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I recalled my wandering eyes, and I kept a few of the others turned toward Saint Stephen's until the cloudbanks breasted the range about an hour later. By then, though, the weather satellite had passed over and picked the thing up also. It reported quite an extensive cloud cover on the other side. The storm had sprung up quickly, as they often do here on Cygnus. Often, too, they disperse just as quickly, after an hour or so of heaven's artillery. But then there are the bad ones--sometimes lingering and lingering, and bearing more thunderbolts in their quivers than any Earth storm.
Betty's position, too, is occasionally precarious, though its advantages, in general, offset its liabilities. We are located on the gulf, about twenty miles inland, and are approximately three miles removed (in the main) from a major river, the Noble; part of Betty does extend down to its banks, but this is a smaller part. We are almost a strip city, falling mainly into an area some seven miles in length and two miles wide, stretching inland, east from the river, and ru
We are not the lowest land about, but we are far from being the highest. We are certainly the most level in the area. This latter feature, as well as our nearness to the equator, was a deciding factor in the establishment of Beta Station. Some other things were our proximity both to the ocean and to a large river. There are nine other cities on the continent, all of them younger and smaller, and three of them located upriver from us. We are the potential capital of a potential country.
We're a good, smooth, easy landing site for drop-boats from orbiting interstellar vehicles, and we have major assets for future growth and coordination when it comes to expanding across the continent. Our original _raison d'etre_, though, was Stopover, repair-point, supply depot, and refreshment stand, physical and psychological, on the way out to other, more settled worlds, further along the line. Cyg was discovered later than many others--it just happened that way--and the others got off to earlier starts. Hence, the others generally attract more colonists. We are still quite primitive. Self-sufficiency, in order to work on our population:land scale, demanded a society on the order of that of the mid-nineteenth century in the American southwest--at least for purposes of getting started. Even now, Cyg is still partly on a natural economy system, although Earth Central technically determines the coin of the realm.
Why Stopover, if you sleep most of the way between the stars?
Think about it a while, and I'll tell you later if you're right.
The thunderheads rose in the east, sending billows and streamers this way and that, until it seemed from the formations that Saint Stephen's was a balcony full of monsters, leaning and craning their necks over the rail in the direction of the stage, us. Cloud piled upon slate-colored cloud, and then the wall slowly began to topple.
I heard the first rumbles of thunder almost half an hour after lunch, so I knew it wasn't my stomach.
Despite all my eyes, I moved to a window to watch. It was like a big, gray, aerial glacier plowing the sky.
There was a wind now, for I saw the trees suddenly quiver and bow down. This would be our first storm of the season. The turquoise fell back before it, and finally it smothered the sun itself. Then there were drops upon the windowpane, then rivulets.
Flint-like, the highest peaks of Saint Stephen's scraped its belly and were showered with sparks. After a moment it bumped into something with a terrible crash, and the rivulets on the quartz panes turned back into rivers.
I went back to my gallery, to smile at dozens of views of people scurrying for shelter. A smart few had umbrellas and raincoats. The rest ran like blazes. People never pay attention to weather reports; this, I believe, is a constant factor in man's psychological makeup, stemming perhaps from an ancient tribal distrust of the shaman. You want them to be wrong. If they're right, then they're somehow superior, and this is even more uncomfortable than getting wet.
I remembered then that I had forgotten my raincoat, umbrella, and rubbers. But it _had_ been a beautiful morning, and W.C. _could_ have been wrong...
Well, I had another cigarette and leaned back in my big chair. No storm in the world could knock my eyes out of the sky.
I switched on the filters and sat and watched the rain pour past.
Five hours later it was still raining, and rumbling and dark.
I'd had hopes that it would let up by quitting time, but when Chuck Fuller came around the picture still hadn't changed any. Chuck was my relief that night, the evening Hell Cop.
He seated himself beside my desk.
"You're early," I said. "They don't start paying you for another hour."
"Too wet to do anything but sit. 'Rather sit here than at home."
"Leaky roof?"
He shook his head.
"Mother-in-law. Visiting again."
I nodded.
"One of the disadvantages of a small world."
He clasped his hands behind his neck and leaned back in the chair, staring off in the direction of the window. I could feel one of his outbursts coming.
"You know how old I am?" he asked, after a while.
"No," I said, which was a lie. He was twenty-nine.
"Twenty-seven," he told me, "and going to be twenty-eight soon. Know where I've been?"
"No."
"No place, that's where! I was born and raised on this crummy world! And I married and I settled down here--and I've never been off it! Never could afford it when I was younger. Now I've got a family..."
He leaned forward again, rested his elbow on his knees, like a kid. Chuck would look like a kid when he was fifty. --Blond hair, close-cropped, pug nose, kind of scrawny, takes a suntan quickly, and well. Maybe he'd act like a kid at fifty, too. I'll never know.
I didn't say anything because I didn't have anything to say.
He was quiet for a long while again.
Then he said, "_You've_ been around."
After a minute, he went on:
"You were born on Earth. Earth! And you visited lots of other worlds too, before I was even born. Earth is only a name to me. And pictures. And all the others--they're the same! Pictures. Names..."
I waited, then after I grew tired of waiting I said, "'Miniver Cheevy, child of scorn...'"
"What does that mean?"
"It's the ancient begi
"It would be worth it," he said.
I laughed. I'd had to listen to his gripes every month or two for over a year and a half. It had never bothered me much before, so I guess it was a cumulative effect that day--the rain, and Saturday night next, and my recent library visits, _and_ his complaining, that had set me off.