C. M. Kornbluth

“ It had to be, Ross. For one thing, it’s dangerous to the man who pilots it. For another, it’s dangerous to—the Galaxy.”
Haarland’s view was anthropomorphic; the danger was not to the immense and uncaring galaxy, but to the sparse fester of life that called itself humanity.
When the race abandoned Earth, it was a gesture of revulsion. Behind them they left a planet that had decimated itself in wars; ahead lay a cosmos that, in all their searches, had revealed no truly sentient life.
Earth was a crippled world, the victim of its playing with nuclear fission and fusion. ”

“ Ross filled him in, carefully explaining why Bernie and Helena had left him. Doc Jones filled Ross in. He didn’t have much to tell. He had come to in the ship, waited around until he got hungry, fallen into a conversation with a rocket pilot on the field—and that was how his round of parties had begun.
Like Ross, Doc, in his soberer moments, had come to the conclusion that Earth was run by person or persons unseen. He had learned little that Ross hadn’t found out or deduced. ”

“ Haarland said calmly. “We’re taking off. Better lie down.”
Ross flopped to the floor. It was no time to argue, not with the first-stage pumps thundering and the preheaters roaring their threat of an imminent four-G thrust.
It came like thunder, slapping Ross against the floor plates as though he were glued to them. He felt every tiny wrinkle in every weld he lay on, and one arm had fallen across a film reel. He heaved, and succeeded in levering it off the reel. It thwacked to the floor as though sandbags were stacked meters-high atop it. ”

“ Ross stood on the traders’ ramp, overlooking the Yards, and the word kept bobbing to the top of his mind.
Decay.
About all of Halsey’s Planet there was the imperceptible reek of decay. The clean, big, bustling, efficient spaceport only made the sensation stronger. From where he stood on the height of the Ramp, he could see the Yards, the spires of Halsey City ten kilometers away—and the tumble-down gray acres of Ghost Town between. ”

“ For each of us, square miles to stand guard over. Our minds roving across the traps we dare not ignore, ready to leap out and straighten these children’s toppling walls of blocks, ready to warn the child that sharp things cut and hot things burn. The blue lights—did you think they were machines?” They were us!
“You’re torturing yourselves!” Ross exploded. “Let them die.”
“Let—ten—billion—children—die? We are not such monsters.”
Ross was humbled before their tragedy. Diffidently he spoke of Halsey’s Planet, Ragansworld, Azor, Jones. ”

“ The image of Helena was blushing.
Ross’s heart leaped. “As simple as that?”
“For you, yes. For others there will be lives spent over the lathes and milling machines, eyes gone blind in calculating and refining trajectories, daring ones lost screaming in the hearts of stars, or gibbering with hunger and pain as the final madness closes down on them, stranded between galaxies. There will be martyrs to undergo the worst martyrdom of all—which is to say, they will never know of it. ”

“ But tell me something, won’t you, Marconi?”
“Tell you what?”
“Tell me why such a violent reaction to the word ‘longliner.’ I want to know.”
“Hell, Ross,” the little man grumbled, “you know what a longliner is. Gutter-scrapings for crews; nothing for a man like you.”
“I want to know more,” Ross insisted. “When I ask you what a longliner is, what the crew do with themselves for two or three centuries, you change the subject. You always change the subject! ”

“ Ross began soothingly.
“Fluctuations be God-damned! I know a fluctuation when I see one, and I know a long-term downtrend when I see one. And that’s what we’re riding, right into bankruptcy, fellow. And now these God-damned dummies blow in from nowhere with a consignment exclusively for Haarland—I don’t know why I don’t get to hell out of this stupid business and go live in a shack on Great Blue Lake and let the planet go ahead and rot.” ”

“ Ross felt repentant—knowing that that was just how Trader Marconi wanted him to feel. He said slowly, “I’m sorry if I’m being a nuisance, Marconi. You know how it is when you feel stale and restless. I know all the stories—but it’s so damned hard to believe them. The famous colonizing ships. They must have been absolutely gigantic to take any reasonable number of people on a closed-circuit, multigeneration ride. We can’t build them that big now!” ”

“ Ross said. “Or if there is, luckily this planet is a trifling part of it. I have never heard of such arrogant pip-squeakery in my life. You flyspecks in your shabby corner of the Galaxy think your own fouled-up mess is the pattern of universal life. You’re wrong! I’ve seen life elsewhere and I know it isn’t.”
The doctor passed his trembling hand over his eyes. “Jones is not mocked,” he croaked. “L-sub-T equals L-sub-zero e to the minus T-over-two-N. You can’t fight that, stranger. You can’t fight that.” ”

“ The thoughtful ones shrugged and sighed as they thought that even the starship booming down toward Halsey’s Planet—fitted with the cleverest air replenishers and the most miraculously efficient waste converters—was only a counter in the game whose great rule was the mass-energy formulation of the legendary Einstein: that there is no way to push a material object past the speed of light. ”

“ 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!” ”

