Search the Sky Page 6

  “What is the meaning of this brawl?” rolled from the wreck’s shriveled lips in a rich basso—no; rolled, Ross noted, from a flat perforated plate on his chest. There was a small, flesh-colored mike slung before his lips. “Who is responsible here?” asked the golden basso.

  Ross’s fortyish assailant said humbly. “I am, sir. This new fellow here—”

  “Manners! Speak when you’re spoken to.”

  Abjectly: “Yes, sir. I’m sorry, sir.”

  Silly fools!” the senile wreck hectored them. “I’m going to take no official notice of this since I’m merely passing through. Luckily for you this is no formal inspection. But you’ve lost your lunch hour with your asinine pranks. Now get back to your work and never let me hear of a disgraceful incident like this again from Junior Unit Twenty-Three.”

  He swept out with his retinue. Ross noted that some of the younger girls were crying and that the older men and women were glaring at him murderously.

  “We’ll teach you manners, you pup,” the foreman-type said. “You go on the dye vats this afternoon. Any more trouble and you’ll miss a few meals.”

  Ross told him: “Just keep your hands off me, mister.”

  The foreman-type expanded into a beam of pleasure. “I thought you’d be sensible,” he said. “Everybody to the plant, now!” He collared a pretty girl of about Ross’s age. “Helena here is working out a bit of insolence on the dye vats herself. She’ll show you.” The girl stood with downcast eyes. Ross liked her face and wondered about her figure. Whatever it was like, it was covered from neck to knee by a loose shirt. But the older women wore fitted clothes.

  The foreman-type led a grand procession through the door. Helena told Ross: “I guess you’d better get in front of me in line. I go here—” She slipped in deftly, and Ross understood a little more of what went on here. The procession was in order of age.

  He had determined to drift for a day or two—not that he seemed to have much choice. The Franklin Foundation, supposedly having endured a good many years, would last another week while he explored the baffling mores of this place and found out how to circumvent them and find his way to the keepers of F-T-L on this world. Nobody would go anywhere with his own ship—not without first running up a setting for the Wesley Drive!

  The line filed into a factory whose like Ross had never before seen. He had a fair knowledge of and eye for industrial processes; it was clear that the place was an electric-cable works. But why was the concrete floor dangerously cracked and sloppily patched? Why was the big enameling oven rumbling and stinking? Why were the rolling mills in a far corner unsupplied with guards and big, easy-to-hit emergency cutoffs? Why was the light bad and the air full of lint? Why did the pickling tank fume and make the workers around it cough hackingly? Most pointed of all, why did the dye vats to which Helena led him stink and slop over?

  There were grimy signs everywhere, including the isolated bay where braiding cord was dyed the standard code colors.

  The signs said things like:

  AGE IS A PRIVILEGE AND NOT A RIGHT.

  AGE MUST BE EARNED BY WORK.

  GRATITUDE IS THE INDEX

  OF YOUR PROGRESS TO MATURITY.

  Helena said girlishly as she took his arm and hooked him out of the moving line: “Here’s Stinkville. Believe me, I’m not going to talk back again. After all, one’s maturity is measured by one’s acceptance of one’s environment, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah,” said Ross. “Listen, Helena, have you ever heard of a place called the Franklin Foundation?”

  “No,” she said. “First you climb up here—golly! I don’t even know your name.”

  “Ross.”

  “All right, Ross. First you climb up here and make sure the yarn’s running over the rollers right; sometimes it gets twisted around and then it breaks. Then you take one of the thermometers from the wall and you check the vat temperature. It says right on the thermometers what it should be for the different colors. If it’s off you turn that gas tap up or down, just a little. Then you check the wringer rolls where the yarn conics out. Watch your fingers when you do! The yarn comes in different thicknesses on the same thread so you have to adjust the wringer rolls so too much dye doesn’t get squeezed out. You can tell by the color; it shouldn’t be lighter after it goes through the rolls. But the yarn shouldn’t come through sloppy and drip dye on the floor while it travels to the bobbin—”

  There was some more, equally uncomplicated. He took the yellow and green vats; she took the red and blue. They had worked in the choking stench and heat for perhaps three hours before Ross finished one temperature check and descended to adjust a gas tap. He found Helena, spent and gasping, on the floor, hidden from the rest of the shop by the bulky tanks.

