REVOLT IN THE ICE EMPIRE

By RAY CUMMINGS

Frozen little Zura was a stellar Utopia, until the Earthmen came to topple the rule of its gentle queen with the cankerous weapons of revolt.

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1940. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

So much has been written into the permanent chronologies of science concerning our pioneer voyage to the little asteroid of Zura—facts and figures and sociological deductions, most of which are, of actuality, erroneous—that even now after these many years, I feel constrained to set down, as simply as I can, exactly what occurred. All my life I have shunned publicity; my wife has shunned it. Zura, weird little wandering world, has never returned. Why, after coming in from the realms of outer space at least twice and rounding our Sun upon an elliptic orbit, it should now have failed to reappear—I will leave that to the astronomers to imagine. But no one from Earth, quite obviously, will ever go to Zura again. Tara and I, so to speak, are sole survivors.

So at least I think I am qualified to tell what happened; to correct the Official Chronolograph in its implications that Zura was a model little world, from which our Earth might learn much. As my grandfather might have quoted his grandfather saying, that is the bunk. When you put humans on a planet, you will get love—but also hate; honesty, but dishonesty; peace, but also war. The weird people of Zura were weird to us only because their environment had made them outwardly different from us. Like us they were human—and there could never have been Utopia evolved from them.

I am no philosopher, but at least I must have my say on this. Tara was misguided. She admits it now. Indeed, at heart she is more opposed than most of you who read this, to those crusaders here on earth who talk of revolutions and bloodshed so that some new Social Order may evolve and bring the world Utopia. The ideals are often sound, but always impossible of fulfillment. And those who sponsor them usually are intelligent enough to know it, advancing themselves upon the pitiful hopes of the ignorant, who think they are being led upward when in reality they are often worse off than before.

Do I seem prefacing some weighty analysis of mankind's frailties? That is wrong. I am prefacing what might better be called a love story. I am an old 

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