Haarland nodded. He hesitated. "Do you understand it now?" he asked.
Ross shook his head dizzily. "I'm trying," he said. "This little ship—it travels faster than light. It has been circling out here—how long? Fourteen hundred years? And you kept it secret—you and your ancestors before you because you were afraid it might be used in war?" He was frowning.
"Not 'afraid' it would be used," Haarland corrected gently. "We knew it would be used."
Ross grimaced. "Well, why tell me about it now? Do you expect me to keep it secret all the rest of my life?"
"I think you would," Haarland said soberly.
"But suppose I didn't? Suppose I blabbed all over the Galaxy, and it was used in war?"
Haarland's face was suddenly, queerly gray. He said, almost to himself, "It seems that there are things worse than war." Abruptly he smiled. "Let's find Ma."
They returned through the coupling and searched the longliner for the old woman. A Sonny told them, "Ma usually hangs around the meter room. Likes to see them blinking." And there they found her.
"Hello, Haarland," she smiled, flashing her superb teeth. "Did you find what you were looking for?"
"Perfect, Ma. I want to talk to you under the seal."
She looked at Ross. "Him?" she asked.
"I vouch for him," Haarland said gravely. "Wesley."
She answered, "The limiting velocity is C."
"But C2 is not a velocity," Haarland said. He turned to Ross. "Sorry to make a mystery," he apologized. "It's a recognition formula. It identifies one member of what we call the Wesley families, or its messenger, to another. And these people are messengers. They were dispatched a couple of centuries ago by a Wesley family whose ship, for some reason, no longer could be used.
Why?—I don't know why. Try your luck, maybe you can figure it out. Ma, tell us the history again."
She knitted her brows and began to chant slowly:
In great-grandfather's time the target was Clyde, Rocketry firm and ores on the side. If we hadn't of seen them direct we'd of missed 'em; There wasn't a blip from the whole damn system.
That was the first.
Before great-grandfather's day was done We cut the orbit of Cyrnus One. The contact there was Trader McCue, But the sons o' bitches missed us too.
That was the second.
My grandpa lived to see the green Of Target Three through the high-powered screen. But where in hell was Builder Carruthers? They let us go by like all the others. That was the——"
"Ma," said Haarland. "Thanks very much, but would you skip to the last one?" Ma grinned.
The Haarland Trading Corp. was last With the fuel down low and going fast. I'm glad it was me who saw the day When they brought us down on GCA. I told him the message; he called it a mystery, But anyway this is the end of the history. And it's about time!
"The message, please," Haarland said broodingly.
Ma took a deep breath and rattled off: "L-sub-T equals L-sub-zero e to the minus-T-over-two-N."
Ross gaped. "That's the message?"
"Used to be more to it," Ma said cheerfully "That's all there is now, though. The darn thing doesn't rhyme or anything. I guess that's the most important part. Anyway, it's the hardest."
"It's not as bad as it seems," Haarland told Ross. "I've asked around. It makes a very little sense."
"It does?"
"Well, up to a point," Haarland qualified. "It seems to be a formula in genetics. The notation is peculiar, but it's all explained, of course. It has something to do with gene loss. Now, maybe that means something and maybe it doesn't. But I know something that does mean something: some member of a Wesley Family a couple of hundred years ago thought it was important enough to want to get it across to other Wesley families. Something's happening. Let's find out what it is, Ross."
The old man suddenly buried his face hi his hands. In a cracked voice he mumbled, "Gene loss and war. Gene loss or war. God, I wish somebody would take this right out of my hands—or that I could drop with a heart attack this minute. You ever think of war, Ross?"
Shocked and embarrassed, Ross-mumbled some kind of answer. One might think of war, good breeding taught, but one never talked about it.
"You should," the old man said hoarsely. "War is what this faster-than-light secrecy and identification rigmarole is all about. Right now war is impossible—between solar systems, anyhow, and that's what counts. A planet might just barely manage to fit an invading multigeneration expedition at gigantic cost, but it never would. The fruits of victory— loot, political domination, maybe slaves—would never come back to the fitters of the expedition but to their remote descendants. A firm will take a flyer on a commercial deal like that, but no nation would accept a war on any such basis-—because a conqueror is a man, and men die. With F-T-L—faster-than-light travel—they might invade Curnus or Azor or any of those other tempting dots on the master maps. Why not? Take the marginal population, hop them up with patriotic fervor and lust for booty, and ship them off to pillage and destroy. There's at least a fifty per cent chance of coming out ahead on the investment, isn't there? Much more attractive deal commercially speaking than our present longliners."
Ross had never seen a war. The last on Halsey's planet had been the Peninsular Rebellion about a century and a half ago. Some half a million constitutional psychopathic inferiors had started themselves an ideal society with theocratic trimmings in a remote and unfruitful corner of the planet. Starved and frustrated by an unrealistic moral creed they finally exploded to devastate their neighboring areas and were quickly quarantined by a radioactive zone. They disintegrated internally, massacred their priesthood, and were permitted to disperse. It was regarded as a shameful episode by every dweller on the planet. It wasn't a subject for popular filmreels; if you wanted to find out about the Peninsular Rebellion you went through many successive library doors and signed your name on lists, and were sternly questioned as to your age and scholarly qualifications and reasons for sniffing around such an unsavory mess.
Ross therefore had not the slightest comprehension of Haarland's anxiety. He told him so.
"I hope you're right," was all the old man would say. "I hope you don't learn worse."
The rest was work.
He had the Yard worker's familiarity with conventional rocketry, which saved him some study of the fine-maneuvering apparatus of the F-T-L craft—but not much. For a week under Haarland's merciless drilling he jetted the ship about its remote area of space, far from the commerce lanes, until the old man grudgingly pronounced himself satisfied.
There were skull-busting sessions with the Wesley drive, or rather with a first derivative of it, an insane-looking object which you could vaguely describe as a fan-shaped slide rule taller than a man. There were twenty-seven main tracks, analogues of the twenty-seven main geodesies of Wesley Space—whatever they were and whatever that was. Your cursor settings on the main tracks depended on a thirty-two step computation based on the apparent magnitudes of the twenty-seven nearest celestial bodies above a certain mass which varied according to yet another lengthy relationship.
Then, having cleared the preliminaries out of the way, you began to solve for your actual setting on the F-T-L drive controls.
Somehow he mastered it, while Haarland, driving himself harder than he drove the youth who was to be his exploring eyes and ears, coached him and cursed him and —somehow!—kept his own complicated affairs going back on Halsey's Planet. When Ross had finally got the theory of the Wesley Drive in some kind of order in his mind, and had learned all there was to learn about the other worlds, and had cut his few important ties with Halsey's Planet, he showed up in Haarland's planet-based office for a final, repetitive briefing.