Search the Sky

by Frederik Pohl

  “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 C2 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 Cymus 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 Cyrnus 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 film reels; 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 coordinates for Ragansworld are—”

  “Skip the coordinates,” 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.

  • • • • Five

  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. 9,400 m.; mean orbit 0.8 AU,” and its coordinates went on to describe it as the fourth planet of a small G-type sun. There had been some changes made: the coordinates 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 longliners 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 sec somebody! Keep your dirty hands oil 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 barrackslike 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 further 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 jerke
d 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 on to 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.”