DECAY.

Ross stood on the traders’ ramp, overlooking the Yards, and the word

kept bobbing to the top of his mind.

Decay.

About all of Halsey’s Planet there was the imperceptible reek of decay.

The clean, big, bustling, efficient spaceport only made the sensation

stronger. From where he stood on the height of the Ramp, he could see

the Yards, the spires of Halsey City ten kilometers away—and the

tumble-down gray acres of Ghost Town between.

Ross wrinkled his nose. He wasn’t a man given to brooding, but the scent

of decay had saturated his nostrils that morning. He had tossed and

turned all the night, wrestling with a decision. And he had got up

early, so early that the only thing that made sense was to walk to work.

And that meant walking through Ghost Town. He hadn’t done that in a long

time, not since childhood. Ghost Town was a wonderful place to play.

“Tag,” “Follow My Fuehrer,” “Senators and President”—all the ancient

games took on new life when you could dodge and turn among crumbling

ruins, dart down unmarked lanes, gallop through sagging shacks where you

might stir out a screeching, unexpected recluse.

But it was clear that—in the fifteen years between childhood games and a

troubled man’s walk to work—Ghost Town had grown.

Everybody knew that! Ask the right specialists, and they’d tell you how

much and how fast. An acre a year, a street a month, a block a week, the

specialists would twinkle at you, convinced that the acre, street, block

was under control, since they could measure it.

Ask the right specialists and they would tell you why it was happening.

One answer per specialist, with an ironclad guarantee that there would

be no overlapping of replies. “A purely psychological phenomenon, Mr.

Ross. A vibration of the pendulum toward greater municipal compactness,

a huddling, a mature recognition of the facts of interdependence,

basically a step forward....”

“A purely biological phenomenon, Mr. Ross. Falling birth rate due to

biochemical deficiency of trace elements processed out of our planetary

diet. Fortunately the situation has been recognized in time and my bill

before the Chamber will provide....”

“A purely technological problem, Mr. Ross. Maintenance of a sprawling

city is inevitably less efficient than that of a compact unit.

Inevitably there has been a drift back to the central areas and the

convenience of air-conditioned walkways, winterized plazas....”

Yes. It was a purely psychological-biological-technological-

educational-demographic problem, and it was basically a step forward.

Ross wondered how many Ghost Towns lay corpselike on the surface of

Halsey’s Planet. Decay, he thought. Decay.

But it had nothing to do with his problem, the problem that had kept him

awake all the night, the problem that blighted the view before him now.

The trading bell clanged. The day’s work began.

For Ross it might be his last day’s work at the Yards.

* * * * *

He walked slowly from the ramp to the offices of the Oldham Trading

Corporation. “Morning, Ross boy,” his breezy young boss greeted him.

Charles Oldham IV’s father had always taken a paternal attitude toward

his help, and Charles Oldham IV was not going to change anything that

Daddy had done. He shook Ross’s hand at the door of the suite and

apologized because they hadn’t been able to find a new secretary for him

yet. They’d been looking for two weeks, but the three applicants they

had been able to dredge up had all been hopeless. “It’s the damn

Chamber,” said Charles Oldham IV, winsomely gesturing with his hands to

show how helpless men of affairs were against the blundering

interference of Government. “Damn labor shortage is nothing but a damn

artificial scarcity crisis. Daddy saw it; he knew it was coming.”

Ross almost told him he was quitting, but held back. Maybe it was

because he didn’t want to spoil Oldham’s day with bad news, right on top

of the opening bell. Or maybe it was because, in spite of a sleepless

night, he still wasn’t quite sure.

The morning’s work helped him to become sure. It was the same monotonous

grind.

Three freighters had arrived at dawn from Halsey’s third moon, but none

of them was any affair of his. There was an export shipment of jewelry

and watches to be attended to, but the ship was not to take off for

another week. It scarcely classified as urgent. Ross worked on the

manifests for a couple of hours, stared through his window for an hour,

and then it was time for lunch.

Little Marconi hailed him as he passed through the traders’ lounge.

Of all the juniors on the Exchange, Marconi was the one Ross found

easiest to take. He was lean and dark where Ross was solid and fair;

worse, he stood four ranks above Ross in seniority. But, since Ross

worked for Oldham, and Marconi worked for Haarland’s, the difference

could be waived in social intercourse.

Ross suspected that, to Marconi as to him, trading was only a job—a dull

one, and not a crusade. And he knew that Marconi’s reading was not

confined to bills of lading. “Lunch?” asked Marconi. “Sure,” Ross said.

And he knew he’d probably spill his secret to the little man from

Haarland’s.

The skyroom was crowded—comparatively. All eight of the usual tables

were taken; they pushed on into the roped-off area by the windows and

found a table overlooking the Yards. Marconi blew dust off his chair.

