Part 12

The man, the scientist, did something to a glittering control panel that was, literally, more complex than the Wesley board back on the starship. Noise filled the vehicle—noise that Ross identified as music for a moment. It was a starkly simple music whose skeleton was three thumps and a crash, three thumps and a crash. Then followed an antiphonal chant—a clear tenor demanding in a monotone: “Is this your car?” and a tremendous chorally-shouted: “NO!”

Too deep for him, Ross thought forlornly as the car swerved around and sped off. His eyes wandered over the control board and fixed on the largest of its dials, where a needle crawled around from a large forty to a large fifty and a red sixty, proportional to the velocity of the vehicle. Unable to concentrate because of the puzzling music, unable to converse, he wondered what the units of time and space were that gave readings of fifty and sixty for their very low rate of speed—hardly more than a brisk walk, when you noticed the slow passage of objects outside. But there seemed to be a whistle of wind that suggested high speed—perhaps an effect peculiar to the cooling-fin power system, however it worked. He tried to shout a question at the driver, but it didn’t get through. The driver smiled, patted his arm and returned to his driving.

They nosed past a building—cooling fins—and Ross almost screamed when he saw what was on the other side: a curve of highway jammed solid with vehicles that were traveling at blinding speed. And the driver wasn’t stopping.

Ross closed his eyes and jammed his feet against the floorboards waiting for the crash which, somehow, didn’t come. When he opened his eyes they were in the traffic and the needle on the speedometer quivered at 275. He blew a great breath and thought admiringly: reflexes to match their superb intellects, of course. There _couldn’t_ have been a crash.

Just then, across the safety island in the opposing lane, there was a crash.

The very brief flash of vision Ross was allowed told him, incredibly, that a vehicle had attempted to enter the lane going the wrong way, with the consequences you’d expect. He watched, goggle-eyed, as the effects of the crash rippled down the line of oncoming traffic. The squeal of brakes and rending of metal was audible even above the thumping music: “Is this your car?” “NO!”

Thereafter, as they drove, the opposing lane was motionless, but not silent. The piercing blasts of strings and trumpets rose to the heavens from each vehicle, as did the brilliant pyrotechnic jets. A call for help, Ross theorized. The music was beginning to make his head ache. It had been going on for at least ten minutes. Suddenly, blessedly, it changed. There was a great fanfare of trombones in major thirds that seemed to go on forever, but didn’t quite. At the end of forever, the same tenor chanted: “You got a Roadmeister?” and the chorus roared: “_YES!_”

Ross realized forlornly that the music must contain values and subtleties which his coarser senses and undeveloped esthetic background could not grasp. But he wished it would stop. It was making him miss all the scenery. After perhaps the fifteenth repetition of the Roadmeister motif, it ended; the driver, with a look of deep satisfaction, did something to the control board that turned off a subsequent voice before it could get out more than a syllable.

He turned to Ross and yelled above the suddenly-noticeable rush of air, “Talk-talk-talk,” and gave a whimsical shrug.

During the moment his attention wandered from the road, his vehicle rammed the one ahead, decelerated sharply and was rammed by the one behind, accelerated and rammed the one ahead again and then fell back into place.

Ross suddenly realized that he knew what had caused those crumples and crinkles around the periphery of the car.

“Subtle,” the driver yelled. “Indirection. Sneak it in.”

“What?” Ross screamed.

“The commersh,” the driver yelled.

It meant nothing to Ross, and he felt miserable because it meant nothing. He studied the roadside unhappily and almost beamed when he saw a sign coming up. Not advertising, of course, he thought. Perhaps some austere reminder of a whole man’s duty to the race and himself, some noble phrase that summed up the wisdom of a great thinker....

But the sign—and it had cooling fins—declared:

BE SMUG! SMOKE SMOGS!

And the next one urged:

BEAT YOUR SISTER CHEAT YOUR BROTHER BUT SEND SOME SMOGS TO DEAR OLD MOTHER.

It said it on four signs which, apparently alerted by radar, zinged in succession along a roadside track even with the vehicle.

There were more. And worse. They were coming to a city.

