Worlds Apart (6 page)

It wasn't a thing that mattered. The men and women who agreed to that provision didn't really consider it as applying to themselves. It would apply only to people of over fifty, and they couldn't see themselves being over fifty. It was a good thing to have in the Constitution, so that there would be no misunderstanding when the time came.

As it happened, the law was directed personally against John Pertwee, and applied to no one else. For by the time the first children had grown up, the only woman they were at all likely to be interested in from the point of view of marriage was Mary Bentley, and the only man, John Pertwee. Mary didn't come into the reckoning. That left Pertwee. No doubt there were other men among the founder colonists who might have trespassed had the opportunity to trespass been offered them. But Pertwee was the only one who at fifty-four was still tall and straight and strong and handsome enough.

Marjory died early -- as most women died, in childbirth. Pertwee married Jean. In the tenth year of the colony, she died. There was no one else for Pertwee to marry. There weren't many deaths on friendly Mundis, but more women were dying than men.

He became Pertwee the lover, the terror of every jealous husband. Nobody turned him off the Council for that; it was inevitable that if the handsomest man in the community was single, something of the sort must happen.

But the case of Helen Hulton was different. She was fifteen. It was against the Constitution. Pertwee had taken advantage of her youth. He was entirely to blame, a libertine, almost a pervert. He was deposed from the presidency, though not turned off the Council.

Frances Bendall was next. That was the end, He was banished from the Council, never to hold office of any kind, removed from the fine house he had built himself and given a small hut on the outskirts of the village and told grimly that the next time the only possible punishment was death for himself and for the girl concerned.

Curiously, it was only the founder colonists who objected. The young people didn't care, The women could understand why a girl should want a man of maturity and experience, particulary such a man as Pertwee; and the men shrugged their shoulders and said if a girl wanted an old guy of fifty-four she was welcome to him.

Pertwee believed the Council meant what they said about the death penalty -- for him, at any rate. On the other hand, there was no question, surely, of executing a girl of twenty who could produce six or seven children. That was only meant to scare girls away from him.

Apparently it had failed to scare Toni. She was not only prepared to fall in love with him, she came to him prepared to run away with him. It was a wild scheme at first sight, but Pertwee usually looked into things a little more closely than that.

If they went away, no one would look for them, There might be a token search close to Lemon, but the people who made it wouldn't expect to find them. Any part of the planet was as safe as any other, as far as the colonists knew. They hadn't explored much of it, because there was very little to explore -- no seas to chart, no animals, the same kind of vegetation everywhere. The only thing that varied was temperature. One could find places where it was hotter, but few places where it was cooler.

It would only be necessary to stay well out of sight for a month or two, and then come back alone -- without Toni. It would be quite a strong bargaining position. . . .

Pertwee started to his feet. Toni was there beside him in the dusk.

She came up silently, effortlessly. She was the right partner to have in an elopement like this. She knew what she could do. She had a sack on her back, and he could trust her to have packed what was necessary.

They melted into the darkness without a word. It was not until they were clear of the bounds of Lemon that Toni remarked: "I still think we should have taken horses."

"Apart from the fact that they would have left a track that could be followed," said Pertwee, "it would have made it more important for us to be discovered. They would have cared more about the horses than about us."

Toni laughed. She laughed easily. She was a happy girl, and Pertwee felt his blood coursing through his veins in a more powerful surge at the thought that she was his. There was no doubt she was the most attractive girl in Lemon -- very little doubt, therefore, that she was the most attractive girl alive.

There was a slight hiatus in his thoughts as he realized that there was something he didn't fully understand about the affair. Toni had had the thing worked out in a way that didn't seem at all typical of her. And she had made up her mind quickly after they had flirted briefly, innocently . . . It occurred to him fleetingly that instead of taking the leading part in the affair he was almost being pushed into it.

But he refused to follow out that thought. John Pertwee was a strong man with a weakness, and his Achilles' heel was women. When the Council cut women out of his life, they struck deeper than would have been the case with most men of his years. With a wise woman he loved beside him, Pertwee could still be a leader, a big man in any community. Without her he was uncertain, weak, lacking purpose in life.