“Been a long time since this was used,” he grumbled. “Drink?” He raised

his eyebrows when Ross nodded. It made a break; Marconi was the one

usually who had a drink with lunch, Ross never touched it.

When the drinks came, each of them said to the other in perfect

synchronism: “I’ve got something to tell you.”

They looked startled—then laughed. “Go ahead,” said Ross.

The little man didn’t even argue. Rapturously he drew a photo out of his

pocket.

God, thought Ross wearily, Lurline again! He studied the picture with a

show of interest. “New snap?” he asked brightly. “Lovely girl——” Then he

noticed the inscription: _To my fiance, with crates of love._ “Well!” he

said, “Fiance, is it? Congratulations, Marconi!”

Marconi was almost drooling on the photo. “Next month,” he said happily.

“A big, big wedding. For keeps, Ross—for keeps. With children!”

Ross made an expression of polite surprise. “You don’t say!” he said.

“It’s all down in black and white! She agrees to have two children in

the first five years—no permissive clause, a straight guarantee. Fifteen

hundred annual allowance per child. And, Ross, do you know what? Her

lawyer told her right in front of me that she ought to ask for three

thousand, and she told him, ‘No, Mr. Turek. I happen to be in love.’ How

do you like that, Ross?”

“A girl in a million,” Ross said feebly. His private thoughts were that

Marconi had been gaffed and netted like a sugar perch. Lurline was of

the Old Landowners, who didn’t own anything much but land these days,

and Marconi was an undersized nobody who happened to make a very good

living. Sure she happened to be in love. Smartest thing she could be. Of

course, promising to have children sounded pretty special; but the

papers were full of those things every day. Marconi could reliably be

counted on to hang himself. He’d promise her breakfast in bed every

third week end, or the maid that he couldn’t possibly find on the labor

market, and the courts would throw all the promises on both sides out of

the contract as a matter of simple equity. But the marriage would stick,

all right.

Marconi had himself a final moist, fatuous sigh and returned the photo

to his pocket. “And now,” he asked brightly, craning his neck for the

waiter, “what’s your news?”

Ross sipped his drink, staring out at the nuzzling freighters in their

hemispherical slips. He said abruptly, “I might be on one of those next

week. Fallon’s got a purser’s berth open.”

Marconi forgot the waiter and gaped. “Quitting?”

“I’ve got to do something!” Ross exploded. His own voice scared him;

there was a knife blade of hysteria in the sound of it. He gripped the

edge of the table and forced himself to be calm and deliberate.

Marconi said tardily, “Easy, Ross.”

“Easy! You’ve said it, Marconi: ‘Easy.’ Everything’s so damned easy and

so damned boring that I’m just about ready to blow! I’ve got to do

something,” he repeated. “I’m getting nowhere! I push papers around and

then I push them back again. You know what happens next. You get soft

and paunchy. You find yourself going by the book instead of by your

head. You’re covered, if you go by the book—no matter what happens. And

you might just as well be dead!”

“Now, Ross——”

“Now, hell!” Ross flared. “Marconi, I swear I think there’s something

wrong with me! Look, take Ghost Town for instance. Ever wonder why

nobody lives there, except a couple of crazy old hermits?”

“Why, it’s Ghost Town,” Marconi explained. “It’s deserted.”

“And why is it deserted? What happened to the people who used to live

there?”

Marconi shook his head. “You need a vacation, son,” he said

sympathetically. “That was a long time ago. Hundreds of years, maybe.”

“But where did the people go?” Ross persisted desperately. “All of the

city was inhabited hundreds of years ago—the city was twice as big as it

is now. How come?”

Marconi shrugged. “Dunno.”

Ross collapsed. “Don’t know. You don’t know, I don’t know, nobody knows.

Only thing is, I care! I’m curious. Marconi, I get—well, moody.

Depressed. I get to worrying about crazy things. Ghost Town, for one.

And why can’t they find a secretary for me? And am I really different

from everybody else or do I just think so—and doesn’t that mean that I’m

insane?”

He laughed. Marconi said warmly, “Ross, you aren’t the only one; don’t

ever think you are. I went through it myself. Found the answer, too. You

wait, Ross.”

He paused. Ross said suspiciously, “Yeah?”

Marconi tapped the breast pocket with the photo of Lurline. “She’ll come

along,” he said.

Ross managed not to sneer in his face. “No,” he said wearily. “Look, I

don’t advertise it, but I was married once. I was eighteen, it lasted

for a year and I’m the one who walked out. Flat-fee settlement; it took

me five years to pay off the loan, but I never regretted it.”

