Search the Sky, Page 2

  Marconi said succinctly, “Look in the star charts. It’s there.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “But, hell,” Marconi said in annoyance. “What in the world has got into you, Ross? Earth is a planet like any other planet. The starship Halsey colonized in was a starship like any other starship—only bigger. I guess, that is—I wasn’t there. After all, what are the longliners but colonists? They happen to be going to planets that are already inhabited, that’s all. So a starship is nothing new or even very interesting, and this is beginning to bore me, and you ought to read your urgent-priority-rush message.”

  Ross felt repentant—knowing that that was just how Trader Marconi wanted him to feel. He said slowly, “I’m sorry if I’m being a nuisance, Marconi. You know how it is when you feel stale and restless. I know all the stories—but it’s so damned hard to believe them. The famous colonizing ships. They must have been absolutely gigantic to take any reasonable number of people on a closed-circuit, multigeneration ride. We can’t build them that big now!”

  “No reason to.”

  “But we couldn’t if we had to. Imagine shooting those things all over the Galaxy. How many inhabited planets in the charts—five hundred? A thousand? Think of the technology, Marconi. What became of it?”

  “We don’t need that sort of technology any more,” Marconi explained. “That job is done. Now we concentrate on more important things. Learning to live with each other. Developing our own planet. Increasing our understanding of social factors and demographic—”

  Ross was laughing at last. “Well, Marconi,” he said at last, “That takes care of that! We sure have figured out how to handle the social factors, all right. Every year there are fewer of them to handle. Pretty soon we’ll all be dead, and then the problem can be marked ‘solved’.”

  Marconi laughed too—eagerly, as if he’d been waiting for the chance. He said, “Now that that’s settled, are you going to open your message? Are you at least going to have some lunch?”

  The Yards messenger stumbled up to their table again, this time with an envelope for Marconi. He looked sharply at Ross’s unopened envelope and said nothing, pointedly. Ross guiltily picked it up and tore it open. You could act like a sulky child in front of a friend, but strangers didn’t understand.

  The message was from his office:

  RADAR REPORTS HIGH VELOCITY SPACECRAFT ON AUTOCONTROLS. FIRST APPROXIMATION TRAJECTORY INDICATES INTERSTELLAR ORIGIN. PROBABLE ETA YARDS 1500. NO RADIO MESSAGES RECEIVED. DON’T HAVE TO TELL YOU TO GET ON THIS IMMEDIATELY AND GIVE IT YOUR BEST.

  OLDHAM.

  Ross looked at Marconi, whose expression was perturbed. “Bet I know what your message says,” he offered with an uneasy quaver in his voice.

  Marconi said: “I’ll bet you do. Oldham’s radar setup on Sunward always has been better than Haarland’s. Better location. Man, you are in trouble! Let’s get out there and hope nobody’s missed you so far.”

  They grabbed sandwiches from the snack bar on the way out and munched them while the Yards jeep took them to the ready line. Skirting the freighters in their pits, slipping past the enormous overhaul sheds, they saw excited debates going on. Twice they were passed by Yards vehicles heading toward the landing area. Halfway to the line they heard the recall sirens warning everybody and everything out of the ten seared acres surrounded by homing and Ground-Controlled Approach radars. That was where the big ones were landed.

  The ready line was jammed when they got there. Ships from one or another of the five moons that circled Halsey’s Planet were common; the moons were the mines. Even the weekly liner and freighters from the colony on Sunward, the planet next in from Halsey’s, were routine to the Yards workers. But to anybody an interstellar ship was a sensation, a once-or-twice-in-a-lifetime thrill.

  Protocols were uncertain. Traders argued about the first crack at the strangers and their goods. A dealer named Aalborg said the only fair system would be to give every trader there an equal opportunity to do business—in alphabetical order. Everybody agreed that under no circumstances should the man from Leverett and Sons be allowed to trade—everybody, except the man from Leverett and Sons. He pointed out that his firm was the logical choice because it had more and fresher experience in handling interstellar goods than any other.

