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 nab, it was just somep’n that happened. Nah, nobody did nothin’ to make it happen. It was in case rf 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 ghncracks. 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. “No-bodyVould 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? Gram 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.