Donald A. Wollheim (ed) Read Online Free Page A

which it cannot go. Every culture has a stopping point. It can achieve its values, attain its goals, follow every path that is open to it. When that happens,
whether in Greece or Rome or Stone-Age Australia, the culture exhausts itself
and begins merely to repeat what it has already done. Throughout history when a civilization reached its climax and leveled off, there was a new,
fresh, vital culture somewhere else to take up the slack and go off in a new direction, jolting the old civilization out of its rut.
    This
time there were no rival cultures.
    There was nothing to take
over.
    By the year 2100, the civilization of Earth
had shot its ammunition. It was a perfect,
static, frozen Western culture. It began to repeat itself over and over,
endlessly. It went nowhere, and took its own sweet tirne doing it.
    It
was not decadent. It did not retrogress. It did not really deteriorate. It
simply jogged along its well-worn circular cinder track, not working up a
sweat, mildly pleased with itself.
    Most
people did not know what had happened, of course. How could they? Did the
citizens of the Dark Ages know that the ages were dark? More significantly, did
they give a damn?
    People
were as happy as they had ever been, after a fashion. They were well-fed. They
were comfortable. There was no atomic horror staring them in the face. Kids
still fell in love, and spring still came around every year.
    Go
up to the man in the copter. Tell him that his culture has run out of gas.
    So what? DONT ROCK THE
BOAT.
    Still,
there were signs. Ignorance always carries a price tag.
    The loss of cultural vitality made itself
manifest—very slowly, the birth rate began to fall. The number of suicides,
even in paradise, began to go up. People killed themselves for reasons that
bordered on the whimsical. Parents who had children often did not want them. The
number of illegitimate children, despite the lowered birthrate, went up.
    The culture was aimless.
    The word wasn't decay.
    It was boredom.
    These
were the facts, as Keith Ortega had worked them out. These were the facts that
Vandervort had to deal with. These were the facts that added up to Venus.
    At
five o'clock in the morning on the first day of September in the year 2150,
Keith Ortega and his wife boarded the
    Foundation ship hidden under an unreclaimed area of the Arizona desert.
    In addition to Keith and Carrie, the ship
carried two pilots, a navigator, a doctor, fifty babies, twenty-five special
humanoid robots, computers, and supplies.
    Keith and Carrie sat in their cabin. There
was nothing to see—no windows, no viewscreens , no
control panels, no flashing lights. There was nothing
to do. Neither of them had ever taken off on a spaceship before. They waited.
    A low whine whistled through the ship, and
steadied into a low, powerful throbbing. The beat of the air-conditioner picked
up. An electronic relay thunked heavily into position.
    "Come
on, come on," Keith whispered.
    The lights dimmed. A muffled, coughing roar cut loose from somewhere far
away. There was a quick giddiness, a sudden second when the heart skipped a
beat. Then the lights brightened again, the sound steadied, and the ship's
gentle gravity field took hold.
    The
ship went up.
    Up, up through the pale sunlight of early
morning. Up through the still, soundless sea that never knew
morning or night, laughter or tears.
    Earth was gone.
    Keith smiled at his wife and wondered how
long it would be before either of them saw a blue sky again.
     
    HI.
    Venus.
    Keith had a mental picture of it, and had
even seen photographs and scientific reports brought back by the early
expeditions. He thought he knew what he was getting into.
    The reality, of course, was
different.
    When
they stepped down from the ship at the receiving station, twenty-five million miles from
Earth, his first surprised impression was one of sameness.
    Even
scientific accounts tended to emphasize the unusual and the unique. Reading old
accounts of the Sahara or the Amazon