  They almost mobbed him.

  It wasn’t merely money that filled the atmosphere with electric tingles. The glamor of time-travel was on them. The crew aboard that ship were travelers of time as well as space. The crew that had launched the ship was dust. The crew that served it now had never seen a planet.

  There was even some humility in the crowd. There were thoughtful ones among them who reflected that it was not, after all, a very great feat to hitch a rocket to a shell and lob it across a few million miles to a neighboring planet. It was eclipsed by the tremendous deed whose climax they were about to witness. The thoughtful ones shrugged and sighed as they thought that even the starship booming down toward Halsey’s Planet—fitted with the cleverest air replenishers and the most miraculously efficient waste converters—was only a counter in the game whose great rule was the mass-energy formulation of the legendary Einstein: that there is no way to push a material object past the speed of light.

  A report swept the field that left men reeling in its wake. Radar Track confirmed that the ship was of unfamiliar pattern. All hope that it might be a starship launched from this very spot on the last leg of a stupefying round trip was officially dead. The starship was foreign.

  “Wonder what they have?” Marconi muttered.

  “Trader!” Ross sneered ponderously. He was feeling better; the weight of depression had been lifted for the time being, either by his confession or the electric atmosphere. If every day were like this, he thought vaguely.

  “Let’s not kid each other,” Marconi was saying exuberantly. “This is an event, man! Where are they from, what are they peddling? Do I get a good cut at their wares? It could be fifty thousand shields for me in commission alone, Lurline and I could build a tower house on Great Blue Lake with that kind of money, with a whole floor for her parents! Ross, you just don’t know what it is to really be in love. Everything changes.” A jeep roared up and slammed to a stop; Ross blinked and yelled: “Here it comes!”

  They watched the ground-controlled approach with the interest of semiprofessionals and concealed their rising excitement with shop talk.

  “Whups! There goes the high-power job into action.” Marconi pointed as a huge dish antenna swiveled ponderously on its mast. “Seems the medium-output dishes can’t handle her.”

  “Maybe the high-power dish can’t either. She might be just plain shot.”

  “Standard, sealed GCA doesn’t get shot, my young friend. Not in a neon-atmosphere tank it doesn’t.”

  “Maybe along about the fifth generation they forgot what it was and cut it open with an acetylene torch to see what was inside.”

  “Bad luck for us in that case, Ross.” The ship steadied on a due-west course and flashed across the heavens and over the horizon.

  “Somebody decided a braking ellipse or two was in order. What about line of sight?”

  “No sweat. The GCA jockey—and I’d bet it’s Delafield himself—pushes a button that hooks him into the high-power dish at every rocket field on Halsey’s. It’s been all thought out. There’s a potential fortune aboard that longliner and Fields Administration wants its percentage for servicing and accommodating.”

  “Wonder what they have?”

  “I already asked that one, Ross.”

  “So you did.”

  They lapsed into silence until the rocket boomed in again from the east, high and slow. The big dish swiveled abruptly and began tracking again.

  “He’ll try to bring her down this time. Yes! There go fore and stabilizing jets.”

  Flame jutted from the silvery speck high in the blue; its apparent speed slowed to a crawl. It vanished for a second as steering jets turned her slowly endwise. They caught
sight of the stern jets when they blasted for the descent.

  It was uneventful—just the landing of a very, very big rocket. When a landing is successful it is like every other successful landing ever made.

  But the action that the field whirled into immediately following the landing was far from routine. The bullhorns roared that all traders, wipers, rubbernecks, and visitors were to get behind the ready lines and stay there. All Class-Three-and-higher Field personnel were to take stations for longliner clearance. The weapons and decontamination parties were to take their stations immediately. Captain Delafield would issue all future orders and don’t let any of the traders talk you out of it, men. Captain Delafield would issue all future orders.