Marconi began gravely, “Sexual incompatibility——”

Ross cut him off with an impatient gesture. “In that department,” he

said, “it so happens she was a genius. But——”

“But?”

Ross shrugged. “I must have been crazy,” he said shortly. “I kept

thinking that she was half-dead, dying on the vine like the rest of

Halsey’s Planet. And I must still be crazy, because I still think so.”

The little man involuntarily felt his breast pocket. He said gently,

“Maybe you’ve been working too hard.”

“Too hard!” Ross laughed, a curious blend of true humor and

self-disgust. “Well,” he admitted, “I need a change, anyhow. I might as

well be on a longliner. At least I’d have my spree to look back on.”

“No!” Marconi said, so violently that Ross slopped the drink he was

lifting to his mouth.

Ross looked hard at the little man—hard and speculatively. “No, then,”

he said. “It was just a figure of speech, of course. But tell me

something, won’t you, Marconi?”

“Tell you what?”

“Tell me why such a violent reaction to the word ‘longliner.’ I want to

know.”

“Hell, Ross,” the little man grumbled, “you know what a longliner is.

Gutter-scrapings for crews; nothing for a man like you.”

“I want to know more,” Ross insisted. “When I ask you what a longliner

is, what the crew do with themselves for two or three centuries, you

change the subject. You always change the subject! Maybe you know

something I don’t know. I want to know what it is, and this time the

subject doesn’t get changed. You don’t get off the hook until I find

out.” He took a sip of his drink and leaned back. “Tell me about

longliners,” he said. “I’ve never seen one coming in; it’s been fifteen

years or so since that bucket from Sirius IV, hasn’t it? But you were on

the job then.”

Marconi was no longer a man in love or one of the few people whom Ross

considered to be wholly alive—like him. He was a hard-eyed little

stranger with a stubborn mouth and an ingratiating veneer. In short he

was again a trader, and a good one.

“I’ll tell you anything I know,” Marconi declared positively, and

insincerely. “Tend to that fellow first though, will you?” He pointed to

a uniformed Yards messenger whose eye had just alighted on Ross. The man

threaded his way, stumbling, through the tables and laid a sealed

envelope down in the puddle left by Ross’s drink.

“Sorry, sir,” he said crisply, wiped off the envelope with his

handkerchief and, for lagniappe, wiped the puddle off the table into

Ross’s lap.

Speechless, Ross signed for the envelope on a red-tabbed slip marked

URGENT * PRIORITY * RUSH. The messenger saluted, almost putting his own

eye out, and left, crashing into tables and chairs.

“Half-dead,” Ross muttered, following him with his eyes. “How the devil

do they stay alive at all?”

Marconi said, unsmiling, “You’re taking this kick pretty seriously,

Ross. I admit he’s a little clumsy, but——”

“But nothing,” said Ross. “Don’t try to tell me you don’t know

something’s wrong, Marconi! He’s a bumbling incompetent, and half his

generation is just like him.” He looked bitterly at the envelope and

dropped it on the table again. “More manifests,” he said. “I swear I’ll

start throwing tableware if I have to check another bill of lading.

Brighten my day, Marconi; tell me about the longliners. You’re not off

the hook yet, you know.”

Marconi signaled for another drink. “All right,” he said. “Marconi tells

all about longliners. They’re ships. They go from the planet of one star

to the planet of another star. It takes a long time, because stars are

many light-years apart and rocket ships cannot travel as fast as light.

Einstein said so—whoever he was. Do we start with the Sirius IV ship? I

was around when it came in, all right. Fifteen years ago, and Halsey’s

Planet is still enjoying the benefits of it. And so is Leverett and Sons

Trading Corporation. They did fine on flowers from seeds that bucket

brought, they did fine on sugar perch from eggs that bucket brought.

I’ve never had it myself. Raw fish for dessert! But some people swear by

it—at five shields a portion. They can have it.”

“The hook, Marconi,” Ross reminded grimly.

Trader Marconi laughed amiably. “Sorry. Well, what else? Pictures and

music, but I’m not much on them. I do read, though, and as a reader I

say, God bless that bucket from Sirius IV. We never had a novelist like

Morris Halliday on this planet—or an essayist like Jay Waring. Let’s

see, there have been eight Halliday novels off the microfilms so far,

and I think Leverett still has a couple in the vaults. Leverett must

be——”

“Marconi. I don’t want to hear about Leverett and Sons. Or Morris

Halliday, or Waring. I want to hear about longliners.”

“I’m trying to tell you,” Marconi said sullenly, the mask down.

“No, you’re not. You’re telling me that the longline ships go from one

stellar system to another with merchandise. I know that.”

“Then what do you want?”

