The Project Gutenberg eBook of Course of Empire, by Richard Wilson
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Title: Course of Empire
Author: Richard Wilson
Illustrator: Stallman
Release Date: February 6, 2022 [eBook #67334]
Language: English
Produced by: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK COURSE OF EMPIRE ***
COURSE OF EMPIRE
By RICHARD WILSON
Mars' sands are red;
Earth's face is too:
We were too green,
And now we're blue!
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Infinity Science Fiction, February 1956.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
The older man sat down on the grassy bank on the hill overlooking the
orchard. The autumn sun was bright but the humidity was low and there
was a breeze.
The younger man sprawled next to him.
"Cigarette?" he asked.
"Thanks," said Roger Boynton. He looked across the valley, past the
apple trees, to the fine white-columned house on the hill beyond. He
smiled reminiscently. "A friend of mine once owned that house. A fellow
commissioner in World Government. He and I used to sit on this very
hill, sometimes. We'd munch on an apple or two that we'd picked on our
way through the orchard. Winesaps, they're called."
"You were telling me about the colonizing," said Allister gently, after
a pause.
The older man sighed. "Yes." He put out the cigarette carefully,
stripped it, scattered the tobacco and wadded the paper into a tiny
ball. "I was commissioner of colonies. I had to decide, after my staff
had gathered all the data, who would be the best man to put in charge.
It was no easy decision."
"I can imagine."
"You can't really. There were so many factors, and the data were
actually quite skimpy. The way it worked out, to be candid with you,
was on the basis of the best guess. And some of the guesses were pretty
wild. We knew Mars was sandy, for instance, and so we put a Bedouin
in charge. That pleased the Middle East, in general, and Jordan in
particular. Jordan donated a thousand camels under Point Four point
four."
"I beg your pardon?" said Allister.
"That's not double-talk. Point Four was the old terrestrial program for
underdeveloped countries. World Government adopted it and broadened it.
Mars is the fourth planet, so--" he traced 4.4 in the air, stabbing
a finger at the imaginary point "--Point Four point four. It was
undoubtedly somebody's little whimsy in the beginning, but then it
became accepted for the descriptive term that it was."
"I see." The young man looked vague. He stubbed out his cigarette
carelessly, so that it continued to smolder in the grass.
"Venus was the rainy planet," Boynton said, looking with disapproval
at the smoking butt, though he did nothing about it, "so we put an
Englishman in charge. England sent a crate of Alligators."
The young man looked startled.
"Alligator raincoats," Boynton said. "Things weren't very well
organized. Too many things were happening too fast. There was a lot of
confusion and although the countries wanted to do what was best, no one
knew exactly what that was. So they improvised as best they could on
the basis of their little knowledge."
"Was it a dangerous thing?"
"The little knowledge? No, not dangerous. Just inefficient. Then there
was Jupiter. We didn't bother about Mercury, although for a time there
was some uninformed talk about sending an Equatorial African to do what
he could."
"Who went to Jupiter?" Allister asked.
"The United States clamored for Jupiter and got it. The argument was
that the other planets would be a cinch to colonize because of their
similarity to Earth but that Jupiter needed a real expert because it
had only its surface of liquid gas and the Red Spot."
"What's that?"
"I'm sorry. I'd forgotten you were just a youngster when all this was
going on. The Red Spot is the Jovians' space platform. They built it
a long time ago and then they retrogressed, the way people do, and
forgot how they'd done it. Earth sent an engineer to see if it could
be done again. The Spot was pretty overpopulated and no real job of
colonization could be done until we built one more."
"And did you?"
"Well, we started to. Before we could really go to work anywhere,
though, we had to solve the language problem. An Australian went to
work on that. He'd had a background of Melanesian pidgin, and if anyone
was suited to the job of cross-breeding four languages into one, he
was."
"Four languages?"
"Yes. English was the official language of Earth. Then there was
Martian, Venusian _chat-chat_, and Spotian. It was a queer amalgam, but
it could be understood by everyone, more or less."
"So that's where it came from. _Chikker-im-up-im chat-chat too-much_,
eh? Interplanetary _bêche de mer_."
"Exactly. Only of course it was called _bêche d'espace_. _Me two-fellah
vimb' kitch-im pjoug by'm by._ But even after the language difficulty
was solved, we had our troubles. They already had camels on Mars,
for instance, and the Martians were amazed when we brought in more.
Particularly because theirs were wild and semi-intelligent and the
first thing the Martian camels did was come over and liberate their
brothers from Earth. They never did come back.
"Same sort of thing with the raincoats on Venus. It doesn't rain
_down_ there, as we know now. It sort of mists _up_. From the ground.
Soaks up under a raincoat in no time. These were just petty annoyances,
of course, but they were symptomatic of the way our half-baked planning
operated."
"You didn't know about the people of Ganymede then?"
"No. We were so busy trying to build another Red Spot that we never
did get to Jupiter's satellites. Oh, it was partly a matter of
appropriations, too. The budget commission kept explaining to us that
there was only so much money and that we'd better show a profit on what
we had before we put in a request to go tooling off to colonize some
new place. I guess the 'Medeans first came when you were about ten?"
"Eleven," the younger man said.
"They scouted our colonies and came directly to Earth. They took right
over and colonized _us_."
A 'Medean overseer climbed the hill effortlessly. He was tall and
tentacled and the breathing apparatus over his head gave him the
appearance of a mechanical man.
"_Kigh-kigh pinis_," the 'Medean said. "_You two-fella all-same
chat-chat too-much. B'phava b'long work he-stop 'long orchard pick-im
apple._"
The two men stood up and obediently walked down the hill toward the
apple orchard.
"Why does he have to talk to us in that pidgin?" the young man asked.
"They all speak English as well as you and me. It's insulting."
"That's why they do it, I think," said Boynton, the former commissioner
of colonies. "They're so much better at colonizing than we were that I
guess they feel they have a right to rub it in."
The 'Medean had overheard them.
"Damn right," he said.
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