And the next one urged:
BEAT YOUR SISTER
CHEAT YOUR BROTHER
BUT SEND SOME SMOGS
TO DEAR OLD MOTHER.
It said it on four signs which, apparently alerted by radar, zinged in
succession along a roadside track even with the vehicle.
There were more. And worse. They were coming to a city.
Turmoil and magnificence! White pylons, natty belts of green, lacy
bridges, the roaring traffic, nimble-skipping pedestrians waving at the
cars and calling—greetings? It sounded like “Suvvabih! Suvvabih!
Bassa-bassa!” The shops were packed and radiant, dazzling. Ross wondered
fleetingly how one parked here, and then found out. A car pulled from
the curb and a hundred cars converged on the spot, shrilling their sweet
message and spouting their gay sparkles. Theirs too! There were a pair
of jolting crashes as it shouldered two other vehicles aside and parked,
two wheels over the curb and on the sidewalk.
“Suvvabih-bassa!” shouted drivers, and the man beside Ross gaily
repeated the cry. The vehicle’s doors opened and they climbed out into
the quick tempo of the street.
It was loud with a melodious babble from speaker horns visible
everywhere. The driver yelled cheerfully at Ross: “C’mon. Party.” He
followed, dazed and baffled, assailed by sudden doubts and
contradictions.
* * * * *
It was a party, all right—twenty floors up a shimmering building in a
large, handsome room whose principal decorative motif seemed to be
cooling fins.
Perhaps twenty couples were assembled; they turned and applauded as they
made their appearance.
The vehicle driver, standing grandly at the head of a short flight of
stairs leading to the room, proclaimed: “I got these rocket flyers like
on the piece of paper you guys read me. Right off the field. Twenny
points. How about that?”
A tall, graying man with a noble profile hurried up and beamed: “Good
show, Joe. I knew we could count on you to try for the high-point combo.
You was always a real sport. You got the fish?”
“Sure we got the fish.” Joe turned and said to one of the lovely ladies,
“Elna, show him the fish.”
She unwrapped a ten-pound swordfish and proudly held it up while Ross,
Bernie, and Helena stared wildly.
The profile took the fish and poked it. “Real enough, Joe. You done
great. Now if the rocket flyers here are okay you’re okay. Then you got
twenny points and the prize.
“You’re a rocket flyer, ain’t you, Buster?”
Ross realized he was being addressed. He croaked: “Men of Earth, we come
from a far-distant star in search of——”
The profile said, “Just a minute, Buster. _Just_ a minute. You ain’t
from Earth?”
“We come from a far-distant star in search of——”
“Stick to the point, Buster. You ain’t a rocket flyer from Earth? None
of you?”
“No,” Ross said. He furtively pinched himself. It hurt. Therefore he
must be awake. Or crazy.
The profile was sorrowfully addressing a downcast Joe. “You should of
asked them, Joe. You really should of. Now you don’t even get the three
points for the swordfish, because you went an’ tried for the combo. It
reely is a pity. Din’t you ask them at all?”
Joe blustered, “He did say sump’m, but I figured a rocket flyer was a
rocket flyer, and they come out of a rocket.” His lower lip was
trembling. Both of the ladies of his party were crying openly. “We
tried,” Joe said, and began to blubber. Ross moved away from him in
horrified disgust.
The profile shook its head, turned and announced: “Owing to a
unfortunate mistake, the search group of Dr. Joseph Mulcahy, Sc.D.,
Ph.D., got disqualified for the combination. They on’y got three points.
So that’s all the groups in an’ who got the highest?”
“I got fifteen! I got fifteen!” screamed a gorgeous brunette in a
transport of joy. “A manhole cover from the museum an’ a las’ month
_Lipreaders Digest_ an’ a steering wheel from a police car! I got
fifteen!”
The others clustered about her, chattering. Ross said to the profile
mechanically: “Man of Earth, we come from a far-distant star in search
of——”
“Sure, Buster,” said the profile. “Sure. Too bad. But you should of told
Joe. You don’t have to go. You an’ your friends have a drink. Mix. Have
fun. I gotta go give the prize now.” He hurried off.
A passing blonde, stacked, said to Ross: “Hel-looo, baldy. Wanna see my
operation?” He began to shake his head and felt Helena’s fingers close
like steel on his arm. The blonde sniffed and passed on.
“I’ll operate her,” Helena said, and then: “Ross, what’s _wrong_ with
everybody? They act so young, even the old people!”
“Follow me,” he said, and began to circulate through the party, trailing
Bernie and a frankly terrified Helena, button-holing and confronting and
demanding and cajoling. Nothing worked. He was greeted with amused
tolerance and invited to have a drink and asked what he thought of the
latest commersh with its tepid trumpets. Nobody gave a damn that he was
from a far-distant star except Joe, who sullenly watched them wander and
finally swaggered up to Ross.