“Don’t be difficult, Marconi. I want to know the facts. All about

longliners. The big hush-hush. The candid explanations that explain

nothing—except that a starship is a starship. I know that they’re

closed-system, multigeneration jobs; a group of people get in on Sirius

IV and their great-great-great-great-grandchildren come giggling and

stumbling out on Halsey’s Planet. I know that every couple of

generations your firm—and mine, for that matter—builds one with profits

that would be taxed off anyway and slings it out, stocked with seeds and

film and sound tape and patent designs and manufacturing specifications

for every new gimmick on the market, in the hope that it’ll be back long

after we’re dead with a similar cargo to enrich your firm’s and my

firm’s then-current owners. Sounds silly—but, as I say, it’s tax money

anyhow. I know that your firm and mine staff the ships with half a dozen

bums of each sex, who are loaded aboard with a dandy case of delirium

tremens, contracted from spending their bounty money the only way they

know how. And that’s just about all I know. Take it from there, Marconi.

And be specific.”

The little man shrugged irritably. “That gag’s beginning to wear thin,

Ross,” he complained. “What do you want me to tell you—the number of

welds in Bulkhead 47 of ‘Starship 74’? What’s the difference? As you

said, a starship is a starship is a longliner. Without them the

inhabited solar systems would have no means of contact or commerce. What

else is there to say?”

Ross looked suddenly lost. “I—don’t know,” he said. “Don’t you know,

Marconi?”

Marconi hesitated, and for a moment Ross was sure he did know—knew

something, at any rate, something that might be an answer to the doubts

and nagging inconsistencies that were bothering him. But then Marconi

shrugged and looked at his watch and ordered another drink.

But there was something wrong. Ross felt himself in the position of a

diagnostician whose patient willfully refuses to tell where it hurts.

The planet was sick—but wouldn’t admit it. Sick? Dying! Maybe he was on

the wrong track entirely. Maybe the starships had nothing to do with it.

Maybe there was nothing that Marconi knew that would fit a piece into

the puzzle and make the answer come out all clear—but Ghost Town

continued to grow acre by acre, year by year. And Oldham still hadn’t

found him a secretary capable of writing her own name.

“According to the historians, everything fits nicely into place,” Ross

said, dubiously. “They say we came here ourselves in longliners once,

Marconi. Our ancestors under some man named Halsey colonized this place,

fourteen hundred years ago. According to the longliners that come in

from other stars, their ancestors colonized wherever they came from in

starships from a place called Earth. Where is this Earth, Marconi?”

Marconi said succinctly, “Look in the star charts. It’s there.”

“Yes, but——”

“But, hell,” Marconi said in annoyance. “What in the world has got into

you, Ross? Earth is a planet like any other planet. The starship Halsey

colonized in was a starship like any other starship—only bigger. I

guess, that is—I wasn’t there. After all, what are the longliners but

colonists? They happen to be going to planets that are already

inhabited, that’s all. So a starship is nothing new or even very

interesting, and this is beginning to bore me, and you ought to read

your urgent-priority-rush message.”

Ross felt repentant—knowing that that was just how Trader Marconi wanted

him to feel. He said slowly, “I’m sorry if I’m being a nuisance,

Marconi. You know how it is when you feel stale and restless. I know all

the stories—but it’s so damned hard to believe them. The famous

colonizing ships. They must have been absolutely gigantic to take any

reasonable number of people on a closed-circuit, multigeneration ride.

We can’t build them that big now!”

“No reason to.”

“But we couldn’t if we had to. Imagine shooting those things all over

the Galaxy. How many inhabited planets in the charts—five hundred? A

thousand? Think of the technology, Marconi. What became of it?”

“We don’t need that sort of technology any more,” Marconi explained.

“That job is done. Now we concentrate on more important things. Learning

to live with each other. Developing our own planet. Increasing our

understanding of social factors and demographic——”

Ross was laughing at last. “Well, Marconi,” he said at last, “that takes

care of that! We sure have figured out how to handle the social factors,

all right. Every year there are fewer of them to handle. Pretty soon

we’ll all be dead, and then the problem can be marked ‘solved.’”

Marconi laughed too—eagerly, as if he’d been waiting for the chance. He

said, “Now that that’s settled, are you going to open your message? Are

you at least going to have some lunch?”

The Yards messenger stumbled up to their table again, this time with an

envelope for Marconi. He looked sharply at Ross’s unopened envelope and

said nothing, pointedly. Ross guiltily picked it up and tore it open.

You could act like a sulky child in front of a friend, but strangers

didn’t understand.

The message was from his office. RADAR REPORTS HIGH VELOCITY SPACECRAFT

ON AUTOCONTROLS. FIRST APPROXIMATION TRAJECTORY INDICATES INTERSTELLAR

ORIGIN. PROBABLE ETA YARDS 1500. NO RADIO MESSAGES RECEIVED. DON’T HAVE

TO TELL YOU TO GET ON THIS IMMEDIATELY AND GIVE IT YOUR BEST. OLDHAM.

