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Ebook has 102 lines and 8667 words, and 3 pages

Illustrator: FREAS

The MERCHANTS Of Venus

Illustrated by FREAS

The telephone rang. Reluctantly, Rod Workham picked it up. Nothing good had come from that phone in six years, and his sour expression was almost an automatic reflex.

"Workham here," he said.

He held the phone an inch away from his ear, but the tirade exceeded his expectations--it would have been audible a foot away:

"Workham! How long do you think we're going to stand for this! At the rate you're going, there won't be a man left on Venus or a dollar in the budget! What kind of a personnel director are you? Don't you know this project is vital to every person on Earth? Thirty more resignations came in on this last mail flight."

Rod put the receiver gently on his desk. General Carlson raved and ranted this way every time a colonist quit, and Rod knew he was not expected to answer, even if given the chance. The general would carry on for about five minutes and then would slam down the phone himself.

He dialed another number on the other phone.

"This is Rod, Dave," he said when he got an answer. "Carlson is on the other phone, yelling at my desk blotter. He says thirty more resignations came in just now. That right?"

"Close enough, Rod--twenty-three pulled out. That makes seventy-eight per cent resigned in less than--"

"Spare me the statistics--Carlson's probably blatting them right now. How do they break down? Are they mostly farmers or technicians?"

"There were only nine technicians left, and all of them quit with this bunch. The rest were farmers." Dave Newson must be smoking his pipe, Rod decided--grinding sounds were coming over the phone. "That doesn't leave very much on Venus to start a colony with--a few farmers, some trappers. And the scientific personnel--damn it, they seem to stick it out all right--"

"Their contracts are different," Rod reminded him. "They go on a two year hitch and then come back to Earth if they want to. The ones who are there are the ones who can take it and are signed up again."

There was a speculative pause on the other end of the line. "Say, Rod," Newson said slowly. "Why not leave this last batch of quitters right where they are? Every one of them. They signed up for the project with their eyes open. Why don't you just refuse to bring them home? ... they'd have to make a go of the colony to save their filthy necks!"

Rod grinned nastily. "I'd like to do it--but even General Carlson wouldn't dare. We'd never get another colonist off Earth, once it got out. They wouldn't trust us. Our first problem is to get a self-supporting society on Venus--and that might do it, all right. But our main job is to relieve the crowding on Earth, and that means large numbers of people will have to go willingly later on. If we get tough with these babies, who will take a chance later on that we won't repeat the trick?"

"But we lose a hundred potential colonists every time one of these quitters starts talking about why he left! More harm is done by letting them come back than would result from leaving them where they are." Again the speculative pause. "Maybe you could shoot them on arrival?"

"I'll suggest it to the general when I see him," Rod said, "if he doesn't shoot me first. Now, can you get me the files on this latest group? And I'd like to see the staff psychologist here, along with all the interviewers who handled and passed the group. We'll see what we can salvage out of this. And if you see Jaimie, send him along too, will you? Maybe our gambling historian can find us something useful in the Project Record."

"The files are already on the way. And I told Biddington you'd probably want to see him--he said he'd be along in about ten minutes. I haven't located all the interviewers yet. Jaimie's been right here, trying to talk me into a game of Nim and protesting he never heard of binary numbers. I'll send him up, but keep your hand on your wallet. If you need anything else, I'll be right here."

Rod thanked him and hung up, shaking his head. Dave Newsom was too good a man to be stuck on a government project--he ought to get out before the trouble started. Anyone who worked for Rod Workham on Project Venus was likely to end up with a bad name. They lived under the ax. The only person who could be sure of his job was Rod himself. He'd been recommended by a committee of top men in his field, and no other personnel man would accept the job if he were removed. Also, most of his men would leave the project if General Carlson bounced him, for they had been telling him so ever since the job had gotten hot.

But there was the danger that the general might decide to bypass Personnel in selecting colonists--or, what was more probable, might try to tame the planet with a military outpost.

Rod could hardly blame the man for his feelings. The job was vital, and everyone was intensely interested in making a go of it. Scientific agriculture had gone about as far as it could; hydroponics had already begun to shoulder the load required by an overpopulated planet. But the fact known to most intelligent people on Earth was that either new room was found in this kind of emergency, some place where people could go and live under nearly the same standards, or else some drastic changes in living standards would be required of all. And absolute and rigidly enforced birth control would have to go into effect. And all the attendant causes for race wars, nationalist wars, and have-not wars would crop up.

But the majority of the people wouldn't move to an undeveloped planet. You couldn't send ordinary citizens as pioneers. For one thing, they wouldn't want to go. For another, the new community wouldn't last long if you forced them to go--the average person had neither the attitudes nor the physique needed to make over a wilderness.

The problem was to find people who would create a community on a new planet and develop an integrated society there. This had meant rigid selection, careful psychological preparation and a terrifically expensive transportation system to get the people there and keep them supplied. And the job had to be done soon. Economists predicted that thirty years were left on Earth under present standards, maybe fifty. If the population couldn't be thinned out one way by then, it would have to be done by another.

