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Title: When the People Fell
Author: Smith, Cordwainer [Linebarger, Paul Myron Anthony]
   (1913-1966)
Date of first publication: April 1959
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   Galaxy Magazine, April 1959
   [New York: Galaxy Publishing Corporation]
   [first edition]
Date first posted: 20 March 2017
Date last updated: 20 March 2017
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #1413

This ebook was produced by Al Haines


PUBLISHER'S NOTE

Italics in the original printed edition are indicated _thus_.

As part of the conversion of the book to its new digital
format, we have made certain minor adjustments in its layout.






When the People Fell


By CORDWAINER SMITH


  _The biggest news story in all
  history had happened centuries
  ago--but he was an eyewitness!_



"Can you imagine a rain of people through an acid fog?  Can you imagine
thousands and thousands of human bodies, without weapons, overwhelming
the unconquerable monsters?  Can you--"

"Look, sir," interrupted the reporter.

"Don't interrupt me!  You ask me silly questions.  I tell you I saw the
Goonhogo itself.  I saw it take Venus.  Now ask me about that!"

The reporter had called to get an old man's reminiscences about bygone
ages.  He did not expect Dobyns Bennett to flare up at him.

Dobyns Bennett thrust home the psychological advantage he had gotten by
taking the initiative.  "Can you imagine showhices in their parachutes,
a lot of them dead, floating out of a green sky?  Can you imagine
mothers crying as they fell?  Can you imagine people pouring down on
the poor helpless monsters?"

Mildly, the reporter asked what showhices were.

"That's old Chinesian for children," said Dobyns Bennett.  "I saw the
last of the nations burst and die, and you want to ask me about
fashionable clothes and things.  Real history never gets into the
books.  It's too shocking.  I suppose you were going to ask me what I
thought of the new striped pantaloons for women!"

"No," said the reporter, but he blushed.  The question was in his
notebook and he hated blushing.

"Do you know what the Goonhogo did?"

"What?" asked the reporter, struggling to remember just what a Goonhogo
might be.

"It took Venus," said the old man, somewhat more calmly.

Very mildly, the reporter murmured, "It _did_?"

"You bet it did!" said Dobyns Bennett belligerently.

"Were you there?" asked the reporter.

"You bet I was there when the Goonhogo took Venus," said the old man.
"I was there and it's the damnedest thing I've ever seen.  You know who
I am.  I've seen more worlds than you can count, boy, and yet when the
nondies and the needies and the showhices came pouring out of the sky,
that was the worst thing that any man could ever see.  Down on the
ground, there were the loudies the way they'd always been--"

The reporter interrupted, very gently.  Bennett might as well have been
speaking a foreign language.  All of this had happened three hundred
years before.  The reporter's job was to get a feature from him and to
put it into a language which people of the present time could
understand.



Respectfully he said, "Can't you start at the beginning of the story?"

"You bet.  That's when I married Terza.  Terza was the prettiest girl
you ever saw.  She was one of the Vomacts, a great family of scanners,
and her father was a very important man.  You see, I was thirty-two,
and when a man is thirty-two, he thinks he is pretty old, but I wasn't
really old, I just thought so, and he wanted Terza to marry me because
she was such a complicated girl that she needed a man's help.  The
Court back home had found her unstable and the Instrumentality had
ordered her left in her father's care until she married a man who then
could take on proper custodial authority.  I suppose those are old
customs to you, boy--"

The reporter interrupted again.  "I am sorry, old man," said he.  "I
know you are over four hundred years old and you're the only person who
remembers the time the Goonhogo took Venus.  Now the Goonhogo was a
government, wasn't it?"

"Anyone knows that," snapped the old man.  "The Goonhogo was a sort of
separate Chinesian government.  Seventeen billion of them all crowded
in one small part of Earth.  Most of them spoke English the way you and
I do, but they spoke their own language, too, with all those funny
words that have come on down to us.  They hadn't mixed in with anybody
else yet.  Then, you see, the Waywanjong himself gave the order and
that is when the people started raining.  They just fell right out of
the sky.  You never saw anything like it--"

The reporter had to interrupt him again and again to get the story bit
by bit.  The old man kept using terms that he couldn't seem to realize
were lost in history and that had to be explained to be intelligible to
anyone of this era.  But his memory was excellent and his descriptive
powers as sharp and alert as ever...



