The Past Through Tomorrow Part 48

Wingate wondered what to do or say next. Finally he led her around the corner of the barracks and bade her good night again. He returned very quickly, looking shame-faced. They re-entered the barracks.

Patron van Huysen also was having trouble getting to sleep. He hated having to discipline his people. By d.a.m.n, why couldn't they all be good boys and leave him in peace? Not but what there was precious little peace for a rancher these days. It cost more to make a crop than the crop fetched in Adonis-at least it did after the interest was paid.

He had turned his attention to his accounts after dinner that night to try to get the unpleasantness out of his mind, but he found it hard to concentrate on his figures. That man Wingate, now . . . he had bought him as much to keep him away from that slave driver Rigsbee as to get another hand. He had too much money invested in hands as it was in spite of his foreman always complaining about being short of labor. He would either have to sell some, or ask the bank to refinance the mortgage again.

Hands weren't worth their keep any more. You didn't get the kind of men on Venus that used to come when he was a boy. He bent over his books again. If the market went up even a little, the bank should be willing to discount his paper for a little more than last season. Maybe that would do it.

He had been interrupted by a visit from his daughter. Annek he was always glad to see, but this time what she had to say, what she finally blurted out. had only served to make him angry. She, preoccupied with her own thoughts, could not know that she hurt her father's heart, with a pain that was actually physical.

But that had settled the matter insofar as Wingate was concerned. He would get rid of the trouble-maker. Van Huysen ordered his daughter to bed with a roughness he had never before used on her.

Of course it was all his own fault, he told himself after he had gone to bed. A ranch on Venus was no place to raise a motherless girl. His Annekchen was almost a woman grown now; how was she to find a husband here in these outlands? What would she do if he should die? She did not know it, but there would be nothing left, nothing, not even a ticket to Terra. No, she would not become a labor client's vrouw; no, not while there was a breath left in his old tired body.

Well, Wingate would have to go, and the one they called Satchel, too. But he would not sell them South. No, he had never done that to one of his people. He thought with distaste of the great, factory like plantations a few hundred miles further from the pole, where the temperature was always twenty to thirty degrees higher than it was in his marshes and mortality among labor clients was a standard item in cost accounting. No, he would take them in and trade them at the a.s.signment station; what happened to them at auction there would be none of his business. But he would not sell them directly South.

That gave him an idea; he did a little computing in his head and estimated that he might be able to get enough credit on the two unexpired labor contracts to buy Annek a ticket to Earth. He was quite sure that his sister would take her in, reasonably sure anyway, even though she had quarreled with him over marrying Annek's mother. He could send her a little money from time to time. And perhaps she could learn to be a secretary, or one of those other fine jobs a girl could get on Earth.

But what would the ranch be like without Annekchen?

He was so immersed in his own troubles that he did not hear his daughter slip out of her room and go outside.

Wingate and Hartley tried to appear surprised when they were left behind at muster for work. Jimmie was told to report to the Big House; they saw him a few minutes later, backing the big Remington out of its shed. He picked them up, then trundled back to the Big House and waited for the Patron to appear. Van Huysen came out shortly and climbed into his cabin with neither word nor look for anyone.

The, crocodile started toward Adonis, lumbering a steady ten miles an hour. Wingate and Satchel conversed in subdued voices, waited, and wondered. After an interminable time the crock stopped. The cabin window flew open. 'What's the matter?' Van Huysen demanded. 'Your engine acting up?'

Jimmie grinned at him. 'No, I stopped it.'

'For what?'

'Better come up here and find out.'

'By d.a.m.n, I do!' The window slammed; presently Van Huysen reappeared, warping his ponderous bulk around the side of the little cabin. 'Now what this monkeyshines?'

'Better get out and walk, Patron. This is the end of the line.' Van Huysen seemed to have no remark suitable in answer, but his expression spoke for him.

