A Gun for Dinosaur and Other Imaginative Tales
- Автор: Де Камп Лайон Спрэг
- Год: 1969
- Язык: английский
- Год: Curtis Books
- Жанр: Научная фантастика
Электронная книга - «A Gun for Dinosaur and Other Imaginative Tales». Краткое содержание книги:
I got red and stammery. She was carrying her mailbag; I couldn't carry it for her because I was completely loaded down with my own gear. I said:
"Mademoiselle, I'm only sorry I couldn't have been a better specimen of the breed. I hope I shan't embarrass you."
"Pouf! Monsieur quests for compliments." (I wasn't, but I didn't argue.) "What kind of Terrien are you?"
"Just a typical Earthman. My father is Irish, my mother is Russian, I was born in Japan and raised in the United States, I'm a British subject, and when I'm home I live in France. That's why they picked me for this job; that, and influence."
"You mean to say because you speak French so fluently?"
"Yes. Anyway, now that you're having a fend in Nouvelle-Arcadie, even an incompetent imitation of a correspondent like me can write it up. If everything had been as dull and peaceful as they warned me it would be, I'd have flubbed the assignment. I may yet."
"Hold! Vaud has told us that Terrans are so aggressive and vain that they're always talking themselves into positions where they have to fight their way out. You seem different."
"Just one of nature's mistakes," I said. "Is this crowd the whole population of Liberté?"
"But no, there are many more. Motta has let only a fraction of us come to the field for the alighting. He feared that an accident might blow up the whole population of the village at once."
"What about this feud?"
"It has commenced about thirty years ago," she said, "when I was a girl of sixty-five." (I was startled until I remembered it takes four and a half Turanian years to make one of ours.) "Henri Vaud put himself to complaining about the colony. You know, at the start everything was most liberal; a sort of co-operative anarchy. But Vaud said the lazies were putting too much of their portion of the work on the diligents; the men fought shamefully over the women; people formed secret societies against the interests of the majority, and so forth."
"Maybe they got bored with all that perfection."
"Perhaps. Anyway, Vaud talked of tighter organization, more discipline, and a more definite goal in life than heating ourselves to the sun on the beach. It sounded inspiring."
"And then?"
"First, there were stricter rules of conduct. Instead of the girls' making love as they pleased and marrying the first boy by whom they got pregnant, he has established a rigorous system of supervised courtship. Then there were regular hours of work instead of weekly totals.
"This new system has given us more production. We have eaten better and we've had more and better houses. The sick have received more attention and the infants more schooling. With more time given to the forge we've made more and better tools."
"It sounds fine so far," I said.
"But some people will always break laws, no matter how liberal. To stop them, Vaud made more and more rules. Nobody might leave Elysée without signing in and out. Everybody must address him formally as vous, while continuing to tutoyer each other ..."
We came to the stockade, which stretched to right and left into the forest. I could hear the sound of surf through the trees. The gate opened and a swarm of children boiled out, shrieking. We were soon wading knee-deep in naked children of all sizes. Adrienne said:
"The littles wanted to be excused from school to see the tender alight, but Motta has decided that the field would be too dangerous."
We went through the gate. Inside, the land had been cleared and cut up with Swiss neatness into tilled patches of wheat, melons, carrots, and so on. Some of the plants were native, but most were terran. Inside the main stockade was a smaller one around the village proper.
When I got settled, I spent a half-hour writing my impressions in shorthand. I may be a lousy correspondent, but I know how to go through the motions.
Then I left the guest house to look at Liberté. I wandered around the fields, took a few pictures, and followed the stockade down to the beach, where it ended in shallow water. A quarter-mile down the beach the other end of it ended likewise.
Despite the wind, the surf wasn't heavy. The beach was in the lee of Nouvelle-Arcadie, which rose from Taylor Sea a couple of miles west. I saw some little floating dots which I took to be Vaud's Activists paddling back to their island.
The beaches on Turania are mostly narrow, because for practical purposes there are no tides. The only moon looks much smaller than ours, only two or three times as big as Jupiter looks to us. There were a dozen or so outrigger dugout canoes and catamarans drawn up on the sand.
Some Passivists were swimming. One shouted to me to join them. I was tempted to do so, as the air was hot and damp and I was sticky. However, I got embarrassed and shook my head. If I stripped I should feel self-conscious, and if I went back for my trunks I should probably feel even more so. These children of nature would wonder if it was a truss.
At the upper edge of the beach, a little skinny man had some sort of apparatus set up on a tripod. I recognized a barometer and other meteorological instruments.
"Allô!" he said. "Me, I am Maximilian Wyss, and you are the terran writer, is it not?"
After civilities I asked him about the apparatus. He said: "I record the weather to see if we need some rain-making.
There are lots of rain squalls here, but they are mostly small. So, a small area like ours may be missed for many consecutive days. Or it may get them every day for half a year and be inundated."
"What's the forecast?" I asked.
"Rain tonight. Look to the west and you will see."
Groombridge 1618 was beginning to set behind Nouvelle-Arcadie. A visitor on Turania always gapes at sunsets. Since this star has about three times the visual diameter of Sol and moves through the sky only about half as fast, it takes nearly six times as long to set in a given latitude. Moreover, the planet is cloudier than Earth, so you see the huge red ball, if at all, through layers of clouds.
During the long sunset, the clouds became thicker until I could see only patches of the sun, though overhead the clouds were banded with yellows and reds and purples. Then the clouds closed in. They boiled and thickened, with lightning and thunder. The swimmers came in, and Maximilian Wyss packed up the portable parts of his apparatus.
"Here she comes," he said.
I started back for Liberté and was going through the inner stockade when it started. In two seconds I could hardly see to walk. I knocked on the first house and was told to come in. This I did, dripping.
" Allô!" said a plump middle-aged fellow. "Come in, my old. You are the correspondent from Earth, no? I am Carl Adorn." He introduced his wife and five children. "Seat yourself. What think you of our vile Utopia, he?"
We had to shout over the roar of the storm. I said: "Is that storm usual?"
"But yes, this is only a little one."
I started pumping Adorn about the story of the colony, but then somebody banged a gong.
"Supper," he said. "Come, everybody."
The seven Adorns marched out into the downpour. When they got to the dining hall they wiped themselves as they went in on a couple of foul-looking bath towels, but that did my soaked clothes no good. There were about a hundred Passivists, all talking like mad. I never saw so many pregnant women at once. I started to sit with the Adorns, but Louis Motta made me sit with him and the officers of the Daedalus.
Motta filled us full of their native wine and asked Captain
Kubala about the planets he'd seen. Kubala told about Cimbria (that is, Procyon A IV) and Scythia and Parthia. (I used to think the astronomers named the planets of other systems after Cunard liners, but I found out they simply used the same system as the Cunard-White Star people, which was to apply obsolete Terran geographical names.)