Turmoil and magnificence! White pylons, natty belts of green, lacy bridges, the roaring traffic, nimble-skipping pedestrians waving at the cars and calling—greetings? It sounded like “Suvvabih! Suvvabih! Bassa-bassa!” The shops were packed and radiant, dazzling. Ross wondered fleetingly how one parked here, and then found out. A car pulled from the curb and a hundred cars converged on the spot, shrilling their sweet message and spouting their gay sparkles. Theirs too! There were a pair of jolting crashes as it shouldered two other vehicles aside and parked, two wheels over the curb and on the sidewalk.

“Suvvabih-bassa!” shouted drivers, and the man beside Ross gaily repeated the cry. The vehicle’s doors opened and they climbed out into the quick tempo of the street.

It was loud with a melodious babble from speaker horns visible everywhere. The driver yelled cheerfully at Ross: “C’mon. Party.” He followed, dazed and baffled, assailed by sudden doubts and contradictions.

* * * * *

It was a party, all right—twenty floors up a shimmering building in a large, handsome room whose principal decorative motif seemed to be cooling fins.

Perhaps twenty couples were assembled; they turned and applauded as they made their appearance.

The vehicle driver, standing grandly at the head of a short flight of stairs leading to the room, proclaimed: “I got these rocket flyers like on the piece of paper you guys read me. Right off the field. Twenny points. How about that?”

A tall, graying man with a noble profile hurried up and beamed: “Good show, Joe. I knew we could count on you to try for the high-point combo. You was always a real sport. You got the fish?”

“Sure we got the fish.” Joe turned and said to one of the lovely ladies, “Elna, show him the fish.”

She unwrapped a ten-pound swordfish and proudly held it up while Ross, Bernie, and Helena stared wildly.

The profile took the fish and poked it. “Real enough, Joe. You done great. Now if the rocket flyers here are okay you’re okay. Then you got twenny points and the prize.

“You’re a rocket flyer, ain’t you, Buster?”

Ross realized he was being addressed. He croaked: “Men of Earth, we come from a far-distant star in search of——”

The profile said, “Just a minute, Buster. _Just_ a minute. You ain’t from Earth?”

“We come from a far-distant star in search of——”

“Stick to the point, Buster. You ain’t a rocket flyer from Earth? None of you?”

“No,” Ross said. He furtively pinched himself. It hurt. Therefore he must be awake. Or crazy.

The profile was sorrowfully addressing a downcast Joe. “You should of asked them, Joe. You really should of. Now you don’t even get the three points for the swordfish, because you went an’ tried for the combo. It reely is a pity. Din’t you ask them at all?”

Joe blustered, “He did say sump’m, but I figured a rocket flyer was a rocket flyer, and they come out of a rocket.” His lower lip was trembling. Both of the ladies of his party were crying openly. “We tried,” Joe said, and began to blubber. Ross moved away from him in horrified disgust.

The profile shook its head, turned and announced: “Owing to a unfortunate mistake, the search group of Dr. Joseph Mulcahy, Sc.D., Ph.D., got disqualified for the combination. They on’y got three points. So that’s all the groups in an’ who got the highest?”

“I got fifteen! I got fifteen!” screamed a gorgeous brunette in a transport of joy. “A manhole cover from the museum an’ a las’ month _Lipreaders Digest_ an’ a steering wheel from a police car! I got fifteen!”

The others clustered about her, chattering. Ross said to the profile mechanically: “Man of Earth, we come from a far-distant star in search of——”

“Sure, Buster,” said the profile. “Sure. Too bad. But you should of told Joe. You don’t have to go. You an’ your friends have a drink. Mix. Have fun. I gotta go give the prize now.” He hurried off.

A passing blonde, stacked, said to Ross: “Hel-looo, baldy. Wanna see my operation?” He began to shake his head and felt Helena’s fingers close like steel on his arm. The blonde sniffed and passed on.

“I’ll operate her,” Helena said, and then: “Ross, what’s _wrong_ with everybody? They act so young, even the old people!”

“Follow me,” he said, and began to circulate through the party, trailing Bernie and a frankly terrified Helena, button-holing and confronting and demanding and cajoling. Nothing worked. He was greeted with amused tolerance and invited to have a drink and asked what he thought of the latest commersh with its tepid trumpets. Nobody gave a damn that he was from a far-distant star except Joe, who sullenly watched them wander and finally swaggered up to Ross.

