four-inch hunting knives, very good—”
“They at least won’t give out. With care.”
“Right. Two sealed cases of garden seeds—anybody’s guess about them. Six sets of overalls, shorts, and jackets. Three pairs of shoes apiece—the Federation allowed that you and Ann might grow a little, Dot—plasta soles and uppers, should last several years. Carpentry tools. Ed’s boat has the garden tools instead. Sears did pack his microscope, didn’t he?”
“Oh my, yes,” said Dorothy, in affectionate mimicry of the fat man’s turn of speech.
“Each crash suit has first-aid kit, radion flashlight (good for two years maybe), compass, field glasses, plus whatever else we had sense enough to stuff in. Set of technical manuals, mostly useless without the ship, but I think there’s one on woodcraft, primitive tools and weapons—survival stuff—”
“Oh, the books!” Wright clutched his hair, groaning. “The books—”
“Just that woodcraft—”
“No, no, no—the books on Argo! Everything—the library—I’ve only just understood that it’s gone. The whole flowering of human thought—man’s best, uncorrupted—Odyssey—Ann’s music, the art volumes you selected, Paul, and your own sketches and paintings—”
“No loss there—”
“Don’t talk like a damn fool! Shakespeare—Divina commedia—”
Dorothy twisted in the narrowness to put both arms around him. “Doc—quiet, dear—please—”
“I can remember pages of Huck Finn—a few pages!”
Dorothy was wiping his face with a loose comer of her jacket. “Doc—subside! Please now—make it stop hurting inside yourself. Oh, quiet.…”
After a time he said lifelessly, “Go on with the inventory, Paul.”
“Well—there’s a duplicate of that map Ed made yesterday from orbit photographs of this area, about a hundred miles square. We’re near the eastern edge of that square. There’s the other map he made of the whole globe. We didn’t duplicate that one. I guess that’s about it.”
“Knives,” Wright muttered. “Knives and a few tools.”
“The firearms may make a difference while they last.”
“Yes, perhaps. But thirty years from now—”
“Thirty years from now,” said Dorothy, still sheltering his head, “thirty years from now our children will be grown.”
“Oh.” Wright groped for her fingers. “You almost wanted it like this, didn’t you? I mean, to land and not return?”
“I don’t know, Doc. Maybe. I’m not sure I ever quite believed in the possibility of return. State Orphanage children like Ann and me, growing up in a tiny world within a big one, we weren’t quite human ever, were we? Not that the big world didn’t seep in plenty.” She smiled off at private shadows of memory. “We did learn things not in the directors’ curriculum. When they started grooming Ann and me for this—Youth Volunteers! Stuffing our little heads with the best they had—oh, it was fun too. By that time I think I had a fair idea of the big world. The Orphanage was pleasant, you know—clean, humanitarian, good teachers, all of them kind and more than a bit hurried. They did try so hard never to let me hear the word ‘nigger’! Ignorance is poor insulating material, don’t you think? And why, Doc, after all that’s been known and thought and argued for the last hundred years, couldn’t they select at least one Oriental for our little trip? Wouldn’t have had to come from Jenga’s empire—our own states in the Federation had plenty of ’em—scholars, technicians, anything you care to name.”
Wright had calmed. He said, “I argued for it and got told. They even said that the spaceport rights and privileges recently given to Jenga’s empire would allow the Asiatics to build their own ship—tacitly implying that humanity should stay in two camps world without end. Ach! You can shove the political mind just so far, then it stalls in its own dirt Even Jensen wasn’t able to budge them.”
“It’s history,” said Dorothy, and Paul wondered: How does she do it? Speaking hands and voice, enough to shove away the black sorrow even before it fairly had hold of him—and she’d try to do it for anyone, loved or not. She was the first (and only one) who said to me there are some things more important than love-and she herself would be bothered to explain that in words. “Well,” Dorothy reflected, “I believe the Orphanage slapped too much destiny of Man on the backs of our little necks—they’re just necks. Paul, why don’t you sleep awhile? You too, Doc. Let me keep watch. I’ll wake you both if anything stirs out there. Doze off, boys.”
Paul tried to, his mind restless in weary flesh. No permissible margin of error, said the twenty-first century. But Argo lay at the bottom of a lake because of an error. Not an error like the gross errors twenty-first century man still made in dealing with his own kind and still noisily disregarded, but an engineering error—something twenty-first-century man viewed with a horror once reserved, in not so ancient times, for moral evil. The cardinal sin was to drop a decimal. If, like Wright, or Paul himself, you were concerned with the agony and growing pains of human nature, disturbed by the paralytic sterility of state socialism and the worse paralysis of open tyranny, you kept your mouth shut—or even yielded, almost unknowingly, to the pressures that reduced ethical realities to a piddling checker game perverting the uses of semantics. They said, “There won’t be any war. If there is, look what we’ve got!” If you were like the majority of Earth’s three billion, you hoped to get by with as much as the traffic would bear and never stuck your neck out. They celebrated the turn of the third millennium with a jolly new song: “Snuggle up, Baby—Uncle pays the bill…” But for all that, you mustn’t use the wrong bolt.
Unreasonably quiet here. A jungle evening on Earth would have been riotous with bird and insect noises.… He slept.
It was dark when Wright’s finger prodded him. “A visitor.”
The darkness was rose-tinged, not with sunset. There were two moons, Paul remembered, one white and large and far away, one red and near. Should the red moon be shining now? He gazed through the half-open doorway, wondering why he was not afraid, seeing something pale and vast, washed in—yes, surely in reddish moon-light. A thing swaying on the pillars of its legs, perhaps listening, tasting the air for strangeness. And scattered through the night, sapphires on black velvet, were tiny dots of blue, moving, vanishing, reappearing. “Blue fireflies,” Dorothy whispered, “blue fireflies, that’s all they are.” He felt her controlled breathing, forced down a foolish laugh. We could have done without a white elephant.
Nine or ten feet tall at the shoulder, a tapir-like snout, black tusks bending more nearly downward than an elephant’s, from milk-white flesh. The ears were mobile, waving to study the night. There was an oval hump near the base of the neck. The beast had been facing them; it turned to pull down a branch, munch the leaves, casually drop the stalk. In silence it drifted away, pausing to meditate, grumbling juicily, but with no alarm.
Wright whispered, “The planet Lucifer did not ask for us.”
“Paul—I stepped out for a minute, while you were both asleep. Firm ground. A smell—flowers, I think—made me remember frangipani.”
“I’ll try it.”
“Oh,
