“If you can’t solve your own problems,” said the wise Knax, “then you most certainly are not very clever.”
“Absolutely!” exclaimed his audience with a laugh. But soon, the laughter ceased; they weren’t feeling too cheerful because of their pressing worries.
A grand fertility reigned on the star Venus. Knax and his audience lived there, and everyone suffered a lot under this ample fertility. Venus is obviously not a star which rotates around itself like Jupiter, Mars, and Earth. Venus always has the same side of its spheric body facing the sun, which makes it scorching hot. Obviously, the result is a plaguing fertility on that side of Venus. Flowery formations on the backsides of Venus’s inhabitants sprawl rapidly and develop long, whirring butterfly wings. These wings soon mass together and create an intricate fruiting body. This body grows quickly, detaches itself from the host, and thus a new Venusian emerges.
These offspring are born without any influence of their progenitors on the flowery formations and their metamorphoses. In close proximity to the sun, procreation of species takes place in a very simple manner, without any trace of terrestrial dualism. One can imagine that this convenience of nature causes considerable inconveniences—for the elderly don’t die that quickly on Venus, which leads to a relentless increase in the number of inhabitants. This population boom obstructs and diminishes the offspring’s mobility.
Now, two contrastingly different kinds of creatures exist on the hot side of Venus. Chubby, idle inhabitants with a sort of turtle fur at their top and bottom. And twenty-armed, uncannily vital creatures with long, delicate hands, which serve as feet when bent into a fistlike form. The chubby ones always make themselves comfortable and lie idly around. They find the vitality and restlessness of the Dynamic Ones embarrassing and occasionally even excruciating.
Knax was one of the dynamic Venusians. Every day, Knax thought deeply about that damning fertility on the sphere’s hot side. The possibility of constructing towers and free-floating bridges in order to handle the lack of space had been considered and discussed in great length and detail. And so, myriads of towers and bridges were built in valleys and on the hills. Yet the Venusians’ fertility was so yielding and abundant that all the towers and bridges didn’t suffice; there were just too many of them. The unhurried turtles covered almost every inch of the ground, calm and rest being their most valuable principles in life. They weren’t bothered much when the twenty-legged ones ran about on their backs or in their immediate proximity.
Knax, the wise one, said gloomily: “Heavens—we don’t even have enough space to go for a walk. Where are we supposed to go? We can’t just always sit on our bridges and in our towers and paint. We need to be able to walk. It’s just not in our nature to quit walking.” Knax’s audience agreed with him, but they didn’t know how to deal with this lack of freedom. Of course, the brutal idea to just snuff out some of the expendable offspring never came up; the concept of killing was unknown to the Venusians.
This situation would have undoubtedly turned into a battle of everybody against everybody, if the nutrition and the food intake of the Unhurried as well as the Dynamic Ones were comparable to the feeding ways here on Earth. But the food wasn’t available on the surface of Venus. The Venusians—the Unhurried as well as the Dynamic Ones—took in their nourishment only once a year: Their hair started growing longer and longer, which made them realize that they were hungry; they never actually felt hungry. Then their body hair rooted itself into Venus’s rubbery skin—and once inside, it grew rapidly several thousand meters into the star’s interior. Deep inside the star, the hair, consisting of the tiniest of tubes, sucked up the nutritional substances and transported them back into the body. When the feeding was complete, the hair broke apart, and the saturated Venusian ran off. If the Unhurried Ones were to cover the whole surface of the planet, the Dynamic Ones would have nowhere to take in their food. But in reality it wasn’t all that bad: there just weren’t enough turtles to cover all of Venus, which had an enormous surface area, after all. There was no room for walking and running around on the hemisphere, but it was sufficient for nutritional purposes. The turtles were very kind and would make room for the Dynamic Ones by piling up into a stack if room was needed for quiet food ingestion. The Unhurried Ones, however, didn’t show even the slightest tolerance for any running and hopping around—since any kind of unrest disturbed their serene philosophical contemplation, which was the most crucial part of their lives.
