Search the Sky, C. M. Kornbluth and Frederik Pohl [list of ebook readers TXT] 📗
Book online «Search the Sky, C. M. Kornbluth and Frederik Pohl [list of ebook readers TXT] 📗». Author C. M. Kornbluth and Frederik Pohl
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, 54learned 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, 55we 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.
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 57Twenty-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-by, 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, redheaded 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. But he won’t be my problem. I’m getting out of here tomorrow!
Holiday.
58“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.
“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 59hall—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 grimlooking 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.
After the car sped on, to the cheers of the marchers, there was happy twittering speculation. Junior Twenty-Three didn’t recognize the Citizen who had graciously waved to them, but they thought he—or she?—was wonderful. So dignified, so distinguished, so learned, so gracious, so democratic!
“Wasn’t it sweet of him?” Helena burbled. “And I’m sure he must be somebody important connected with the voting, otherwise he’d just vote from home.”
Ross’s feet were beginning to hurt when they reached the suburban center. To the best of his recollection, they were no more than eight or ten kilos from the field and his starship. Backtrack on the road to the suburban center about three kilos, take the fork to the right, and that would be that.
Junior Twenty-Three reached a pitch of near-ecstasy marveling at the low, spacious buildings of the center. Through sweeping, transparent windows they saw acres of food and clothing in the shopping center; the Drive-In Theater was an architectural miracle. The Civic Center almost finished them off, with its statue of Equal Justice Under the Law (a dignified beldame whose chin and nose 60almost met, leaning on a gem-crusted crutch) and Civic Virtue (in a motorized wheelchair equipped with an emergency oxygen tent, Lindbergh-Carrel auxiliary blood pump and an artificial kidney).
Merry oldsters were everywhere in their cars and wheelchairs, gaily waving at the kids. Only one untoward incident marred their prevoting tour of inspection. A thick-headed young man mistakenly called out a cheerful: “Life and wisdom, ma’am!” to a beaming oldster.
“Ma’am, is it?” the oldster roared through his throat mike and amplifier in an unmistakable baritone. “I’ll ma’am you, you wise punk!” He spun his wheelchair on a decishield, threw it into high and roared down on the offender, running him over. The boy covered himself as well as he could while the raging old man backed over him again and ran over him again. His ordeal ended when the oldster collapsed forward in the chair, hanging from his safety belt.
The boy got up with tire marks on him and groaned: “Oh, lord! I’ve hurt him.” He appealed
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