the good seed
By MARK MALLORY
The island was drowning—if they
failed to find some common ground,
both of them were doomed.
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Worlds of If Science Fiction, January 1960.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
They said—as they have said of so many frontiersmen just likehim—that there must have been a woman in his past, to make him what hewas. And indeed there had, but she was no flesh-and-blood female. Thename of his lady was Victoria, whom the Greeks called Nike and earlyconfounded with the Pallas Athena, that sterile maiden. And at the ageof thirty-four she had Calvin Mulloy most firmly in her grasp, for hehad neither wife nor child, nor any close friend worth mentioning—onlyhis hungry dream for some great accomplishment.
It had harried him to the stars, that dream of his. It had drivenhim to the position of top survey engineer on the new, raw planet ofMersey, still largely unexplored and unmapped. And it had pushed him,too, into foolishnesses like this latest one, building a sailplane outof scrap odds and ends around the Mersey Advance Base—a sailplanewhich had just this moment been caught in a storm and cracked up on anisland the size of a city backyard, between the banks of one of themouths of the Adze River.
The sailplane was gone the moment it hit. Actually it had come downjust short of the island and floated quickly off, what was left ofit, while Calvin was thrashing for the island with that inept strokeof his. He pulled himself up, gasping, onto the rocks, and, with thecoolness of a logical man who has faced crises before, set himselfimmediately to taking stock of his situation.
He was wet and winded, but since he was undrowned and on solid land inthe semitropics, he dismissed that part of it from his mind. It hadbeen full noon when he had been caught in the storm, and it could notbe much more than minutes past that now, so swiftly had everythinghappened; but the black, low clouds, racing across the sky, and thegusts of intermittent rain, cut visibility down around him.
He stood up on his small island and leaned against the wind that blewin and up the river from the open gulf. On three sides he saw nothingbut the fast-riding waves. On the fourth, though, shading his eyesagainst the occasional bursts of rain, he discerned a long, low,curving blackness that would be one of the river shores.
There lay safety. He estimated its distance from him at less than ahundred and fifty yards. It was merely, he told himself, a matter ofreaching it.
Under ordinary conditions, he would have settled down where he was andwaited for rescue. He was not more than fifteen or twenty miles fromthe Advance Base, and in this storm they would waste no time waitingfor him to come in, before starting out to search for him. No sailplanecould survive in such a blow. Standing now, with the wind pushing athim and the rain stinging against his face and hands, he found timefor a moment's wry humor at his own bad luck. On any civilized world,such a storm would have been charted and predicted, if not controlledentirely. Well, the more fool he, for venturing this far from Base.
It was in his favor that this world of Mersey happened to be soEarthlike that the differences between the two planets were mostlyunimportant. Unfortunately, it was the one unimportant difference thatmade his present position on the island a death trap. The gulf intowhich