Seas of Venus(40)

The table and chairs of the combined living/dining area on which the door opened were of good quality but ordinary design. All four of the walls, however, were hidden within changing holographic vistas.

Johnnie glanced back at the door by which he'd entered. It was now a shop entrance in a good district of Wenceslas Dome. Pedestrians hurried past, chatting silently and looking at window displays. He couldn't be sure how long the hologram loop ran, but it didn't repeat during the time his eyes followed it.

The wall in front of which Sergeant Britten stood, smiling imperturbably, was the seascape that had made Johnnie gasp.

Seascape—not a beach scene. It showed the green-gold water ten feet below the surface, probably in a lagoon like that around which Blackhorse Base was constructed. A mass of silvery fish, none of them more than a finger long, flicked into sight like magnesium raining from a star shell.

The school of fish vanished as abruptly as they had appeared, with and perhaps because of the appearance of something with spines, tentacles, and nodes that could be either eyes or the receptors of a vegetable life form. It slid just over the bottom, raising curls of sand. Johnnie thought the newcomer was the ugliest thing he'd ever seen in his life—

Until a section of bottom the size of a bedsheet roused itself and wrapped the spiny creature in a flurry of blood and bubbles.

"I like my surroundings to remind me that there are alternatives," Dan said drily. "It helps prevent me from becoming too rigid . . . or it may be that I'm just a little weird."

As before, the smile didn't affect the truth of the statement.

The wall on Johnnie's right was jungle. At first glance it seemed relatively static. A closer examination showed that one of the strangler vines crawling up a massive trunk was in turn being attacked by a swarm of ants.

Worker ants were hacking through the cortex with their pincers and bringing up globules of sap which they loaded on their backs. Tendrils curled from the flanks of the vine, but a cordon of warrior ants, twice the one-inch length of the workers, was burning back the vegetable defenses with squirts of acid from their tails.

A gray-white shadow like a mass of ash swept across the scene, then vanished upward into the canopy again with a snap of its ghostly wings. The ants, workers and warriors alike, were gone. There was a deep semi-circular gouge missing from the vine where they had been.

Swarms of flying insects arrowed to the vast well of sap now that the ants were no longer present to fend them off.

Across from the wall of jungle was an image that Johnnie couldn't place. Mountains in the middle distance thrust up into a sky that was an unfamiliar streaky mixture of white and blue, like partly-mixed paint. Closer by were rutted white fields across which meandered black streaks like the tracks of giant slugs. The foreground—the portion of the scene that Johnnie could have touched were it not a hologram—appeared to be water, but there were chunks of white rock floating in it.

"Recognize it?" Uncle Dan said, waving toward the image on which the younger man's eyes were focused. He was smiling, but he almost always smiled; and this was not an expression of real humor.

"No, I don't," Johnnie said. "Where is it?"

"It's one of the outlet glaciers of Vatnajökull," his uncle explained. "On Earth. Before."

Johnnie looked hard at the scene. Ice, then; sliding across the land and carrying streaks of dirt and crushed rock with it to the sea. Hard to imagine such a volume of water cold enough to freeze—and under an open sky, as here. . . .

But that had been Earth.

"I like," Dan repeated softly, "to be reminded that there are alternatives. This particular view reminds me that some alternatives are closed off forever, because of what men like me did or failed to do a very long time ago."

"Ah," said Johnnie. "It's disconcerting, I guess. To me, at least."

He forced a smile. "But maybe that's good."

"Come into the office with me," Dan said, stepping toward the wall of jungle. "I want to go over the table of equipment for the operation—unless you're too tired? I was going to have Britten make up a bunk for you in the office after we'd finished, but you can have my bed if you'd like."

His hand swung back a door which seemed to be part of the trunk of a fallen giant. A pack of mutated slime molds now slithered their way through the foliage, leaving gray, burned patches behind them. The section of office visible through the opening was even more dissonant than the lines along the corners where the holographic images joined.

"I'm fine," Johnnie said. "I—look, I'm doing fine, but I couldn't sleep now anyway, Uncle Dan."

"Nothing wrong with living on your nerves, John," the older man said with a chuckle as he led Johnnie into the office. "Myself, I've been doing it for years. Britten, why don't you get us all something to eat?"