“I figured something out,” he said grimly. “You made me lose.” He
brought up a roundhouse right, and Ross saw the stars and heard the
birdies.
* * * * *
Bernie and Helena brought him to on the street. He found he had been
walking for some five minutes with a blanked-out mind. They told him he
had been saying over and over again, “Men of Earth, I come from a
far-distant star.” It had got them ejected from the party.
Helena was crying with anger and frustration; she had also got a nasty
scare when one of the vehicles had swerved up onto the sidewalk and
almost crushed the three of them against the building wall.
“And,” she wailed, “I’m hungry and we don’t know where the ship is and
I’ve got to sit down and—and go someplace.”
“So do I,” Bernie said weakly.
So did Ross. He said, “Let’s just go into this restaurant. I know we
have no money—don’t nag me please, Helena. We’ll order, eat, not pay,
and get arrested.” He held up his hand at the protests. “I said, get
arrested. The smartest thing we could do. Obviously somebody’s running
this place—and it’s not the stoops we’ve seen. The quickest way I know
of to get to whoever’s in charge is to get in trouble. And once they see
us we can explain everything.”
It made sense to them. Unfortunately the first restaurant they tried was
coin-operated—from the front door on. So were the second to seventh.
Ross tried to talk Bernie into slugging a pedestrian so they could all
be jugged for disturbing the peace, but failed.
Helena noted at last that the women’s wear shops had live attendants
who, presumably, would object to trouble. They marched into one of the
gaudy places, each took a dress from a rack and methodically tore them
to pieces.
A saleslady approached them dithering and asked tremulously: “What for
did you do that? Din’t you like the dresses?”
“Well yes, very much,” Helena began apologetically. “But you see, the
fact is——”
“Shuddup!” Ross told her. He said to the saleslady: “No. We hated them.
We hate every dress here. We’re going to tear up every dress in the
place. Why don’t you call the police?”
“Oh,” she said vaguely. “All right,” and vanished into the rear of the
store. She returned after a minute and said, “He wants to know your
names.”
“Just say ‘three desperate strangers,’” Ross told her.
“Oh. Thank you.” She vanished again.
The police arrived in five minutes or so. An excited elder man with many
stripes on his arms strode up to them excitedly as they stood among the
shredded ruins of the dresses. “Where’d they go?” he demanded. “Didja
see what they looked like?”
“We’re them. We three. We tore these dresses up. You’d better take them
along for evidence.”
“Oh,” the cop said. “Okay. Go on into the wagon. And no funny business,
hear me?”
They offered no funny business. In the wagon Ross expounded on his theme
that there must be directing intelligences and that they must be at the
top. Helena was horribly depressed because she had never been arrested
before and Bernie was almost jaunty. Something about him suggested that
he felt at home in a patrol wagon.
It stopped and the elderly stripe-wearer opened the door for them. Ross
looked on the busy street for anything resembling a station house and
found none.
The cop said, “Okay, you people. Get going. An’ let’s don’t have no
trouble or I’ll run you in.”
Ross yelled in outrage, “This is a frame-up! You have no right to turn
us loose. We demand to be arrested and tried!”
“Wise guy,” sneered the cop, climbed into the wagon and drove off.
They stood forlornly as the crowd eddied and swirled around them. “There
was a plate of sandwiches at that party,” Helena recalled wistfully.
“And a ladies’ room.” She began to cry. “If only you hadn’t acted so
darn superior, Ross! I’ll bet they would have let us have all the
sandwiches we wanted.”
Bernie said unexpectedly, “She’s right. Watch me.”
He buttonholed a pedestrian and said, “Duh.”
“Yeah?” asked the pedestrian with kindly interest.
Bernie concentrated and said, “Duh. I yam losted. I yam broke. I losted
all my money. Gimme some money, mister, please?”
The pedestrian beamed and said, “That is real tough luck, buddy. If I
give you some money will you send it to me when you get some more? Here
is my name wrote on a card.”
Bernie said, “Sure, mister. I will send the money to you.”
“Then,” said the pedestrian, “I will give you some money because you
will send it back to me. Good luck, buddy.”
Bernie, with quiet pride, showed them a piece of paper that bore the
interesting legend Twenty Dollars.
“Let’s eat,” Ross said, awed.
A machine on a restaurant door changed the bill for a surprising heap of
coins and they swaggered in, making beelines for the modest twin doors
at the rear of the place. Close up the doors were not very modest, but
after the initial shock Ross realized that there must be many on this
planet who could not read at all. The washroom attendant, for instance,
who collected the “dimes” and unlocked the booths. “Dime” seemed to be
his total vocabulary.
By comparison the machines in the restaurant proper were intelligent.
