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 sevenlegged 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. “A wright, 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 that 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.”
• • • • Fourteen
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 bum. 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 pa
ck 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.
Search the Sky Page 17
