The COMPLEAT Collected SFF Works, page 297
Left by herself the girl eyed the hairy mob with calm self-possession. They returned the compliment, openly taking in her slender legs, narrow hips, black hair. They undressed her with hungry eyes.
"Doing anything tonight, Baby?" inquired a bear disguised as a man.
"Wait your turn, Bulstrode," ordered a scar-faced neighbour. He spat on thick, calloused fingers, combed his hair with them, straightened an invisible tie. "This one is for gentlemen only." He leered with undisguised appetite at the subject of his remarks. "Isn't that so, Sweetie?"
"All men are gentlemen." She switched her gaze to Bulstrode, surveying him with a kind of dark-eyed innocence. "When they wish to be."
Bulstrode's optics dulled and his huge fingers twitched while he digested this. It took him quite a time. When he spoke again it was in an apologetic rumble.
"I was only joking, Lady. I sort of thought—"
"She isn't interested, you hairy ape," interjected Scarface. "Don't use your breath to display your ignorance." He rubbed his bristly chin, gave another pull to the non-existent tie. "Can I carry your bags to Annie's place, Honey-pie?"
Shuffling slowly around on big feet, Bulstrode grunted: "What makes you think she's heading for Annie's? Why, you slit-cheeked, half-eared louse!" Extending a spade-sized hand he spread it across the other's face, curled his fingers and squeezed.
The victim gurgled convulsively behind the horny palm, made frantic pulls at the thick wrist, finally kicked him on the shin. Ignoring that, Bulstrode began to twist the face leftward, bending him sidewise.
"Stop it!" ordered the girl.
Still holding on, Bulstrode looked over a massive shoulder and said, "Hey?"
"Stop it!" she repeated. "You wouldn't behave that way at home."
Bulstrode let go, examined his hand as if he had never noticed it before. His opponent made snuffling noises, voiced a lurid oath, let go a haymaker. It caught the big man smack on the chin, rattling his teeth but not knocking him down.
Sweeping a columnar arm around in the manner of one trying to brush away an annoying fly, Bulstrode pleaded, "Look, lady, just turn your back a minute while I kill him."
"Don't be silly." Her black eyes surveyed the pair of them. "You're like overgrown children. You don't even know what you're squabbling about—do you?"
They became sheepish, didn't answer.
"Do you?" she insisted.
A tall, gray-haired individual spoke from the front rank of the vastly entertained audience. "You're not at home now, ma'am. This is Venus. Home never comes nearer than thirty million miles."
"Home is as near as your memory permits," she contradicted.
"Maybe you're right. But some of us haven't got so damn much worth remembering." He paused, finished without bitterness, "That's why we're here."
"Speak for yourself, Marsden," said a squat, swarthy man standing behind him. "I'm here to make money and quick!"
"I'm here because I love the sunshine," yelled another from the rear.
Some laughed, some didn't. All glanced at the fog which permitted visibility of no more than two hundred feet. Now and again it lifted to two thousand. Often it descended to ground level. Moisture condensed on their slickers and trickled down in little streams. The girl's black hair sparkled with diamonds of wetness.
"If you're not going to Annie's," continued Marsden, "somebody will have to put you up." A satirical sweep of his hand indicated her choice of six or seven hundred wooden shacks. "Take a look at what's on offer."
"No place for a lady," informed Bulstrode, trying to ingratiate himself and eyeing her like an elephant hoping for a bun.
"Thank you, but I knew what I was coming to. I was well-primed in advance." She smiled at them. "So I brought my own home with me."
Turning away she tripped light-footed toward the ship's tail and where cargo was piling up as the long-armed hoist swung to and from. Presently those on the ship dropped a ramp and rolled down it a small aluminium trailer with two wheels amidships.
"Oh, holy smoke," griped a snaggle-toothed onlooker, openly disappointed. "I'm the only one in this world with a pneumatic mattress—and what's it to her?"
"If they're going to start lugging them across homes and all," complained another, "it's the beginning of the end. This town will get too big for its boots before you know it."