Young Dobyns Bennett had not been at Experimental Area A very long,
before he realized that the most beautiful female he had ever seen was
Terza Vomact.  At the age of fourteen, she was fully mature.  Some of
the Vomacts did mature that way.  It may have had something to do with
their being descended from unregistered, illegal people centuries back
in the past.  They were even said to have mysterious connections with
the lost world back in the age of nations when people could still put
numbers on the years.

He fell in love with her and felt like a fool for doing it.

She was so beautiful, it was hard to realize that she was the daughter
of Scanner Vomact himself.  The scanner was a powerful man.

Sometimes romance moves too fast and it did with Dobyns Bennett because
Scanner Vomact himself called in the young man and said, "I'd like to
have you marry my daughter Terza, but I'm not sure she'll approve of
you.  If you can get her, boy, you have my blessing."

Dobyns was suspicious.  He wanted to know why a senior scanner was
willing to take a junior technician.

All that the scanner did was to smile.  He said, "I'm a lot older than
you, and with this new santaclara drug coming in that may give people
hundreds of years, you may think that I died in my prime if I die at a
hundred and twenty.  You may live to four or five hundred.  But I know
my time's coming up.  My wife has been dead for a long time and we have
no other children and I know that Terza needs a father in a very
special kind of way.  The psychologist found her to be unstable.  Why
don't you take her outside the area?  You can get a pass through the
dome anytime.  You can go out and play with the loudies."

Dobyns Bennett was almost as insulted as if someone had given him a
pail and told him to go play in the sandpile.  And yet he realized that
the elements of play in courtship were fitted together and that the old
man meant well.

The day that it all happened, he and Terza were outside the dome.  They
had been pushing loudies around.

Loudies were not dangerous unless you killed them.  You could knock
them down, push them out of the way, or tie them up; after a while,
they slipped away and went about their business.  It took a very
special kind of ecologist to figure out what their business was.  They
floated two meters high, ninety centimeters in diameter, gently just
above the land of Venus, eating microscopically.  For a long time,
people thought there was radiation on which they subsisted.  They
simply multiplied in tremendous numbers.  In a silly sort of way, it
was fun to push them around, but that was about all there was to do.

They never responded with intelligence.

Once, long before, a loudie taken into the laboratory for experimental
purposes had typed a perfectly clear message on the typewriter.  The
message had read, "Why don't you Earth people go back to Earth and
leave us alone?  We are getting along all--"

And that was all the message that anybody had ever got out of them in
three hundred years.  The best laboratory conclusions was that they had
very high intelligence if they ever chose to use it, but that their
volitional mechanism was so profoundly different from the psychology of
human beings that it was impossible to force a loudie to respond to
stress as people did on Earth.



The name _loudie_ was some kind of word in the old Chinesian language.
It meant the "ancient ones."  Since it was the Chinesians who had set
up the first outposts on Venus, under the orders of their supreme boss
the Waywonjong, their term lingered on.

Dobyns and Terza pushed loudies, climbed over the hills and looked down
into the valleys where it was impossible to tell a river from a swamp.
They got thoroughly wet, their air converters stuck, and perspiration
itched and tickled along their cheeks.  Since they could not eat or
drink while outside--at least not with any reasonable degree of
safety--the excursion could not be called a picnic.  There was
something mildly refreshing about playing child with a very pretty
girl-child but Dobyns wearied of the whole thing.

Terza sensed his rejection of her.  Quick as a sensitive animal, she
became angry and petulant.  "You didn't have to come out with me!"

"I wanted to," he said, "but now I'm tired and want to go home."

"You treat me like a child.  All right, play with me.  Or you treat me
like a woman.  All right, be a gentleman.  But don't seesaw all the
time yourself.  I just got to be a little bit happy and you have to get
middle-aged and condescending.  I won't take it."

"Your father--" he said, realizing the moment he said it that it was a
mistake.

"My father this, my father that.  If you're thinking about marrying me,
do it yourself."  She glared at him, stuck her tongue out, ran over a
dune, and disappeared.

Dobyns Bennett was baffled.  He did not know what to do.  She was safe
enough.  The loudies never hurt anyone.  He decided to teach her a
lesson and to go on back himself, letting her find her way home when
she pleased.  The Area Search Team could find her easily if she really
got lost.

He walked back to the gate.

When he saw the gates locked and the emergency lights on, he realized
that he had made the worst mistake of his life.



His heart sinking within him, he ran the last few meters of the way,
and beat the ceramic gate with his bare hands until it opened only just
enough to let him in.

"What's wrong?" he asked the doortender.

The doortender muttered something which Dobyns could not understand.

"Speak up, man!" shouted Dobyns.  "What's wrong?"