Ross looked at Marconi, whose expression was perturbed. “Bet I know what

your message says,” he offered with an uneasy quaver in his voice.

Marconi said: “I’ll bet you do. Oldham’s radar setup on Sunward always

has been better than Haarland’s. Better location. Man, you are in

trouble! Let’s get out there and hope nobody’s missed you so far.”

They grabbed sandwiches from the snack bar on the way out and munched

them while the Yards jeep took them to the ready line. Skirting the

freighters in their pits, slipping past the enormous overhaul sheds,

they saw excited debates going on. Twice they were passed by Yards

vehicles heading toward the landing area. Halfway to the line they heard

the recall sirens warning everybody and everything out of the ten seared

acres surrounded by homing and Ground-Controlled Approach radars. That

was where the big ones were landed.

The ready line was jammed when they got there. Ships from one or another

of the five moons that circled Halsey’s planet were common; the moons

were the mines. Even the weekly liner and freighters from the colony on

Sunward, the planet next in from Halsey’s, were routine to the Yards

workers. But to anybody an interstellar ship was a sensation, a

once-or-twice-in-a-lifetime thrill.

Protocols were uncertain. Traders argued about the first crack at the

strangers and their goods. A dealer named Aalborg said the only fair

system would be to give every trade there an equal opportunity to do

business—in alphabetical order. Everybody agreed that under no

circumstances should the man from Leverett and Sons be allowed to

trade—everybody, except the man from Leverett and Sons. He pointed out

that his firm was the logical choice because it had more and fresher

experience in handling interstellar goods than any other....

They almost mobbed him.

It wasn’t merely money that filled the atmosphere with electric tingles.

The glamor of time-travel was on them. The crew aboard that ship were

travelers of time as well as space. The crew that had launched the ship

was dust. The crew that served it now had never seen a planet.

There was even some humility in the crowd. There were thoughtful ones

among them who reflected that it was not, after all, a very great feat

to hitch a rocket to a shell and lob it across a few million miles to a

neighboring planet. It was eclipsed by the tremendous deed whose climax

they were about to witness. The thoughtful ones shrugged and sighed as

they thought that even the starship booming down toward Halsey’s

Planet—fitted with the cleverest air replenishers and the most

miraculously efficient waste converters—was only a counter in the game

whose great rule was the mass-energy formulation of the legendary

Einstein: that there is no way to push a material object past the speed

of light.

A report swept the field that left men reeling in its wake. Radar Track

confirmed that the ship was of unfamiliar pattern. All hope that it

might be a starship launched from this very spot on the last leg of a

stupefying round trip was officially dead. The starship was foreign.

“Wonder what they have?” Marconi muttered.

“Trader!” Ross sneered ponderously. He was feeling better; the weight of

depression had been lifted for the time being, either by his confession

or the electric atmosphere. If every day were like this, he thought

vaguely....

“Let’s not kid each other,” Marconi was saying exuberantly. “This is an

event, man! Where are they from, what are they peddling? Do I get a good

cut at their wares? It could be fifty thousand shields for me in

commission alone. Lurline and I could build a tower house on Great Blue

Lake with that kind of money, with a whole floor for her parents! Ross,

you just don’t know what it is to really be in love. Everything

changes.”

A jeep roared up and slammed to a stop; Ross blinked and yelled: “Here

it comes!”

They watched the ground-controlled approach with the interest of

semiprofessionals and concealed their rising excitement with shop talk.

“Whups! There goes the high-power job into action.” Marconi pointed as a

huge dish antenna swiveled ponderously on its mast. “Seems the

medium-output dishes can’t handle her.”

“Maybe the high-power dish can’t either. She might be just plain shot.”

“Standard, sealed GCA doesn’t get shot, my young friend. Not in a

neon-atmosphere tank it doesn’t.”

“Maybe along about the fifth generation they forgot what it was and cut

it open with an acetylene torch to see what was inside.”

“Bad luck for us in that case, Ross.” The ship steadied on a due-west

course and flashed across the heavens and over the horizon.

“Somebody decided a braking ellipse or two was in order. What about line

of sight?”

“No sweat. The GCA jockey—and I’d bet it’s Delafield himself—pushes a

button that hooks him into the high-power dish at every rocket field on

Halsey’s. It’s been all thought out. There’s a potential fortune aboard

that longliner and Fields Administration wants its percentage for

servicing and accommodating.”

“Wonder what they have?”

“I already asked that one, Ross.”

“So you did.”

