R is for Rocket (11 page)

    His face was cold. His mouth trembled, asking: "Who — Who won the presidential election yesterday?"

    The man behind the desk laughed. "You joking? You know very well. Deutscher, of course! Who else? Not that fool weakling Keith. We got an iron man now, a man with guts!" The official stopped. "What's wrong?"

    Eckels moaned. He dropped to his knees. He scrabbled at the golden butterfly with shaking fingers. "Can't we," he pleaded to the world, to himself, to the officials, to the Machine, "can't we take it
back,
can't we
make
it alive again? Can't we start over? Can't we — "

    He did not move. Eyes shut, he waited, shivering. He heard Travis breathe loud in the room; he heard Travis shift his rifle, click the safety catch, and raise the weapon.

    There was a sound of thunder.

The rain continued. It was a hard rain, a perpetual rain, a sweating and steaming rain; it was a mizzle, a downpour, a fountain, a whipping at the eyes, an undertow at the ankles; it was a rain to drown all rains and the memory of rains. It came by the pound and the ton, it hacked at the jungle and cut the trees like scissors and shaved the grass and tunneled the soil and molted the bushes. It shrank men's hands into the hands of wrinkled apes; it rained a solid glassy rain, and it never stopped.

    "How much farther, Lieutenant?"

    "I don't know. A mile, ten miles, a thousand."

    "Aren't you sure?"

    "How can I be sure?"

    "I don't like this rain. If we only knew how far it is to the Sun Dome, I'd feel better."

    "Another hour or two from here."

    "You really think so, Lieutenant?"

    "Of course."

    "Or are you lying to keep us happy?"

    "I'm lying to keep you happy. Shut up!"

    The two men sat together in the rain. Behind them sat two other men who were wet and tired and slumped like clay that was melting.

    The lieutenant looked up. He had a face that once had been brown and now the rain had washed it pale, and the rain had washed the color from his eyes and they were white, as  were his teeth, and as was his hair. He was all white. Even his uniform was beginning to turn white, and perhaps a little green with fungus.

    The lieutenant felt the rain on his cheeks. "How many million years since the rain stopped raining here on Venus?"

    "Don't be crazy," said one of the two other men. "It never stops raining on Venus. It just goes on and on. I've lived here for ten years and I never saw a minute, or even a second, when it wasn't pouring."

    "It's like living under water," said the lieutenant, and rose up, shrugging his guns into place. "Well, we'd better get going. We'll find that Sun Dome yet."

    "Or we won't find it," said the cynic.

    "It's an hour or so."

    "Now you're lying to me, Lieutenant."

    "No, now I'm lying to myself. This is one of those times when you've got to lie. I can't take much more of this."

    They walked down the jungle trail, now and then looking at their compasses. There was no direction anywhere, only what the compass said. There was a gray sky and rain falling and jungle and a path, and, far back behind them somewhere, a rocket in which they had ridden and fallen. A rocket in which lay two of their friends, dead and dripping rain.

    They walked in single file, not speaking. They came to a river which lay wide and flat and brown, flowing down to the great Single Sea. The surface of it was stippled in a billion places by the rain.

    "All right, Simmons."

    The lieutenant nodded and Simmons took a small packet from his back which, with a pressure of hidden chemical, inflated into a large boat. The lieutenant directed the cutting of wood and the quick making of paddles and they set out into the river, paddling swiftly across the smooth surface in the rain.

    The lieutenant felt the cold rain on his cheeks and on his neck and on his moving arms. The cold was beginning to seep into his lungs. He felt the rain on his ears, on his eyes, on his legs.

    "I didn't sleep last night," he said.

    "Who could? Who has? When? How many nights have we slept? Thirty nights, thirty days! Who can sleep with rain slamming their head, banging away. . . . I'd give anything for a hat. Anything at all, just so it wouldn't hit my head any more. I get headaches. My head is sore; it hurts all the time."

    "I'm sorry I came to China," said one of the others.

    "First time I ever heard Venus called China."

