happens tomorrow?” she asked.
“They’ve sent a messenger to the nearest town. It’s on the coast. Nathan and I will go there in the morning, try to arrange meetings with the various people in authority. I don’t know whether it will be initially necessary for Mohammed to go to the mountain or whether they’ll come to us. Local transport isn’t very fast, although I hear they have the beginnings of a railroad. It may take a while to make the necessary contacts, but once we have channels of communication open it will get easier. What we need is a house—or a couple of houses—in the village, and people to handle liaison. Nathan and I may have to do a fair amount of traveling in the first few months, though.”
“You think we’ll stay the full year? Even if things are really as healthy and happy as they seem?”
“Almost certainly. If the colony is a success and doesn’t need our help, all well and good...but we’ll want to know why it’s a great success just as much as we’d want to know why it was in trouble. There’s a lot of work to be done. The whole question of whether there’s to be a new colony program may depend on the information we bring back—and from that point of view analyzing and documenting the successes may be even more vital than analyzing and documenting the failures.”
“If it really is a success,” she said.
“If...,” I echoed noncommittally.
“You say they have a railroad,” she said. “Steam engines, I presume...Is that good or bad, after all this time? What sort of technological level are they supposed to have reached?”
I shrugged. “Silly question,” I said, in an offhand manner. “There are no ‘levels of technology.’ Such things are an artifact of history. Maybe the notion has some meaning when you consider the order in which new discoveries are likely to be made—but there’s no coherent chain effect like a row of dominoes falling over. Here, where the colonists started out with all the knowledge of science and technology Earth could provide them with, and were limited only by the speed at which they could begin to muster the physical resources, technological developments would crop up in an entirely different order.”
“But there are no tractors in the fields and horses do most of the work. They obviously don’t have internal combustion engines. Why not?”
“Maybe they haven’t struck oil,” I suggested. “Or maybe they decided to do without. One advantage of having all that knowledge at your fingertips is that you can also decide which inventions you don’t want. Hindsight may have suggested to the old leaders of the colony that petrol engines are one thing the New Arcadia can do without. I don’t know...but did you see those magnificent horses? It isn’t just the people here that grow big and strong. There might be a lot to be said for a simpler way of life. Look where five centuries of industrial revolution got us on Earth.”
“And you reckon that’s OK? The colony lands, burns the books, and starts over from scratch?”
“That’s not what I said,” I pointed out. “They keep the books, and they use them. Only they aren’t simple-minded about it. They don’t just look to the books to tell them what to do—they look into them and try to figure out what not to do as well. The colonists were taking big risks to leave Earth...they must really have hated it. So why would they want to set out and slavishly recreate it? No...if this colony is succeeding, the men behind it will have had something up their sleeve...something that has allowed it to succeed.”
“You really want to find something like that, don’t you?” she said. “A magic formula. Something to save the entire colony concept, renew the whole effort.”
I studied her carefully. She had a hard, bony face, framed by white-blond hair which grew wild all around it. She was thirty-some, and didn’t look as if she’d done a lot of smiling in her life. Her sense of humor was decidedly acid. I liked her.
“OK,” I said. “So I would. If there were such a thing to be found. But I’m not an idiotic optimist. I believe in the colony project even if there is no magic formula. I think we should keep trying, in spite of setbacks. I think we’ve done what we can with Earth. We have to move on to new levels of ambition.”
I almost expected her to sneer, but she didn’t. “A lot of people think that kind of talk is poison,” she commented.
“Not out here,” I said.
“Don’t bet on it.”
“What do you mean?”
“What I said,” she muttered tersely.
She couldn’t be talking about the colonists—she had to be thinking evil thoughts about someone on the strength. So who was on board to play devil’s advocate? Nathan? She wasn’t going to say. Maybe she was talking about herself. Maybe she meant to imply nothing more than the fact that other people didn’t quite have my deep-seated conviction about the rightness of it all.
“It’ll be dark pretty soon,” she said, changing the subject.
The sun was squatting on the horizon, but twilight might last some time. She wasn’t trying to pick an argument, though...just putting things back together again.
“No point in taking a long walk,” I said. “They haven’t got street lights yet. Maybe they’re waiting till they have streets.”
“It wouldn’t be very romantic anyhow,” she said, with the irony back at full force. “Not without a moon.”
“That’s one hell of an old joke,” I said. “And it wasn’t ever funny.”
“Don’t take it to heart,” she said.
I suddenly felt slightly embarrassed, as though the sarcasm were directed specifically at me, instead of just coming naturally. I moved away reflexively, and then turned the movement into a first strolling step back in the direction of the hall.
“Maybe they’re missing us,” I said. “It might be your turn to make a speech.”
“Sure,” she countered. “I’d be a big hit. Every single dirty joke that’s been made up back home in the last two hundred years will be new to these guys.”
“Don’t bet on it,” I told her.
CHAPTER TWO
There was a lot of the evening still to be endured. I say “endured” because it really wasn’t my scene at all. I’m not antisocial, but I find humanity en masse something of an embarrassment of riches. I don’t like crowds. Few scientists do. Once you have given over your life to the study of abstract principles governing the behavior of things which have only to be observed, never communicated with, your attitude to your fellow humans begins to change, and keeps on changing. A gap opens up between you, and no matter how close you stand to other people there’s an intangible distance forbidding a complete meeting of the minds. The distancing effect is even worse, of course, when the fellow human in question is one with whom you have nothing in common...not even a cultural background. In such instances, it is far too easy for said fellow human to become another thing to be observed, to be placed in a context of abstract and generalized principles rather than a context of social interaction.
I have to confess that I could only watch the Florians from within. I could not reach out and join them. I could not enjoy the social occasion that they had concocted for our benefit, despite the fact that they