They lapsed into silence until the rocket boomed in again from the east,

high and slow. The big dish swiveled abruptly and began tracking again.

“He’ll try to bring her down this time. Yes! There go fore and

stabilizing jets.”

Flame jutted from the silvery speck high in the blue; its apparent speed

slowed to a crawl. It vanished for a second as steering jets turned her

slowly endwise. They caught sight of the stern jets when they blasted

for the descent.

It was uneventful—just the landing of a very, very big rocket. When a

landing is successful it is like every other successful landing ever

made.

But the action that the field whirled into immediately following the

landing was far from routine. The bullhorns roared that all traders,

wipers, rubbernecks, and visitors were to get behind the ready lines and

stay there. All Class-Three-and-higher Field personnel were to take

stations for longliner clearance. The weapons and decontamination

parties were to take their stations immediately. Captain Delafield would

issue all future orders and don’t let any of the traders talk you out of

it, men. Captain Delafield would issue all future orders.

Ross watched in considerable surprise as Field men working with drilled

precision broke out half a dozen sleek, needle-nosed guns from an

innocent-looking bay of the warehouse and manhandled them into position.

From another bay a large pressure tank was hauled and backed against the

lock of the starship. Ross could see the station medic bustlingly

supervise that, and the hosing of white gunk onto the juncture between

tank and ship.

Delafield crossed the stretch from the GCA complex to the tank, vanished

into it through a pressure-fitted door and that was that. The tank had

no windows.

Ross said to Marconi, wonderingly: “What’s all this about? There was Doc

Gibbons handling the pressure tank, there was Chunk Blaney rolling out a

God-damned cannon I never knew was there—how many more little secrets

are there that I don’t know about?”

Marconi grinned. “They have gun drill once a month, my young friend, and

they never say a word about it. Let the right rabble-rouser get hold of

the story and he might sail into office on a platform of ‘Keep the

bug-eyed monsters off of Halsey’s Planet.’ You have to have reasonable

precautions, military and medical, though—and this is the straight

goods—there’s never been any trouble of either variety.”

The conversation died and there was a long, boring hour of nothing. At

last Delafield appeared again. One of the decontamination party ran up

in a jeep with a microphone.

“What’ll it be?” Ross demanded. “Alphabetic order? Or just a rush?”

The announcement floored him. “Representative of the Haarland Trading

Corporation please report to the decontamination tank.”

The representative of the Haarland Trading Corporation was Marconi.

“Hell,” Ross said bitterly. “Good luck with them, whoever they are.”

Marconi brooded for a moment and then said gruffly, “Come on along.”

“You mean it?”

“Sure. Uh—naturally, Ross, you’ll give me your word not to make any

commercial offers or inquiries without my permission.”

“Oh. Naturally.” They started across the field and were checked through

the ready line, Marconi cheerfully presenting his identification and

vouching for Ross.

Captain Delafield, at the tank, snapped, “What are you doing here, Ross?

You’re Oldham’s man. I distinctly said——”

“My responsibility, Captain. Will that do it?” Marconi asked.

Delafield snapped, “It’ll be your fundament if Haarland hears about it.

Actually it’s the damnedest situation—they _asked_ for Haarland’s.”

Marconi looked frightened and his hand involuntarily went to his breast

pocket. He swallowed and asked, “Where are they from?”

Delafield grimaced and said, “Home.”

Marconi exploded, “Oh, no!”

“That’s all I can get out of them. I suppose their trajectory can be

analyzed, and there must be books. We haven’t been in the ship yet.

Nobody goes in until it gets sprayed, rayed, dusted, and busted down

into its component parts. Too many places for nasty little mutant

bacteria and viruses to lurk.”

“Sure, Captain. ‘Home,’ eh? They’re pretty simple?”

“Happy little morons. Fifteen of them, ranging in age from one month to

what looks like a hundred and twenty. All they know is ‘home’ and ‘we

wish to see the representative of the Haarland Trading Corporation.’

First the old woman said it. Then the next in line—he must be about a

hundred—said it. Then a pair of identical twins, fifty-year-old women,

said it in chorus. Then the rest of them on down to the month-old baby,

and I swear to God he tried to say it. Well, you’re the Haarland Trading

Corporation. Go on in.”

..... 2

THEY were all naked. Why not? There’s no weather in a space ship. All of

them laughed when Ross and Marconi came in through the lock except the

baby, who was nursing at the breast of a handsome woman. Their laughter

was what attracted Ross immediately. Cheerful—no meanness in it. The

happy yelping of puppies at play with a red rubber bone.

A stab went through him as the pleasure in their simple happiness turned

to recollection and recognition. His wife of a decade ago.... Ross

studied them with amazement, expecting to find her features in their

features, her figure in theirs. And failed. Yet they reminded him

inescapably of his miserable year with that half-a-woman, but they were

physically no kin of hers. They were just cheerful laughers who he knew

were less than human.