    "Sure, China. Chinese water cure. Remember the old torture? Rope you against a wall. Drop one drop of water on your head every half-hour. You go crazy waiting for the next one. Well, that's Venus, but on a big scale. We're not made for water. You can't sleep, you can't breathe right, and you're crazy from just being soggy. If we'd been ready for a crash, we'd have brought waterproofed uniforms and hats. It's this beating rain on your head gets you, most of all. It's so heavy. It's like BB shot. I don't know how long I can take it."

    "Boy, me for the Sun Dome! The man who thought
them
up, thought of something."

    They crossed the river, and in crossing they thought of the Sun Dome, somewhere ahead of them, shining in the jungle rain. A yellow house, round and bright as the sun. A house forty feet high by one hundred feet in diameter, in which was warmth and quiet and hot food and freedom from rain. And in the center of the Sun Dome, of course, was a sun. A small floating free globe of yellow fire, drifting in a space at the top of the building where you could look at it from where you sat, smoking or reading a book or drinking your hot chocolate crowned with marshmallow dollops or drinking something else. There it would be, the yellow sun, just the size of the Earth sun, and it was warm and continuous, and the rain world of Venus would be forgotten as long as you stayed in that house and idled your time.

    The lieutenant turned and looked back at the three men using their oars and gritting their teeth. They were as white as mushrooms, as white as he was. Venus bleached everything away in a few months. Even the jungle was an immense cartoon nightmare, for how could the jungle be green with no sun, with always rain falling and always dusk? The white, white jungle with the pale cheese-colored leaves, and the earth carved of wet Camembert, and the tree boles like immense toadstools — everything black and white. And how often could you see the soil itself? Wasn't it mostly a creek, a stream, a puddle, a pool, a lake, a river, and then, at last, the sea?

    "Here we are!"

    They leaped out on the farthest shore, splashing and sending up showers. The boat was deflated and stored in a cigar-box packet. Then, standing on the rainy shore, they tried to light up a few smokes for themselves, and it was five minutes or so before, shuddering, they worked the inverted lighter and, cupping their hands, managed a few drags upon cigarettes that all too quickly were limp and beaten away from their lips by a sudden slap of rain.

    They walked on.

    "Wait just a moment," said the lieutenant "I thought I saw something ahead."

    "The Sun Dome?"

    "I'm not sure. The rain closed in again."

    Simmons began to run. "The Sun Dome!"

    "Come back, Simmons!"

    "The Sun Dome!"

    Simmons vanished in the rain. The others ran after him.

    They found him in a little clearing, and they stopped and looked at him and what he had discovered.

    The rocket ship.

    It was lying where they had left it. Somehow they had circled back and were where they had started. In the ruin of the ship green fungus was growing up out of the mouths of the two dead men. As they watched, the fungus took flower, the petals broke away in the rain, and the fungus died.

    "How did we do it?"

    "An electrical storm must be nearby. Threw our compasses off. That explains it."

    "You're right."

    "What'll we do now?"

    "Start out again."

    "Good Lord, we're not any closer to anywhere!"

    "Let's try to keep calm about it, Simmons."

    "Calm, calm! This rain's driving me wild!"

    "We've enough food for another two days if we're careful."

    The rain danced on their skin, on their wet uniforms;- the rain streamed from their noses and ears, from their fingers and knees. They looked like stone fountains frozen in the jungle, issuing forth water from every pore.

    And, as they stood, from a distance they heard a roar.

    And the monster came out of the rain.

    The monster was supported upon a thousand electric blue legs. It walked swiftly and terribly. It struck down a leg with a driving blow. Everywhere a leg struck a tree fell and burned. Great whiffs of ozone filled the rainy air, and smoke blew away and was broken up by the rain. The monster was a half mile wide and a mile high and it felt of the ground like a great blind thing. Sometimes, for a moment, it had no legs at all. And then, in an instant, a thousand whips would fall out of its belly, white-blue whips, to sting the jungle.