  “Heat knock you out?” he asked briskly. “Don’t try to talk. I’ll tote you over by the wall away from the burners. Maybe we’ll catch a little breeze from the windows there.” She nodded weakly.

  He picked her up without too much trouble, carried her three yards or so to the wall, still isolated from the rest of the shop. She was ripely curved under that loose shirt, he learned. He set her down easily, crouching himself, and did not take his hands away.

  It’s been a long time, he thought—and she was responding! Whether she knew it or not, there was a drowsy smile on her face and her body moved a little against his hands, pleasurably. She was breathing harder.

  Ross did the sensible thing and kissed her.

  Wildcat!

  Ross reeled back from her fright and anger, his face copiously scratched. “I’m dreadfully sorry,” he sputtered. “Please accept my sincerest—”

  The flare-up of rage ended; she was sobbing bitterly, leaning against the wall, wailing that nobody had ever treated her like that before, that she’d be set back three years if he told anybody, that she was a good, self-controlled girl and he had no right to treat her that way, and what kind of degenerate was he, not yet twenty and going around kissing girls when everybody knew you went crazy from it.

  He soothed her—from a distance. Her sobbing dropped to a bilious croon as she climbed the ladder to the yellow vat, tears still on her face, and checked its temperature.

  Ross, wondering if he were already crazy from too much kissing of girls, mechanically resumed his duties. But she had responded. And how long had they been working? And wasn’t this shift ever going to end?

  All the shifts ended in time. But there was a catch to it: There was always another shift. After the afternoon shift on the dye vats came dinner—porridge!—and then came the evening shift on the dye vats, and then sleep. The foreman was lenient, though; he let Ross off the vats after the end of the second day. Then it was kitchen orderly, and only two shifts a day. And besides, you got plenty to eat.

  But it was a long, long way, Ross thought sardonically to himself, from the shining pictures he had painted to himself back on Halsey’s Planet. Ross the explorer, Ross the hero, Ross the savior of humanity . . .

  Ross, the semipermanent K.P.

  He had to admit it to himself: The expedition thus far had been a bust. Not only was it perfectly clear that there no longer was a Franklin Foundation on Gemser, but more had been lost than time and effort. For Ross himself, he silently admitted, was as close to lost as he ever wanted to be. He was, in effect, a prisoner, in a prison from which there was no easy escape as long as he was cursed with youthfulness . . .

  Of course, the implications of that were that there was a perfectly easy escape in time. All he had to do was get old enough to matter, on this insane planet. Ninety, maybe. And then he would be perfectly free to totter out to the spaceport, dragoon a squad of juniors into lifting him into the ship, and take off . . .

  Helena was some help. But only psychologically; she was pleasant company, but neither she nor anyone else in the roster of forty-eight to whom he was permitted to speak had ever heard of the Franklin Foundation, or F-T-L travel, or anything. Helena said, “Wait for Holiday. Maybe one of the grownups will
tell you then.”

  “Holiday?” Ross slid back and scratched his shoulder blades against the corner of his bed. Helena was sprawled on the floor, half watching a projected picture on the screen at the end of the dormitory.

  “Yes. You’re lucky, it’s only eight days off. That’s when Dobermann—” she pointed to the foreman—”graduates; he’s the only one this year. And we all move up a step, and the new classes come in, and then we all get everything we want. Well, pretty near,” she amended. “We can’t do anything bad. But you’ll see; it’s nice.”

  Then the picture ended, and it was calisthenics time, and then lights out. Forty-eight men and women on their forty-eight bunks—the honor system appeared to work beautifully; there had been no signs of sex play that Ross had been able to see—slept the sleep of the innocent. While Ross, the forty-ninth, lay staring into the dark with rising hope.

  In the kitchen the next morning he got more information from Helena. Holiday seemed to be a cross between saturnalia and Boy’s Week; for one day of the year the elders slightly relaxed their grip on the reins. On that day alone one could Speak Before Being Spoken To, Interrupt One’s Elders, even Leave the Room Without Being Excused.