And now the third colony was quitting, rushing home, leaving nothing on the jungle planet but a few small clearings soon to be taken over by the vegetation.

Several times in the last year Rod had thought of volunteering himself; but he knew it for a futile gesture. He wasn't five hundred men. He didn't even have the special skills or physique that were needed.

His gloomy thoughts were interrupted by the arrival of the men.

Biddington was first. Then in twos and threes came the interviewers, all looking like the home team at the half, three touchdowns behind and just waiting for their coach.

If psychologists made good colonists, Rod thought, here would be a dozen more volunteers.

The arrival of Homer Jaimison brought the only cheerful face in the group. The project historian was a young man, just over thirty, and considerably over six feet. He wore the expression of a man who is itching to do something. Jaimie had never really been busy yet on the project--the colonies had died out so quickly that his work had been mostly clerical, and he'd had to fill in time as best he could. So far he had done it making up improbable contests of skill for drinks, with such a weird assortment of shifting rules and scoring that he hadn't paid for a drink since his arrival. He made a valuable contribution to the project, however, since he helped to keep the group's minds off their troubles a part of the time.

Rod genuinely liked Jaimie, and expected to miss him strongly when Venus became self-supporting to the point where the historian would have to complete his work in residence.

When they were all seated, Rod leaned against his desk and said, "I can see you all know why we're here. To begin with, I'm not going to accuse anyone of mistakes. Each of you is the best possible man in the country for his job. If you weren't, you wouldn't be here. I wouldn't have asked for you; and General Carlson wouldn't have kept you. So there's nothing to feel bad about. If you can't do this work, no one can. Self-recrimination is foolish when you've been put on an impossible problem. I didn't call you in to bawl you out, but to ask you if we should continue spending project funds for nothing."

Jaimie raised his eyebrows at this speech, but said nothing.

"What do you mean, impossible problem?" one of the interviewers objected. "We know what we need--it's just that we're still making some mistake in selection that we haven't corrected."

"That's right, Rod." Biddington, the project psychologist, took up the dissension. "We know something is wrong with the selection techniques, or in the personality patterns we consider necessary. But it's only a problem of finding out what it is. The problem is by no means insoluble."

"As long as you're not ready to give us up," another interviewer said, "we aren't going to quit."

"You can't afford to get defeatist about this, Rod," Biddington went on. "This project is too important to fail. Whether you like it or not, your experience is too valuable for you to back out."

Rod grinned and held up his hands. "All right. That's the reaction I wanted. If you all still think we can get somewhere, we may as well try to analyze this last group." He sat down at his desk. "I have the files here, along with the tapes of the interviews. Let's see what difference we can find between those who hung on this long, and the ones that quit after the first three months."

The group settled down to trying to differentiate between a man who couldn't do a job but could try for six months longer than the next. They took the colonists carefully apart, trait by trait, and put them all back. They reviewed the colonists' records from birth, and compared them in endless combinations. Jaimie came into the discussion to show what the status of the colonies had been at the time each colonist had resigned: what diseases had been encountered when one man quit; how much jungle had been cleared before another did.

Files came and went in a continuous flux; coffee and sandwiches came and grew cold and stale. The air became gray with smoke.

Nothing.

The same results had come out of every investigation: You needed a man who was unstable to get him to leave Earth. You needed a man who was stable to have him stay on Venus. You needed initiative and resourcefulness to survive on a new planet. You needed a man who had so little initiative and resourcefulness that the competition on Earth wouldn't be profitable. You needed a young, healthy, vigorous specimen. You needed an older, experienced, more mature person.

You needed A and you needed non-A.

And even if you found people with the factors balanced just right, assuming you knew what the balance should be, where did you find five hundred of them?

The discussion went on. The solutions got wilder and more absurd. Take whole orphan asylums and bring them up on Venus under military guard. Build a development in the steamiest, nastiest jungle, and test recruits for the colony there. Send African natives.

The men were beginning to make the whole thing look impossible again, so Rod decided to call a halt until they could get a better perspective. Tired himself, he dismissed them. They left quietly, not arguing in little groups or mumbling half-formed ideas to themselves, the way a team that has been progressing will do.

Only Jaimie stayed. He remained sitting hunched up near the desk, in the same position he'd held for the last hour. When the others had all left, he grinned at Rod.

"You know, for a group of practicing psychologists, this is the softest bunch of suckers I've seen."

"You've proved that to your own profit several times so far," Rod answered, rubbing his face as though smoothing the wrinkles could remove the tension. "Who have you robbed lately?"

"I did feel that way," Rod said. "I'm just about ready to quit. I think that whatever our mistake has been, we can't do any better than we have. We just don't know enough."

Jaimie wasn't grinning now. "What will happen if you quit?"

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