Man travels at C squared

[OldTimer]

Humous sci-fi short story, read in around the1980s, about a man who inherits a space ship from his uncle that travels at C squared. Travels to different planets. One of these is Earth where most people are idiots, but some of the people who maintain the planet are bathroom attendants.

 

[hitmouse]

Sounds like something Robert Sheckley might have written.

 

[sueelleker]

C. M.Kornbluth wrote several stories where people of low intelligence outnumbered the intelligent ones; who quite often "worked" at menial jobs to keep civilization going. Not sure if one of them had a space ship though.

 

[Venusian Broon]

This has vague echoes of Douglas Adam's The Resturant at the End of the Universe (The Second book in the Hitchhiker's guide to the Galaxy trilogy)

The protagonists land on prehistoric earth to find that the descendants of humanity are actually the useless third of another civilisation that was tricked into leaving their own homeworld by the better 2/3rd saying that their original world was going to be destroyed by a disaster.

The captain in the book is obsessed by taking baths.

 

[OldTimer]

Thankyou for the suggestions. Both Kornbluth and Sheckley have very large bibliographies and it's hard to tell which story it might be. I'll see what I can find out. The Douglas Adam's story is great but isn't what I was thinking for.

 

[Dave92f1]

Humous sci-fi short story, read in around the1980s, about a man who inherits a space ship from his uncle that travels at C squared. Travels to different planets. One of these is Earth where most people are idiots, but some of the people who maintain the planet are bathroom attendants.

As I recall the ships in the E. E. “Doc” Smith stories (1930s) traveled at the speed of light squared. (I always wondered what the hell that could possibly mean).

 

[otistdog]

Could this be Frederik Pohl's Search the Sky (1954)? (Inheriting a ship from an uncle does not match, but other details do.)

 

[pwiecek]

Search the Sky Was written by Phol & Kornbluth and gets my vote for the book the OP is looking for. There's a good synopsis on Wikipedia. Two other stories in the theme of hidden caretakers are "The Marching Morons" & "The Little Black bag". THough they only appear in the setup of the second story.

 

[OldTimer]

Search the Sky has some similar elements to it, but isn't quite it.

 

[Danny McG]

Search the Sky has some similar elements to it, but isn't quite it.

Are you sure?
It's got the bathroom attendants who are secretly the intelligentsia in it.

Extract:-
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"