Search the Sky by C. M. Kornbluth and Frederik Pohl (best books for students to read .TXT) š
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āMa,ā said Haarland. āThanks very much, but would you skip to the last one?ā
Ma grinned.
āThe message, please,ā Haarland said broodingly.
Ma took a deep breath and rattled off: āL-sub-T equals L-sub-zero e to the minus-T-over-two-N.ā
Ross gaped. āThatās the message?ā
āUsed to be more to it,ā Ma said cheerfully āThatās all there is now, though. The darn thing doesnāt rhyme or anything. I guess thatās the most important part. Anyway, itās the hardest.ā
āItās not as bad as it seems,ā Haarland told Ross. āIāve asked around. It makes a very little sense.ā
āIt does?ā
āWell, up to a point,ā Haarland qualified. āIt seems to be a formula in genetics. The notation is peculiar, but itās all explained, of course. It has something to do with gene loss. Now, maybe that means something and maybe it doesnāt. 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. Somethingās happening. Letās find out what it is, Ross.ā The old man suddenly buried his face in his hands. In a cracked voice he mumbled, āGene loss and war. Gene loss or war. God, I wish 41somebody would take this right out of my handsāor that I could drop with a heart attack this minute. You ever think of war, Ross?ā
Shocked and embarrassed, Ross mumbled some kind of answer. One might think of war, good breeding taught, but one never talked about it.
āYou should,ā the old man said hoarsely. āWar is what this faster-than-light secrecy and identification rigmarole is all about. Right now war is impossibleābetween solar systems, anyhow, and thatās what counts. A planet might just barely manage to fit an invading multigeneration expedition at gigantic cost, but it never would. The fruits of victoryāloot, political domination, maybe slavesāwould 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 basisābecause a conqueror is a man, and men die. With F-T-Lāfaster-than-light travelāthey 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. Thereās at least a fifty per cent chance of coming out ahead on the investment, isnāt there? Much more attractive deal commercially speaking than our present longliners.ā
Ross had never seen a war. The last on Halseyās 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 wasnāt 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 42and reasons for sniffing around such an unsavory mess.
Ross therefore had not the slightest comprehension of Haarlandās anxiety. He told him so.
āI hope youāre right,ā was all the old man would say. āI hope you donāt learn worse.ā
The rest was work.
He had the Yard workerās familiarity with conventional rocketry, which saved him some study of the fine-maneuvering apparatus of the F-T-L craftābut not much. For a week under Haarlandās 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 Spaceāwhatever 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 andāsomehow!ākept his own complicated affairs going back on Halseyās 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 Halseyās Planet, he showed up in Haarlandās planet-based office for a final, repetitive briefing.
Marconi was there.
He had trouble meeting Rossās eyes, but his handclasp 43was firm and his voice warmly friendlyāand a little envious. āThe very best, Ross,ā he said. āIāI wishāāā He hesitated and stammered. He said, in a flood, āDamn it, I should be going! Do a good job, Rossāand I hope you donāt hate me.ā And he left while Ross, disturbed, went in to see old man Haarland.
Haarland spared no time for sentiment. āYouāre cleared for space flight,ā he growled. āAccording to the visa, youāre going to Sunwardāin case anyone asks you between here and the port. Actually, letās hear where you are going.ā
Ross said promptly, āI 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 areāāā
āSkip the co-ordinates,ā mumbled Haarland, rubbing his eyes. āWhat do you do when you get in contact with a Wesley Drive family?ā
Ross hesitated and licked his lips. āIāwell, itās a little hardāāā
āDammit,ā roared Haarland, āIāve told you a thousand timesāāā
āYessir, I know. All I meant was I donāt exactly understand what Iām looking for.ā
āIf I knew what you were to look for,ā Haarland rasped, āI wouldnāt have to send you out looking! Canāt you get it through your thick head? Something is wrong. I donāt know what. Maybe Iām crazy for bothering about itāheaven knows, Iāve got troubles enough right hereābut we Haarlands have a tradition of service, and maybe itās so old that weāve kind of forgotten just what itās all about. But itās not so old that Iāve forgotten the family tradition. If I had a son, heād be doing this. I counted on Marconi to be 44my son; now all I have left is you. And thatās little enough, heaven knows,ā he finished bitterly.
Ross, wounded, said by rote: āOn 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.ā
Haarland stood up. āAll right,ā he said. āSorry I snapped at you. Come on; Iāll go up to the ship with you.ā
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 Halseyās 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.
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 āRagansworld. Pop. 900,000,000; diam. 9400 m.; mean orbit 0.8 AU,ā 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, Gemserāthere, he was sure, was a world where nothing was seriously awry.
He left the ship mumbling a name to himself: āFranklin Foundation.ā And he was greeted by a corporalās 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 didnāt seem to go in for the elaborate decontamination procedures of Halseyās 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.
46āI would like,ā he said, āto be put in touch with the Franklin Foundation, please.ā
āCome right in here,ā beamed one of the four, and another said:
āDonāt worry about a thing.ā They held the door for him, and he walked into a small and sybaritically furnished room. The second man said, āJust a few questions. Where are you from?ā
Ross said simply, āHalseyās Planet,ā and waited.
Nothing happened, except that all four men nodded comprehendingly, and the questioner made a mark on a sheet of paper. Ross amplified, āFifty-three light years away. You knowāanother star.ā
āCertainly,ā the man said briskly. āYour name?ā
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. Halseyās Planet might be just a back eddy in the main currents of civilization. Quite possibly on another worldāthis one, for instanceātravelers from the stars were a commonplace. The field hadnāt seemed overly busy, though; and there was nothing resembling a spaceship. Unlessāhe thought with a sudden sense of shockāthose rusting hulks clumped together at the edge of the field had once been spaceships. But that was hardly likely, he reassured himself. You just donāt let spaceships rust.
āSex?ā the man asked, and āAge?ā āEducation?ā āMarital status?ā 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. āTau quotient?ā for instance; Ross blinked and said, with an edge to his voice:
āI donāt know what a tau quotient is.ā
āPut him down as zero,ā one of the men advised, and the interlocutor nodded happily.
āWorking-with-others rating?ā he asked, beaming.
Ross said with controlled irritation, āLook, I donāt know anything about these ratings. Will you take me to somebody who can put me in touch with the Franklin Foundation?ā
47The man who was sitting next to him patted him
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