“I figured something out,” he said grimly. “You made me lose.” He brought up a roundhouse right, and Ross saw the stars and heard the birdies.

* * * * *

Bernie and Helena brought him to on the street. He found he had been walking for some five minutes with a blanked-out mind. They told him he had been saying over and over again, “Men of Earth, I come from a far-distant star.” It had got them ejected from the party.

Helena was crying with anger and frustration; she had also got a nasty scare when one of the vehicles had swerved up onto the sidewalk and almost crushed the three of them against the building wall.

“And,” she wailed, “I’m hungry and we don’t know where the ship is and I’ve got to sit down and—and go someplace.”

“So do I,” Bernie said weakly.

So did Ross. He said, “Let’s just go into this restaurant. I know we have no money—don’t nag me please, Helena. We’ll order, eat, not pay, and get arrested.” He held up his hand at the protests. “I said, get arrested. The smartest thing we could do. Obviously somebody’s running this place—and it’s not the stoops we’ve seen. The quickest way I know of to get to whoever’s in charge is to get in trouble. And once they see us we can explain everything.”

It made sense to them. Unfortunately the first restaurant they tried was coin-operated—from the front door on. So were the second to seventh. Ross tried to talk Bernie into slugging a pedestrian so they could all be jugged for disturbing the peace, but failed.

Helena noted at last that the women’s wear shops had live attendants who, presumably, would object to trouble. They marched into one of the gaudy places, each took a dress from a rack and methodically tore them to pieces.

A saleslady approached them dithering and asked tremulously: “What for did you do that? Din’t you like the dresses?”

“Well yes, very much,” Helena began apologetically. “But you see, the fact is——”

“Shuddup!” Ross told her. He said to the saleslady: “No. We hated them. We hate every dress here. We’re going to tear up every dress in the place. Why don’t you call the police?”

“Oh,” she said vaguely. “All right,” and vanished into the rear of the store. She returned after a minute and said, “He wants to know your names.”

“Just say ‘three desperate strangers,’” Ross told her.

“Oh. Thank you.” She vanished again.

The police arrived in five minutes or so. An excited elder man with many stripes on his arms strode up to them excitedly as they stood among the shredded ruins of the dresses. “Where’d they go?” he demanded. “Didja see what they looked like?”

“We’re them. We three. We tore these dresses up. You’d better take them along for evidence.”

“Oh,” the cop said. “Okay. Go on into the wagon. And no funny business, hear me?”

They offered no funny business. In the wagon Ross expounded on his theme that there must be directing intelligences and that they must be at the top. Helena was horribly depressed because she had never been arrested before and Bernie was almost jaunty. Something about him suggested that he felt at home in a patrol wagon.

It stopped and the elderly stripe-wearer opened the door for them. Ross looked on the busy street for anything resembling a station house and found none.

The cop said, “Okay, you people. Get going. An’ let’s don’t have no trouble or I’ll run you in.”

Ross yelled in outrage, “This is a frame-up! You have no right to turn us loose. We demand to be arrested and tried!”

“Wise guy,” sneered the cop, climbed into the wagon and drove off.

They stood forlornly as the crowd eddied and swirled around them. “There was a plate of sandwiches at that party,” Helena recalled wistfully. “And a ladies’ room.” She began to cry. “If only you hadn’t acted so darn superior, Ross! I’ll bet they would have let us have all the sandwiches we wanted.”

Bernie said unexpectedly, “She’s right. Watch me.”

He buttonholed a pedestrian and said, “Duh.”

“Yeah?” asked the pedestrian with kindly interest.

Bernie concentrated and said, “Duh. I yam losted. I yam broke. I losted all my money. Gimme some money, mister, please?”

The pedestrian beamed and said, “That is real tough luck, buddy. If I give you some money will you send it to me when you get some more? Here is my name wrote on a card.”

Bernie said, “Sure, mister. I will send the money to you.”

“Then,” said the pedestrian, “I will give you some money because you will send it back to me. Good luck, buddy.”

Bernie, with quiet pride, showed them a piece of paper that bore the interesting legend Twenty Dollars.