"The Goonhogo is coming back and they're taking over."

"That's impossible," said Dobyns.  "They couldn't--"  He checked
himself.  _Could_ they?

"The Goonhogo's taken over," the gatekeeper insisted.  "They've been
given the whole thing.  The Earth Authority has voted it to them.  The
Waywonjong has decided to send people right away.  They're sending
them."

"What do the Chinesians want with Venus?  You can't kill a loudie
without contaminating a thousand acres of land.  You can't push them
away without them drifting back.  You can't scoop them up.  Nobody can
live here until we solve the problem of these things.  We're a long way
from having solved it," said Dobyns in angry bewilderment.

The gatekeeper shook his head.  "Don't ask me.  That's all I hear on
the radio.  Everybody else is excited too."

Within an hour, the rain of people began.

Dobyns went up to the radar room, saw the skies above.  The radar man
himself was drumming his fingers against the desk.  He said, "Nothing
like this has been seen for a thousand years or more.  You know what
there is up there?  Those are warships, the warships left over from the
last of the old dirty wars.  I knew the Chinesians were inside them.
Everybody knew about it.  It was sort of like a museum.  Now they don't
have any weapons in them.  But do you know--there are millions of
people hanging up there over Venus and I don't know what they are going
to do!"

He stopped and pointed at one of the screens.  "Look, you can see them
running in patches.  They're behind each other, so they cluster up
solid.  We've never had a screen look like that."

Dobyns looked at the screen.  It was, as the operator said, full of
blips.

As they watched, one of the men exclaimed, "What's that milky stuff
down there in the lower left?  See, it's--it's pouring," he said, "it's
pouring somehow out of those dots.  How can you pour things into a
radar?  It doesn't really show, does it?"

The radar man looked at his screen.  He said, "Search me.  I don't know
what it is, either.  You'll have to find out.  Let's just see what
happens."

Scanner Vomact came into the the room.  He said, once he had taken a
quick, experienced glance at the screens, "This may be the strangest
thing we'll ever see, but I have a feeling they're dropping people.
Lots of them.  Dropping them by the thousands, or by the hundreds of
thousands, or even by the millions.  But people are coming down there.
Come along with me, you two.  We'll go out and see it.  There may be
somebody that we can help."



By this time, Dobyns' conscience was hurting him badly.  He wanted to
tell Vomact that he had left Terza out there, but he had hesitated--not
only because he was ashamed of leaving her, but because he did not want
to tattle on the child to her father.  Now he spoke.

"Your daughter's still outside."

Vomact turned on him solemnly.  The immense eyes looked very tranquil
and very threatening, but the silky voice was controlled.

"You may find her."  The scanner added, in a tone which sent the thrill
of menace up Dobyns' back, "And everything will be well if you bring
her back."

Dobyns nodded as though receiving an order.

"I shall," said Vomact, "go out myself, to see what I can do, but I
leave the finding of my daughter to you."

They went down, put on the extra-long-period converters, carried their
miniaturized survey equipment so that they could find their way back
through the fog, and went out.  Just as they were at the gate, the
gatekeeper said, "Wait a moment, sir and excellency.  I have a message
for you here on the phone.  Please call Control."

Scanner Vomact was not to be called lightly and he knew it.  He picked
up the connection unit and spoke harshly.

The radar man came on the phone screen in the gatekeeper's wall.
"They're overhead now, sir."

"Who's overhead?"

"The Chinesians are.  They're coming down.  I don't know how many there
are.  There must be two thousand warships over our heads right here and
there are more thousands over the rest of Venus.  They're down now.  If
you want to see them hit ground, you'd better get outside quick."

Vomact and Dobyns went out.

Down came the Chinesians.  People's bodies were raining right out of
the milk-cloudy sky.  Thousands upon thousands of them with plastic
parachutes that looked like bubbles.  Down they came.

Dobyns and Vomact saw a headless man drift down.  The parachute cords
had decapitated him.

A woman fell near them.  The drop had torn her breathing tube loose
from her crudely bandaged throat and she was choking in her own blood.
She staggered toward them, tried to babble but only drooled blood with
mute choking sounds, and then fell face forward into the mud.

Two babies dropped.  The adult accompanying them had been blown off
course.  Vomact ran, picked them up and handed them to a Chinesian man
who had just landed.  The man looked at the babies in his arms, sent
Vomact a look of contemptuous inquiry, put the weeping children down in
the cold slush of Venus, gave them a last impersonal glance and ran off
on some mysterious errand of his own.

