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Updated: June 3, 2025
Kielland shouted, "Let's get out of here!" and headed down the stairs, clinging to the railing for dear life. Control Tower was sinking in the mud. They had moved faster than he had anticipated, Kielland thought, and snarled at himself all the way down to the landing platform below.
Inside the Administration shack Kielland found a weary-looking man behind a desk, scribbling furiously at a pile of reports. Everything in the shack was splattered with mud. The crude desk and furniture was smeared; the papers had black speckles all over them. Even the man's face was splattered, his clothing encrusted with gobs of still-damp mud.
He waved the Venusian out the door and turned to Kielland with burden of ten months' frustration in his voice. "They're stupid," he said slowly. "They are so incredibly stupid I could go screaming into the swamp every time I see one of them coming. Their stupidity is positively abysmal." "Then why use them?" Kielland spluttered.
Kielland asked peevishly. "According to my records you have five Axis-Traction dredges, plus a dozen or more of the old kind." "Ah!" said Simpson. "Well, Number One had its vacuum chamber corroded out a week after we started using dredging. Ran into a vein of stuff with 15 per cent acid content, and it got chewed up something fierce.
James or Miss Jewett, by Kielland or Bjornson, by Maupassant, by Palacio Valdes, by Giovanni Verga, by Tourguenief, in one of those little frames seems to me of an exquisite color and texture and of an entire literary preciousness, not only as regards the diction, but as regards those more intangible graces of form, those virtues of truth and reality, and those lasting significances which distinguish the masterpiece.
Though he has by nature no more sympathy with the pietistic movement than Daudet, Kielland yet manages to get, psychologically, closer to his problem. His pietists are more humanly interesting than those of Daudet, and the little drama which they set in motion is more genuinely pathetic.
"You mean he brought us an evacuation ship?" "No, he's going to tell us how to make this Installation pay. Right, Kielland?" Simpson's grin was something to see. Kielland scowled. "What are you going to do with the dredge just leave it there?" he asked angrily.
He could have won even wider fame, and doubtless if he had remained in Norway, he would have been one of that group of great Norwegians who have given their little land renown surpassed by that of no other in the modern republic of letters. The name of Boyesen would have been set with the names of Bjornson, of Ibsen, of Kielland, and of Lie.
Kielland caught Sparks by the shoulder, shouting to be heard above the racket. "The transport did you get it?" "I I think so." "They're sending us a ferry?" "It should be on its way." Simpson sloshed up, his face heavy with dismay. "The dredges! They've cut loose the dredges." "Bother the dredges. Get your men collected and into the shelters. We'll have a ship here any minute."
Kielland wiped sweat from his forehead and sank back on his cot with a shudder. "We should be so stupid," he said. "I must admit," he said later to a weary and mystified Simpson, "that I didn't expect them to move so fast. But when you've decided in your mind that somebody's really pretty stupid, it's hard to adjust to the idea that maybe he isn't, all of a sudden.
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