from the water-driven generator to the cabin.
Standing glumly in the shed beyond the cabin were a variety of indigenous herbivores, drowsily munching moist hay. A number of species had been collected; it wasn’t yet established what each was good for. Already, ten types with edible flesh had been catalogued, plus two types secreting drinkable fluids. A gargantuan beast covered with thick hair served as a source of muscle-power. And now the big-footed dobbin that Dieter used to pull his cart.
The dobbin raced determinedly down the road; in a matter of seconds it had hit full velocity. Feet flying, it sped like a furry ostrich, tiny head erect, legs a blur of motion. Blop-blop was the noise a running dobbin made. The cart bounced wildly; Louis and Irma held on for their lives. Delirious with joy, Dieter clutched the reins and urged the thing faster.
“This is fast enough,” Irma managed, gritting her teeth. “You haven’t seen anything,” Dieter yelled. “This thing really loves to run.”
A wide ditch lay ahead, a tumble of rocks and shrubs. Louis closed his eyes; the cart was already on the verge of bursting apart. “We won’t make it,” he grunted. “We’ll never get across.”
As it reached the ditch, the dobbin unfolded two stubby, ratty-hided wings and flapped them energetically. The dobbin and the cart rose slightly in the air, hung over the ditch, and then bumpily lowered on the far side.
“It’s a bird,” Irma gasped.
“Yes!” Dieter shouted. “It can go anywhere. That’s my good dobbin.” He leaned precariously forward and whacked the thing on its shaggy rump. “Noble dobbin! Majestic bird!”
The landscape shot past. To the far right rose a hazy range of mountains, mostly lost in the drifting swirls of fog that kept the surface of the planet always damp. A solid skin of growing vegetation and creeping insects… everywhere Louis looked there was life. Except at one charred spot at the base of the mountains, a black sore already beginning to turn green as plant-life quietly covered it.
The scout domes had been there. The non-Venusians who had preceded them, cooped up in their “refuges,” their airtight stations. Now they were dead; only the eight Venusians remained.
When the second ship had landed, the ambulances were already on the way. The second landing was more successful; nobody had been hurt, and the ship was virtually undamaged. The ambulances had collected the injured and taken them to the installations set up in anticipation of their arrival. During the first month, the non-Venusians had cooperated fully—in spite of orders from the Crisis Government. Then, toward March, the Crisis Government had stopped transmitting. A week later a heavy-duty projectile had come bursting down on the non-Venusian domes; within a day only the eight Venusians were extant.
The death of the non-Venusians was a shock, but a shock they could recover from. The problem of their own existence was simplified; now they were totally on their own, without communication of any sort with non-Venusians.
Between the ruined domes and their own ships and installations there was ample intact equipment at their disposal. Promptly, they had begun carting it off and putting it into operation. But a lethargy crept over them. Finally they had ceased the regular pilgrimages; they stopped collecting the Earth-manufactured materials, the elaborate machinery and industrial products.
None of them really wanted to go on from the point at which they had left off. In actuality they wanted to start from the bottom up. It was not a replica of Earth-civilization that they wanted to create; it was their own typical community, geared to their own unique needs, geared to the Venusian conditions, that they wanted.
It had to be agrarian.
They already had crops and simple cabins, irrigation ditches, clothing woven from plant fibre, electricity, a pair of dobbin-drawn carts, sanitation and wells. They had domesticated native animals; they had located natural building materials. They were shaping basic tools and functional artifacts. In their first year, thousands of years of cultural evolution had been achieved. Perhaps, in a decade—
Off beyond the meadow was a long gully. Occasional drifters lay here and there among the shrubbery; a cloud had come settling down, the week before. And beyond the gully, in the shadows of a wide ridge, rested an immense wad of white material.
“What’s that?” Dieter inquired, interrupting Louis’ thoughts. “I’ve never seen that life form.”
In the second dobbin cart, Frank and Syd approached. The Venusians gathered silently, uneasy in the presence of the ominous mound of white. In Syd’s arms the baby stirred fitfully.
“It doesn’t belong here,” Frank said finally.
“Why do you say that?” Dieter asked. “Who are you to pass judgement?”
“I mean,” Frank explained, “it’s not Venusian. It came down a day or so after the drifters.”
“Came down!” Dieter was perplexed. “What do you mean?”
Frank shrugged. “Like the drifters. It descended.”
“I saw another one,” Irma volunteered. “Apparently it’s a second interstellar life form.”
Abruptly, Louis’ hand closed around Dieter’s shoulder. “Take the cart over to it. I want to examine it.”
Dieter’s face sagged resentfully. “Why? I want to show you my corn.”
“The hell with your corn,” Louis said sharply. “We better take a look at that thing.”
“I looked at the other one,” Frank said. “It seemed harmless. I couldn’t see any special characteristics… it’s a single cell, like the drifters.” He hesitated. “I broke it open. It’s got a. nucleus, cell-wall, granules within the cytoplast. The usual stuff; it’s definitely a protozoon.”