  Whee, Ross thought sourly. But still . . .

  The foreman, Dobermann, once you learned how to handle him, wasn’t such a bad guy. Ross, studying his habits, learned the proper approach and used it. Dobermann’s commonest complaint was of irresponsibility—irresponsibility when some thirty-year-old junior was caught sneaking into line ahead of his proper place, irresponsibility when Ross forgot to make his bed before stumbling out in the dark to his kitchen shift, one awful case of irresponsibility when Helena thoughtlessly poured cold water into the cooking vat while it was turned on. There was a sizzle, a crackle, and a puff of steam, and Helena was weeping over a broken heating element.

  Dobermann came storming over, and Ross saw his chance. “That is very irresponsible of you, Helena,” he said coldly, back to Dobermann but entirely conscious of his presence. “If Junior Unit Twenty-Three was all as irresponsible as you, it would reflect badly on Mr. Dobermann. You don’t know how lucky you are that Mr. Dobermann is so kind to you.” Helena’s weeping dried up instantly; she gave Ross one furious glance, and lowered her eyes before Dobermann. Dobermann nodded approvingly to Ross as he waded into Helena; it was a memorable tirade, but Ross heard only part of it. He was looking at the cooking vat; it was a simple-minded bit of construction, a spiral of resistance wire around a ceramic core. The core had cracked and one end of the wire was loose; if it could be reconnected, the cracked core shouldn’t matter much—the wire was covered with insulation anyhow. He looked up and opened his mouth to say something, then remembered and merely stood looking brightly attentive.

  “—looks like you want to go back to the vats,” the foreman was finishing. “Well, Helena, if that’s what you want we can make you happy. This time you’ll be by yourself, too; you won’t have Ross to help you out when the going’s rough. Will she, Ross?”

  “No, sir,” Ross said immediately. “Sir?”

  Dobermann looked back at him, frowning, “What?”

  “I think I can fix this,” Ross said modestly.

  Dobermann’s eyes bulged. “Fix it?”

  Yes, sir. It’s only a loose wire. Back where I come from, we all learned how to take care of things like that when we were still in school. It’s just a matter of—”

  “Now, hold on, Ross!”; the foreman howled. “Tampering with a machine is bad enough, but if you’re going to turn out to be a liar, too, you’re going just too far! School, indeed!

  You know perfectly well, Ross, that even I won’t be ready for school until after Holiday. Ross, I knew you were a troublemaker, knew it the first day I set eyes on you. School! Well, we’ll see how you like the school I’m going to send you to!”

  The vats weren’t so bad the second time. Even though the porridge was cold for two days, until somebody got around to delivering a different though equally worn-out cooking vat.

  Helena passed out from the heat three times. And when, on the third time, Ross, goaded beyond endurance, kissed her again, there were no hysterics.

  • • • • Six

  From birth to puberty you were an infant. From puberty to Dobermann’s age, a junior. For ten years after that you went to school, learning the things you had neither the need nor the right to know before.

  And then you were Of Age.

  Being Of Age meant much, much more than voting, Ross found out. For one thing, it meant freedom to marry—after the enforced sexlessness of the junior years and the directed breeding via artificial insemination of the Scholars. It meant a healthy head start on seniority, which carried with it all offices and all power.

  It meant freedom.

  As a bare beginning, it meant the freedom to command any number of juniors or scholars. On Ross’s last punitive day in the dye vats, a happy ancient commandeered the entire staff to help set shrubs in his front lawn—a good dozen acres of careful landscaping it was, and the prettiest sight Ross had seen on this ugly planet.

  When they got back to the dye vats, the yellow and blue had boiled over, and broken strands of yarn had fouled all the bobbins. Dobermann raged—at the juniors.

  But then Dobermann’s raging came to an end forever. It was the night before Holiday, and there was a pretty ceremony as he packed his kit and got ready to turn Junior Unit Twenty-Three over to his successor. Everyone was scrubbed, and though a certain amount of license in regard to neatness was allowed between dinner and lights out, each bunk was made and carefully smoothed free of wrinkles. After half an hour of fidgety waiting, Dobermann called—needlessly—for attention, and the minister came in with his ancient retinue.