The three of them ate and ate and ate. Only after coffee did they spare
a thought for Dr. Sam Jones, who should about then be awakening with a
murderous hangover aboard the starship.
Thinking about him did not mean they could think of anything to do.
“He’s in trouble,” Bernie said. “_We’re_ in trouble. First things
first.”
“What trouble?” asked Helena brightly. “You got twenty dollars by asking
for it and I suppose you can get plenty more. And I think we wouldn’t
have got thrown out of that party if—ah—_we_ hadn’t gone swaggering
around talking as if we knew everything. Maybe these people here aren’t
very bright——”
Ross snorted.
Helena went on doggedly, “——not _very_ bright, but they certainly can
tell when somebody’s brighter than they are. And naturally they don’t
like it. Would you like it? It’s like a really old person talking to a
really young person about nothing but age. But here when you’re bright
you make everybody feel bad every time you open your mouth.”
“So,” Ross said impatiently, “we can go on begging and drifting. But
that’s not what we’re here for. The answer is supposed to be on Earth.
Obviously none of the people we’ve seen could possibly know anything
about genetics. Obviously they can’t keep this machine civilization
going without guidance. There must be people of normal intelligence
around. In the government, is my guess.”
“No,” said Helena, but she wouldn’t say why. She just thought not.
The inconclusive debate ended with them on the street again. Bernie, who
seemed to enjoy it, begged a hundred dollars. Ross, who didn’t, got
eleven dollars in singles and a few threats of violence for acting like
a wise guy. Helena got no money and three indecent proposals before Ross
indignantly took her out of circulation.
They found a completely automatic hotel at nightfall. Ross tried to
inspect Helena’s room for comfort and safety, but was turned back at the
threshold by a staggering jolt of electricity. “Mechanical house dick,”
he muttered, picking himself up from the floor. “Well,” he said to her
sourly, “it’s safe. Good night.”
And later in the gents’ room, to Bernie: “You’d think the damn-fool
machine could be adjusted so that a person with perfectly innocent
intentions could visit a lady——”
“Sure,” said Bernie soothingly, “sure. Say, Ross, frankly, is this Earth
exactly what you expected it to be?”
The attendant moved creakily across the floor and said hopefully,
“Dime?”
..... 13
THEIR second day on the bum they accumulated a great deal of change and
crowded into a telephone booth. The plan was to try to locate their
starship and find out what, if anything, could be done for Sam Jones.
An automatic Central conferred with an automatic Information and decided
that they wanted the Captain of the Port, Baltimore Rocket Field.
They got the Port Captain on the wire and Ross asked after the starship.
The captain asked, “Who wan’sta know, huh?”
Ross realized he had overdone it and shoved Bernie at the phone. Bernie
snorted and guggled and finally got out that he jus’ wannit ta know. The
captain warmed up immediately and said oh, sure, the funny-lookin’ ship,
it was still there all right.
“How about the fella that’s in it?”
“You mean the funny-lookin’ fella? He went someplace.”
“He went someplace? What place?”
“Someplace. He went away, like. I din’t see him go, mister. I got plenty
to do without I should watch out for every dummy that comes along.”
“T’anks,” said Bernie hopelessly at Ross’s signal.
They walked the street, deep in thought. Helena sobbed, “Let’s _leave_
him here, Ross. I don’t like this place.”
“No.”
Bernie growled, “What’s the difference, Ross? He can get a snootful just
as easy here as anywhere else——”
“No! It isn’t the Doc, don’t you see? But this is the place we’re
looking for. All the answers we need are here; we’ve got to get them.”
Bernie stepped around two tussling men on the ground, ineffectually
thumping each other over a chocolate-covered confection. “Yeah,” he said
shortly.
* * * * *
Helena said: “Isn’t that a silly way to put up a big sign like that?”
Ross looked up. “My God,” he said. A gigantic metal sign with the
legend, _Buy Smogs_——_You Can SMOKE Them_, was being hoisted across the
street ahead. The street was nominally closed to traffic by cheerfully
inattentive men with red flags; a mobile boom hoist was doing the work,
and quite obviously doing it wrong. The angle of the boom arm with the
vertical was far too great for stability; the block-long sign was
tipping the too-light body of the hoisting engine on its treads....
Ross made a flash calculation: when the sign fell, as fall it inevitably
would, perhaps two hundred people who had wandered uncaringly past the
warning flags would be under it.
There was a sudden aura of blue light around the engine body.
It tipped back to stability. The boom angle decreased, and the engine
crawled forward to take up the horizontal difference.
The blue light went out.
Helena choked and coughed and babbled, “But Ross, it _couldn’t_ have
because——”
Ross said: “It’s them!”
“Who?”
Excitedly: “The people behind all this! The people who built the cities
and put up the buildings and designed the machines. The people who have
the answers! Come on, Bernie. I just seem to antagonize these people—I
want you to ask the boom operator what happened.”