“Let’s eat,” Ross said, awed.

A machine on a restaurant door changed the bill for a surprising heap of coins and they swaggered in, making beelines for the modest twin doors at the rear of the place. Close up the doors were not very modest, but after the initial shock Ross realized that there must be many on this planet who could not read at all. The washroom attendant, for instance, who collected the “dimes” and unlocked the booths. “Dime” seemed to be his total vocabulary.

By comparison the machines in the restaurant proper were intelligent. The three of them ate and ate and ate. Only after coffee did they spare a thought for Dr. Sam Jones, who should about then be awakening with a murderous hangover aboard the starship.

Thinking about him did not mean they could think of anything to do.

“He’s in trouble,” Bernie said. “_We’re_ in trouble. First things first.”

“What trouble?” asked Helena brightly. “You got twenty dollars by asking for it and I suppose you can get plenty more. And I think we wouldn’t have got thrown out of that party if—ah—_we_ hadn’t gone swaggering around talking as if we knew everything. Maybe these people here aren’t very bright——”

Ross snorted.

Helena went on doggedly, “——not _very_ bright, but they certainly can tell when somebody’s brighter than they are. And naturally they don’t like it. Would you like it? It’s like a really old person talking to a really young person about nothing but age. But here when you’re bright you make everybody feel bad every time you open your mouth.”

“So,” Ross said impatiently, “we can go on begging and drifting. But that’s not what we’re here for. The answer is supposed to be on Earth. Obviously none of the people we’ve seen could possibly know anything about genetics. Obviously they can’t keep this machine civilization going without guidance. There must be people of normal intelligence around. In the government, is my guess.”

“No,” said Helena, but she wouldn’t say why. She just thought not.

The inconclusive debate ended with them on the street again. Bernie, who seemed to enjoy it, begged a hundred dollars. Ross, who didn’t, got eleven dollars in singles and a few threats of violence for acting like a wise guy. Helena got no money and three indecent proposals before Ross indignantly took her out of circulation.

They found a completely automatic hotel at nightfall. Ross tried to inspect Helena’s room for comfort and safety, but was turned back at the threshold by a staggering jolt of electricity. “Mechanical house dick,” he muttered, picking himself up from the floor. “Well,” he said to her sourly, “it’s safe. Good night.”

And later in the gents’ room, to Bernie: “You’d think the damn-fool machine could be adjusted so that a person with perfectly innocent intentions could visit a lady——”

“Sure,” said Bernie soothingly, “sure. Say, Ross, frankly, is this Earth exactly what you expected it to be?”

The attendant moved creakily across the floor and said hopefully, “Dime?”

..... 13

THEIR second day on the bum they accumulated a great deal of change and crowded into a telephone booth. The plan was to try to locate their starship and find out what, if anything, could be done for Sam Jones.

An automatic Central conferred with an automatic Information and decided that they wanted the Captain of the Port, Baltimore Rocket Field.

They got the Port Captain on the wire and Ross asked after the starship. The captain asked, “Who wan’sta know, huh?”

Ross realized he had overdone it and shoved Bernie at the phone. Bernie snorted and guggled and finally got out that he jus’ wannit ta know. The captain warmed up immediately and said oh, sure, the funny-lookin’ ship, it was still there all right.

“How about the fella that’s in it?”

“You mean the funny-lookin’ fella? He went someplace.”

“He went someplace? What place?”

“Someplace. He went away, like. I din’t see him go, mister. I got plenty to do without I should watch out for every dummy that comes along.”

“T’anks,” said Bernie hopelessly at Ross’s signal.

They walked the street, deep in thought. Helena sobbed, “Let’s _leave_ him here, Ross. I don’t like this place.”

“No.”

Bernie growled, “What’s the difference, Ross? He can get a snootful just as easy here as anywhere else——”

“No! It isn’t the Doc, don’t you see? But this is the place we’re looking for. All the answers we need are here; we’ve got to get them.”

Bernie stepped around two tussling men on the ground, ineffectually thumping each other over a chocolate-covered confection. “Yeah,” he said shortly.

* * * * *

Helena said: “Isn’t that a silly way to put up a big sign like that?”