He didn't /want/ to survey Toni's reasons too closely. It was enough that he had Toni.

4

The disappearance of Pertwee and Toni was probably the most disturbing single event in the history of Mundis. They were the first two who ran away from the community, and they were Pertwee and Toni. Only the disappearance of Rog Foley with Mary Bentley would have produced the same stir.

It was suddenly rediscovered that Pertwee was a great man. This didn't mean people took his side and said they would welcome him with open arms when and if he came back. It meant, however, that the incident was important.

Jim Bentley collected a dozen stories in the first morning. They included:

Pertwee and Toni were setting out to start a new race on the other side of the planet. He would bring up his children indoctrinated to attack and destroy Lemon one day.

Pertwee had gone to search for other human beings on Mundis in a sort of Hidden City somewhere. Deposed in Lemon, he was looking for another race he could rule.

Pertwee and Toni had been kidnapped by intelligent non-human Mundans who lived underground and had hidden when the Terrans arrived in their great ship twenty years since.

Pertwee and Toni were already dead. They had had a suicide pact -- one night of love, and then death together.

An unknown lover had killed Toni. Then, wondering how to cover up, he hit on the plan of murdering Pertwee, too, and making it look as if they had gone away together.

Bentley reported these to his wife and Alice and young Jim. Alice was diverted by the first theory.

"Pertwee and Toni have to go away because our rules for strong breeding won't permit a union like that," she observed sarcastically. "Yet now it's suggested that the two of them can found a race that will overcome all of us here in Lemon. Do I smell an inconsistency?"

The Bentleys got on better than most families. Perhaps that was because there were only four of them. Most families were much bigger, and there was a lot of quarreling just on general principles. The Bentleys never quarreled. They just silently disagreed. They seemed to get on even better than they did, for they avoided the subjects on which they knew they would disagree.

"Do you know anything about this, Alice?" Bentley asked, with a shrewd glance at her.

"No," she said honestly. "But I know what you mean. There's more in it than meets the eye. And I'll tell you this -- just before Rog Foley married June Smith, Toni was chasing him hard."

"Oh. Foley," said Bentley thoughtfully. "Frankly, Alice, I hoped you'd marry Rog."

"It was duly considered," Alice observed briefly.

Bentley and Mary looked at her with interest at that, but her expression told them not to pursue the matter.

In the afternoon a large search party was organized. The older people were grim and angry; the young people thought the whole thing was a great joke. There was jocular calculation of how long Pertwee would last living with Toni.

Hardly anyone could think of Toni's second name offhand. They had to go back in memory and remember her being born. She was the daughter of Albert Cursiter and Nancy Brown, they remembered, and she took after her mother. Nancy had been the Toni of her generation. She had died in the only disaster of Mundan history -- the bush fire that had killed five people, back when the country round about Lemon was still being explored and no one had much experience of Mundan bush fires. Like Toni, she hadn't been pretty -- only enormously attractive. She was called Nancy Brown because that was easier to remember than the name of the husband of the time. Actually she had been Nancy Mayor, Brown, Simpson, Smith, Cursiter, Jackson, and Morgan, in short order.

Mundis was flatter than Earth. There had never been a survey from the air, so it was quite possible that some parts of the world would prove surprising. But certainly all that had ever been explored had proved very much the same.

Over almost all of the surface of the planet a coarse grass grew. Its roots were so long and powerful that it seemed to be capable of leveling the ground itself. Once, no doubt, Mundis had been mountainous, but the grass had conquered all but the barest, rockiest ground. Even there it was working slowly and patienly, first gaining a precarious footing and then gradually eating away the mountain. Possibly the hill on which New Paris had been built was all that was left of a whole mountain range. The valley of Lemon was not so much a flat area among hills as a depression in flat ground.