The boom operator cheerfully explained that nah, it was just somep’n
that happened. Nah, nobody did nothin’ to make it happen. It was in case
if anything went wrong, like. You know?
They retired and regrouped their forces.
“Foolproof machines,” Ross said slowly. “And I mean really _fool_ proof.
Friends, I was wrong, I admit it; I thought that those buildings and
cars were something super-special, and they turned out to be just silly
gimcracks. But not this blue light thing. That boom _had_ to fall.”
Bernie shrugged rebelliously. “So what? So they’ve got some kinds of
machines you don’t have on Halsey’s Planet?”
“A different order of machines, Bernie! Believe me, that blue light was
something as far from any safety device I ever heard of as the starships
are from oxcarts. When we find the people who designed them——”
“Suppose they’re all dead?”
Ross winced. He said determinedly, “We’ll find them.” They returned to
their begging and were recognized one day by the gray-haired profile of
the party. He didn’t remember just who they were or where they were from
or where he had met them, but he enthusiastically invited them to yet
another party. He told them he was Hennery Matson, owner of an airline.
Ross asked about accidents and blue lights. Matson jovially said some o’
his pilots talked about them things but he din’t bother his head none.
Ya get these planes from the field, see, an’ they got all kinds of
gadgets on them. Come on to the party!
They went, because Hennery promised them another guest—Sanford Eisner,
who was a wealthy aircraft manufacturer. But he din’t bother his head
none either; them rockets was hard to make, you had to feed the
patterns, like, into the master jigs just so, and, boy!, if you got ’em
in backwards it was a _mess_. Wheredja get the patterns? Look, mister,
we _always_ had the patterns, an’ don’t spoil the party, will ya?
The party was a smasher. They all woke with headaches on Matson’s deep
living room rug.
“You did fine, Ross,” Helena softly assured him. “Nobody would have
guessed you were any smarter than anybody else here. There wasn’t a bit
of trouble.”
Ross seemed to have a hiatus in his memory.
The importance of the hiatus faded as time passed. There was a general
move toward the automatic dispensing bar. It seemed to be regulated by a
time clock; no matter what you dialed first thing in the morning, it
ruthlessly poured a double rye with Worcestershire and tabasco and
plopped a fair imitation of a raw egg into the concoction. It helped!
Along about noon something clicked in the bar’s innards. Guests long
since surfeited with the prairie oysters joyously dialed martinis and
manhattans and the day’s serious drinking began.
Ross fuzzily tried to trace the bar’s supply. There were nickel pipes
that led Heaven knew where. Some vast depot of fermentation tanks and
stills? Fed grain and cane by crawling harvest-monsters? Grain and cane
planted from seed the harvest-monsters carefully culled from the crop
for the plow-and-drag-and-drill-and-fertilize-and-cultivate monsters?
His head was beginning to ache again. A jovial martini-drinker who had
something to do with a bank—a _bank!_—roared, “Hey, fellas! I got a idea
what we can do! Less go on over to _my_ place!”
So they all went, and that disposed of another day.
* * * * *
It blended into a dream of irresponsible childhood. When your clothes
grew shabby you helped yourself to something that fit from your host of
the moment’s wardrobe. When you grew tired of one host you switched to
another. They seldom remembered you from day to day, and they never
asked questions.
Their sex was uninhibited and most of the women were more or less
pregnant most of the time. They fought and sulked and made up and
giggled and drank and ate and slept. All of the men had jobs, and all of
them, once in a while, would remember and stagger over to a phone and
make a call to an automatic receptionist to find out if everything was
going all right with their jobs. It always was. They loved their
children and tolerated anything from them, except shrewd inquisitiveness
which drew a fast bust in the teeth from the most indulgent daddy or
adoring mommy. They loved their friends and their guests, as long as
they weren’t wise guys, and tolerated anything from them—as long as they
weren’t wise guys.
Did it last a day, a week, a month?
Ross didn’t know. The only things that were really bothering Ross were,
first, nobody wouldn’t tell him nothin’ about the blue lights and,
second, that Bernie, he was actin’ like a wise guy.
There came a morning when it ended as it had begun: on somebody’s living
room rug with a headache pounding between his eyes. Helena was sobbing
softly, and that wise guy, Bernie, was tugging at him.
“Lea’ me alone,” ordered Captain Ross without opening his eyes. Wouldn’t
let a man get his rest. What did he have to bring them along for,
anyway? Should have left them where he found them, not brought them to
this place Earth where they could act like a couple of wise guys and
keep getting in his way every time he came close to the blue-light
people, the intelligent people, the people with the answers to——to——
He lay there, trying to remember what the question was.
“——_have_ to get him out of here,” said Helena’s voice with a touch of
hysteria.