'No, I mean it,' Jimmie went on. 'This is the end 'of the line for you. I've stuck to solid ground the whole way, so you could walk back. You'll be able to follow the trail I broke; you ought to be able to make it in three or four hours, fat as you are.'

The Patron looked from Jimmie to the others. Wingate and Satchel closed in slightly, eyes unfriendly. 'Better get goin', Fatty,' Satchel said softly, 'before you get chucked out headfirst.'

Van Huysen pressed back against the rail of the crock, his hands gripping it. 'I won't get out of my own crock,' he said tightly.

Satchel spat in the palm of one hand, then rubbed the two together. 'Okay, Hump. He asked for it -'

'Just a second.' Wingate addressed Van Huysen, 'See here, Patron van Huysen-we don't want to rough you up unless we have to. But there are three of us and we are determined. Better climb out quietly.'

The older man's face was dripping with sweat which was not entirely due to the muggy heat. His chest heaved, he seemed about to defy them. Then something went out inside him. His figure sagged, the defiant lines in his face gave way to a whipped expression which was not good to see.

A moment later he climbed quietly, listlessly, over the side into the ankle-deep mud and stood there, stooped, his legs slightly bent at the knees.

When they were out of sight of the place where they had dropped their patron Jimmie turned the crock off in a new direction. 'Do you suppose he'll make it?' asked Wingate.

'Who?' asked Jimmie. 'Van Huysen? Oh, sure, he'll make it-probably.' He was very busy now with his driving; the crock crawled down a slope and lunged into navigable water. In a few minutes the marsh gra.s.s gave way to open water. Wingate saw that they were in a broad lake whose further sh.o.r.es were lost in the mist. Jimmie set a compa.s.s course.

The far sh.o.r.e was no more than a strand; it concealed an overgrown bayou. Jimmie followed it a short distance, stopped the crock, and said, 'This must be just about the place,' in an uncertain voice. He dug under the tarpaulin folded up in one corner of the empty hold and drew out a broad flat paddle. He took this to the rail, and, leaning out, he smacked the water loudly with the blade: Slap! . . . slap, slap. . . . Slap!

He waited.

The flat head of an amphibian broke water near the side; it studied Jimmie with bright, merry eyes. 'h.e.l.lo,' said Jimmie.

it answered in its own language. Jimmie replied in the same tongue, stretching his mouth to reproduce the uncouth clucking syllables. The native listened, then slid underwater again.

He-or, more probably, she-was back in a few minutes, another with her. 'Thigarek?' the newcomer said hopefully.

'Thigarek when we get there, old girl,' Jimmie temporized. 'Here . . . climb aboard.' He held out a hand, which the native accepted and wriggled gracefully inboard. It perched its unhuman, yet oddly pleasing, little figure on the rail near the driver's seat. Jimmie got the car underway.

How long they were guided by their little pilot Wingate did not know, as the timepiece on the control panel was out of order, but his stomach informed him that it was too long. He rummaged through the cabin and dug out an iron ration which he shared with Satchel and Jimmie. He offered some to the native, but she smelled at it and drew her head away.

Shortly after that there was a sharp hissing noise and a column of steam rose up ten yards ahead of them. Jimmie halted the crock at once. 'Cease firing!' he called out. 'It's just us chickens.'

'Who are you?' came a disembodied voice.

'Fellow travelers.'

'Climb out where we can see you.'

'Okay.'

The native poked Jimmie in the ribs. 'Thigarek,' she stated positively.

'Huh? Oh, sure.' He parceled out trade tobacco until she acknowledged the total, then added one more package for good will. She withdrew a piece of string from her left cheek pouch, tied up her pay, and slid over the side. They saw her swimming away, her prize carried high out of the water.

'Hurry up and show yourself!'

'Coming!' They climbed out into waist-deep water and advanced holding their hands overhead. A squad of four broke cover and looked them over, their weapons lowered but ready. The leader searched their harness pouches and sent one of his men on to look over the crocodile.

'You keep a close watch,' remarked Wingate.

