Donald A. Wollheim (ed) Read Online Free

do."
    There was more talk, but it was singularly
unproductive. Early in the morning, without finding what he had come for, Keith
said good night and left. The Old Man stayed in his chair in the too-hot room,
smiling a little, his eyes nervously peering into the shadows, sipping his
brandy.
    Keith lifted his copter and flew toward home,
with the lights of Los Angeles below him and a full moon above him. The' night
wind, deflected by the vents, was fresh and cold in his face. High over bis head, the freight lanes were shadowed with ships.
    The violet sign floated in the air: DON'T ROCK THE BOAT.
    All the way home he thought of Old Man
Vandervort, sitting alone in his castle, and the
simple question whispered through his mind:
    Why?
    Some questions, fortunately, were easier to answer.
    Keith Ortega had answered some of them to his
own satisfaction a long time ago. He had written a book, with the somewhat
melodramatic title of The
New Age of Darkness, and
the book in a sense had led Vandervort to the idea of the Venus project. The
book had been widely read, and was generally regarded as possibly correct and
certainly amusing.
    No one took the book very seriously—which tended to confirm its thesis.
    No one but Vandervort.
    It was about the planet Earth.
    What was the book about?
    The story of Earth was a familiar one. After
a million years or so of bashing in each other's brains with bigger and better
weapons, the human animal had finally achieved a fairly uniform, stable,
planet-wide civilization. He had done it out of sheer necessity, just a cat's
whisker this side of nuclear extinction, but he had done it.
    By the year 2050, the dream of One World was
no longer a dream.
    The
human animal was living on it.
    In his understandable haste, however, he had overlooked a few basic
points.
    One civilization had taken over from many
diverse civilizations. Given the facts of history, it could not have been
otherwise. An essentially Western culture, due to a running headstart in technology, had spread itself thickly around the globe. It had taken root
and prospered wherever it had touched. It had swallowed and digested every
other way of life on the planet Earth.
    There
was One World, and there was peace.
    A standardized, uniform, flourishing,
world-wide civilization.
    The
human animal began to breathe more easily.
    There was a joker in the deck, even though
his laugh was a long time in coming. One World meant one culture pattern.
There had been no orchestration of differences, but simply an almost complete obliteration of differences. When man was in a hurry, he
took the quickest available shortcuts.
    It was a good culture pattern, by and large,
and the human animal was better off than he had ever been before. It was a lifeway of plenty, a culture of unlimited technological
resources, a philosophy founded on the dignity of man.
    Earth
became a paradise— literally, there was a paradise on
Earth. The jungles and the deserts and the arctic wastes, when they were
needed, were converted into rich, green land. The power of the sun was
harnessed, and harnessed cheaply. Vandervort Enterprises made a thousand fortunes from solar power, but they delivered the goods. The
culture flowered.
    The worlds of the solar system were briefly explored, written up, and
ignored. Both Mars and Venus, contrary to early semi-scientific guesses, were
found to be habitable. Habitable, but not very palatable. Mars was an almost waterless desert, and Venus a strange jungle world that
never saw the sun. With the untapped resources of Earth ready and waiting in
the back yard, the other planets were not worth colonizing.
    One
thing about Paradise: nobody wanted to leave it.
    The
human animal stayed home in droves.
    He had a good thing on Earth. It was up to him to appreciate it, to
protect it, to cherish it. The new golden rule was: DON'T ROCK THE BOAT.
    The uniform culture pattern, the framework
for human existence, filled out. Every culture has a potential beyond