Knax, the wise one, on the other hand, never stopped contemplating a great deal on the poor freedom of movement and came up one day with the following solution as well as speech: “Fellow inhabitants of the Venusian skin! As you all know, we have countless craters on our side of the star. Very hot air puffs out of them from time to time, rising up with tremendous speed into the heavens, only to cool down when it comes in contact with the cold ether. Couldn’t we use this hot, very light crater air as a balloon carrier? And couldn’t we then create on top of these balloons the freedom of movement we need? What do you think?”
“That’s it! Let’s do just that! We will cut the balloon hulls from our star’s exterior, which splendidly suits our purposes.” The audience found Knax’s suggestion so appealing that they even forgot to thank him for it. All the twenty-handed ones got to work immediately, and the turtles gladly made way when they heard about the plan—they also helped with cutting the Venusian skin. Soon Venus was filled with high-pitched cheers, and everyone was grateful and eagerly shaking the wise Knax’s hands, which became swollen and started hurting badly.
“Gratitude can be quite hard to take!” exclaimed Knax with laughter. Meanwhile the balloons above the craters bulged upwards in the sky. The Dynamic Ones, who were attached to the balloons, climbed the ropes up and down with ease. Many balloons, however, got so tight and firm that their surface became very slippery, which made it hard to move around.
Knax, the wise one, explained: “Fellow inhabitants of Venus! Do produce new balloons quickly and make holes in the old, tight ones—then the main balloon will form small sub-balloons in many different places, and the terrain which we need for us to walk on will have a roughened structure again.” Knax had to elaborate on his plan more than once—and slowly, the fellow Venusians began to understand, and did what he asked them to do.
Soon, the joyfulness on the balloons grew even bigger, and Knax was being celebrated as everybody’s savior and redeemer. And the turtles, now leading awfully quiet lives down below, were also pleased. Unfortunately, the turtles’ joy didn’t last very long, for they soon realized that the huge crater balloons, which grew bigger and bigger every day due to the sub-balloons they produced, were blocking their view of the big sun, so that the turtles had to lie in the shade. They summoned the wise Knax and explained to him the unbearable deprivation of light.
“We aren’t familiar with such abundance of shade,” said the turtles. “After all, it is our nature that we require sunlight at all times for our philosophical contemplation. We don’t know how to deal with darkness, which is something we haven’t yet experienced on our side of Venus before. That’s why we need you, Knax, to crack our nocturnal problem. Otherwise we will perish. And you don’t want that to happen, do you?”
Knax ran his twenty hands through his seven ears and exclaimed with a moan: “How am I supposed to do that? Tell me, how? I don’t know! I just don’t know!”
He ran into a cave and thought hard about the problem—and came up with the idea that one could tie up all the balloons on the crater’s edge and let them rise into the sky. By using longer cords, connection with the ground could be made easily—even if the balloons were to rise several miles high. And that is what happened: soon the balloons were hovering miles above the ground, while at the same time new balloons were forming—populated by many of the Dynamic Ones. There was a large number of balloons in the Venusian skies now, taking on all possible forms. And the turtlish inhabitants on Venus’s surface took pleasure in the busy liveliness of their atmosphere, as did the twenty-armed ones, who never fell down, of course, because they were such good climbers.
“Now all the shadows are gone!” said the chubby, idle ones. “And the restless minds, too!” And Knax let everyone worship him as their savior, while residing on top of the biggest balloon, from which no less than two hundred club-shaped sub-balloons had grown. And the gigantic sun with its protuberances tanned the wise Knax’s cheeks and hands completely brown—that’s how fierce it was burning high up in the sky. Fortunately, the great heat didn’t do any harm to the Venusians. If you happen to live close to a sun, you are used to the greatest of heat—all Venusian bodies are constructed in such a way that it simply can’t get too hot for them.