Short Fiction - Algis Budrys (chrysanthemum read aloud .TXT) 📗

I go back to where the Foundation was, now and then. I bring doctors with me, after each time it seems to me I have found a way to tell them what to seek. The Veld lies where his chamber was, before the stone decayed, and tells me nothing.

If he truly reflects me, as he is now, then I don’t know if I can bear to wait for the day when I can dash myself down from the outraged air and surrender myself to the sea-speckled rocks. The doctors say that if only someone would tell them what questions to ask about the Veld, and if only someone would give them the answers to the questions, they might be able to do something.

Charpantier is there sometimes, and mocks me. “You’re getting crazier every day, Maurer,” he says. “Suppose you restore the Veld? Then what? Does he make another transporter?” He shakes his head. “Poor Maurer. What’re you doing to these people you bring here? What do you want from them? Something the Veld himself couldn’t accomplish?”

I try. I try to tell them how to question, and I command them to question. And I hope the Veld dies. But though Charpantier and I⁠—even Charpantier and I⁠—are growing a little older, the Veld is only moribund, and no more dead than he was before the days when thirty generations of men battled to keep the southernmost edge of the creeping ice from burying the Veld beyond the reach of hope.

For I hope⁠—though I can see a sprig of silver, here and there, in Charpantier’s darkness now. The Veld must be accessible to my hope, though I must command millions of men.

And I think Charpantier hopes, too, because so long as he can see me failing he knows I am imperfect, but he wishes perfection for me. I know he brings no doctors only because he has not yet found a way for a man to respond to the command, “Be perfect!”

Each time the hope dies, I tell my men: “Go home, now. Rest.” And they go home. But I? I blunder about, thinking that perhaps if I could kill the Veld, that would be an end to it. But nothing can kill the Veld, unless it be something the Veld knows of. So first we must heal the Veld. And healed he will once again seek his heart’s desire, hopelessly. As do I. As do I.

I’ve come a long, long way to die alone, David Greaves thought as Defiance tumbled through the misty shroud of Venus, hopelessly torn apart by the explosion in her engines. On the console in front of him, the altimeter was one of the last few meaningful instruments, and it told him there were only a few tortured miles remaining before the ship he had brought this far⁠—had spent his fortune in building when no government would yet consider risking a manned rocket on his flight⁠—would smash down to its doom on a planet no man had ever walked.

Battered and tossed in his seat by the ship’s crazy tumbling, Greaves tensed the oak-hard muscles of his arms and thrust himself up to his feet. He wasn’t dead yet. He wasn’t dead and, if the slim chance paid off, he’d still be present to laugh in the government’s face when the first, safe, cautious official venture finally made its way across the emptiness between Earth and the Sun’s second planet.

Dragging himself from handhold to handhold, his tendons cracking with the strain, he levered himself toward the Crash Capsule, forced open its hatch and pulled himself through, while the winds of Venus tore at the shattered hull and the scream of Defiance’s passage through the murky sky rose to a savage howl.

Outside the cloud-lashed hull there were no stars. Below, no one knew what sort of jungle, or sea, or desert of whipping poison sand might lie in wait. Greaves had not cared when he set out, and did not care now. If men had always waited to be sure, if all the adventurers of mankind had waited until the signposts had gone up, the cave bears would still be the dominant form of life on Earth, and races undreamed of might never know such a thing as man to contest their sway over the Universe.

I’ll live to see my share of that, Greaves thought as he pulled the capsule’s hatch shut and dropped into the special padding that, in theory, would cushion much of the impact. Or else I’ll know I tried. He tripped the lever that would flood the capsule with Doctor Eckstrom’s special anesthetic⁠—the experimental compound that might⁠—just barely, might⁠—offer a chance.

As the hiss of the yellow-tinged, acrid gas became louder and louder in his ears, David Greaves thought again of the almost obsessive lengths to which he had gone in making sure that there would be such a thing as the capsule. The entire project⁠—the decision to build the ship, to sacrifice for it the personal fortune he had built up in his meteoric rise from obscurity to being one of the world’s most dynamic and certainly youngest industrialists⁠—had been marked by his fanatical persistence and dedication. But that dream had come first, and the fortune second⁠—the sole purpose of his career, from its very beginnings when he was only another engineer test pilot, had simply been to accumulate the means so Defiance could be built. But the ship had been three-quarters complete when he conceived the idea for the capsule. He could not even now remember exactly when or how he had decided that he must have some device aboard that would protect him from a crash and⁠—here was the vital thing he insisted upon⁠—keep him alive, no matter how injured, no matter how long might be necessary, until rescuers could reach him.

For him to even think in terms of rescuers⁠—of depending on others⁠—was totally uncharacteristic. For him