The cheerful laughers exposed unblemished teeth in all their mouths,

including that of the hundred-and-twenty-year-old matriarch. Why not? If

you put calcium and fluorides into a closed system, they stay there.

The old woman stopped laughing at them long enough to say to Marconi,

“We wish to see the representative of the Haarland——”

“Yes, I know. I’m the representative of the Haarland Trading

Corporation. Welcome to Halsey’s Planet. May I ask what your name is,

ma’am?”

“Ma,” she said genially.

“Pleased to meet you, Ma. My name’s Marconi.”

Ma said, bewildered, “You just said you were the representative of the

Haarland Trading——”

“Yes, Ma, but that’s all right. Let’s say that’s my other name. Two

names—understand?”

She laughed at the idea of two names, wonderingly.

Marconi pressed, “And what’s the name of this gentleman?”

“He isn’t Gentleman. He’s Sonny.”

Sonny was a hundred years old.

“Pleased to meet you, Sonny. And your name, sir?”

“Sonny,” said a redheaded man of eighty or thereabouts.

The identical-twin women were named The Kids. The baby was named Him.

The rest of the troop were named Girl, Ma, or Sonny. After introductions

Ross noticed that Him had been passed to another Ma who was placidly

suckling him. She had milk; it dribbled from the corner of the baby’s

mouth. “There isn’t another baby left in the ship, is there?” Ross asked

in alarm.

They laughed and the Ma suckling the baby said: “There was, but she

died. Mostly they do when you put them into the box after they get born.

Ma here was lucky. Her Him didn’t die.”

“Put them in the box? What box? Why?”

Marconi was nudging him fiercely in the ribs. He ignored it.

They laughed amiably at his ignorance and explained that the box was the

box, and that you put your newborn babies into it because you put your

newborn babies into it.

A beep tone sounded from the ship.

Ma said, “We have to go back now, The Representative of the Haarland

Trading Corporation Marconi.”

“What for?”

Ma said, “At regular intervals signaled by a tone of six hundred cycles

and an intermittent downward shifting of the ship lights from standard

illumination frequency to a signal frequency of 420 millimicrons, ship’s

operating personnel take up positions at the control boards for

recalibration of ship-working meters and instruments against the battery

of standard masters. We’ll be right back.”

They trooped through the hatch, leaving Ross and Marconi staring at each

other in the decontamination tank.

“Well,” Ross said slowly, “at last I know why the Longliner Departments

have their little secrets. ‘The box.’ I say it’s murder.”

“Be reasonable,” Marconi told him—but his own face was white under the

glaring germicidal lamps. “You can’t let them increase without limit or

they’d all die. And before they died there’d be cannibalism. Which do

you prefer?”

“Letting kids be born and then snuffing them out if a computer decides

they’re the wrong sex or over the quota is inhuman.”

“I didn’t say I like it, Ross. But it works.”

“So do pills!”

“Pills are a private matter. A person might privately decide not to take

hers. The box is a public matter and the group outnumbers and overrules

a mother who decides not to use it. There’s your question of

effectiveness answered, but there’s another point. Those people are

sane, Ross. Preposterously naive, but sane! Saner than childless women

or sour old bachelors we both know who never had to love anything small

and helpless, and so come to love nobody but themselves. They’re sane.

Partly because the women get a periodic biochemical shakeup called

pregnancy that their biochemical balance is designed to mesh with.

Partly because the men find tenderness and protectiveness in themselves

toward the pregnant women. Mostly, I think, because—it’s something to

do.

“Can you imagine the awful monotony of life in the ship? The work is

sheer rote and repetition. They can’t read or watch screentapes. They

were born in the ship, and the books and screentapes are meaningless

because they know nothing to compare them with. The only change they see

is each other, aging toward death. Frequent pregnancies are a Godsend to

them. They compare and discuss them; they wonder who the fathers are;

they make bets of rations; the men brag and keep score. The girls look

forward to their first and their last. The jokes they make up about

them! The way they speculate about twins! The purgative fear, even,

keeps them sane.”

“And then,” Ross said, “‘the box.’”

Staring straight ahead at the ship’s port Marconi echoed: “Yes. ‘The

box.’ If there were another way—but there isn’t.”

* * * * *

His breezy young boss, Charles Oldham IV, was not pleased with what Ross

had to report.

“Asked for Haarland!” he repeated unbelievingly. “Those dummies didn’t

know where they were going or where they were from, but they knew enough

to ask for Haarland.” He slammed a ruler on his desk and yelled:

“God-damn it!”

