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his hand relax. Slowly, carefully, listening to those who slept about him, Tom drew his hand forth. He hesitated, sucked in his breath, and then, waiting, opened his hand and uncrumpled the tiny fragment of painted canvas.
All the world was asleep in the moonlight.
And there on his hand was the Smile.
He looked at it in the white illumination from the midnight sky. And he thought, over and over to himself, quietly, the Smile, the lovely Smile.
An hour later he could still see it, even after he had folded it carefully and hidden it. He shut his eyes and the Smile was there in the darkness. And it was still there, warm and gentle, when he went to sleep and the world was silent and the moon sailed up and then down the cold sky towards morning.
Here there be Tygers
‘YOU have to beat a planet at its own game,’ said Chatterton. ‘Get in, rip it up, poison its animals, dam its rivers, sow its fields, depollinate its air, mine it, nail it down, hack away at it, and get the hell out from under when you have what you want. Otherwise, a planet will fix you good. You can’t trust planets. They’re bound to be different, bound to be bad, bound to be out to get you, especially this far off, a billion miles from nowhere, so you get them first. Tear their skin off, I say. Drag out the minerals and run away before the damn world explodes in your face. That’s the way to treat them.’
The rocket ship sank down towards planet 7 cf star system 84. They had travelled millions upon millions of miles. Earth was far away, her system and her sun forgotten, her system settled and investigated and profited on, and other systems rummaged through and milked and tidied up, and now the rockets of these tiny men from an impossibly remote planet were probing out to far universes. In a few months, a few years, they could travel anywhere, for the speed of their rocket was the speed of a god, and now for the ten thousandth time one of the rockets of the far-circling hunt was feathering down towards an alien world.
‘No,’ said Captain Forester. ‘I have too much respect for other worlds to treat them the way you want to, Chatterton. It’s not my business to rape or ruin, anyway, thank God. I’m glad I’m just a rocket man. You’re the anthropologist-mineralogist. Go ahead, do your mining and ripping and scraping. I’ll just watch. I’ll just go around looking at this new world, whatever it is, however it seems. I like to look. All rocket men are lookers or they wouldn’t be rocket men. You like to smell new airs, if you’re a rocket man, and see new colours and new people if there are new people to see, and new oceans and islands.’
‘Take your gun along,’ said Chatterton.
‘In my holster,’ said Forester.
They turned to the port together and saw the green world rising to meet their ship. ‘I wonder what it thinks of us?’ said Forester.
‘It won’t like me,’ said Chatterton. ‘By God, I’ll see to it it won’t like me. And I don’t care, you know. I don’t give a damn. I’m out for the money. Land us over there, will you, Captain; that looks like iron country if I ever saw it.’
It was the freshest green colour they had seen since childhood.
Lakes lay like clear blue water droplets through the soft hills; there were no loud highways, signboards, or cities. It’s a sea of green golf-links, thought Forester, which goes on for ever. Putting greens, driving greens, you could walk ten thousand miles in any direction and never finish your game. A Sunday planet, a croquet-lawn world, where you could lie on your back, clover in your lips, eyes half-shut, smiling at the sky, smelling the grass, drowse through an eternal Sabbath, rousing only on occasion to turn the Sunday paper or crack the red-striped wooden ball through the hoop.
‘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!’
