Galactic Storm, page 10
They brought home a Crawlybox for the Bronx and the humming annyapes I mentioned, after two of them had run amok through hearing the hum without earplugs. They put them where the noise would be deadened—tied them on the roof where between them and the ship there was only the wall of their box, an air pipe and six inches of nothing. No sound got by.
And really, I suppose, that is where the story of the invasion of the earth leaves off. We had defeated the last attempt of an unbalanced race to conquer another planet, and actually killed off that race. But I can't stop there. There is more to the Venusian invasion than that. First there was the international blowup.
The Iron Curtain went down again with a clang, and almost at once Radio Moscow began claiming sole credit for the saving of the earth, and they created nineteen rocket designers Heroes of the Soviet Union. Indignantly, the President of the United States awarded Sharp, by a special dispensation front Congress, the Order of the Purple Heart during one of his lucid periods. The Atlantic Pact countries followed suit in crediting Sharp with his rightful kudos.
However, any country with an axe to grind at once invented its own personal private hero and decorated him on the spot. A notable exception was Argentina—she had ignored the Venusians completely from start to finish. Her only action was to appropriate a sample of venerium and attempt to patent it as the result of a successful research programme—in Argentina! Fortunately, samples brought from Venus made nonsense of the claim, or else we should now be paying royalties to them every time we flew space.
The next war came as the result of a row between Spain and Italy in the General Assembly. It made a considerable mess of several countries, until the President of the United States and the Prime Minister of Great Britain took that momentous decision that landed us where we are now. They A-bombed both sides simultaneously and declared both countries outside all international trade. That stopped the war all right, but it necessitated doing the same thing when Brazil and Chile quarelled, and again when Jugoslavia ... and again ...
Inside two years after the expedition returned from Venus, the U.S.A., the British Empire and the Soviet Union were the military governors of the world. They had to be. Partly it was a case of saving mankind from itself. That's the situation to-day. There's the Iron Curtain one side, and on the other the States and Britain, watching for any attempt to upset the precarious balance of power. It has been that way for seven years now. The Venusians certainly brought about an end of that dreadful hypocritical talk that had been the sole feature of international affairs since World War II. But they left us sitting in a powder barrel, and somebody is going to drop a match.
Then there was the awful discovery that the second expedition to Venus made, four years after we went into Antarctica. This second expedition was long after the international break-up, and was exclusively American.
The discovery was that the plant now covered Venus. Literally. Three years under those conditions had done odd things to it. It was darker green, grew six feet in the hour on the average. Its scent was incredibly strong. It had developed a thick outer skin that was impervious to knife or flame. The blossoms were big enough to engulf a man, and pulsed slowly. The plant was now a bigger menace than the few remaining annyapes. The expedition found the air drunkenly sweet with the perfume, still stinking of formaldehyde in patches, dry beyond measure, for what little water there was to be had was absorbed greedily by the plant.
After three of the crew had been crushed for their moisture by the encircling tendrils of the plant (this was before they started to use suits of venerium and wore inflated rubber), the saucer came back in a big hurry, bringing samples they kept under strict control. A single seed let fall at take-off nearly killed them all when it worked its way into the auto-pilot gen. Soon enough, they said, unless something happened, it would have nothing left to convert. There's another expedition scheduled to pick up the information in a year from now. The big bugs say it will be habitable by them. Query.
Well, they forgot about Venus for the time being. However, only a few weeks later a Russian saucer made the trip and never came back. There was a first-class row over that at once, the Russians madly accusing the West of having deliberately blown the ship to hell and gone. However, it became accepted that the plant made Venus temporarily untouchable, and we settled down to an uneasy truce.
There had been further problems. The radiation was already doing a heap of damage when we went south for the first time. When the Venusians stepped up their offensive, the ozone in the upper air was already nearly a third converted to CO2. There were twice as many cases of skin cancer during that summer as there were five years before. So when we came back, Honey explained what the reason was, and a couple of top hydroponics experts invented a sort of airborne growth and turned it loose up top. It behaved just as the plant on Venus is supposed to be behaving. It re-converted the ozone layers to ozone and died off of carbon starvation after about six months. The only trouble was that it was a menace to high level shipping, and one kept finding festoons of rotting vegetation draped over the noses of airplanes. However, it did cure the radiation problem.
Well John Hopkins got the first sample of the re-mutated seed, and pronounced it impossible to destroy except by the venusian blight. And that much free formaldehyde would put Venus right back where it started. However, if left to itself, they said that in another seven to ten years it would die of suffocation! It was still madly converting what was left of the CO2 in the atmosphere to carbon and oxygen.