“ Jones, yes!” He staggered off, staring from ribald curbing to scatological wall in an orgy of prurience.
Ross sighed and walked through the deserted, weed-grown streets to the stone building that bore on its cracked lintel the one surviving word, “Earth.” This was all wrong, he was almost certain; Earth had to be a planet, not a city. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Helena said.
“Don’t interrupt! What this outfit needs is some discipline—tightening up. You two have got to accept your responsibilities. Keep alert! Be on the lookout! Any single thing out of the ordinary may be a deathtrap. Watch for——”
Helena was looking not at Ross but over his shoulder. Bernie was making strangled noises and pointing.
Ross turned. Behind him stood a mechanical monstrosity vaguely recognizable as a heavily-armed truck, its motor faintly humming. A man leaned darkly from the cab and transfixed them to the ground with a powerful spotlight. ”

“ He unkinked himself and studied the planet through a vision screen at its highest magnification. The apparent distance was one mile; nothing was hidden from him.
“Golly,” he said, impressed. “Science! Makes you realize what backward gropers we were.”
Obviously they had it, down there on the pleasant, cloud-flecked, green and blue planet. Science! White, towering cities whose spires were laced by flying bridges—and inexplicably decorated with something that looked like cooling fins. ”

“ Helena whispered, “They want us to come out. Ross—Ross—I can’t face them!” She buried her face in her hands.
“Steady,” he said gravely. “They’re only human.”
Ross gripped that belief tightly; he hardly dared permit himself to think, even for a second, that perhaps these people were no longer merely human. Hoarsely he said, “We need their help. Maybe we should send Doc Jones out first. He’s the oldest of us, and he’s the only one you could call a scientist; he can talk to them. Where is he?”
A raucous Jones voice bellowed through the domed control room: “Who wansh ol’ doc, hargh? ”

“ Marconi said in annoyance. “What in the world has got into you, Ross? Earth is a planet like any other planet. The starship Halsey colonized in was a starship like any other starship—only bigger. I guess, that is—I wasn’t there. After all, what are the longliners but colonists? They happen to be going to planets that are already inhabited, that’s all. So a starship is nothing new or even very interesting, and this is beginning to bore me, and you ought to read your urgent-priority-rush message.” ”

“ The fifth time Ross got that answer, the guard had stepped out of the room. Ross took the opportunity to thrash the thing through. “Why?” he demanded. “Back where I come from we’ve got lots of prisons. I never heard of one nobody escaped from.”
The other prisoner laughed shortly. “Now you have,” he said. “Go ahead, try. Every one of us has tried, one time or another. There’s only one thing stopping you—there’s no place to go. You can get past the guards easy enough—they’re lazy, when they’re not either drunk or boy-chasing. You can roam around ‘Minerva’ all you like. ”

“ Haarland,” Ross exploded, “it seems to me that you’re contradicting yourself all over the place. Did six planets pass this ship up or didn’t six planets pass this ship up? Which is it? And why would anybody pass a longliner up anyhow?”
Haarland asked, “Suppose the planets were vacant?”
“What?” Ross was shaken. “But that’s silly! I mean, even I know that the star charts show which planets are inhabited and which aren’t.”
“And suppose the star charts are wrong. Suppose the planets have become vacant. The people have died off, perhaps; their culture decayed.” ”

“ 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.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ Now, it is a law of genetics that in small populations, variations tend to smooth out and every member of the population tends to become like every other member. So-called unfixed genes are lost as the generations pass; the end product of this process would theoretically be a population in which every member had exactly the same genes as every other member. This is a practical impossibility, but the Joneses whom we fight are a tragic demonstration of the fact that the process need not be pushed to its ultimate extreme to dislocate the life of a planet and cause endless misery to its dwellers. ”

“ The ship that Haarland revealed was fully as great a contrast. Ross knew spaceships as well as any grounder could, both the lumbering interplanet freighters and the titanic longliners. But the ship that swung around Halsey’s Planet was a midget (fueled rocket ships must be huge) ; its jets were absurdly tiny, clearly incapable of blasting away from planetary gravity; its entire hull length was unbroken and sheer (did the pilot dare fly blind?) ”

“ Ross thought hard and long. He realized first that he could probably never explain what he meant to Bernie, and second that if he did they’d probably both wind up aboard “Minerva” for conspiracy to advocate equality. He shifted his ground. “Of course everybody agrees on the natural superiority of women,” he said, “but people seem to differ from planet to planet as to the reasons. What do they say here on Azor?” ”

“ Yet—this was Jones, not Earth; the city was only a city, not the planet that the star charts logged. And the planet, beyond all other considerations, was less like Earth than any conceivable chart error could account for. Gravitation, wrong; atmosphere, wrong; flora and fauna, wrong.
So. Eliminate the impossible, and what remains, however unlikely, is true. So there had been a flaw in his calculations. And the way to check that, once and for all, was to get back to the starship.
Ross wheeled and went back into the book room. “Doc,” he called, “how do we get out of here?” ”