“——go back and get that fellow Haarland,” said Bernie’s voice, equally
tense. Ross contemplated the fragments of conversation he had caught,
ignoring what the two were saying to him. Haarland, he thought fuzzily,
_that_ wise guy....
Bernie had him on his feet. “Leggo,” ordered Ross, but Bernie was
tenacious. He stumbled along and found himself in the men’s room of the
apartment. The tired-looking attendant appeared from nowhere and Bernie
said something to him. The attendant rummaged in his chest and found
something that Bernie put into a fizzy drink.
Ross sniffed at it suspiciously. “Wassit?” he asked.
“Please, Ross, drink it. It’ll sober you up. We’ve got to get out of
here—we’re going nuts, Helena and me. This has been going on for weeks!”
“Nope. Gotta find a blue light,” Ross said obstinately, swaying.
“But you aren’t finding it, Ross. You aren’t doing anything except get
drunk and pass out and wake up and get drunk. Come on, drink the drink.”
Ross impatiently dashed it to the floor. Bernie sighed. “All right,
Ross,” he said wearily. “Helena can run the ship; we’re taking off.”
“Go ’head.”
“Good-by, Ross. We’re going back to Halsey’s Planet, where you came
from. Maybe Haarland can tell us what to do.”
“Go ’head. _That_ wise guy!” Ross sneered.
The attendant was watching dubiously as Bernie slammed out and Ross
peered at himself in a mirror. “Dime?” the attendant asked in his tired
voice. Ross gave him one and went back to the party.
Somehow it was not much fun.
He shuffled back to the bar. The boilermaker didn’t taste too good. He
set it down and glowered around the room. The party was back in swing
already; Helena and Bernie were nowhere in sight. Let them go, then....
He drank, but only when he reminded himself to. This party had become a
costume ball; one of the men lurched out of the room and staggered back
guffawing. “Looka him!” one of the women shrieked. “He got a woman’s hat
on! Horace, you get the craziest kinda ideas!”
Ross glowered. He suddenly realized that, while he wasn’t exactly sober,
he wasn’t drunk either. Those soreheads, they had to go and spoil the
party....
He began abruptly to get less drunk yet. Back to Halsey’s Planet, they
said? Ask Haarland what to do, they said? Leave him here——?
He was cold sober.
He found a telephone. The automatic Central checked the automatic
Information and got him the Captain of the Port, Baltimore Rocket Field.
The Captain was helpful and sympathetic; caught by the tense note in
Ross’s voice when he told him who wannit to know, the Captain said,
“Gee, buddy, if I’d of known I woulda stopped them. Stoled your ship, is
that what they done? They could get arrested for that. You could call
the cops an’ maybe they could do something——”
Ross didn’t bother to explain. He hung up.
The party was no fun at all. He left it.
Ross walked along the street, hating himself. He couldn’t hate Helena
and Bernie; they had done the right thing. It had been his fault, all
the way down the line. He’d been acting like a silly child; he’d had a
job of work to do, and he let himself be sidetracked by a crazy round of
drinking and parties.
Of course, he told himself, something had been accomplished. Somebody
had built the machines—not the happy morons he had been playing with.
Somebody had invented whatever it was that flared with blue light and
repaired the idiot errors the morons made. Somebody, somewhere.
Where?
Well, he had some information. All negative. At the parties had been
soldiers and politicians and industrialists and clergy and entertainers
and, heaven save the mark, scientists. And none of them had had the wit
to do more than push the Number Three Button when the Green Light A
blinked, by rote. None of them could have given him the answer to the
question that threatened to end human domination over the cosmos; none
of them would have known what the words meant.
Maybe—Ross made himself face it—maybe there was no answer. Maybe even if
he found the intellects that lurked beneath the surface on this ancient
planet, they could not or would not tell him what he wanted to know.
Maybe the intellects didn’t exist.
Maybe he was all wrong in all of his assumptions; maybe he was wasting
his time. But, he told himself wryly, he had fixed it for himself that
time was all he had left. He might as well waste it. He might as well go
right on looking....
A migrant party was staggering down the street toward him, a score of
persons going from one host’s home to another. He crossed to avoid them.
They were singing drunkenly.
Ross looked at them with the distaste of the recently reformed. One of
the voices raised in song caught his ear:
“——bobbed his nose and dyed it rose, and kissed his lady fair, And
sat her down on a cushion brown in a seven-legged chair. ‘By
Jones,’ he said, ‘my shoes are red, and so’s my overcoat, And with
buttons nine in a zigzag line, I’ll——’”
“Doc!” Ross bellowed. “Doc Jones! For God’s sake, come over here!”
They got rid of the rest of Doctor Sam Jones’s party, and Ross sobered
the doctor up in an all-night restaurant. It wasn’t hard; the doctor had
had plenty of practice.