"Which town?" asked a third, staring around and pretending to see nothing whatever.
MARSDEN caught her at her door three days later. He leaned on one of the hardwood posts somebody had driven in to show the limits of her property, let his calculating gaze rest on the trailer, decided that what hung behind the facing window were the first lace curtains he'd seen in two or three years.
"Getting settled down?"
"Yes, thank you. I've been very busy. Unpacking and sorting things out takes quite a time."
"I suppose so. Nobody help you?"
"I didn't need any help."
"You may need it aplenty before you're through." He tilted his hat backward. "Anyone worried you yet?"
"Dear me, no. Why should they?"
"This is a man's town."
Looking as if she hadn't the vaguest notion of what he meant, she said: "Then why don't they give it a name?"
"It isn't enough of a place to deserve a name. Besides it's the only settlement on Venus. There isn't any other—yet. Anyway, names start arguments and arguments start fights."
"If they'll quarrel over the question of what to call this town it's evident that they haven't enough to do."
"When they feel like letting off steam they'll fight over anything. What else do you expect on the space-frontier?"
She did not answer.
"And they've plenty to do," he continued with a touch of harshness. "They're eating a mountain of white granite that runs niobium thirty pounds to the ton. It's useful for high tensils and stainless steels. Also, they're building a narrow-gauge railway eastward to a lake of pitchblende that makes a Geiger chatter like a machine-gun." He rubbed his lips with a thick forefinger. "Yes, they work hard, swear hard, drink hard and fight hard."
"There are things more worth fighting for."
"Such as what?"
"This town, for instance."
"A bunch of tumbledown shanties. A hell of a town!"
"It will be one someday."
"I can see it," Marsden registered a knowing grin. "Exactly as the boys would like it. Complete with city hall, police stations and high-walled jail. A lot of them came here to get away from all that. Do you know that at least forty per cent of them have done time?"
"I don't see that it matters much."
"Don't you? Why not?" He was slightly surprised.
"Men who're really evil prefer to take things easy."
"Meaning—?"
"Those who've come this far must have done so to make a fresh start with a clean sheet. They'd be stupid to mess up their lives a second time."
"Some people are made that way," he informed.
"And some make them that way," she retorted.
"Christ, a reformer!" He showed disgust. "What's your name?"
"Miranda Dean."
"It could be worse."
"What do you mean?"
"It could be Dolly Doberhorst."
"Who on earth is she?"
"An obese charmer at Annie's. Some men like 'em fat." He studied her figure. "And some don't."
"Really?" She seemed quite unconscious of his meaning or the appetite in his eyes. "Well, I'd better get on with my work. Pardon me, will you?"
"Sure."
He watched her enter the trailer, but did not continue on his way. He remained leaning on the post, picking his teeth with a thin stalk of grass and thinking that she'd be very much to his taste without her clothes. Clean and wholesome, not painted and gross like the others.
Staying there he exercised his masculine privilege of pondering possibilities until suddenly he became aware of a huge bulk at his side.
Bulstrode followed his gaze, growled: "What's the idea, staring at her place like you've a mind to bust in?"
"You wouldn't dream of it, of course?"
"No, I wouldn't. She's no faggot."
"Don't give me that! She's merely playing hard to get. Females are females. And you're a liar."
"That's enough for me," said Bulstrode, speaking low in his chest. "Take off that coat so I can get at your meat."
"Tough talk doesn't worry me, Muscle-bound." Marsden protruded a pocket significantly. "Because."
"Humph!" Bulstrode blinked, shuffled round to face him. "So you've got a gun. Like to know something?"
"What?"
"I just don't give a damn!"
With that he thrust out a hairy paw, arrested it halfway as Miranda Dean reappeared and came towards them. He lowered the paw, tried to hide it in the manner of a kid caught with a prohibited catapult. Marsden relaxed, took his hand from his pocket.
Coming up, she said brightly: "I thought maybe you boys would like to have these." Smiling at each in turn she bestowed a couple of little black books, returned to her trailer.