    "There's the electrical storm," said one of the men. "There's the thing ruined our compasses. And it's coming this way."

    "Lie down, everyone," said the lieutenant.

    "Run!" cried Simmons.

    "Don't be a fool. Lie down. It hits the highest points. We may get through unhurt. Lie down about fifty feet from the rocket. It may very well spend its force there and leave us be. Get down!"

    The men flopped.

    "Is it coming?" they asked each other, after a moment.

    "Coming."

    "Is it nearer?"

    "Two hundred yards off."

    "Nearer?"

    "Here she is!"

    The monster came and stood over them. It dropped down ten blue bolts of lightning which struck the rocket. The rocket flashed like a beaten gong and gave off a metal ringing. The monster let down fifteen more bolts which danced about in a ridiculous pantomime, feeling of the jungle and the watery soil.

    "No, no!" One of the men jumped up.

    "Get down, you fool!" said the lieutenant.

    "No!"

    The lightning struck the rocket another dozen times. The lieutenant turned his head on his arm and saw the blue blazing flashes. He saw trees split and crumple into ruin. He saw the monstrous dark cloud turn like a black disk overhead and hurl down a hundred other poles of electricity.

    The man who had leaped up was now running, like someone in a great hall of pillars. He ran and dodged between the pillars and then at last a dozen of the pillars slammed down and there was the sound a fly makes when landing upon the grill wires of an exterminator. The lieutenant remembered this from his childhood on a farm. And there was a smell of a man burned to a cinder.

    The lieutenant lowered his head. "Don't look up," he told the others. He was afraid that he too might run at any moment.

    The storm above them flashed down another series of bolts and then moved on away. Once again there was only the rain, which rapidly cleared the air of the charred smell, and in a moment the three remaining men were sitting and waiting for the beat of their hearts to subside into quiet once more.

    They walked over to the body, thinking that perhaps they could still save the man's life. They couldn't believe that there wasn't some way to help the man. It was the natural act of men who have not accepted death until they have touched it and turned it over and made plans to bury it or leave it there for the jungle to bury in an hour of quick growth.

    The body was twisted steel, wrapped in burned leather. It looked like a wax dummy that had been thrown into an incinerator and pulled out after the wax had sunk to the charcoal skeleton. Only the teeth were white, and they shone like a strange white bracelet dropped half through a clenched black fist.

    "He shouldn't have jumped up." They said it almost at the same time.

    Even as they stood over the body it began to vanish, for the vegetation was edging in upon it, little vines and ivy and creepers, and even flowers for the dead.

    At a distance the storm walked off on blue bolts of lightning and was gone.

    They crossed a river and a creek and a stream and a dozen other rivers and creeks and streams. Before their eyes rivers appeared, rushing, new rivers, while old rivers changed their courses — rivers the color of mercury, rivers the color of silver and milk.

    They came to the sea.

    The Single Sea. There was only one continent on Venus. This land was three thousand miles long by a thousand miles wide, and about this island was the Single Sea, which covered the entire raining planet. The Single Sea, which lay upon the pallid shore with little motion . . .

    "This way." The lieutenant nodded south. "I'm sure there are two Sun Domes down that way."

    "While they were at it, why didn't they build a hundred more?"

    "There're a hundred and twenty of them now, aren't there?"

    "One hundred and twenty-six, as of last month. They tried to push a bill through Congress back on Earth a year ago to provide for a couple dozen more, but oh no, you know how
that
is. They'd rather a few men went crazy with the rain."

    They started south.

    The lieutenant and Simmons and the third man, Pickard, walked in the rain, in the rain that fell heavily and lightly, heavily and lightly; in the rain that poured and hammered and did not stop falling upon the land and the sea and the walking people.

    Simmons saw it first. "There it is!"

    "There's what?"

    "The Sun Dome!"

    The lieutenant blinked the water from his eyes and raised his hands to ward off the stinging blows of the rain.

    At a distance there was a yellow glow on the edge of the jungle, by the sea. It was, indeed, the Sun Dome.

    The men smiled at each other.