The leader glanced at him. 'Yes,' he said, 'and no. The little people told us you were coming. They're worth all the watch dogs that were ever littered.'

They got underway again with one of the scouting party driving. Their captors were not unfriendly but not disposed to talk. 'Wait till you see the Governor,' they said.

Their destination turned out to be a wide stretch of moderately high ground. Wingate was amazed at the number of buildings and the numerous population. 'How in the world can they keep a place like this a secret?' he asked Jimmie.

'If the state of Texas were covered with fog and had only the population of Waukegan, Illinois, you could hide quite a lot of things.'

'But wouldn't it show on a map?'

'How well mapped do you think Venus is? Don't be a dope.' On the basis of the few words he had had with Jimmie beforehand Wingate had expected no more than a camp where fugitive clients lurked in the bush while squeezing a precarious living from the country. What he found was a culture and a government. True, it was a rough frontier culture and a simple government with few laws and an unwritten const.i.tution, but a framework of customs was in actual operation and its gross offenders were punished-with no higher degree of injustice than one finds anywhere.

It surprised Humphrey Wingate that fugitive slaves, the sc.u.m of Earth, were able to develop an integrated society. It had surprised his ancestors that the transported criminals of Botany Bay should develop a high civilization in Australia. Not that Wingate found the phenomenon of Botany Bay surprising-that was history, and history is never surprising-after it happens.

The success of the colony was more credible to Wingate when he came to know more of the character of the Governor, who was also generalissimo, and administrator of the low and middle justice. (High justice was voted on by the whole community, a procedure that Wingate considered outrageously sloppy, but which seemed to satisfy the community.) As magistrate the Governor handed out decisions with a casual contempt for rules of evidence and legal theory that reminded Wingate of stories 'he had heard of the apocryphal Old Judge Bean. 'The Law West of Pecos', but again the people seemed to like it.

The great shortage of women in the community (men outnumbered them three to one) caused incidents which more than anything else required the decisions of the Governor. Here, Wingate was forced to admit, was a situation in which traditional custom would have been nothing but a source of trouble; 'he admired the shrewd common sense and understanding of human nature with which the Governor sorted out conflicting strong human pa.s.sions and suggested modus operandi for getting along together. A man who could maintain a working degree of peace in such matters did not need a legal education.

The Governor held office by election and was advised by an elected council. It was Wingate's private opinion that the Governor would have risen to the top in any society. The man had boundless energy, great gusto for living, a ready thunderous laugh-and the courage and capacity for making decisions. He was a 'natural'.

The three runaways were given a couple of weeks in which to get their bearings and find some job in which they could make themselves useful and self-supporting. Jimmie stayed with his crock, now confiscated for the community, but which still required a driver. There were other crockers available who probably would have liked the job, but there was tacit consent that the man who brought it in should drive it, if he wished. Satchel found a billet in the fields, doing much the same work he had done for Van Huysen. He told Wingate that he was 'actually having to work harder; nevertheless he liked it better because the conditions were, as he put it. 'looser'.

Wingate detested the idea of going back to agricultural work. He had no rational excuse, it was simply that he hated it. His radio experience at last stood him in good stead. The community had a jury-rigged, low-power radio on which a constant listening watch was kept, but which was rarely used for transmission because of the danger of detection. Earlier runaway slave camps had been wiped out by the company police through careless use of radio. Nowadays they hardly dared use it, except in extreme emergency.

But they needed radio. The grapevine telegraph maintained through the somewhat slap-happy help of the little people enabled them to keep some contact with the other fugitive communities with which they were loosely confederated, but it was not really fast, and. any but the simplest of messages were distorted out of recognition.

Wingate was a.s.signed to the community radio when it was discovered that he had appropriate technical knowledge. The previous operator had been lost in the bush. His opposite number was a pleasant old codger, known as Doc, who could listen for signals but who knew nothing of upkeep and repair.

