The Past Through Tomorrow (60 page)

“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 constitution, 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 scum 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 passions 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 crackers 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 assigned 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 for “making do,” gave him a degree of happiness he had not known since he was a boy, but he 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 assistance 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 manuscript to Doc. He had learned that the nickname title 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 for emotional attitudes, not sociological opinions.”

Doc accepted the manuscript, 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 to 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 classes 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 circumstances 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 hardworking 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 I 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. Nobody 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 assistance 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 class 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 to 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.