‘If ever a planet was a woman, this one is.’
‘Woman on the outside, man on the inside,’ said Chatterton. ‘All hard underneath, all male iron, copper, uranium, black sod. Don’t let the cosmetics fool you.’
He walked to the bin where the Earth Drill waited. Its great screw-snout glittered bluely, ready to stab seventy feet deep and suck out corks of earth, deeper still with extensions into the heart of the planet. Chatterton winked at it. ‘We’ll fix your woman, Forester, but good.’
‘Yes, I know you will,’ said Forester, quietly.
The rocket landed.
‘It’s too green, too peaceful,’ said Chatterton. ‘I don’t like it.’ He turned to the captain. ‘We’ll go out with our rifles.’
‘I give orders, if you don’t mind.’
‘Yes, and my company pays our way with millions of dollars of machinery we must protect; quite an investment.’
The air on the new planet 7 in star system 84 was good. The port swung wide. The men filed out into the greenhouse world.
The last man to emerge was Chatterton, gun in hand.
As Chatterton set foot to the green lawn, the earth trembled. The grass shook. The distant forest rumbled. The sky seemed to blink and darken imperceptibly. The men were watching Chatterton when it happened.
‘An earthquake, by God!’
Chatterton’s face paled. Everyone laughed.
‘It doesn’t like you, Chatterton!’
‘Nonsense!’
The trembling died away at last.
‘Well,’ said Captain Forester, ‘it didn’t quake for us, so it must be that it doesn’t approve of your philosophy.’
‘Coincidence,’ Chatterton smiled. ‘Come on now on the double. I want the Drill out here in a half-hour for a few samplings.’
‘Just a moment.’ Forester stopped laughing. ‘We’ve got to clear the area first, be certain there’re no hostile people or animals. Besides, it isn’t every year you hit a planet like this, very nice; can you blame us if we want to have a look at it?’
‘All right.’ Chatterton joined them. ‘Let’s get it over with.’
They left a guard at the ship and they walked away over fields and meadows, over small hills and into little valleys. Like a bunch of boys out hiking on the finest day of the best summer in the most beautiful year in history, walking in the croquet weather where if you listened you could hear the whisper of the wooden ball across grass, the click through the hoop, the gentle undulations of voices, a sudden high drift of women’s laughter from some ivy-shaded porch, the tinkle of ice in the summer tea-pitcher.
‘Hey,’ said Driscoll, one of the younger crewmen, sniffing the air. ‘I brought a baseball and bat; we’ll have a game later. What a diamond!’
The men laughed quietly in the baseball season, in the good quiet wind for tennis, in the weather for bicycling and picking wild grapes.
‘How’d you like the job of mowing all this?’ asked Driscoll.
The men stopped.
‘I knew there was something wrong!’ cried Chatterton. ‘This grass; it’s freshly cut!’
‘Probably a species of dichondra, always short.’
Chatterton spat on the green grass and rubbed it in with his boot. ‘I don’t like it, I don’t like it. If anything happened to us, no one on Earth would ever know. Silly policy: if a rocket fails to return, we never send a second rocket to check the reason why.’
‘Natural enough,’ explained Forester. ‘We can’t waste time on a thousand hostile worlds, fighting futile wars. Each rocket represents years, money, lives. We can’t afford to waste two rockets if one rocket proves a planet hostile. We go on to peaceful planets. Like this one.’
‘I often wonder,’ said Driscoll, ‘what happened to all those lost expeditions on worlds we’ll never try again.’
Chatterton eyed the distant forest. ‘They were shot, stabbed, broiled for dinner. Even as we may be, any minute. It’s time we got back to work, Captain!’
They stood at the top of a little rise.
‘Feel,’ said Driscoll, his hands and arms out loosely. ‘Remember how you used to run when you were a kid, and how the wind felt? Like feathers on your arms. You ran and thought any minute you’d fly, but you never quite did.’
The men stood remembering. There was a smell of pollen and new rain drying upon a million grass blades.
Driscoll gave a little run. ‘Feel it, by God, the wind! You know, we never have really flown by ourselves. We have to sit inside tons of metal, away from flying, really. We’ve never flown like birds fly, to themselves. Wouldn’t it be nice to put your arms out like this –’ He extended his arms. ‘And run.’ He ran ahead of them, laughing at his idiocy. ‘And fly!’ he cried.
He flew.
Time passed on the silent gold wrist-watches of the men standing below. They stared up. And from the sky came a high sound of almost unbelievable laughter.