Wingate threw himself into the job of overhauling the antiquated installation. The problems presented by lack of equipment, the necessity of 'making do', gave him a degree of happiness he had not known since he was a boy, but was not aware of it.

He was intrigued by the problem of safety in radio communication. An idea, derived from some account of the pioneer days in radio, gave him a lead. His installation, like all others, communicated by frequency modulation. Somewhere he had seen a diagram for a totally obsolete type of transmitter, an amplitude modulator. He did not have much to go on, but he worked out a circuit which he believed would oscillate in that fashion and which could be hooked up from the gear at hand.

He asked the Governor for permission to attempt to build it. 'Why not? Why not?' the Governor roared at him. 'I haven't the slightest idea what you are talking about son, but if you think you can build a radio that the company can't detect, go right ahead. You don't have to ask me; it's your pigeon.'

'I'll have to put the station out of commission for sending.'

'Why not?'

The problem had more knots in it than he had thought. But he labored at it with the clumsy but willing a.s.sistance of Doc. His first hookup failed; his forty-third attempt five weeks later worked. Doc, stationed some miles out in the bush, reported himself able to hear the broadcast via a small receiver constructed for the purpose, whereas Wingate picked up nothing whatsoever on the conventional receiver located in the same room with the experimental transmitter.

In the meantime he worked on his book.

Why he was writing a book he could not have told you. Back on Earth it could have been termed a political pamphlet against the colonial system. Here there was no one to convince of his thesis, nor had he any expectation of ever being able to present it to a reading public. Venus was his home. He knew that there was no chance for him ever to return: the only way lay through Adonis, and there, waiting for him, were warrants for half the crimes in the calendar, contract-jumping, theft, kidnapping, criminal abandonment, conspiracy, subverting government. If the company police ever laid hands on him, they would jail him and lose the key.

No, the book arose, not from any expectation of publication, but from a half-subconscious need to arrange his thoughts. He had suffered a complete upsetting of all the evaluations by which he had lived; for his mental health it was necessary that he formulate new ones. It was natural to his orderly, if somewhat unimaginative, mind that he set his reasons and conclusions forth in writing.

Somewhat diffidently he offered the ma.n.u.script to Doc. He had learned that the nickname t.i.tle had derived from the man's former occupation on Earth; he had been a professor of economics and philosophy in one of the smaller universities. Doc had even offered a partial explanation of his presence on Venus. 'A little matter involving one of my women students,' he confided. 'My wife took an unsympathetic view of the matter and so did the board of regents. The board had long considered my opinions a little too radical.'

'Were they?'

'Heavens, no! I was a rockbound conservative. But I had an unfortunate tendency to express conservative principles in realistic rather than allegorical language.'

'I suppose you're a radical now.'

Doc's eyebrows lifted slightly. 'Not at all. Radical and conservative are terms of emotional att.i.tudes, not sociological opinions.'

Doc accepted the ma.n.u.script, read it through, and returned it without comment. But Wingate pressed him for an opinion. 'Well, my boy, if you insist-'

'I do.'

'I would say that you have fallen into the commonest fallacy of all in dealing with social and economic subjects-the "devil theory".'

'Huh?'

'You have attributed conditions of villainy that simply result from stupidity. Colonial slavery is nothing new; it is the inevitable result of imperial expansion, the automatic result of an antiquated financial structure -, 'I pointed out the part the banks played in my book.'

'No, no, no! You think bankers are scoundrels. They are not. Nor are company officials, nor patrons, nor the governing cla.s.ses back on Earth. Men are constrained by necessity and build up rationalizations to account for their acts. It is not even cupidity. Slavery is economically unsound, nonproductive, but men drift into it whenever the circ.u.mstances compel it. A different financial system-but that's another story.'

'I still think it's rooted in human cussedness,' Wingate said stubbornly.

'Not cussedness-simply stupidity. I can't prove it to you, but you will learn.'

