Search the Sky by C. M. Kornbluth and Frederik Pohl (top ebook reader .TXT) 📕

gently on the shoulder. “Just answer the questions,” he said comfortably. “Everything will be all right.”

Ross flared, “The hell everything will——”

Something with electrified spikes in it hit him on the back of the neck.

Ross yelled and ducked away; the man next to him returned a little rod to his pocket. He smiled at Ross. “Don’t feel bad,” he said sympathetically. “Go ahead now, answer the questions.”

Ross shook his head dazedly. The pain was already leaving his neck, but he felt nauseated by the suddenness and sharpness of it; he could not remember any pain quite like that in his life. He stood up waveringly and said, “Wait a minute, now——”

This time it was the man on the other side, and the pain was about twice as sharp. Ross found himself on the floor, looking up through a haze. The man on his right kept the rod in his hand, and the expression on his face, while in no way angry, was stern. “Bad boy,” he said tenderly. “Why don’t you want to answer the questions?”

Ross gasped, “God damn it, all I want is to see somebody! Keep your dirty hands off me, you old fools!” And that was a mistake, as he learned in the blessedly few minutes before he passed out completely under the little rods held by the gentle but determined men.

He answered all the questions—bound to a chair, with two of the men behind him, when he had regained consciousness. He answered every one. They only had to hit him twice.

When they untied him the next morning, Ross had caught on to the local folkways quite well. The fatherly fellow who released him said, “Follow me,” and stood back, smiling but with one hand on one of the little rods. And Ross was careful to say:

“Yes, sir!”

They rode in a three-wheeled car, and entered a barracks-like building. Ross was left alone next to a bed in a dormitory with half a hundred beds. “Just wait here,” the man said, smiling. “The rest of your group is out at their morning 48session now. When they come in for lunch you can join them. They’ll show you what to do.”

Ross didn’t have too long to wait. He spent the time in conjecture as confused as it was fruitless; he had obviously done something wrong, but just what was it?

If he had had twice as long he would have got no farther toward an answer than he was: nowhere. But a noise outside ended his speculations. He glanced toward the curiously shaped door—all the doors on this planet seemed to be rectangular. A girl of about eighteen was peering inside.

She stared at Ross and said, “Oh!” Then she disappeared. There were footsteps and whispers, and more heads appeared and blinked at him and were jerked back.

Ross stood up in wretched apprehension. All of a sudden he was fourteen years old again, and entering a new school where the old hands were giggling and whispering about the new boy. He swore sullenly to himself.

A new face appeared, halted for an inspection of Ross, and walked confidently in. The man was a good forty years old, Ross thought; perhaps a kind of overseer in this institution—whatever kind of institution it was. He approached Ross at a sedate pace, and he was followed through the door in single file by a couple score men and women. They ranged in age, Ross thought wonderingly, from the leader’s forty down to the late teens of the girl who had first peered in the door, and now was at the end of the procession.

The leader said, “How old are you?”

“Why, uh——” Ross figured confusedly: this planet’s annual orbital period was roughly forty per cent longer than his own; fourteen into his age, multiplied by ten, making his age in their local calculations....

“Why, I’m nineteen of your years old, about. And a half.”

“Yes. And what can you do?”

“Look here, sir. I’ve been through all this once. Why don’t you go and ask those gentlemen who brought me here? And can anybody tell me where the Franklin Foundation is?”

49The fortyish fellow, with a look of outrage, slapped Ross across the mouth. Ross knocked him down with a roundhouse right.

A girl yelled, “Good for you, Junior!” and jumped like a wildcat onto a slim, gray-haired lady, clawing, and slapping. The throng dissolved immediately into a wild melee. Ross, busily fighting off the fortyish fellow and a couple of his stocky buddies, noted only that the scrap was youth against age, whatever it meant.

“How dare you?” a voice thundered, and the rioters froze.

A decrepit wreck was standing in the doorway, surrounded by three or four gerontological textbook cases only a little less spavined than he. “Glory,” a girl muttered despairingly. “It would be the minister.”

“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 50plant, 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, 51I’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 comes 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 52on 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 KP.

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 53there 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