Here and there forests grew. Mundan trees were small and thick. Their wood was harder and tougher than the wood of Earth. It didn't burn as the wood the colonists were used to burned: only under pressure, reluctantly, but finally with enormous release of energy. Fires occasionally started in the grass or bush, and they would sweep rapidly along until they reached a wood. That stopped them. The woods were the natural fire depots of Mundis. Bush fires didn't often get round them; the trees were such powerful water pumps that the vegetation all round a wood smoldered damply instead of blazing.

The search for Pertwee and Toni, in country like this, was admittedly a formality. If they had been careful not to leave tracks, they had left none.

Dogs were useless for tracking. The grass had a harsh, musky odor that covered human scent very rapidly.

Alice sought out Rog during the search. "Did you put Toni up to this?" she asked bluntly.

Rog nodded, and dumfounded Alice once again. Rog was unpredictable. He would admit nothing or everything. It was no surprise to her that he should be behind the disappearance of Toni and Pertwee, but she hadn't expected him to admit it as casually as that.

"Why?" she demanded.

Rog nodded forward at June, a little further ahead. "June was jealous," he said. "I had to get rid of Toni."

Alice snorted. "If you expect me to believe that, you must think I'm dumb."

"I don't think you're dumb, Alice."

That was all he would say on the subject.

The search, having accomplished all that anyone expected it to accomplish -- nothing -- was given up in the early evening. Pertwee and Toni were gone, lost, safe until they cared to come back, if they ever did.

And good luck to them, said Rog and his friends with the cheerful unconcern they had often shown over the prohibitions of the Constitution.

5

Another meeting was held at Jessie Bendall's house, but the constitution of this one was different. Jessie and the Bentleys knew what Robertson would say -- "Death to both of them. They must be shown that the law means precisely what it says." They knew what Boyne would say, shaking his head -- " This thing is against the laws of God and man."

But they didn't know what the attitude of the silent minority would be, the quiet, solitary people like Toni's improbable father, Albert Cursiter, and Bob Foley, and Kim Jackson. So they invited them instead of Robertson and Boyne.

"There's something going on," Jessie Bendall said, her kindly face puzzled and worried. "Something's rocking the boat."

"Somebody," corrected Bob Foley, who even now could almost he mistaken for his son. He had the same long nose, the same wiry strength, the same way of speaking. But Bob wasn't important; Rog was. "And I think the somebody is Rog Foley," Bob went on.

"I believe everyone overestimates Rog," Mary Bentley remarked. "He's always seemed a placid, straightforward sort of boy to me."

He's a devil," said Bob morosely. "You never know what he's up to."

"Let's stick to the main issues," said Jessie. "Pertwee is one of our big men. We always knew that. The trouble is, our life here isn't a struggle. There aren't emergencies. We don't need Pertwee."

"We haven't needed Pertwee for the last ten years or so, anyway," said Bentley. "We may need him again."

"Then," said Jessie, "do you say, Jim, that we must accept his marriage to Toni? Are we to break down Article Six? Do we admit we were wrong and -- "

"What the hell," said Kim Jackson abruptly. "We /were/ wrong. It was nonsense. I always said so."

Jessie and Mary and Bentley exchanged startled glances. Was this, then, going to be one of the attitudes to be reckoned with? Jackson, of course, had not always said so. In public, at any rate, he seldom said anything. Certainly nothing so forthright.

"It's not really so much a question of whether we were wrong or not," said Jessie carefully, "as whether we admit it. Whether we're being edged into admitting that some of the Constitution is wrong, and therefore possibly more of it -- "

"For chrissake," said Jackson loudly and unhelpfully. "If you try to cut stone with wood and it won't cut, do you go on trying and insisting it's got to cut?" He looked round challengingly, obviously certain he had put his finger right on the core of the matter.

"Toni isn't had," said Albert Cursiter eagerly, unaware that his contribution was hardly relevant. "She wouldn't do anything she thought was wrong."

Jessie caught Mary's eye and shook her head helplessly. She frowned at Brad, who was taking no part in the discussion. Brad merely grinned back.