Ross filled him in, carefully explaining why Bernie and Helena had left
him. Doc Jones filled Ross in. He didn’t have much to tell. He had come
to in the ship, waited around until he got hungry, fallen into a
conversation with a rocket pilot on the field—and that was how _his_
round of parties had begun.
Like Ross, Doc, in his soberer moments, had come to the conclusion that
Earth was run by person or persons unseen. He had learned little that
Ross hadn’t found out or deduced. The blue lights had bothered him, too;
he’d asked the pilot about it, and found out about what Ross had—there
appeared to be some sort of built-in safety device which kept the
inevitable accidents from becoming unduly fatal. How they worked, he
didn’t know—
But he had an idea.
“It sounds a little ridiculous, I admit,” he said, embarrassed. “But I
think it might work. It’s a radio program.”
“A radio program?”
“I said it sounded ridiculous. They call it, ‘What’s Biting You,’ and
one of the fellows was telling me about it. It seems that you can appear
before the panel on the program with any sort of problem, any sort at
all, and they guarantee to solve it for you. There’s some sort of bond
posted—I don’t know much about the details, but this man assured me that
the bond was only a formality; they never failed. Of course,” Doc
finished, hearing his own proposal with a touch of doubt, “I don’t know
whether they ever had any problem like this before, but——”
“Yeah,” said Ross. “What have we got to lose?”
They got into the program. It took the techniques of a doubler on an
army chow line and a fair amount of brute strength, but they got to the
head of the queue at the studio and wedged themselves inside. Doc came
close to throttling the man who prowled through the studio audience,
selecting the lucky few who would get on stage—but they got on.
The theme music swelled majestically around them, and a chorus crooned,
“What’s Biting You—Hunh?” It was repeated three times, with crashing
cymbals under the “Hunh?”
Ross listened to the beginning of the program and cursed himself for
being persuaded into such a harebrained tactic. But, he had to admit,
the program offered the only possibility in sight. The central figure
was a huge, jovially grinning figure of papier-mâché, smoking a Smog and
billowing smoke rings at the audience. An announcer, for some obscure
reason in blackface, interviewed the disturbed derelicts who came before
Smiley Smog, the papier-mâché figure, and propounded their problems to
Smiley in a sort of doggerel. And in doggerel the answers came back.
The first person to go up before Smiley was a woman, clearly in her last
month of pregnancy. The announcer introduced her to the audience and
begged for a real loud holler of hello for this poor mizzuble li’l girl.
“Awright, honey,” he said. “You just step right up here an’ let ol’
Uncle Smiley take care of your troubles for you. Less go, now. What’s
Bitin’ You?”
“Uh,” she sobbed, “it’s like I’m gonna have a baby.”
“Hoddya like that!” the announcer screamed. “She’s gonna have a _baby!_
Whaddya say to that, folks?” The audience shrieked hysterically.
“Awright, honey,” the announcer said. “So you’re gonna have a baby, so
what’s bitin’ you about that?”
“It’s my husband,” the woman sniffled. “He don’t like kids. We got eight
already,” she explained. “Jack, he says if we have one more kid he’s
gonna take off an’ marry somebody else.”
“He’s gonna marry somebody else!” the announcer howled. “Hoddya like
that, folks?” There was a tempest of boos. “Awright, now,” the announcer
said, “you just sit there, honey, while I tell ol’ Uncle Smiley about
this. Ya ready? Listen:
“What’s bitin’ this lady is plain to see:
Her husband don’t want no more family!”
The huge figure’s head rotated on a concealed hinge to look down on the
woman. From a squawk-box deep in Smiley’s papier-mâché belly, a weary
voice declaimed:
“If one more baby is your husband’s dread,
Cross him up, lady. Have twins instead!”
The audience roared its approval. The announcer asked anxiously, “Ya get
it? When ya get inta the hospital, like, ya jus’ tell the nurse ya want
to take _two_ kids home with you. See?”
The grateful woman staggered away. Ross gave Doc a poisonous look.
“What else is there to do?” the doctor hissed. “All right, perhaps this
won’t work out—but let’s try!” He half rose, and staggered against the
man next to him, who was already starting toward the announcer. “Go on,
Ross,” Doc hissed venomously, blocking off the other man.
Ross went. What else was there to do?
“What’s biting me,” he said belligerently before the announcer could put
him through the preliminaries, “is simply this: L-sub-T equals
L-sub-zero e to the minus-T-over-two-N.”
Dead silence in the studio. The announcer quavered, “Wh-what was that
again, buddy?”
“I said,” Ross repeated firmly, “L-sub-T equals L-sub-zero e to the——”
“Now, wait a minute, buddy,” the announcer ordered. “We never had no
stuff like that on _this_ program before. Whaddya, some kind of a wise
guy?”
There might have been violence; the conditions were right for it. But
Uncle Smiley Smog saved the day.