Marsden took one look at what he'd got and groaned, "Holy Moses, a prayer-book!"
"With hymns," confirmed Bulstrode on a note of sheer incredulity.
"A religious nut," said Marsden. "I knew she'd have a flaw somewhere. Nobody's perfect."
"Hymns," repeated Bulstrode with the air of one whose idol has revealed feet of clay. His beefy features registered confusion.
"Wait until Annie hears about this," Marsden went on. "She'll roll on the floor and bust her corsets."
"It's no bloody business of Annie's," asserted Bulstrode, feeling belligerent for no reason that he could understand.
Jerking a thumb toward the trailer, Marsden said: "It's going to be. Sooner or later she'll make it Annie's business. They get that way. I know—I've met 'em before. They can't leave well alone. They think their godgiven mission in life is to improve everything and everybody."
"Maybe some of us could do with it," Bulstrode suggested.
"Speak for yourself," Marsden looked him over. "A shave, a haircut and a bath and you'd rise to the subhuman level." His tones hardened. "But this is a free world. Why should you wash or shave if you don't want to?"
"It's honest dirt," said Bulstrode, giving him a retaliatory stare. "Soap and water can take it off—which is more than it could for your mind."
"Suffering saints, that holy tome must be working on you already! Sling it away before it takes hold."
He set the example by shying his own book into a bank of weeds. Bulstrode promptly retrieved it.
"If we don't want them we ought to give them back. They may have cost her money."
"All right," said Marsden, with malicious anticipation. "You go tell her to put them where the monkey put the nuts. I'll stay here and watch the fun."
"I'll keep them." Bulstrode crammed them into a hind pocket. "I'll give them to her some other time when I'm passing."
Marsden smiled to himself as he watched the other lumber away. Then he favoured the trailer with another speculative stare before he departed in the opposite direction.
The ship lifted in the late afternoon of the third day, groaned high in the dank, everlasting fog and was gone toward the mother planet that no man on Venus could see. A sister ship was due in about six weeks' time and another two months after that. In the intervals those who remained were a primitive community vastly marooned beneath perpetual cloud.
Miranda went out for her first sight-seeing stroll that same evening. It was pleasant enough because the vapourous blanket came no lower with the night, the air was rich with oxygen which clung to the lower levels though absent in the upper strata. There were strong plant-odours and the area held comforting warmth.
Lights were beginning to show here and there amid the sprawl of many shacks; electric lights served by a small generating-station astride a rushing torrent three miles away. There was quite a blaze of illumination from one place midway along the rutted, straggling main street.
She walked slowly into the sluttish town that had no name, noting the rickety fence around somebody's clapboard, one-room abode and, outside another, the pathetic remnants of a tiny garden soon started and as soon abandoned. One Earth-rose still battled for life amid an unruly mob of Venusian growths trying to strangle the stranger from afar.
To her right a larger, three-roomed erection had a dilapidated shop front with a wire screen in lieu of precious glass, a few rusting hammers, saws, chisels, pliers and other oddments exhibited behind. A crudely lettered sign among the display read: Haircut $1.00. Beard Trimming 40¢. She wondered whether the sign ever brought in a customer.
Farther along she came to the extraordinarily well-lit building from which sounded fifty or more raucous voices and occasional bursts of song. It was a large edifice by local standards, built mostly of peeled logs and noteworthy for having real windows of real glass. Somebody must have paid a fancy price to import those transparent sheets.
A big board hung over the door and revealed neat, precise letters from which condensation dripped steadily.
ANNIE'S PLACE
Anna M. Jones, Prop.
A burly, rubber-booted man came along the street, paused outside the door, examined Miranda curiously. He was a complete stranger to her, and she to him.
"What's the matter, Sweetie? Annie gone bad on you?"
She eyed him in calm silence.
"Not deaf, are you?"
"No," she said.
"Then why don't you answer a civil question?"
"I didn't consider it civil."
