“Why, I guess you come right along with me,” Ross said heartily, cursing his luck.
“Where’s that?”
“Where? You mean, where?” Ross scratched his head. “Well, let’s see. Frankly, Helena, your planet was quite a disappointment to me. I had hoped—Well, no matter. I suppose the best thing to do is to look up the next planet on the list.”
“What list?”
Ross hesitated, then shrugged and plunged into the explanation. All about the longliners and the message and faster-than-light travel and the Wesley Families—and none of it, while he was talking, seemed convincing at all. But perhaps Helena was less critical; or perhaps Helena simply did not care. She listened attentively and made no comment. She only said, at the end, “What’s the name of the next planet?”
He consulted the master charts. Haarland’s listing showed a place called Azor, conveniently near at hand in the strange geodesics of the Wesley Effect, where the far galaxies might be near at hand in the warped space-lines, and the void just beyond the viewplates be infinitely distant. The F.T.L. family of Azor was named Cavallo; when last heard from, they had been builders of machine tools.
Ross told Helena about it. She shrugged and watched curiously as he began to set up the F.T.L. problem on the huge board.
VII
They were well within detection range of Azor’s radar, if any, and yet there had been no beeping signal that the planet’s G.C.A. had taken over and would pilot them down. Another blank? He studied the surface of the world under his highest magnification and saw no signs that it had been devastated by war. There were cities—intact, as far as he could tell, but not very attractive. The design ran to huge, gloomy piles that mounted toward central towers.
Azor was a big world which showed not much water and a great deal of black rock. It was the fifth of its system and reportedly had colonized its four adjacent neighbors and their moons.
His own search radar pinged. The signal was followed at once by a guarded voice from his ship-to-ship communicator: “What ship are you? Do you receive me? The band is 798.44.”
He hastily dialed the frequency on his transmitter and called, “I receive you. We are a vessel from outside your solar system, home planet Halsey. We want to contact a family named Cavallo of the planet Azor believed to be engaged in building machine tools. Can you help us?”
“You are a male?” the voice asked cautiously. “In command or simply the communicator?”
“I’m a male and I’m in command of this vessel.”
The voice said: “Then sheer off this system and go elsewhere, my friend.”
“What is this? Who are you?”
“My name does not matter. I happen to be on watch aboard the prison orbital station Minerva. Get going, my friend, before the planetary G.C.A. picks you up.”
Prison orbital station? A very sensible idea. “Thanks for the advice,” he parried. “Can you tell me anything about the Cavallo family?”
“I have heard of them. My friend, your time is running out. If you do not sheer off very soon they will land you. And I judge from the tone of your voice that it will not be long before you join the rest of us criminals aboard Minerva. It is not pleasant here. Goodbye.”
“Wait, please!” Ross had no intention at all of committing any crimes that would land him aboard a prison hulk, and he had every intention of fulfilling his mission. “Tell me about the Cavallo family—and why you expect me to get in trouble on Azor.”
“The time is running out, my friend, but—the Cavallo family of machine tool builders is located in Novj Grad. And the crime of which all of us aboard Minerva were convicted is conspiracy to advocate equality of the sexes. Now go!”
The carrier-wave hum of the communicator died, but immediately there was another electronic noise to fill the cabin—the beep of a G.C.A. radar taking over the sealed landing controls of the craft.
Helena had been listening with very little comprehension. “Who was your friend, Ross?” she asked. “Where are we?”
“I think,” Ross said, “he was my friend. And I think we are—in trouble.”
The ship began to jet tentative bursts of reaction mass, nosing toward the big, gloomy planet.
“That’s all right,” Helena said comfortably. “At least they won’t know I disconnected a Senior Citizen.” She thought a moment. “They won’t, will they? I mean, the Senior Citizens here won’t know about the Senior Citizens there, will they?”
He tried to break it to her gently as the ship picked up speed. “Helena, it’s possible that the old people here won’t be Senior Citizens—not in your planet’s sense. They may just be old people, with no special authority over young people. I think, in fact, that we may find you outranking older people who happen to be males.”
She took it as a joke. “You are funny, Ross. Old means Senior, doesn’t it? And Senior means better, wiser, abler, and in charge, doesn’t it?”
“We’ll see,” he said thoughtfully as the main reaction drive cut in. “We’ll see very shortly.”
The spaceport was bustling, busy, and efficient. Ross marveled at the speed and dexterity with which the anonymous ground operator whipped his ship into a braking orbit and set it down. And he stared enviously at the crawling clamshells on treads, bigger than houses, that cupped around his ship; the ship was completely and hermetically surrounded, and bathed in a mist of germicides and prophylactic rays.
A helmeted figure riding a little platform on the inside of one of the clamshells turned a series of knobs, climbed down, and rapped on the ship’s entrance port.
Ross opened it diffidently, and almost strangled in the antiseptic fumes. Helena choked and wheezed behind him as the figure threw back its helmet and said, “Where’s the captain?”
“I am he,” said Ross meticulously. “I would like to be put in touch with the Cavallo Machine-Tool Company of Novj