The papier-mâché figure puffed a blinding series of smoke rings at Ross.
From its molded torso, the weary voice said:
“If you’re looking for counsel sagacious and wise,
The price is ten cents. It’s right under your eyes.”
They left the studio in a storm of animosity.
“Maybe we could have collected the forfeit,” Doc said hopefully.
“Maybe we could have collected some lumps,” Ross growled. “Got any more
ideas?”
The doctor sipped his coffee. “No,” he admitted. “I wonder—No, I don’t
suppose that means anything.”
“That jingle? Sure it means something, Doc. It means I should have had
my head examined for letting you talk me into that performance.”
The doctor said rebelliously, “Maybe I’m wrong, Ross, but I don’t see
that you’ve had any ideas than panned out much better.”
Ross got up. “All right,” he admitted. “I’m sorry if I gave you a hard
time. It’s all this coffee and all the liquor underneath it; I swear, if
I ever get back to a civilized planet I’m going on a solid diet for a
month.”
They headed for the room marked “Gents,” Ross sullenly quiet, Doc
thoughtfully quiet.
Doc said reflectively, “‘The price is ten cents.’ Ross, could that mean
a paper that we could buy on a newsstand, maybe?”
“Yeah,” Ross said in irritation. “Look, Doc, don’t give it another
thought. There must be some way to straighten this thing out; I’ll think
of it. Let’s just make believe that whole asinine radio program never
happened.” The attendant materialized and offered Ross a towel.
“Dime?” he said wearily.
Ross fished absently in his pocket. “The thing that bothers me, Doc,” he
said, “is that I know there are intelligent people somewhere around. I
even know what they’re doing, I bet. They’re doing exactly what I tried
to do: acted as stupid as anybody else, or stupider. I’d make a guess,”
he said, warming up, “that if we could just make a statistical analysis
of the whole planet and find the absolute stupidest-seeming people of
the lot, we’d——”
He ran out of breath all at once. His eyes bulged.
He looked at the men’s-room attendant, and at the ten-cent piece in his
own hand.
“You!” he breathed.
The attendant’s face suddenly seemed to come to life. In a voice that
was abruptly richer and deeper than before, the man said: “Yes. You had
to find us yourself, you know.”
..... 14
THERE was a home base, a gigantic island called Australia, to which they
took Ross and Doc Jones in a little car that sprouted no wings and
flashed no rockets, but flew.
They lived underground there, invisible to goggling passengers and
crewmen aboard the “rockets.” (They weren’t rockets. They were
turbo-jets. But it made the children happy to think that they had
rockets, so iron filings were added to the hot jet stream, and they
sparkled in magnificent display.)
There they were born, and there they spent strange childhoods, learning
such things as psychodynamics and teleportation. By the time they were
eight months or so old they thought it amusing to converse of Self and
the Meaning of Meaning. By eighteen months a dozen infants would chat in
_terza rima_. But by the age of two they had put such toys behind them
with a sigh of pleasant regret. They would revert to them only for such
purposes as love-making or choral funeral addresses.
They were then of an age to begin their work.
They were born there, and trained there for terrible tasks. And they
died there, at whatever risk. For that they would not surrender: their
right to die among their own.
But their lives between cradle and grave, those they gave away.
Nursemaids? What else can one call them?
They explained it patiently to Ross and the doctor.
“The pattern emerged clearly in the twentieth century. Swarming slums
abrawl with children, children, children everywhere. Walk down a Chicago
Southside street, and walk away with the dazed impression that all the
world was pregnant. Walk through pretty, pleasant Evanston, and find the
impression wrong. Those who lived in Evanston were reasonable people.
They waited and thought. Being reasonable, they saved and planned. Being
reasonable, they resorted to gadgets or chemicals or continence.
“A woman of the period had some three hundred and ninety opportunities
to conceive a child. In the slums and the hills they took advantage of
as many of them as they might. But around the universities, in the
neighborhoods of the well-educated and the well-to-do, what was the
score?
“First, education, until the age of twenty. This left two hundred and
ninety-nine opportunities. Then, for perhaps five years, shared work;
the car, the mortgage, the furniture, that two salaries would pay off
earlier than one. Two hundred and thirty-four opportunities were left.
Some of them were seized: a spate of childbearing perhaps would come
next. But subtract a good ten years more at the end of the cycle, for
the years when a child would be simply too late—too late for fashion,
too late for companionship with the first-born. We started with three
hundred and ninety opportunities. We have, perhaps, one hundred and
forty-four left.
“Is that the roster complete? No. There is the battle of the budget: No,
not right now, not until the summer place is paid for. And more. The
visits from the mothers-in-law, the quarterly tax payments, the
country-club liaisons and the furtive knives behind the brownstone
fronts and what becomes of fertility—they have all been charted. But
these are superfluous. The ratio 390:144 points out the inevitable. As
three hundred and ninety outweighs one hundred and forty-four, so the
genes of the slovenly and heedless outweigh the thoughtful and slow to
act.
“We tampered with the inevitable.
“The planet teemed and burst. The starships went forth. The strong,
bright, quick ones went out in the ships. Two sorts were left: The
strong ones who were not bright, the bright ones who were not strong.
“We are the prisoners of the planet. We cannot leave.
“The children—the witless ones outside—can leave. But who would have
them?”
Ross peered into the shifting shadows. “But,” he said, “you are the
masters of the planet——”
“_Masters?_ We are slaves! Fully alive only here where we are born and
die. Abstracted and as witless as they when we are among _them_—well we
might be. For each of us, square miles to stand guard over. Our minds
roving across the traps we dare not ignore, ready to leap out and
straighten these children’s toppling walls of blocks, ready to warn the
child that sharp things cut and hot things burn. The blue lights—did you
think they were machines?” They were _us_!
“You’re torturing yourselves!” Ross exploded. “Let them die.”
“Let—ten—billion—children—die? We are not such monsters.”
Ross was humbled before their tragedy. Diffidently he spoke of Halsey’s
Planet, Ragansworld, Azor, Jones. He warmed to the task and was growing,
he thought, eloquent when their smiles left him standing ashamed.
“I don’t understand,” he said, almost weeping.
The voice corrected him: “You do. But you do not—yet—know that you do.
Consider the facts:
“Your planet. Sterile and slowly dying.
“The planets you have seen. One sterile because it is imprisoned by
ancients, one sterile under an in-driven matriarchal custom, one sterile
because all traces of divergence have been wiped out.
“Earth. Split into an incurable dichotomy—the sterility of brainless
health, the sterility of sick intellect.
“Humanity, then, imprisoned in a thousand sterile tubes, cut off each
from the other, dying. We feared war, and so we isolated the members
with a wall of time. We have found something worse to fear. What if the
walls are cracked?”
“Crack the walls? How? Is it too late?”
Somehow the image of Helena was before him.
“Is it too late?” they gently mocked. “Surely you know. How? Perhaps you
will ask her.”
The image of Helena was blushing.
Ross’s heart leaped. “As simple as that?”
“For you, yes. For others there will be lives spent over the lathes and
milling machines, eyes gone blind in calculating and refining
trajectories, daring ones lost screaming in the hearts of stars, or
gibbering with hunger and pain as the final madness closes down on them,
stranded between galaxies. There will be martyrs to undergo the worst
martyrdom of all—which is to say, they will never know of it. They will
be unhappy traders and stock-chasers, grinding their lives to smooth
dull blanks against the wearying routine so that the daring ones may go
forth to the stars. But for you—you have seen the answer.
“Old blood runs thin. Thin blood runs cold. Cold blood dies. Let the
walls crack.”
There was a murmuring in the shadows that Ross could not hear. Then the
voice again, saying a sort of good-by.
“We have had a great deal of experience with children, so we know that
they must not be told too much. There is nothing more you need be told.
You will go back now——”
Ross dared interrupt. “But our ship—the others have taken it away——”
Again the soundless laughter. “The ship has not been taken far. Did you
think we would leave you stranded here?”
Ross peered hard into the shadows. But only the shadows were there, and
then he and Jones were in the shadows no longer.
“Ross!” Helena was hysterical with joy. Even Bernie was stammering and
shaking his head incredulously. “Ross, dearest! We thought—And the ship
acted all _funny_, and then it landed here and there just wasn’t anybody
around, and I couldn’t make it go again——”
“It will go now,” Ross promised. It did. They sealed ship; he took the
controls; and they hung in space, looking back on a blue-green planet
with a single moon.
There were questions; but Ross put an end to questions. He said, “We’re
going back to Halsey’s Planet. Haarland wanted an answer. We’ve found
it; we’ll bring it to him. The F-T-L families have kept their secret too
well. No wars between the planets—but stagnation worse than wars. And
Haarland’s answer is this: He will be the first of the F-T-L traders.
He’ll build F-T-L ships, and he’ll carelessly let their secrets be
stolen. We’ll bridge the galaxy with F-T-L transports; and we’ll pack
the ships with a galaxy of crews! New genes for old; hybrid vigor for
dreary decay!
“Do you see it?” His voice was ringing loud; Helena’s eyes on him were
adoring. “Mate Jones to Azor, Halsey’s Planet to Earth. Smash the
smooth, declining curve! Cross the strains, and then breed them back.
Let mankind become genetically wild again instead of rabbits isolated in
their sterile hutches!”
Exultantly he set up the combinations for Halsey’s Planet on the Wesley
board.
Helena was beside him, proud and close, as he threw in the drive.