The success of the 'silent radio' caused the Governor to send Wingate on a long swing around the other camps of the free federation to help them rig new equipment and to teach them how to use it. He spent four hard-working and soul-satisfying weeks, and finished with the warm knowledge that he had done more to consolidate the position of the free men against their enemies than could be done by winning a pitched battle.

When he returned to his home community, he found Sam Houston Jones waiting there.

Wingate broke into a run. 'Sam!' he shouted. 'Sam! Sam!' He grabbed his hand, pounded him on the back, and yelled at him the affectionate insults that sentimental men use in attempting to cover up their weakness. 'Sam, you old scoundrel! When did you get here? How did you escape? And how the devil did you manage to come all the way from South Pole? Were you transferred before you escaped?'

'Howdy, Hump,' said Sam. 'Now one at a time, and not so fast.'

But Wingate bubbled on. 'My, but it's good to see your ugly face, fellow. And am 1 glad you came here-this is a great place. We've got the most up-and-coming little state in the Whole federation. You'll like it. They're a great bunch -'

'What are you?' Jones asked, eyeing him. 'President of the local chamber of commerce?'

Wingate looked at him, and then laughed. 'I get it. But seriously, you will like it. Of course, it's a lot different from what you were used to back on Earth-but that's all past and done with. No use crying over spilt milk, eh?'

'Wait a minute. You are under a misapprehension, Hump. Listen. I'm not an escaped slave. I'm here to take you back.'

Wingate opened his mouth, closed it, then opened it again. 'But Sam,' he said, 'that's impossible. You don't know.'

'I think I do.'

'But you don't. There's no going back for me. If I did, I'd have to face trial, and they've got me dead to rights. Even if I threw myself on the mercy of the court and managed to get off with a light sentence, it would be twenty years before I'd be a free man. No, Sam, it's impossible. You don't know the things I'm charged with.'

'I don't, eh? It's cost me a nice piece of change to clear them up.'

'Huh?'

'I know how you escaped. I know you stole a crock and kidnapped your patron and got two other clients to run with you. It took my best blarney and plenty of folding money to fix it. So help me, Hump-Why didn't you pull something mild, like murder, or rape, or robbing a post office?'

'Well, now, Sam-I didn't do any of those things to cause you trouble. I had counted you out of my calculations. I was on my own. I'm sorry about the money.'

'Forget it. Money isn't an item with me. I'm filthy with the stuff. You know that. It comes from exercising care in the choice of parents. I was just pulling your leg and it came off in my hand.'

'Okay. Sorry.' Wingate's grin was a little forced. n.o.body likes charity. 'But tell me what happened. I'm still in the dark.'

'Right.' Jones had been as much surprised and distressed at being separated from Wingate on grounding as Wingate had been. But there had been nothing for him to do about it until he received a.s.sistance from Earth. He had spent long weeks as a metal worker at South Pole, waiting and wondering why 'his sister did not answer his call for help. He had written letters to her to supplement his first radiogram, that being the only type of communication he could afford, but the days crept past with no answer.

When a message did arrive from her the mystery was cleared up. She had not received his radio to Earth promptly, because she, too, was aboard the Evening Star-in the first cla.s.s cabin, traveling, as was her custom, in a stateroom listed under her maid's name. 'It was the family habit of avoiding publicity that stymied us,' Jones explained. 'If I hadn't sent the radio to her rather than the family lawyers, or if she had been known by name to the purser, we would have gotten together the first day.' The message had not been relayed to her on Venus because the bright planet had by that time crawled to superior opposition on the far side of the sun from the Earth. For a matter of sixty earth days there was no communication, Earth to Venus. The message had rested, recorded but still scrambled, in the hands of the family firm, until she could be reached.

When she received it, she started a small tornado. Jones had been released, the liens against his contract paid, and ample credit posted to his name on Venus, in less than twenty-four hours. 'So that was that,' concluded Jones, 'except that I've got to explain to big sister when I get home just how I got into this mess. She'll burn my ears.'