  Ross watched in considerable surprise as Field men working with drilled precision broke out half a dozen sleek, needlenosed guns from an innocent-looking bay of the warehouse and manhandled them into position. From another bay a large pressure tank was hauled and backed against the lock of the starship. Ross could see the station medic bustlingly supervise that, and the hosing of white gunk on to the juncture between tank and ship.

  Delafield crossed the stretch from the GCA complex to the tank, vanished into it through a pressure-fitted door and that was that. The tank had no windows.

  Ross said to Marconi, wonderingly: “What’s all this about? There was Doc Gibbons handling the pressure tank, there was Chunk Blaney rolling out a God-damned cannon I never knew was there—how many more little secrets are there that I don’t know about?”

  Marconi grinned. “They have gun drill once a month, my young friend, and they never say a word about it. Let the right rabble-rouser get hold of the story and he might sail into oil ice on a platform of “Keep the bug-eyed monsters off of Halsey’s Planet.” You have to have reasonable precautions, military and medical, though—and this is the straight goods—there’s never been any trouble of either variety.”

  The conversation died and there was a long, boring hour of nothing. At last Delafield appeared again. One of the decontamination party ran up in a jeep with a microphone.

  “What’ll it be?” Ross demanded. “Alphabetic order? Or just a rush?”

  The announcement floored him. “Representative of the Haarland Trading Corporation please report to the decontamination tank.”

  The representative of the Haarland Trading Corporation was Marconi.

  “Hell,” Ross said bitterly. “Good luck with them, whoever they are.”

  Marconi brooded for a moment and then said gruffly, “Come on along.”

  “You mean it?”

  “Sure. Uh—naturally, Ross, you’ll give me your word not to make any commercial offers or inquiries without my permission.”

  “Oh. Naturally.” They started across the field and were checked through the ready line, Marconi cheerfully presenting his identification and vouching for Ross.

  Captain Delafield, at the tank, snapped, “What are you doing here, Ross? You’re Oldham’s man. I distinctly said—”

  “My responsibility, Captain. Will that do it?” Marconi asked.

  Delafield snapped, “It’ll be your fundament if Haarland hears about it. Actually it’s the damnedest situation—they asked for Haarland’s.”

  Marconi looked frightened and his hand involuntarily went to his breast pocket. He swallowed and asked, “Where are they from?”

  Delafield grimaced and said, “Home.”

  Marconi exploded, “Oh, no!”

  “That’s all I can get out of them. I suppose their trajectory can be analyzed, and there must be books. We haven’t been in the ship yet. Nobody goes in until it gets sprayed, rayed, dusted, and busted down into its component parts. Too many places for nasty little mutant bacteria and viruses to lurk.”

  “Sure, Captain. ‘Home’, eh? They’re pretty simple?”

  “Happy little morons. Fifteen of them, ranging in age from one month to what looks like a hundred and twenty. All they know is “home” and “we wish to see the representative of the Haarland Trading Corporation.” First the old woman said it. Then the next in line—he must be about a hundred—said it. Then a pair of identical twins, fifty-year-old women, said it in chorus. Then the rest of them on down to the month-old baby, and I swear to God he tried to say it. Well, you’re the Haarland Trading Corporation. Go on in.”

  • • • • Two

  They were all naked. Why not? There’s no weather in a space ship. All of them laughed when Ross and Marconi came in through the lock except the baby, who was nursing at the breast of a handsome woman. Their laughter was what attracted Ross immediately. Cheerful—no meanness in it. The happy yelping of puppies at play with a red rubber bone.

  A stab went through him as the pleasure in their simple happiness turned to recollection and recognition. His wife of a decade ago.

  Ross studied them with amazement, expecting to find her features in their features, her figure in theirs. And failed. Yet they reminded him inescapably of his miserable year with that half-a-woman, hut they were physically no kin of hers. They were just cheerful laughers who he knew were less than human.

  The cheerful laughers exposed unblemished teeth in all their mouths, including that of the hundred-and-twenty-year-old matriarch. Why not? If you put calcium and fluorides into a closed system, they stay there.