"Oh, that's the way it is, eh?" He made a thin scowl. "One of those finicky tarts. Like to pick and choose." He shrugged broad, damp shoulders. "You'll change before you're through with this life."
"Don't we all?" she offered, sweetly.
"Not the way we want," he countered.
"The way God wants," she said.
"Jumping Jesus, don't give me that stuff!
Sniffing his contempt he went inside. The noise from the place boosted and sank as the door opened and shut. A waft of air came out redolent of strong tobacco, strong booze and sweat.
A broken crate lay under one of the windows. Mounting it, Miranda raised herself on tiptoe, glanced inside. Not for long. Just for a brief moment, without approval or disapproval, but somewhat in the manner of a general studying the field of battle. It sufficed to show the expected setup of tables, chairs, bottles and six or eight blowsy women. And even a piano.
Thirty million miles. Every pound, every ounce had to be hauled a minimum of thirty million miles and often much more. So they didn't have this and they didn't have that—but they did have brewing facilities and a piano.
Well, she couldn't blame them for it. All work and no play adds up to a miserable existence. This was a man's world and men needed an outlet. Annie was supplying the demand. Annie was giving them light and laughter and girls to whom nothing was too hot or too heavy.
But sooner or later men would find they had other needs, if not today then tomorrow or the day after, or next month, or next year. It would be for Miranda rather than for Annie to help supply those.
This was a world in earliest pangs of birth. Science was the skilled midwife, but the fidgeting father was Ordinary Humanity. The world was destined to grow up no matter how reluctant to escape its easy-going, irresponsible childhood.
And it would grow up, become big and civilised, truly a world in its own right. The test of civilisation is its capacity for fulfilling individual needs, all needs, sober or sodden, sensible or crazy; the need for darkness or light, noise or silence, joy or tears, heaven or hell, salvation or damnation. The adult world would have room for opposites of everything—including Annie and her ilk.
Hurriedly returning to her trailer Miranda extracted something from its small case, went back to Annie's place nursing the object in her hands. Except for the tinkling of the piano the building was silent as she neared. Then suddenly a chorus of hoarse, powerful voices roared into catchy song that shook the door and rattled the windows.
Anna Maria, Anna Maria, Anna Maria Jones,
She's the queen of the tambourine, the banjo and the bones;
Rootitoot she plays the flute in a fascinating manner,
Pinkety-pong she runs along the keys of the grand planner.
Rumpety-tum she bangs the drum with very superior tones,
Anna Maria, Anna Maria, Anna Maria Jones!
They howled the last three words at the very tops of their voices, followed with much hammering on tables and stamping of feet. Then came an anticipatory quietness as they awaited a response from the subject of their song.
Outside the door Miranda promptly snatched the noiseless pause, stretched her little concertina, made it emit a drone of opening chords and commenced to sing in a high, sweet voice. The tune was fully as catchy, in fact it had somewhat of a boogie beat, but the words were different: something about Hallelujah, Christ the King.
Within the building a chair got knocked over, a glass was smashed. There sounded a mutter of many voices and several oaths. A crimson-faced, tousel-haired man jerked open the door and stared at Miranda.
"Jeez!" he said, blinking. "Jeez!
Several more joined the dumbfounded onlooker, pressing around him or peering over his shoulders. They were too petrified with amazement to think up suitable remarks. Eventually they parted to make way for one of Annie's girls, a buxom woman with hennaed hair and a revealing frock.
Crinkling heavily pencilled brows at the singer, the woman said in hard, metallic tones, "Beat it, you silly bitch!
"Haw-haw!" chortled the tousel-haired man, willing to extract the most from this diversion. "What's the matter, Ivy? You afraid of competition?"
"From that!" Ivy emitted a loud sniff. "Don't talk crazy!
"Oh, I don't know," he mused, slyly baiting her, "Annie could use a young and slender one, just for a pleasant change."
"Not a goddam hymn-howler, she couldn't," contradicted Ivy with much positiveness. "And neither could you. Get wise to yourself. You's no scented Adonis."