There were now sizable gaps in the jungles of the Amazon and Congo basins, a deplorable shortage of oranges and redwoods in America, and so little pine forest in Canada, the New York papers were down to sixteen pages for the next six months. In addition, all the areas involved reeked of highly poisonous formaldehyde compounds. They got rid of that by spraying with phenol, and from the resulting plastic porridge they synthesized any amount of invaluable materials. That was that; and free for nothing they had several hundred thousand square miles of habitable—well, more or less—territory where there had only been jungle before.
Of course, unfortunately, the losses by coastal erosion had made up for that about seven times over. Every country in the world with a coastline had as big a dyking problem along it as had Holland before, and there was an unprecedented amount of water in the sea.
Well, that's got to stay there for a while. Until the plant is dead. Then they say they are going to ship it to Venus. I don't know how long it will take, but they seem quite confident the planet will be habitable once they get the water there. I wonder what it'll be like without axial rotation—
At the moment they're experimenting with the technique of shipment and sending samples to Mars.
And how about the Venusian legacy?
NOW THAT THE plum of space travel had fallen into their open mouths, of course, both sides of the Iron Curtain made the most of it. We made Mars first, by twenty terrestrial days, and the Russians made Jupiter first without meaning to, when their biggest ship blew a fuze too close to the giant planet and lost control. The moon has been a popular place for holidays since the first commercial lines went there, but by international covenant no military activity is permitted on the satellite. Another grudging but necessary agreement—it would make too good a gun position.
I've never left the Earth, though. I had all I wanted of saucers when Honey and I were fleeing north from the big blowup. I said I'd been offered a free holiday on Mars by the government. Maybe I'll accept. On the other hand, maybe—
So far, nobody's landed on Mercury, or gone beyond the orbit of Jupiter. There's a rumour that Saturn's moons have been visited by now, but by Russians, and they are discreet. There's no point in visiting any of the outer planets, even Minos—the one responsible for the aberrations earlier attributed to Pluto, the tiny dead heart of the nova that gave us our system.
As for the other technical achievements made possible by the Venusians, you use them every day. You sleep in a plastifoam bed, you eat off plastic plates. Your complexes are treated by psychiatrists with Venusian telepathic amplifiers. Yes, the sciences certainly got a kick out of the Venusian legacy. Granted.
But men's minds remain on Earth. Earthbound. Stuck fast in the cloying mud of nationalism, a so-called virtue that has caused more suffering and death than any vice yet invented. And here we sit in this country of the U.S.A, wondering how long before we have to drop a bomb on someone's toe who's going to kick!
Well, the general situation is insufferable. Maybe I'd better go off to Mars before it's too late.
However, there's one ray of hope, I hear. It resides in a six-foot blond Swede by the name of Christian Sven. You may recall the efforts of Garry Davis—der kleine Mensch, the Little Man—who camped on the steps of U.N.O. building in an attempt to establish his claim to international citizenship. His was a praiseworthy crusade. But he lacked the intense personal magnetism necessary to convert a people, and Sven has it.
He also has an idea. His is a proposal to set up an international—or rather supranational and unnationalistic—clique or caste of brilliant minds, to whom the world may safely entrust its affairs. He has a big following in Britain and France, and Holland and Scandinavia are all for him. Not yet in America.
But that's our only chance. Mankind rose for a few brief days above the mores of petty selfishness when the menace of the Venusians threatened. Now it's only a basis for argument. Or fighting. I can't tell which.
So Sven and his idea, that may mean safety, struggle against ignorance and prejudice and selfishness, and he does incredible things by himself, while the man who could have saved America on his behalf is in an asylum and a sentimental figurehead of American greatness. I cannot make people listen to me, and Honey—he is up in a top Government post, holding down an easy chair. After ten years there's a tremendous lot of him to hold it down. He certainly did more to convert people to belief in the Venusians than I did, but he is that most horrible man, the "practical man", the materialist, who will not alter the existing order because he does not know how to dream. He was quite content to preserve the world as it was before the coming of the enemy.
I—call me an idealist if you will, a visionary, but unless Sven is right, and can abolish the petty bonds of nationalism, I foresee the destruction of humanity as swiftly and surely as ever the Venusians were destroyed, our air poisoned not by a plant and an enemy, but by ourselves.
Who is going to kick back? And when?
The End
John Brunner, Galactic Storm