‘Tell him to come down,’ whispered Chatterton. ‘He’ll be killed.’
Nobody heard. Their faces were raised away from Chatterton; they were stunned and smiling.
At last Driscoll landed at their feet. ‘Did you see me? My God, I flew!’
They had seen.
‘Let me sit down, oh Lord, Lord.’ Driscoll slapped his knees, chuckling. ‘I’m a sparrow, I’m a hawk, God bless me. Go on, all of you, try it!’
‘It’s the wind. It picked me up and flew me!’ he said, a moment later, gasping, shivering with delight.
‘Let’s get out of here.’ Chatterton started turning slowly in circles, watching the blue sky. ‘It’s a trap, it wants us all to fly in the air. Then it’ll drop us all at once and kill us. I’m going back to the ship.’
‘You’ll wait for my order on that,’ said Forester.
The men were frowning, standing in the warm-cool air, while the wind sighed about them. There was a kite sound in the air, a sound of eternal March.
‘I asked the wind to fly me,’ said Driscoll. ‘And it did !’
Forester waved the others aside. ‘I’ll chance it next. If I’m killed, back to the ship, all of you.’
‘I’m sorry, I can’t allow this; you’re the captain,’ said Chatterton. ‘We can’t risk you.’ He took out his gun. ‘I should have some sort of authority or force here. This game’s gone on too long; I’m ordering us back to the ship!’
‘Holster your gun,’ said Forester quietly.
‘Stand still, you idiot!’ Chatterton blinked now at this man, now at that. ‘Haven’t you felt it? This world’s alive, it has a look to it, it’s playing with us, biding its time.’
‘I’ll be the judge of that,’ said Forester. ‘You’re going back to the ship, in a moment, under arrest, if you don’t put up that gun.’
‘If you fools won’t come with me, you can die out here. I’m going back, get my samples, and get out.’
‘Chatterton!’
‘Don’t try to stop me!’
Chatterton started to run. Then, suddenly, he gave a cry.
Everyone shouted and looked up.
‘There he goes,’ said Driscoll.
Chatterton was up in the sky.
Night had come on like the closing of a great but gentle eye. Chatterton sat stunned on the side of the hill. The other men sat around him, exhausted and laughing. He would not look at them, he would not look at the sky, he would only feel of the earth, and his arms and his legs and his body, tightening in on himself.
‘God, wasn’t it perfect!’ said a man named Koestler.
They had all flown, like orioles and eagles and sparrows, and they were all happy.
‘Come out of it, Chatterton, it was fun, wasn’t it?’ said Koestler.
‘It’s impossible.’ Chatterton shut his eyes, tight, tight. ‘It can’t do it. There’s only one way for it to do it; it’s alive. The air’s alive. Like a fist, it picked me up. Any minute now, it can kill us all. It’s alive!’
‘All right,’ said Koestler, ‘say it’s alive. And a living thing must have purposes. Suppose the purpose of this world is to make us happy.’
As if to add to this, Driscoll came flying up, canteens in each hand. ‘I found a creek, tested and pure water, wait’ll you try it!’
Forester took a canteen, nudged Chatterton with it, offering a drink. Chatterton shook his head and drew hastily away. He put his hands over his face. ‘It’s the blood of this planet. Living blood. Drink that, put that inside and you put this world inside you to peer out your eyes and listen through your ears. No thanks!’
Forester shrugged and drank.
‘Wine!’ he said.
‘It can’t be!’
‘It is. Smell it, taste it! A rare white wine!’
‘French domestic’ Driscoll sipped his.
‘Poison,’ said Chatterton.
They passed the canteens round.
They idled on through the gentle afternoon, not wanting to do anything to disturb the peace that lay all about them. They were like very young men in the presence of great beauty, of a fine and famous woman, afraid that by some word, some gesture, they might turn her face away, avert her loveliness and her kindly attentions.
They had felt the earthquake that had greeted Chatterton, thought Forester, and they did not want earthquake. Let them enjoy this Day After School Lets Out, this fishing weather. Let them sit under the shade trees or walk on the tender hills, but let them drill no drillings, test no testings, contaminate no contaminations.
They found a small stream which poured into a boiling water pool. Fish, swimming in the cold creek above, fell glittering into the hot spring and floated, minutes later, cooked, to the surface.
Chatterton reluctantly joined the others, eating.
‘It’ll poison us all. There’s always a trick to things like this. I’m sleeping in the rocket tonight. You can sleep out if you want. To quote a map I saw in medieval history:
