Chapter II: Part 2

As he fell asleep he was remembering what Delafield had told him about the moons and the planet ports. His dreams were of the cities of other planets, and every one of them was populated by aloof Delafields and avaricious Oldhams.

..... 3

“WAKE up, Ross,” Marconi was saying, joggling him. “Come on, wake up.”

Ross thrust himself up on an elbow and opened his eyes. He said with a tongue the size of his forearm in a dust-lined mouth: “Wha’ time is it? Wha’ the hell are you doing here, for that matter?”

“It’s around noon. You’ve slept for three hours; you can get up.”

“Uh.” Ross automatically reached for a cigarette. The smoke got in his eyes and he rubbed them; it dehydrated and seared what little healthy tissue appeared to be left in his mouth. But it woke him up a little. “What are you doing here?” he demanded.

Marconi’s hand was involuntarily on his breast pocket again, the one in which he carried Lurline’s picture. He said harshly: “You want a job? Topside? Better than purser?” He wasn’t meeting Ross’s eye. His gaze roved around the apartment and lighted on a coffee maker. He filled it and snapped it on. “Get dressed, will you?” he demanded.

Ross sat up. “What’s this all about, Marconi? What do you want, anyway?”

Marconi, for his own reasons, became violently angry. “You’re the damnedest question-asker I ever did meet, Ross. I’m trying to do you a favor.”

“What favor?” Ross asked suspiciously.

“You’ll find out. You’ve been bellyaching to me long enough about how dull your poor little life is. Well, I’m offering you a chance to do something big and different. And what do you do? You crawfish. Are you interested or aren’t you? I told you: It’s a space job, and a big one. Bigger than being a purser for Fallon. Bigger than you can imagine.”

Ross began to struggle into his clothes, no more than half comprehending, but stimulated by the magic words. He asked, puzzling sleepily over what Marconi had said, “What are you sore about?” His guess was that Lurline had broken a date—but it seemed to be the wrong time of day for that.

“Nothing,” Marconi said grumpily. “Only I have my own life to live.” He poured two cups of coffee. He wouldn’t answer questions while they sipped the scalding stuff. But somehow Ross was not surprised when, downstairs, Marconi headed his car along the winding road through Ghost Town that led to the Yards.

Every muscle of Ross’s body was stiff and creaky; another six hours of sleep would have been a wonderful thing. But as they drove through the rutted streets of Ghost Town he began to feel alive again. He stared out the window at the flashing ruins, piecing together the things Marconi had said.

“Watch it!” he yelled, and Marconi swerved the car around a tumbled wall. Ross was shaking, but Marconi only drove faster. This was crazy! You didn’t race through Ghost Town as though you were on the pleasure parkways around the Great Blue Lake; it wasn’t safe. The buildings had to fall over from time to time—nobody, certainly, bothered to keep them in repair. And nobody bothered to pick up the pieces when they fell, either, until the infrequent road-mending teams made their rounds.

But at last they were out of Ghost Town, on the broad highway from Halsey City to the port. The administration building and car park was just ahead.

It was there that Marconi spoke again. “I’m assuming, Ross, that you weren’t snowing me when you said you wanted thrills, chills, and change galore.”

“That’s not the way I put it. But I wasn’t snowing you.”

“You’ll get them. Come on.”

He led Ross across the field to the longliner, past a gaggle of laughing, chattering Sonnies and Mas. He ignored them.

The longliner was a giant of a ship, a blunt torpedo a hundred meters tall. It had no ports—naturally enough; the designers of the ship certainly didn’t find any reason for its idiot crew to look out into space, and landings and takeoffs would be remote-controlled. Two hundred years old it was; but its metal was as bright, its edges as sharp, as the newest of the moon freighters at the other end of the hardstand. Two hundred years—a long trip, but an almost unimaginably long distance that trip covered. For the star that spawned it was undoubtedly almost as far away as light would travel in two centuries’ time. At 186,000 miles per second, sixty seconds in a minute, sixty minutes in an hour. Ross’s imagination gave up the task. It was far.

He stared about him in fascination as they entered the ship. He gaped at sterile, gray-walled cubicles, each of which contained the same chair and cot—no screen or projector for longliners. Ross remembered his rash words of the day before about shipping out on a longliner, and shuddered.

“Here we are,” said Marconi stopping before a closed door. He knocked and entered.

It was a cubicle like the others, but there were reels stacked on the floor and a projector. Sitting on the cot in a just-awakened attitude was old man Haarland himself. Beady-eyed, Ross thought. Watchful.

Haarland asked: “Ross?”

“Yes, sir,” Marconi said. There was tension in his voice and attitude. “Do you want me to stay, sir?”

Haarland growled: “Good God, no. You can get out. Sit down, Ross.”

Ross sat down. Marconi, carefully looking neither to right or left, went out and closed the door. Haarland stretched, scratched, and yawned. He said: “Ross, Marconi tells me you’re quite a fellow. Sincere, competent, a good man to give a tough job to. Namely, his.”

“Junior-Fourth Trader?” Ross asked, bewildered.

“A little more dramatic than that—but we’ll come to the details in a minute. I’m told you were ready to quit Oldham for a purser’s berth. That’s ethical. Would you consider it unethical to quit Oldham for Haarland?”

“Yes—I think I would.”

“Glad to hear it! What if the work had absolutely nothing to do with trading and never brings you into a competitive situation with Oldham?”

“Well——” Ross scratched his jaw. “Well, I think that would be all right. But a Junior Fourth’s job, Mr. Haarland——” The floor bucked and surged under him. He gasped, “What was that?”

“Blastoff, I imagine,” Haarland said calmly. “We’re taking off. Better lie down.”

Ross flopped to the floor. It was no time to argue, not with the first-stage pumps thundering and the preheaters roaring their threat of an imminent four-G thrust.

It came like thunder, slapping Ross against the floor plates as though he were glued to them. He felt every tiny wrinkle in every weld he lay on, and one arm had fallen across a film reel. He heaved, and succeeded in levering it off the reel. It thwacked to the floor as though sandbags were stacked meters-high atop it.

Blackout came very soon.

He awoke in free fall. He was orbiting aimlessly about the cubicle.

Haarland was strapped to the cot, absorbed in manipulating the portable projector, trying to thread a free-floating film. Ross bumped against the old man; Haarland abstractedly shoved him off.

He careened from a bulkhead and flailed for a grip.

“Oh,” said Haarland, looking up. “Awake?”

“Yes, awake!” Ross said bitterly. “What is all this? Where are we?”

The old man said formally, “Please forgive my cavalier treatment of you. You must not blame your friend Marconi; he had no idea that I was planning an immediate blastoff with you. I had an assignment for him which he—he preferred not to accept. Not to mince words, Ross, he quit.”

“Quit his job?”

The old man shook his head. “No, Ross. Quit much more than the job of working for me. He quit on an assignment which is—I am sorry if it sounds melodramatic—absolutely vital to the human race.” He suddenly frowned. “I—I think,” he added weakly. “Bear with me, Ross. I’ll try to explain as I go along. But, you see, Marconi left me in the lurch. I needed him and he failed me. He felt that you would be glad to take it on, and he told me something about you.” Haarland glowered at Ross and said, with a touch of bitterness, “A recommendation from Marconi, at this particular point, is hardly any recommendation at all. But I haven’t much choice—and, besides, I took the liberty of calling that pompous young fool you work for.”

“Mister Haarland!” Ross cried, outraged. “Oldham may not be any prize but really——”

“Oh, you know he’s a fool. But he had a lot to say about you. Enough so that, if you want the assignment, it’s yours. As to the nature of the assignment itself——” Haarland hesitated, then said briskly, “The assignment itself has to do with a message my organization received via this longliner. Yes, a message. You’ll see. It has also to do with certain facts I’ve found in its log which, if I can ever get this damned thing working——There we are.”

He had succeeded in threading the film.

He snapped on the projector. On the screen appeared a densely packed block of numerals, rolling up and being replaced by new lines as fast as the eye could take them in. Haarland said, “Notice anything?”

Ross swallowed. “If that stuff is supposed to mean anything to me,” he declared, “it doesn’t.”

Haarland frowned. “But Marconi said——Well, never mind.” He snapped off the projector. “That was the ship’s log, Ross. It doesn’t matter if you can’t read it; you wouldn’t, I suppose, have had much call for that sort of thing working for Oldham. It is a mathematical description of the routing of this ship, from the time it was space-launched until it arrived here yesterday. It took a long time, Ross. The reason that it took a long time is partly that it came from far away. But, even more, there is another reason. We were not this ship’s destination! Not the original destination. We weren’t even the first alternate—or the second alternate. To be exact, Ross, we were the seventh choice for this ship.”

Ross let go of his stanchion, floated a yard, and flailed back to it. “That’s ridiculous, Mr. Haarland,” he protested. “Besides, what has all this to do with——”

“Bear with an old man,” said Haarland, with an amused gleam in his eye.

There was very little he could do but bear with him, Ross thought sourly. “Go on,” he said.

Haarland said professorially, “It is conceivable, of course, that a planet might be asleep at the switch. We could believe it, I suppose, if it seemed that the first-choice planet somehow didn’t pick the ship up when this longliner came into radar range. In that event, of course, it would orbit once or twice on automatics, and then select for its first alternate target—which it did. It might be a human failure in the GCA station—once.” He nodded earnestly. “Once, Ross. Not six times. No planet passes up a trading ship.”

“Mr. Haarland,” Ross exploded, “it seems to me that you’re contradicting yourself all over the place. Did six planets pass this ship up or didn’t six planets pass this ship up? Which is it? And why would anybody pass a longliner up anyhow?”

Haarland asked, “Suppose the planets were vacant?”

“What?” Ross was shaken. “But that’s silly! I mean, even I know that the star charts show which planets are inhabited and which aren’t.”

“And suppose the star charts are wrong. Suppose the planets have become vacant. The people have died off, perhaps; their culture decayed.”

Decay. Death and decay.

Ross was silent for a long time. He took a deep breath. He said at last, “Sorry. I won’t interrupt again.”

Haarland’s expression was a weft of triumph and relief. “Six planets passed this ship up. Remember Leverett’s ship fifteen years ago? Three planets passed that one before it came to us. Nine different planets, all listed on the traditional star charts as inhabited, civilized, equipped with GCA radars, and everything else needed. Nine planets out of communication, Ross.”

Decay, thought Ross. Aloud he said, “Tell me why.”

Haarland shook his head. “No,” he said strongly, “I want you to tell me. I’ll tell you what I can. I’ll tell you the message that this ship brought to me. I’ll tell you all I know, all I’ve told Marconi that he isn’t man enough to use, and the things that Marconi will never learn, as well. But why nine planets that used to be pretty much like our own planet are now out of communication, that you’ll have to tell me.”

Forward rockets boomed; the braking blasts hurled Ross against the forward bulkhead. Haarland rummaged under the cot for space suits. He flung one at Ross.

“Put it on,” he ordered. “Come to the airlock. I’ll show you what you can use to find out the answers.” He slid into the pressure suit, dived weightless down the corridor, Ross zooming after.

They stood in the airlock, helmets sealed. Wordlessly Haarland opened the pet cocks, heaved on the lock door. He gestured with an arm.

Floating alongside them was a ship, a ship like none Ross had ever seen before.

..... 4

PICTURE Leif’s longboat bobbing in the swells outside Ambrose Light, while the twentieth-century liners steam past; a tiny, ancient thing, related to the new giants only as the Eohippus resembles the horse.

The ship that Haarland revealed was fully as great a contrast. Ross knew spaceships as well as any grounder could, both the lumbering interplanet freighters and the titanic longliners. But the ship that swung around Halsey’s Planet was a midget (fueled rocket ships must be huge); its jets were absurdly tiny, clearly incapable of blasting away from planetary gravity; its entire hull length was unbroken and sheer (did the pilot dare fly blind?).

The coupling connections were being rigged between the ships. “Come aboard,” said Haarland, spryly wriggling through the passage. Ross, swallowing his astonishment, followed.

The ship was tiny indeed. When Ross and Haarland, clutching handholds, were drifting weightlessly in its central control cabin, they very nearly filled it. There was one other cabin, Ross saw; and the two compartments accounted for a good nine-tenths of the cubage of the ship. Where that left space for the combustion chambers and the fuel tanks, the crew quarters, and the cargo holds, Ross could not imagine. He said: “All right, Mr. Haarland. Talk.”

Haarland grinned toothily, his expression eerie in the flickering violet light that issued from a gutter around the cabin’s wall.

“This is a spaceship, Ross. It’s a pretty old one—fourteen hundred years, give or take a little. It’s not much to look at, compared with the up-to-date models you’re used to, but it’s got a few features that you won’t find on the new ones. For one thing, Ross, it doesn’t use rockets.” He hesitated. “Ask me what it does use,” he admitted, “and I can’t tell you. I know the name, because I read it: nucleophoretic drive. What nucleophoresis is and how it works, I can’t say. They call it the Wesley Effect, and the tech manual says something about squared miles of acceleration. Does that mean anything to you? No. How could it? But it works, Ross. It works well enough so that this little ship will get you where you’re going very quickly. The stars, Ross—it will take you to the stars. Faster than light. What the top speed is I have no idea; but there is a ship’s log here, too. And it has a three-month entry—three months, Ross!—in which this little ship explored the solar systems of fourteen stars.”

Wide-eyed, Ross held motionless. Haarland paused. “Fourteen hundred years,” he repeated. “Fourteen hundred years this ship has been floating out here. And for all that time, the longliners have been crawling from star to star, while little hidden ships like this one could have carried a thousand times as much goods a million times faster. Maybe the time has come to get the ships out of hiding. I don’t know. I want to find out; I want you to find out for me. I’ll be specific, Ross. I need a pilot. I’m too old, and Marconi turned it down. Someone has to go out there——” he gestured to the blind hull and the unseen stars beyond—“and find out why nine planets are out of communication. Will you do it?”

Ross opened his mouth to speak, and a thousand questions competed for utterance. But what he said, barely aloud, was only: “Yes.”

The far-off stars—more than a thousand million of them in our galaxy alone. By far the greatest number of them drifted alone through space, or with only a stellar companion as utterly unlivable by reason of heat and crushing gravity as themselves. Fewer than one in a million had a family of planets, and most even of those could never become a home for human life.

But out of a thousand million, any fraction may be a very large number, and the number of habitable planets was in the hundreds.

Ross had seen the master charts of the inhabited universe often enough to recognize the names as Haarland mentioned them: Tau Ceti II, Earth, the eight inhabitable worlds of Capella. But to realize that this ship—this ship!—had touched down on each of them, and on a hundred more, was beyond astonishment; it was a dream thing, impossible but unquestioned.

Through Haarland’s burning, old eyes, Ross looked back through fourteen centuries, to the time when this ship was a scout vessel for a colonizing colossus. The lumbering giant drove slowly through space on its one-way trip from the planet that built it—was it semi-mythical Earth? The records were not clear—while the tiny scout probed each star and solar system as it drew within range. While the mother ship was covering a few hundred million miles, the scout might flash across parsecs to scan half a dozen worlds. And when the scout came back with word of a planet where humans could survive, they christened it with the name of the scout’s pilot, and the chartroom labored, and the ship’s officers gave orders, and the giant’s nose swerved through a half a degree and began its long, slow deceleration.

“Why slow?” Ross demanded. “Why not use the faster-than-light drive for the big ships?”

Haarland grimaced. “I’ve got to answer that one for you sooner or later,” he said, “but let me make it later. Anyway, that’s what this ship was: a faster-than-light scout ship for a real longliner. What happened to the longliner the records don’t show; my guess is the colonists cannibalized it to get a start in constructing homes for themselves. But the scout ship was exempted. The captain of the expedition had it put in an orbit out here, and left alone. It’s been used a little bit, now and then—my great-grandfather’s father went clear to 40 Eridani when my great-grandfather was a little boy, but by and large it has been left alone. It had to be, Ross. For one thing, it’s dangerous to the man who pilots it. For another, it’s dangerous to—the Galaxy.”

Haarland’s view was anthropomorphic; the danger was not to the immense and uncaring galaxy, but to the sparse fester of life that called itself humanity.

When the race abandoned Earth, it was a gesture of revulsion. Behind them they left a planet that had decimated itself in wars; ahead lay a cosmos that, in all their searches, had revealed no truly sentient life.

Earth was a crippled world, the victim of its playing with nuclear fission and fusion. But the techniques that gave them a faster-than-light drive gave them as well a weapon that threatened solar systems, not cities; that could detonate a sun as readily as uranium could destroy a building. The child with his forbidden matches was now sitting atop a munitions dump; the danger was no longer a seared hand or blinded eye, but annihilation.

And the decision had been made: secrecy. By what condign struggles the secrecy had been enforced, the secrecy itself concealed. But it had worked. Once the radiating colonizers had reached their goals, the nucleophoretic effect had been obliterated from their records and, except for a single man on each planet, from their minds.

Why the single man? Why not bury it entirely?

Haarland said slowly, “There was always the chance that something would go wrong, you see. And—it has.”

Ross said hesitantly, “You mean the nine planets that have gone out of communication?”

Haarland nodded. He hesitated. “Do you understand it now?” he asked.

Ross shook his head dizzily. “I’m trying,” he said. “This little ship—it travels faster than light. It has been circling out here—how long? Fourteen hundred years? And you kept it secret—you and your ancestors before you because you were afraid it might be used in war?” He was frowning.

“Not ‘afraid’ it would be used,” Haarland corrected gently. “We knew it would be used.”

Ross grimaced. “Well, why tell me about it now? Do you expect me to keep it secret all the rest of my life?”

“I think you would,” Haarland said soberly.

“But suppose I didn’t? Suppose I blabbed all over the Galaxy, and it was used in war?”

Haarland’s face was suddenly, queerly gray. He said, almost to himself, “It seems that there are things worse than war.” Abruptly he smiled. “Let’s find Ma.”

They returned through the coupling and searched the longliner for the old woman. A Sonny told them, “Ma usually hangs around the meter room. Likes to see them blinking.” And there they found her.

“Hello, Haarland,” she smiled, flashing her superb teeth. “Did you find what you were looking for?”

“Perfect, Ma. I want to talk to you under the seal.”

She looked at Ross. “Him?” she asked.

“I vouch for him,” Haarland said gravely. “Wesley.”

She answered, “The limiting velocity is C.”

“But C^2 is not a velocity,” Haarland said. He turned to Ross. “Sorry to make a mystery,” he apologized. “It’s a recognition formula. It identifies one member of what we call the Wesley families, or its messenger, to another. And these people are messengers. They were dispatched a couple of centuries ago by a Wesley family whose ship, for some reason, no longer could be used. Why?—I don’t know why. Try your luck, maybe you can figure it out. Ma, tell us the history again.”

She knitted her brows and began to chant slowly:

“In great-grandfather’s time the target was Clyde,
Rocketry firm and ores on the side.
If we hadn’t of seen them direct we’d of missed ’em;
There wasn’t a blip from the whole damn system.
That was the first.
Before great-grandfather’s day was done
We cut the orbit of Cyrnus One.
The contact there was Trader McCue,
But the sons o’ bitches missed us too.
That was the second.
My grandpa lived to see the green
Of Target Three through the high-powered screen.
But where in hell was Builder Carruthers?
They let us go by like all the others.
That was the——”

“Ma,” said Haarland. “Thanks very much, but would you skip to the last one?”

Ma grinned.

The Haarland Trading Corp. was last
With the fuel down low and going fast.
I’m glad it was me who saw the day
When they brought us down on GCA.
I told him the message; he called it a mystery,
But anyway this is the end of the history.
And it’s about time!

“The message, please,” Haarland said broodingly.

Ma took a deep breath and rattled off: “L-sub-T equals L-sub-zero e to the minus-T-over-two-N.”

Ross gaped. “That’s the message?”

“Used to be more to it,” Ma said cheerfully “That’s all there is now, though. The darn thing doesn’t rhyme or anything. I guess that’s the most important part. Anyway, it’s the hardest.”

“It’s not as bad as it seems,” Haarland told Ross. “I’ve asked around. It makes a very little sense.”

“It does?”

“Well, up to a point,” Haarland qualified. “It seems to be a formula in genetics. The notation is peculiar, but it’s all explained, of course. It has something to do with gene loss. Now, maybe that means something and maybe it doesn’t. But I know something that does mean something: some member of a Wesley Family a couple of hundred years ago thought it was important enough to want to get it across to other Wesley families. Something’s happening. Let’s find out what it is, Ross.” The old man suddenly buried his face in his hands. In a cracked voice he mumbled, “Gene loss and war. Gene loss or war. God, I wish somebody would take this right out of my hands—or that I could drop with a heart attack this minute. You ever think of war, Ross?”

Shocked and embarrassed, Ross mumbled some kind of answer. One might think of war, good breeding taught, but one never talked about it.

“You should,” the old man said hoarsely. “War is what this faster-than-light secrecy and identification rigmarole is all about. Right now war is impossible—between solar systems, anyhow, and that’s what counts. A planet might just barely manage to fit an invading multigeneration expedition at gigantic cost, but it never would. The fruits of victory—loot, political domination, maybe slaves—would never come back to the fitters of the expedition but to their remote descendants. A firm will take a flyer on a commercial deal like that, but no nation would accept a war on any such basis—because a conqueror is a man, and men die. With F-T-L—faster-than-light travel—they might invade Curnus or Azor or any of those other tempting dots on the master maps. Why not? Take the marginal population, hop them up with patriotic fervor and lust for booty, and ship them off to pillage and destroy. There’s at least a fifty per cent chance of coming out ahead on the investment, isn’t there? Much more attractive deal commercially speaking than our present longliners.”

Ross had never seen a war. The last on Halsey’s planet had been the Peninsular Rebellion about a century and a half ago. Some half a million constitutional psychopathic inferiors had started themselves an ideal society with theocratic trimmings in a remote and unfruitful corner of the planet. Starved and frustrated by an unrealistic moral creed they finally exploded to devastate their neighboring areas and were quickly quarantined by a radioactive zone. They disintegrated internally, massacred their priesthood, and were permitted to disperse. It was regarded as a shameful episode by every dweller on the planet. It wasn’t a subject for popular filmreels; if you wanted to find out about the Peninsular Rebellion you went through many successive library doors and signed your name on lists, and were sternly questioned as to your age and scholarly qualifications and reasons for sniffing around such an unsavory mess.

Ross therefore had not the slightest comprehension of Haarland’s anxiety. He told him so.

“I hope you’re right,” was all the old man would say. “I hope you don’t learn worse.”

* * * * *

The rest was work.

He had the Yard worker’s familiarity with conventional rocketry, which saved him some study of the fine-maneuvering apparatus of the F-T-L craft—but not much. For a week under Haarland’s merciless drilling he jetted the ship about its remote area of space, far from the commerce lanes, until the old man grudgingly pronounced himself satisfied.

There were skull-busting sessions with the Wesley drive, or rather with a first derivative of it, an insane-looking object which you could vaguely describe as a fan-shaped slide rule taller than a man. There were twenty-seven main tracks, analogues of the twenty-seven main geodesics of Wesley Space—whatever they were and whatever that was. Your cursor settings on the main tracks depended on a thirty-two step computation based on the apparent magnitudes of the twenty-seven nearest celestial bodies above a certain mass which varied according to yet another lengthy relationship. Then, having cleared the preliminaries out of the way, you began to solve for your actual setting on the F-T-L drive controls.

Somehow he mastered it, while Haarland, driving himself harder than he drove the youth who was to be his exploring eyes and ears, coached him and cursed him and—somehow!—kept his own complicated affairs going back on Halsey’s Planet. When Ross had finally got the theory of the Wesley Drive in some kind of order in his mind, and had learned all there was to learn about the other worlds, and had cut his few important ties with Halsey’s Planet, he showed up in Haarland’s planet-based office for a final, repetitive briefing.

Marconi was there.

He had trouble meeting Ross’s eyes, but his handclasp was firm and his voice warmly friendly—and a little envious. “The very best, Ross,” he said. “I—I wish——” He hesitated and stammered. He said, in a flood, “Damn it, I should be going! Do a good job, Ross—and I hope you don’t hate me.” And he left while Ross, disturbed, went in to see old man Haarland.

Haarland spared no time for sentiment. “You’re cleared for space flight,” he growled. “According to the visa, you’re going to Sunward—in case anyone asks you between here and the port. Actually, let’s hear where you _are_ going.”

Ross said promptly, “I am going on a mission of exploration and reconnaissance. My first proposed destination is Ragansworld; second Gemser, third Azor. If I cannot make contact with any of these three planets, I will select planets at random from the master charts until I find some Wesley Drive families somewhere. The contacts for the first three planets are: On Ragansworld, Foley Associates; on Gemser, the Franklin Foundation; on Azor, Cavallo Machine Tool Company. F-T-L contacts on other planets are listed in the appendix to the master charts. The co-ordinates for Ragansworld are——”

“Skip the co-ordinates,” mumbled Haarland, rubbing his eyes. “What do you do when you get in contact with a Wesley Drive family?”

Ross hesitated and licked his lips. “I—well, it’s a little hard——”

“Dammit,” roared Haarland, “I’ve told you a _thousand_ times——”

“Yessir, I know. All I meant was I don’t exactly understand what I’m looking for.”

“If I knew what you were to look for,” Haarland rasped, “I wouldn’t have to send you out looking! Can’t you get it through your thick head? _Something_ is wrong. I don’t know what. Maybe I’m crazy for bothering about it—heaven knows, I’ve got troubles enough right here—but we Haarlands have a tradition of service, and maybe it’s so old that we’ve kind of forgotten just what it’s all about. But it’s not so old that I’ve forgotten the family tradition. If I had a son, he’d be doing this. I counted on Marconi to be my son; now all I have left is you. And that’s little enough, heaven knows,” he finished bitterly.

Ross, wounded, said by rote: “On landing, I will attempt at once to make contact with the local Wesley Drive family, using the recognition codes given me. I will report to them on all the data at hand and suggest the need for action.”

Haarland stood up. “All right,” he said. “Sorry I snapped at you. Come on; I’ll go up to the ship with you.”

And that was the way it happened. Ross found himself in the longliner, then with Haarland in the tiny, ancient, faster-than-light ship which had once been tender to the ship that colonized Halsey’s Planet. He found himself shaking hands with a red-eyed, suddenly-old Haarland, watching him crawl through the coupling to the longliner, watching the longliner blast away.

He found himself setting up the F-T-L course and throwing in the drive.

..... 5

ROSS was lucky. The second listed inhabited planet was still inhabited.

He had not quite stopped shuddering from the first when the approach radar caught him. The first planet was given in the master charts as “Ragansworld. Pop. 900,000,000; diam. 9400 m.; mean orbit 0.8 AU,” and its co-ordinates went on to describe it as the fourth planet of a small G-type sun. There had been some changes made: the co-ordinates now intersected well inside a bright and turbulent gas cloud.

It appeared that suppressing the F-T-L drive had not quite annihilated war.

But the second planet, Gemser—there, he was sure, was a world where nothing was seriously awry.

He left the ship mumbling a name to himself: “Franklin Foundation.” And he was greeted by a corporal’s guard of dignified and ceremonially dressed men; they smiled at him, welcomed him, shook his hand, and invited him to what seemed to be the local equivalent of the administration building. He noticed disapprovingly that they didn’t seem to go in for the elaborate decontamination procedures of Halsey’s Planet, but perhaps, he thought, they had bred disease-resistance into their bloodlines. Certainly the four men in his guide party seemed hale and well-preserved, though the youngest of them was not less than sixty.

“I would like,” he said, “to be put in touch with the Franklin Foundation, please.”

“Come right in here,” beamed one of the four, and another said:

“Don’t worry about a thing.” They held the door for him, and he walked into a small and sybaritically furnished room. The second man said, “Just a few questions. Where are you from?”

Ross said simply, “Halsey’s Planet,” and waited.

Nothing happened, except that all four men nodded comprehendingly, and the questioner made a mark on a sheet of paper. Ross amplified, “Fifty-three light years away. You know—another star.”

“Certainly,” the man said briskly. “Your name?”

Ross told him, but with a considerable feeling of deflation. He thought wryly of his own feelings about the longlines and the far stars; he remembered the stir and community excitement that a starship meant back home. Still, Ross told himself. Halsey’s Planet might be just a back eddy in the main currents of civilization. Quite possibly on another world—this one, for instance—travelers from the stars were a commonplace. The field hadn’t seemed overly busy, though; and there was nothing resembling a spaceship. Unless—he thought with a sudden sense of shock—those rusting hulks clumped together at the edge of the field had once been spaceships. But that was hardly likely, he reassured himself. You just don’t let spaceships rust.

“Sex?” the man asked, and “Age?” “Education?” “Marital status?” The questions went on for more time than Ross quite understood; and they seemed far from relevant questions for the most part; and some of them were hard questions to answer. “Tau quotient?” for instance; Ross blinked and said, with an edge to his voice:

“I don’t know what a tau quotient is.”

“Put him down as zero,” one of the men advised, and the interlocutor nodded happily.

“Working-with-others rating?” he asked, beaming.

Ross said with controlled irritation, “Look, I don’t know anything about these ratings. Will you take me to somebody who can put me in touch with the Franklin Foundation?”

The man who was sitting next to him patted him gently on the shoulder. “Just answer the questions,” he said comfortably. “Everything will be all right.”

Ross flared, “The hell everything will——”

Something with electrified spikes in it hit him on the back of the neck.

Ross yelled and ducked away; the man next to him returned a little rod to his pocket. He smiled at Ross. “Don’t feel bad,” he said sympathetically. “Go ahead now, answer the questions.”

Ross shook his head dazedly. The pain was already leaving his neck, but he felt nauseated by the suddenness and sharpness of it; he could not remember any pain quite like that in his life. He stood up waveringly and said, “Wait a minute, now——”

This time it was the man on the other side, and the pain was about twice as sharp. Ross found himself on the floor, looking up through a haze. The man on his right kept the rod in his hand, and the expression on his face, while in no way angry, was stern. “Bad boy,” he said tenderly. “Why don’t you want to answer the questions?”

Ross gasped, “God damn it, all I want is to see somebody! Keep your dirty hands off me, you old fools!” And that was a mistake, as he learned in the blessedly few minutes before he passed out completely under the little rods held by the gentle but determined men.

He answered all the questions—bound to a chair, with two of the men behind him, when he had regained consciousness. He answered every one. They only had to hit him twice.

When they untied him the next morning, Ross had caught on to the local folkways quite well. The fatherly fellow who released him said, “Follow me,” and stood back, smiling but with one hand on one of the little rods. And Ross was careful to say:

“Yes, sir!”

They rode in a three-wheeled car, and entered a barracks-like building. Ross was left alone next to a bed in a dormitory with half a hundred beds. “Just wait here,” the man said, smiling. “The rest of your group is out at their morning session now. When they come in for lunch you can join them. They’ll show you what to do.”

Ross didn’t have too long to wait. He spent the time in conjecture as confused as it was fruitless; he had obviously done something wrong, but just what was it?

If he had had twice as long he would have got no farther toward an answer than he was: nowhere. But a noise outside ended his speculations. He glanced toward the curiously shaped door—all the doors on this planet seemed to be rectangular. A girl of about eighteen was peering inside.

She stared at Ross and said, “Oh!” Then she disappeared. There were footsteps and whispers, and more heads appeared and blinked at him and were jerked back.

Ross stood up in wretched apprehension. All of a sudden he was fourteen years old again, and entering a new school where the old hands were giggling and whispering about the new boy. He swore sullenly to himself.

A new face appeared, halted for an inspection of Ross, and walked confidently in. The man was a good forty years old, Ross thought; perhaps a kind of overseer in this institution—whatever kind of institution it was. He approached Ross at a sedate pace, and he was followed through the door in single file by a couple score men and women. They ranged in age, Ross thought wonderingly, from the leader’s forty down to the late teens of the girl who had first peered in the door, and now was at the end of the procession.

The leader said, “How old are you?”

“Why, uh——” Ross figured confusedly: this planet’s annual orbital period was roughly forty per cent longer than his own; fourteen into his age, multiplied by ten, making his age in their local calculations....

“Why, I’m nineteen of your years old, about. And a half.”

“Yes. And what can you do?”

“Look here, sir. I’ve been through all this once. Why don’t you go and ask those gentlemen who brought me here? And can anybody tell me where the Franklin Foundation is?”

The fortyish fellow, with a look of outrage, slapped Ross across the mouth. Ross knocked him down with a roundhouse right.

A girl yelled, “Good for you, Junior!” and jumped like a wildcat onto a slim, gray-haired lady, clawing, and slapping. The throng dissolved immediately into a wild melee. Ross, busily fighting off the fortyish fellow and a couple of his stocky buddies, noted only that the scrap was youth against age, whatever it meant.

“How _dare_ you?” a voice thundered, and the rioters froze.

A decrepit wreck was standing in the doorway, surrounded by three or four gerontological textbook cases only a little less spavined than he. “Glory,” a girl muttered despairingly. “It would be the minister.”

“What is the meaning of this brawl?” rolled from the wreck’s shriveled lips in a rich basso—no; rolled, Ross noted, from a flat perforated plate on his chest. There was a small, flesh-colored mike slung before his lips. “Who is responsible here?” asked the golden basso.

Ross’s fortyish assailant said humbly: “I am, sir. This new fellow here——”

“Manners! Speak when you’re spoken to.”

Abjectly: “Yes, sir. I’m sorry, sir.”

“Silly fools!” the senile wreck hectored them. “I’m going to take no official notice of this since I’m merely passing through. Luckily for you this is no formal inspection. But you’ve lost your lunch hour with your asinine pranks. Now get back to your work and never let me hear of a disgraceful incident like this again from Junior Unit Twenty-Three.”

He swept out with his retinue. Ross noted that some of the younger girls were crying and that the older men and women were glaring at him murderously.

“We’ll teach you manners, you pup,” the foreman-type said. “You go on the dye vats this afternoon. Any more trouble and you’ll miss a few meals.”

Ross told him: “Just keep your hands off me, mister.”

The foreman-type expanded into a beam of pleasure. “I thought you’d be sensible,” he said. “Everybody to the plant, now!” He collared a pretty girl of about Ross’s age. “Helena here is working out a bit of insolence on the dye vats herself. She’ll show you.” The girl stood with downcast eyes. Ross liked her face and wondered about her figure. Whatever it was like, it was covered from neck to knee by a loose shirt. But the older women wore fitted clothes.

The foreman-type led a grand procession through the door. Helena told Ross: “I guess you’d better get in front of me in line. I go here——” She slipped in deftly, and Ross understood a little more of what went on here. The procession was in order of age.

He had determined to drift for a day or two—not that he seemed to have much choice. The Franklin Foundation, supposedly having endured a good many years, would last another week while he explored the baffling mores of this place and found out how to circumvent them and find his way to the keepers of F-T-L on this world. Nobody would go anywhere with his own ship—not without first running up a setting for the Wesley Drive!

The line filed into a factory whose like Ross had never before seen. He had a fair knowledge of and eye for industrial processes; it was clear that the place was an electric-cable works. But why was the concrete floor dangerously cracked and sloppily patched? Why was the big enameling oven rumbling and stinking? Why were the rolling mills in a far corner unsupplied with guards and big, easy-to-hit emergency cutoffs? Why was the light bad and the air full of lint? Why did the pickling tank fume and make the workers around it cough hackingly? Most pointed of all, why did the dye vats to which Helena led him stink and slop over?

There were grimy signs everywhere, including the isolated bay where braiding cord was dyed the standard code colors. The signs said things like: AGE IS A PRIVILEGE AND NOT A RIGHT. AGE MUST BE EARNED BY WORK. GRATITUDE IS THE INDEX OF YOUR PROGRESS TO MATURITY.

Helena said girlishly as she took his arm and hooked him out of the moving line: “Here’s Stinkville. Believe me, I’m not going to talk back again. After all, one’s maturity is measured by one’s acceptance of one’s environment, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” said Ross. “Listen, Helena, have you ever heard of a place called the Franklin Foundation?”

“No,” she said. “First you climb up here—golly! I don’t even know your name.”

“Ross.”

“All right, Ross. First you climb up here and make sure the yarn’s running over the rollers right; sometimes it gets twisted around and then it breaks. Then you take one of the thermometers from the wall and you check the vat temperature. It says right on the thermometers what it should be for the different colors. If it’s off you turn that gas tap up or down, just a little. Then you check the wringer rolls where the yarn comes out. Watch your fingers when you do! The yarn comes in different thicknesses on the same thread so you have to adjust the wringer rolls so too much dye doesn’t get squeezed out. You can tell by the color; it shouldn’t be lighter after it goes through the rolls. But the yarn shouldn’t come through sloppy and drip dye on the floor while it travels to the bobbin——”

There was some more, equally uncomplicated. He took the yellow and green vats; she took the red and blue. They had worked in the choking stench and heat for perhaps three hours before Ross finished one temperature check and descended to adjust a gas tap. He found Helena, spent and gasping, on the floor, hidden from the rest of the shop by the bulky tanks.

“Heat knock you out?” he asked briskly. “Don’t try to talk. I’ll tote you over by the wall away from the burners. Maybe we’ll catch a little breeze from the windows there.” She nodded weakly.

He picked her up without too much trouble, carried her three yards or so to the wall, still isolated from the rest of the shop. She was ripely curved under that loose shirt, he learned. He set her down easily, crouching himself, and did not take his hands away.

It’s been a long time, he thought—and she was responding! Whether she knew it or not, there was a drowsy smile on her face and her body moved a little against his hands, pleasurably. She was breathing harder.

Ross did the sensible thing and kissed her.

Wildcat!

Ross reeled back from her fright and anger, his face copiously scratched. “I’m dreadfully sorry,” he sputtered. “Please accept my sincerest——”

The flare-up of rage ended; she was sobbing bitterly, leaning against the wall, wailing that nobody had ever treated her like that before, that she’d be set back three years if he told anybody, that she was a good, self-controlled girl and he had no _right_ to treat her that way, and what kind of degenerate was he, not yet twenty and going around kissing girls when _everybody_ knew you went crazy from it.

He soothed her—from a distance. Her sobbing dropped to a bilious croon as she climbed the ladder to the yellow vat, tears still on her face, and checked its temperature.

Ross, wondering if he were already crazy from too much kissing of girls, mechanically resumed his duties. But she had responded. And how long had they been working? And wasn’t this shift ever going to end?