Ross looked up. “My God,” he said. A gigantic metal sign with the legend, _Buy Smogs_——_You Can SMOKE Them_, was being hoisted across the street ahead. The street was nominally closed to traffic by cheerfully inattentive men with red flags; a mobile boom hoist was doing the work, and quite obviously doing it wrong. The angle of the boom arm with the vertical was far too great for stability; the block-long sign was tipping the too-light body of the hoisting engine on its treads....

Ross made a flash calculation: when the sign fell, as fall it inevitably would, perhaps two hundred people who had wandered uncaringly past the warning flags would be under it.

There was a sudden aura of blue light around the engine body.

It tipped back to stability. The boom angle decreased, and the engine crawled forward to take up the horizontal difference.

The blue light went out.

Helena choked and coughed and babbled, “But Ross, it _couldn’t_ have because——”

Ross said: “It’s them!”

“Who?”

Excitedly: “The people behind all this! The people who built the cities and put up the buildings and designed the machines. The people who have the answers! Come on, Bernie. I just seem to antagonize these people—I want you to ask the boom operator what happened.”

The boom operator cheerfully explained that nah, it was just somep’n that happened. Nah, nobody did nothin’ to make it happen. It was in case if anything went wrong, like. You know?

They retired and regrouped their forces.

“Foolproof machines,” Ross said slowly. “And I mean really _fool_ proof. Friends, I was wrong, I admit it; I thought that those buildings and cars were something super-special, and they turned out to be just silly gimcracks. But not this blue light thing. That boom _had_ to fall.”

Bernie shrugged rebelliously. “So what? So they’ve got some kinds of machines you don’t have on Halsey’s Planet?”

“A different order of machines, Bernie! Believe me, that blue light was something as far from any safety device I ever heard of as the starships are from oxcarts. When we find the people who designed them——”

“Suppose they’re all dead?”

Ross winced. He said determinedly, “We’ll find them.” They returned to their begging and were recognized one day by the gray-haired profile of the party. He didn’t remember just who they were or where they were from or where he had met them, but he enthusiastically invited them to yet another party. He told them he was Hennery Matson, owner of an airline.

Ross asked about accidents and blue lights. Matson jovially said some o’ his pilots talked about them things but he din’t bother his head none. Ya get these planes from the field, see, an’ they got all kinds of gadgets on them. Come on to the party!

They went, because Hennery promised them another guest—Sanford Eisner, who was a wealthy aircraft manufacturer. But he din’t bother his head none either; them rockets was hard to make, you had to feed the patterns, like, into the master jigs just so, and, boy!, if you got ’em in backwards it was a _mess_. Wheredja get the patterns? Look, mister, we _always_ had the patterns, an’ don’t spoil the party, will ya?

The party was a smasher. They all woke with headaches on Matson’s deep living room rug.

“You did fine, Ross,” Helena softly assured him. “Nobody would have guessed you were any smarter than anybody else here. There wasn’t a bit of trouble.”

Ross seemed to have a hiatus in his memory.

The importance of the hiatus faded as time passed. There was a general move toward the automatic dispensing bar. It seemed to be regulated by a time clock; no matter what you dialed first thing in the morning, it ruthlessly poured a double rye with Worcestershire and tabasco and plopped a fair imitation of a raw egg into the concoction. It helped!

Along about noon something clicked in the bar’s innards. Guests long since surfeited with the prairie oysters joyously dialed martinis and manhattans and the day’s serious drinking began.

Ross fuzzily tried to trace the bar’s supply. There were nickel pipes that led Heaven knew where. Some vast depot of fermentation tanks and stills? Fed grain and cane by crawling harvest-monsters? Grain and cane planted from seed the harvest-monsters carefully culled from the crop for the plow-and-drag-and-drill-and-fertilize-and-cultivate monsters?

His head was beginning to ache again. A jovial martini-drinker who had something to do with a bank—a _bank!_—roared, “Hey, fellas! I got a idea what we can do! Less go on over to _my_ place!”

So they all went, and that disposed of another day.

* * * * *

It blended into a dream of irresponsible childhood. When your clothes grew shabby you helped yourself to something that fit from your host of the moment’s wardrobe. When you grew tired of one host you switched to another. They seldom remembered you from day to day, and they never asked questions.