Vomact kept Bennett from picking up the children.  "Come on, let's keep
looking.  We can't take care of all of them."



The world had known that the Chinesians had a lot of unpredictable
public habits, but they never suspected that the nondies and the
needies and the showhices could pour down out of a poisoned sky.  Only
the Goonhogo itself would make such a reckless use of human life.
_Nondies_ were men and _needies_ were women and _showhices_ were the
little children.  And the _Goonhogo_ was a name left over from the old
days of nations.  It meant something like republic or state or
government.  Whatever it was, it was the organization that ran the
Chinesians in the Chinesian manner, under the Earth Authority.

And the ruler of the Goonhogo was the Waywonjong.

The Waywonjong didn't come to Venus.  He just sent his people.  He sent
them floating down into Venus, to tackle the Venusian ecology with the
only weapons which could make a settlement of that planet
possible--people themselves.  Human arms could tackle the loudies, the
loudies who had been called "old ones" by the first Chinesian scouts to
cover Venus.

The loudies had to be gathered together so gently that they would not
die and, in dying, each contaminate a thousand acres.  They had to be
kept together by human bodies and arms in a gigantic living corral.

Scanner Vomact rushed forward.

A wounded Chinesian man hit the ground and his parachute collapsed
behind him.  He was clad in a pair of shorts, had a knife at his belt,
canteen at his waist.  He had an air converter attached next to his
ear, with a tube running into his throat.  He shouted something
unintelligible at them and limped rapidly away.

People kept on hitting the ground all around Vomact and Dobyns.

The self-disposing parachutes were bursting like bubbles in the misty
air, a moment or two after they touched the ground.  Someone had done a
tricky, efficient job with the chemical consequences of static
electricity.

And as the two watched, the air was heavy with people.  One time,
Vomact was knocked down by a person.  He found that it was two
Chinesian children tied together.

Dobyns asked, "What are you doing?  Where are you going?  Do you have
any leaders?"

He got cries and shouts in an unintelligible language.  Here and there
someone shouted in English "This way!" or "Leave us alone!" or "Keep
going..." but that was all.

The experiment worked.

Eighty-two million people were dropped in that one day.



After four hours which seemed barely short of endless, Dobyns found
Terza in a corner of the cold hell.  Though Venus was warm, the
suffering of the almost-naked Chinesians had chilled his blood.

Terza ran toward him.

She could not speak.

She put her head on his chest and sobbed.  Finally she managed to say,
"I've--I've--I've tried to help, but they're too many, too many, too
many!"  And the sentence ended as shrill as a scream.

Dobyns led her back to the experimental area.

They did not have to talk.  Her whole body told him that she wanted his
love and the comfort of his presence, and that she had chosen that
course of life which would keep them together.

As they left the drop area, which seemed to cover all of Venus so far
as they could tell, a pattern was beginning to form.  The Chinesians
were beginning to round up the loudies.

Terza kissed him mutely after the gatekeeper had let them through.  She
did not need to speak.  Then she fled to her room.

The next day, the people from Experimental Area A tried to see if they
could go out and lend a hand to the settlers.  It wasn't possible to
lend a hand; there were too many settlers.  People by the millions were
scattered all over the hills and valleys of Venus, sludging through the
mud and water with their human toes, crushing the alien mud, crushing
the strange plants.  They didn't know what to eat.  They didn't know
where to go.  They had no leaders.

All they had were orders to gather the loudies together in large herds
and hold them there with human arms.

The loudies didn't resist.

After a time-lapse of several Earth days, the Goonhogo sent small scout
cars.  They brought a very different kind of Chinesian--these late
arrivals were uniformed, educated, cruel, smug men.  They knew what
they were doing.  And they were willing to pay any sacrifice of their
own people to get it done.

They brought instructions.  They put the people together in gangs.  It
did not matter where the nondies and needies had come from on Earth; it
didn't matter whether they found their own showhices or somebody
else's.  They were shown the jobs to do and they got to work.  Human
bodies accomplished what machines could not have done--they kept the
loudies firmly but gently encircled until every last one of the
creatures was starved into nothingness.

Rice fields began to appear miraculously.

Scanner Vomact couldn't believe it.  The Goonhogo biochemists had
managed to adapt rice to the soil of Venus.  And yet the seedlings came
out of boxes in the scout cars and weeping people walked over the
bodies of their own dead to keep the crop moving toward the planting.