  The old woman stopped laughing at them long enough to say to Marconi, “We wish to see the representative of the Haarland—”

  “Yes, I know. I’m the representative of the Haarland Trading Corporation. Welcome to Halsey’s Planet. May I ask what your name is, ma’am?”

  “Ma,” she said genially.

  “Pleased to meet you, Ma. My name’s Marconi.”

  Ma said, bewildered, “You just said you were the representative of the Haarland Trading—”

  “Yes, Ma, but that’s all right. Let’s say that’s my other name. Two names—understand?”

  She laughed at the idea of two names, wonderingly.

  Marconi pressed, “And what’s the name of this gentleman?”

  “He isn’t Gentleman. He’s Sonny.”

  Sonny was a hundred years old.

  “Pleased to meet you, Sonny. And your name, sir?”

  “Sonny,” said a redheaded man of eighty or thereabouts. The identical-twin women were named The Kids. The baby was named Him. The rest of the troop were named Girl, Ma, or Sonny. After introductions Ross noticed that Him had been passed to another Ma who was placidly suckling him. She had milk; it dribbled from the corner of the baby’s mouth. “There isn’t another baby left in the ship, is there?” Ross asked in alarm.

  They laughed and the Ma suckling the baby said: “There was, but she died. Mostly they do when you put them into the box after they get born. Ma here was lucky. Her Him didn’t die.”

  “Put them in the box? What box? Why?

  Marconi was nudging him fiercely in the ribs. He ignored it.

  They laughed amiably at his ignorance and explained that the box was the box, and that you put your newborn babies into it because you put your newborn babies into it.

  A beep tone sounded from the ship.

  Ma said, “We have to go back now, The Representative of the Haarland Trading Corporation Marconi.”

  “What for?”

  Ma said, “At regular intervals signaled by a tone of six hundred cycles and an intermittent downward shifting of the ship lights from standard illumination frequency to a signal frequency of 420 millimicrons, ship’s operating personnel take up positions at the control boards for recalibration of ship-working meters and instruments against the battery of standard masters. We’ll be right back.”

  They trooped through the hatch, leaving Ross and Marconi staring at each other in the decontamination tank.

  “Well,” Ross said slowly, “at last I know why the Longliner Departments have their little secrets. ‘The box’. I say it’s murder.”

  “Be reasonable,” Marconi told him—but his own face was white under the glaring germicidal lamp
s. “You can’t let them increase without limit or they’d all die. And before they died there’d be cannibalism. Which do you prefer?”

  “Letting kids be born and then snuffing them out if a computer decides they’re the wrong sex or over the quota is inhuman.”

  “I didn’t say I like it, Ross. But it works.”

  “So do pills!”

  “Pills are a private matter. A person might privately decide not to take hers. The box is a public matter and the group outnumbers and overrules a mother who decides not to use it. There’s your question of effectiveness answered, but there’s another point. Those people are sane, Ross. Preposterously naive, but sane! Saner than childless women or sour old bachelors we both know who never had to love anything small and helpless, and so conic to love nobody but themselves. They’re sane. Partly because the women get a periodic biochemical shakeup called pregnancy that their biochemical balance is designed to mesh with. Partly because the men find tenderness and protectiveness in themselves toward the pregnant women. Mostly, I think, because—it’s something to do.

  “Can you imagine the awful monotony of life in the ship? The work is sheer rote and repetition. They can’t read or watch screentapes. They were born in the ship, and the books and screentapes are meaningless because they know nothing to compare them with. The only change they see is each other, aging toward death. Frequent pregnancies are a Godsend to them. They compare and discuss them; they wonder who the fathers are; they make bets of rations; the men brag and keep score. The girls look forward to their first and their last. The jokes they make up about them! The way they speculate about twins! The purgative fear, even, keeps them sane.”

  “And then,” Ross said, “ ‘The box’.”

  Staring straight ahead at the ship’s port Marconi echoed: “Yes. ‘The box’. If there were another way-but there isn’t.”