“Maybe we could have collected the forfeit,” Doc said hopefully.
“Maybe we could have collected some lumps,” Ross growled. “Got any more ideas?”
The doctor sipped his coffee. “No,” he admitted. “I wonder—No, I don’t suppose that means anything.”
“That jingle? Sure it means something, Doc. It means I should have had my head examined for letting you talk me into that performance.”
The doctor said rebelliously, “Maybe I’m wrong, Ross, but I don’t see that you’ve had any ideas than panned out much better.”
Ross got up. “All right,” he admitted. “I’m sorry if I gave you a hard time. It’s all this coffee and all the liquor underneath it; I swear, if I ever get back to a civilized planet I’m going on a solid diet for a month.”
They headed for the room marked “Gents,” Ross sullenly quiet, Doc thoughtfully quiet.
Doc said reflectively, ” ‘The price is ten cents.’ Ross, could that mean a paper that we could buy on a newsstand, maybe?”
“Yeah,” Ross said in irritation. “Look, Doc, don’t give it another thought. There must be some way to straighten this thing out; I’ll think of it. Let’s just make believe that whole asinine radio program never happened.” The attendant materialized and offered Ross a towel.
“Dime?” he said wearily.
Ross fished absently in his pocket. “The thing that bothers me, Doc,” he said, “is that I know there are intelligent people somewhere around. I even know what they’re doing, I bet. They’re doing exactly what I tried to do: acted as stupid as anybody else, or stupider. I’d make a guess,” he said, warming up, “that if we could just make a statistical analysis of the whole planet and find the absolute stupidest-seeming people of the lot, we’d——”
He ran out of breath all at once. His eyes bulged.
He looked at the men’s-room attendant, and at the ten-cent piece in his own hand.
“You!” he breathed.
The attendant’s face suddenly seemed to come to life. In a voice that was abruptly richer and deeper than before, the man said: “Yes. You had to find us yourself, you know.”
14
THERE was a home base, a gigantic island called Australia, to which they took Ross and Doc Jones in a little car that sprouted no wings and Sashed no rockets, but flew.
They lived underground there, invisible to goggling passengers and crewmen aboard the “rockets.” (They weren’t rockets. They were turbo-jets. But it made the children happy to think that they had rockets, so iron filings were added to the hot jet stream, and they sparkled in magnificent display.)
There they were born, and there they spent strange childhoods, learning such things as psychodynamics and tele-portation. By the time they were eight months or so old they thought it amusing to converse of Self and the Meaning of Meaning. By eighteen months a dozen inf ants would chat in terza rima. But by the age of two they had put such toys behind them with a sigh of pleasant regret. They would revert to them only for such purposes as love-making or choral funeral addresses.
They were then of an age to begin their work.
They were born there, and trained therefor terrible tasks. And they died there, at whatever risk. For that they would not surrender: their right to die among their own.
But their lives between cradle and grave, those they gave away.
Nursemaids? What else can one call them?
They explained it patiently to Ross and the doctor.
“The pattern emerged clearly in the twentieth century. Swarming slums abrawl with children, children, children everywhere. Walk down a Chicago Southside street, and walk away with the dazed impression that all the world was pregnant. Walk through pretty, pleasant Evanston, and find the impression wrong. Those who lived in Evanston were reasonable people. They waited and thought. Being reasonable, they saved and planned. Being reasonable, they resorted to gadgets or chemicals or continence.
“A woman of the period had some three hundred and ninety opportunities to conceive a child. In the slums and the hills they took advantage of as many of them as they might. But around the universities, in the neighborhoods of the well-educated and the well-to-do, what was the score?