“Lea’ me alone,” ordered Captain Ross without opening his eyes. Wouldn’t let a man get his rest. What did he have to bring them along for, anyway? Should have left them where he found them, not brought them to this place Earth where they could act like a couple of wise guys and keep getting in his way every time he came close to the blue-light people, the intelligent people, the people with the answers to—to—
He lay there, trying to remember what the question was.
“—have to get him out of here,” said Helena’s voice with a touch of hysteria.
“—go back and get that fellow Haarland,” said Bernie’s voice, equally tense. Ross contemplated the fragments of conversation he had caught, ignoring what the two were saying to him. Haarland, he thought fuzzily, that wise guy …
Bernie had him on his feet. “Leggo,” ordered Ross, but Bernie was tenacious. He stumbled along and found himself in the men’s room of the apartment. The tired-looking attendant appeared from nowhere and Bernie said something to him. The attendant rummaged in his chest and found something that Bernie put into a fizzy drink.
Ross sniffed at it suspiciously. “Wassit?” he asked.
“Please, Ross, drink it. It’ll sober you up. We’ve got to get out of here—we’re going nuts, Helena and me. This has been going on for weeks!”
“Nope. Gotta find a blue light,” Ross said obstinately, swaying.
“But you aren’t finding it, Ross. You aren’t doing anything except get drunk and pass out and wake up and get drunk. Come on, drink the drink.” Ross impatiently dashed it to the floor. Bernie sighed. “All right, Ross,” he said wearily. “Helena can run the ship; we’re taking off.”
“Go ’head.”
“Goodbye, Ross. We’re going back to Halsey’s Planet, where you came from. Maybe Haarland can tell us what to do.”
“Go ’head. That wise guy!” Ross sneered.
The attendant was watching dubiously as Bernie slammed out and Ross peered at himself in a mirror. “Dime?” the attendant asked in his tired voice. Ross gave him one and went back to the party.
Somehow it was not much fun.
He shuffled back to the bar. The boilermaker didn’t taste too good. He set it down and glowered around the room. The party was back in swing already; Helena and Bernie were nowhere in sight. Let them go, then …
He drank, but only when he reminded himself to. This party had become a costume ball; one of the men lurched out of the room and staggered back guffawing. “Looka him!” one of the women shrieked. “He got a woman’s hat on! Horace, you get the craziest kinda ideas!”
Ross glowered. He suddenly realized that, while he wasn’t exactly sober, he wasn’t drunk either. Those soreheads, they had to go and spoil the party …
He began abruptly to get less drunk yet. Back to Halsey’s Planet, they said? Ask Haarland what to do, they said? Leave him here—?
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 could 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 time 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 another. He crossed to avoid them. They were singing drunkenly.
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 in a seven-legged chair.
‘By Jones,’ he said, ‘my shoes are red, and so’s my overcoat,
And with buttons nine in 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