  The rich mechanical voice boomed out from his breastplate: “Junior Dobermann, today you are a man!” Dobermann stood with his head bowed, silent and content. Junior Unit Twenty-Three chanted antiphonally: “Good-bye, Junior Dobermann!”

  The retinue took three steps forward, and the minister boomed, “Beauty comes with age. Age is beauty!”

  And the chorus: “Old heads are wisest!” Ross, standing as straight as any of them, faked the words with his lips and tongue, and wondered how many repetitions had drilled those sentiments into Junior Unit Twenty-Three.

  There were five more chants, and five responses, and then the minister and his court of four were standing next to Dobermann. Breathing heavily from his exertions, the minister reached behind him and took a book from the hands of the nearest of his retinue. He said, panting, “Scholar Dobermann, in the Book lies the words of the Fathers. Read them and learn.”

  The chorus cried thrice, “The Word of the Fathers Is Law.” And then the minister touched Dobermann’s hand, and in solemn silence, left.

  As soon as the elders had gone, the juniors flocked around Dobermann to wish him well. There was excited laughter in the congratulations, and a touch of apprehension too: Dobermann, with all his faults, was a known quantity, and the members of Junior Unit Twenty-Three were beginning to look a little fearfully at the short, red-headed youth who, from the next day on would be Dobermann’s successor.

  Ross promised himself: He can be good or bad, a blessing or a problem. Bui he won’t be my problem. I’m getting out of here tomorrow!

  Holiday.

  “Oh, it’s fun,” Helena told him enthusiastically. “First you get up early to get the voting out of the way—”

  “Voting?”

  “Sure. Don’t they vote where you come from? I thought everybody voted. That’s democracy, like we have it here.”

  He sardonically quoted one of the omnipresent wall signs: “The happiness of the majority means the happiness of the minority.” He had often wondered what, if anything, it meant. But Helena solemnly nodded.

  They were whispering from their adjoining cots by dim, false dawn filtering through the windows on Holiday morning. They were not the only whisperers. Things were relaxing already.

&n
bsp; “Ross,” Helena said.

  “Yes?”

  “I thought maybe you might not know. On Holiday if you, ah, want to do that again you don’t have to wait until I faint. Ah, of course you don’t do it right out in the open.” Overcome by her own daring she buried her head under the coarse blanket.

  Fine, thought Ross wearily. Once a year—or did Holiday come once a year?—the kids were allowed to play ‘Spin The Bottle”. No doubt their elders thought it was too cute for words: mere tots of thirty and thirty-five childishly and innocently experimenting with sex. Of course it would be discreetly supervised so that nobody would Get In Trouble.

  He was quite sure Helena’s last two faints had been unconvincing phonies.

  The wake-up whistle blew at last. The chattering members of Junior Unit Twenty-Three dawdled while they dressed, and the new foreman indulgently passed out shabby, smutted ribbons which the girls tied in their hair. They had sugar on their mush for breakfast, and Ross’s stomach came near turning as he heard burbles of gratitude at the feast.

  With pushing and a certain amount of inexpert horseplay they formed a column of fours and hiked from the hall—from the whole factory complex, indeed, along a rubberized highway.

  Once you got out of the factory area things became pleasanter by the mile. Hortatory roadside signs thinned out and vanished. Stinking middens of industrial waste were left behind. And then the landscape was rolling, sodded acres with the road pleasantly springy underfoot, the air clean and crisp.

  They oohed and aahed at houses glimpsed occasionally in the distance—always rambling, one-story affairs that looked spanking-new.

  Once a car overhauled them on the highway and slowed to a crawl. It was a huge thing, richly upholstered within. A pair of grim-looking youths were respectively chauffeur and footman; the passenger waved at the troop from Junior Twenty-Three and grinned out of a fantastic landscape of wrinkles. Ross gaped. Had he thought the visiting minister was old? This creature, male or female, was old.