Search the Sky by C. M. Kornbluth and Frederik Pohl (the best electronic book reader .txt) 📖

“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 41somebody 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 42and 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 43was 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 44my 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.