Venusian bacteria could not kill human beings, nor could they dispose
of human bodies after death.  A problem arose and was solved.  Immense
sleds carried dead men, women and children--those who had fallen wrong,
or drowned as they fell, or had been trampled by others--to an
undisclosed destination.  Dobyns suspected the material was to be used
to add Earth-type organic waste to the soil of Venus, but he did not
tell Terza.

The work went on.

The nondies and needies kept working in shifts.  When they could not
see in the darkness, they proceeded without seeing--keeping in line by
touch or by shout.  Foremen, newly trained, screeched commands.
Workers lined up, touching fingertips.  The job of building the fields
kept on.



"That's a big story," said the old man, "eighty-two million people
dropped in a single day.  And later I heard that the Waywonjong said it
wouldn't have mattered if seventy million of them had died.  Twelve
million survivors would have been enough to make a spacehead for the
Goonhogo.  The Chinesians got Venus, all of it.

"But I'll never forget the nondies and the needies and the showhices
falling out of the sky, men and women and children with their poor
scared Chinesian faces.  That funny Venusian air made them look green
instead of tan.  There they were, falling all around.

"You know something, young man?" said Dobyns Bennett approaching his
fifth century of age.

"What?" said the reporter.

"There won't be things like that happening on any world again.  Because
now, after all, there isn't any separate Goonhogo left.  There's only
one Instrumentality and they don't care what a man's race may have been
in the ancient years.  Those were the rough old days, the ones I lived
in.  Those were the days men still tried to do things."

Dobyns almost seemed to doze off, but he roused himself sharply and
said, "I tell you, the sky was full of people.  They fell like water.
They fell like rain.  I've seen the awful ants in Africa, and there's
not a thing among the stars to beat them for prowling horror.  Mind
you, they're worse than anything the stars contain.  I've seen the
crazy worlds near Alpha Centauri, but I never saw anything like the
time the people fell on Venus.  More than eighty-two million in one day
and my own little Terza lost among them.

"But the rice did sprout.  And the loudies died as the walls of people
held them in with human arms.  Walls of people, I tell you, with
volunteers jumping in to take the places of the falling ones.

"They were people still, even when they shouted in the darkness.  They
tried to help each other even while they fought a fight that had to be
fought without violence.  They were people still.  And they did so win.
It was crazy and impossible, but they won.  Mere human beings did what
machines and science would have taken another thousand years to do...

"The funniest thing of all was the first house that I saw a nondie put
up, there in the rain of Venus.  I was out there with Vomact and with a
pale sad Terza.  It wasn't much of a house, shaped out of twisted
Venusian wood.  There it was.  _He_ built it, the smiling half-naked
Chinesian nondie.  We went to the door and said to him in English,
'What are you building here, a shelter or a hospital?'

"The Chinesian grinned at us.  'No,' he said, 'gambling.'

"Vomact wouldn't believe it: 'Gambling?'

"'Sure,' said the nondie.  'Gambling is the first thing a man needs in
a strange place.  It can take the worry out of his soul."

"Is that all?" said the reporter.



Dobyns Bennett muttered that the personal part did not count.  He
added, "Some of my great-great-great-great-great-grandsons may come
along.  You count those greats.  Their faces will show you easily
enough that I married into the Vomact line.  Terza saw what happened.
She saw how people build worlds.  This was the hard way to build them.
She never forgot the night with the dead Chinesian babies lying in the
half-illuminated mud, or the parachute ropes dissolving slowly.  She
heard the needies weeping and the helpless nondies comforting them and
leading them off to nowhere.  She remembered the cruel, neat officers
coming out of the scout cars.  She got home and saw the rice come up,
and saw how the Goonhogo made Venus a Chinesian place."

"What happened to you personally?" asked the reporter.

"Nothing much.  There wasn't any more work for us, so we closed down
Experimental Area A.  I married Terza.

"Any time later, when I said to her, 'You're not such a bad girl!' she
was able to admit the truth and tell me she was not.  That night in the
rain of people would test anybody's soul and it tested hers.  She had
met a big test and passed it.  She used to say to me, 'I saw it once.
I saw the people fell, and I never want to see another person suffer
again.  Keep me with you, Dobyns, keep me with you forever.'

"And," said Dobyns Bennett, "it wasn't forever, but it was a happy and
sweet three hundred years.  She died after our fourth diamond
anniversary.  Wasn't that a wonderful thing, young man?"

The reporter said it was.  And yet, when he took the story back to his
editor, he was told to put it into the archives.  It wasn't the right
kind of story for entertainment and the public would not appreciate it
any more.






[End of When the People Fell, by Cordwainer Smith]
