He was cold sober.
He found a telephone. The automatic Central checked the automatic Information and got him the Captain of the Port, Baltimore Rocket Field. The Captain was helpful and sympathetic; caught by the tense note in Ross’s voice
when he told him who wannit to know, the Captain said, “Gee, buddy, if I’d of known I woulda stopped them. Stoled your ship, is that what they done? They cocdd get arrested for that. You could call the cops an’ maybe they could do something——”
Ross didn’t bother to explain. He hung up.
The party was no fun at all. He left it.
Ross walked along the street, hating himself. He couldn’t hate Helena and Bernie; they had done the right thing. It had been his fault, all the way down the line. He’d’ been acting like a silly child; he’d had a job of work to do, and he let himself be sidetracked by a crazy round of drinking and parties.
Of course, he told himself, something had been accomplished. Somebody had built the machines—not the happy morons he had been playing with. Somebody had invented whatever it was that flared with blue light and repaired the idiot errors the morons made. Somebody, somewhere.
Where?
Well, he had some information. All negative. At the parties had been soldiers and politicians and industrialists and clergy and entertainers and, heaven save the mark, scientists. And none of them had had the wit to do more than push the Number Three Button when the Green Light A blinked, by rote. None of them could have given him the answer to the question that threatened to end human domination over the cosmos; none of them would have known what the words meant.
Maybe–Ross made himself face it—maybe there was no answer. Maybe even if he found the intellects that lurked beneath the surface on this ancient planet, they could not or would not tell him what he wanted to know. Maybe the intellects didn’t exist.
Maybe he was all wrong in all of his assumptions; maybe he was wasting his time. But, he told himself wryly, he had fixed it for himself that tune was all he had left. He might as well waste it. He might as well go right on looking. . . .
A migrant party was staggering down the street toward him, a score of persons going from one host’s home to an-
other. He crossed to avoid them. They were singing drunk-enly.
Ross looked at them with the distaste of the recently
reformed. One of the voices raised in song caught his ear:
“——bobbed his nose and dyed it rose, and kissed
his lady fair, And sat her down on a cushion brown hi
a seven-legged chair. ‘By Jones,’ he said, ‘my shoes
are red, and so’s my overcoat, And with buttons
nine hi a zigzag line, I’ll——”
“Doc!” Ross bellowed. “Doc Jones! For God’s sake, come over here!”
They got rid of the rest of Doctor Sam Jones’s party, and Ross sobered the doctor up in an all-night restaurant. It wasn’t hard; the doctor had had plenty of practice.
Ross filled him hi, 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, hi 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. The blue lights had bothered him, too; he’d asked the pilot about it, and found out about what Ross had— there appeared to be some sort of built-in safety device which kept the inevitable accidents from becoming unduly fatal. How they worked, he didn’t know—
But he had an idea.
“It sounds a little ridiculous, I admit,” he said, embarrassed. “But I think it might work. It’s a radio program.”
“A radio program?”
“I said it sounded ridiculous. They call it, ‘What’s Biting You,’ and one of the fellows was telling me about it. It seems that you can appear before the panel on the program with any sort of problem, any sort at all, and they guarantee to solve it for you. There’s some sort of bond posted—I don’t know much about the details, but this man assured me that the bond was only a formality; they