All the shifts ended in time. But there was a catch to it: There was always another shift. After the afternoon shift on the dye vats came dinner—porridge!—and then came the evening shift on the dye vats, and then sleep. The foreman was lenient, though; he let Ross off the vats after the end of the second day. Then it was kitchen orderly, and only two shifts a day. And besides, you got plenty to eat.

But it was a long, long way, Ross thought sardonically to himself, from the shining pictures he had painted to himself back on Halsey’s Planet. Ross the explorer, Ross the hero, Ross the savior of humanity....

Ross, the semipermanent KP.

He had to admit it to himself: The expedition thus far had been a bust. Not only was it perfectly clear that there no longer was a Franklin Foundation on Gemser, but more had been lost than time and effort. For Ross himself, he silently admitted, was as close to lost as he ever wanted to be. He was, in effect, a prisoner, in a prison from which there was no easy escape as long as he was cursed with youthfulness....

Of course, the implications of that were that there was a perfectly easy escape in time. All he had to do was get old enough to matter, on this insane planet. Ninety, maybe. And then he would be perfectly free to totter out to the spaceport, dragoon a squad of juniors into lifting him into the ship, and take off....

Helena was some help. But only psychologically; she was pleasant company, but neither she nor anyone else in the roster of forty-eight to whom he was permitted to speak had ever heard of the Franklin Foundation, or F-T-L travel, or anything. Helena said, “Wait for Holiday. Maybe one of the grownups will tell you then?”

“Holiday?” Ross slid back and scratched his shoulder blades against the corner of his bed. Helena was sprawled on the floor, half watching a projected picture on the screen at the end of the dormitory.

“Yes. You’re lucky, it’s only eight days off. That’s when Dobermann——” she pointed to the foreman——“graduates; he’s the only one this year. And we all move up a step, and the new classes come in, and then we all get everything we want. Well, pretty near,” she amended. “We can’t do anything _bad_. But you’ll see; it’s nice.”

Then the picture ended, and it was calisthenics time, and then lights out. Forty-eight men and women on their forty-eight bunks—the honor system appeared to work beautifully; there had been no signs of sex play that Ross had been able to see—slept the sleep of the innocent. While Ross, the forty-ninth, lay staring into the dark with rising hope.

In the kitchen the next morning he got more information from Helena. Holiday seemed to be a cross between saturnalia and Boy’s Week; for one day of the year the elders slightly relaxed their grip on the reins. On that day alone one could Speak Before Being Spoken To, Interrupt One’s Elders, even Leave the Room without Being Excused.

Whee, Ross thought sourly. But still....

The foreman, Dobermann, once you learned how to handle him, wasn’t such a bad guy. Ross, studying his habits, learned the proper approach and used it. Dobermann’s commonest complaint was of irresponsibility—irresponsibility when some thirty-year-old junior was caught sneaking into line ahead of his proper place, irresponsibility when Ross forgot to make his bed before stumbling out in the dark to his kitchen shift, one awful case of irresponsibility when Helena thoughtlessly poured cold water into the cooking vat while it was turned on. There was a sizzle, a crackle, and a puff of steam, and Helena was weeping over a broken heating element.

Dobermann came storming over, and Ross saw his chance. “That is very irresponsible of you, Helena,” he said coldly, back to Dobermann but entirely conscious of his presence. “If Junior Unit Twenty-Three was all as irresponsible as you, it would reflect badly on Mr. Dobermann. You don’t know how lucky you are that Mr. Dobermann is so kind to you.”

Helena’s weeping dried up instantly; she gave Ross one furious glance, and lowered her eyes before Dobermann. Dobermann nodded approvingly to Ross as he waded into Helena; it was a memorable tirade, but Ross heard only part of it. He was looking at the cooking vat; it was a simple-minded bit of construction, a spiral of resistance wire around a ceramic core. The core had cracked and one end of the wire was loose; if it could be reconnected, the cracked core shouldn’t matter much—the wire was covered with insulation anyhow. He looked up and opened his mouth to say something, then remembered and merely stood looking brightly attentive.

“——looks like you want to go back to the vats,” the foreman was finishing. “Well, Helena, if that’s what you want we can make you happy. This time you’ll be by yourself, too; you won’t have Ross to help you out when the going’s rough. Will she, Ross?”

“No, sir,” Ross said immediately. “Sir?”

Dobermann looked back at him, frowning. “What?”

“I think I can fix this,” Ross said modestly.

Dobermann’s eyes bulged. “Fix it?”

“Yes, sir. It’s only a loose wire. Back where I come from, we all learned how to take care of things like that when we were still in school. It’s just a matter of——”

“Now, hold on, Ross”; the foreman howled. “Tampering with a machine is bad enough, but if you’re going to turn out to be a liar, too, you’re going just too far! School, indeed! You know perfectly well, Ross, that even I won’t be ready for school until after Holiday. Ross, I knew you were a troublemaker, knew it the first day I set eyes on you. School! Well, we’ll see how you like the school I’m going to send you to!”

The vats weren’t so bad the second time. Even though the porridge was cold for two days, until somebody got around to delivering a different though equally worn-out cooking vat.

Helena passed out from the heat three times. And when, on the third time, Ross, goaded beyond endurance, kissed her again, there were no hysterics.

..... 6

FROM birth to puberty you were an infant. From puberty to Dobermann’s age, a junior. For ten years after that you went to school, learning the things you had neither the need nor the right to know before.

And then you were Of Age.

Being Of Age meant much, much more than voting, Ross found out. For one thing, it meant freedom to marry—after the enforced sexlessness of the junior years and the directed breeding via artificial insemination of the Scholars. It meant a healthy head start on seniority, which carried with it all offices and all power.

It meant freedom.