“Mr. Oldham!” Ross protested, aghast. For a superior to lose his temper

publicly was unthinkable; it covered you with embarrassment.

“Manners be God-damned too!” Oldham screamed, breaking up fast. “What do

you know about the state of our books? What do you know about the

overhead I inherited from my loving father? What the hell do you know

about the downcurve in sales?”

“These fluctuations——” Ross began soothingly.

“Fluctuations be God-damned! I know a fluctuation when I see one, and I

know a long-term downtrend when I see one. And that’s what we’re riding,

right into bankruptcy, fellow. And now these God-damned dummies blow in

from nowhere with a consignment exclusively for Haarland—I don’t know

why I don’t get to hell out of this stupid business and go live in a

shack on Great Blue Lake and let the planet go ahead and rot.”

Ross’s horror at the unseemly outburst was eclipsed by his interest at

noting how similarly he and Oldham had been thinking. “Sir,” he

ventured, “I’ve had something on my mind for a while——”

“It can wait,” Oldham growled, collecting himself with a visible effort.

So there went his chance to resign. “What about customs? I know Haarland

hasn’t got enough cash to lay out. Who has?”

Ross said glibly: “Usual arrangement, sir. They turn an estimated

twenty-five per cent of the cargo over to the port authority for

auction, the receipts to be in full discharge of their import tax. And I

suppose they enter protective bids. They aren’t wasting any

time—auction’s 2100 tonight.”

“You handle it,” Oldham muttered. “Don’t go over one hundred thousand

shields. Diversify the purchases as much as possible. And try to sneak

some advance information out of the dummies if you get a chance.”

“Yes, sir,” Ross said. As he left he saw Oldham taking a plastic bottle

from a wall cabinet.

And that, thought Ross as he rode to the Free Port, was the first crack

he had ever seen in the determined optimism of the trading firm’s top

level. They were optimists and they were idealists, at least to hear

them tell it. Interplanetary trading was a cause and a mission; the

traders kept the flame of commerce alight. Perhaps, thought Ross, they

had been able to indulge in the hypocrisy of idealism only so long as a

population upcurve assured them of an expanding market. Perhaps now that

births were flattening out—some said the dirty word “declining”—they all

would drop their optimistic creed in favor of fang-and-claw competition

for the favors of the dwindling pool of consumers.

And that, Ross thought gloomily, was the way he’d go himself if he

stayed on: junior trader, to senior trader, to master trader, growing

every year more paranoidally suspicious of his peers, less scrupulous in

the chase of the shield....

But he was getting out, of course. The purser’s berth awaited. And then,

perhaps, the awful depressions he had been enduring would lift off him.

He thought of the master traders he knew: his own man Oldham, none too

happy in the hereditary business; Leverett, still smug and fat with his

terrific windfall of the Sirius IV starship fifteen years ago; Marconi’s

boss Haarland—Haarland broke the sequence all to hell. It just wasn’t

possible to think of Haarland being driven by avarice and fear. He was

the oldest of them all, but there was more zest and drive in his

parchment body than in the rest of them combined.

In the auction hall Ross found a seat near the velvet ropes. One of the

professional bidders lounging against a wall flicked him an almost

imperceptible signal, and he answered with another. That was that; he

had his man, and a good one. They had often worked together in the

commodity pits, but not so often or so exclusively that the bidder would

be instantly known as his.

Inside the enclosure Marconi, seated at a bare table, labored over a

sheaf of papers with one of the “Sonnies” from the ship. Sonny was

wriggling in coveralls, the first clothes he had ever worn. Ross saw

they hadn’t been able to get shoes onto him.

Who else did he know? Captain Delafield was sitting somberly within the

enclosure; Win Fraley, the hottest auctioneer on the Port, was studying

a list, his lips moving. Every trading firm was represented; the heads

of the smaller firms were there in person, not daring to delegate the

bidding job. Plenty of Port personnel, just there for the excitement of

the first longliner in fifteen years, even though it was well after

close of the business day.

The goods were in sealed cases against the back wall as usual. Ross

could only tell that some of them were perforated and therefore ought to

contain living animals. Only the one Sonny from the starship crew was

there; presumably the rest were back on the ship. He wouldn’t be able to

follow Oldham’s orders to snoop out the nature of the freight from them.

Well, damn Oldham; damn even the auction, Ross thought to himself. His

mood of gloom did not lift.

The auction was a kind of letdown. All that turmoil and bustle,

concentrated in a tiny arc around the velvet ropes, contrasted

unpleasantly with the long, vacant rows of dusty seats that stretched to

the back of the hall. Maybe a couple of centuries ago Ross would have

enjoyed the auction more. But now all it made him think of was the thing

he had been brooding about for a night and a day, the slow emptying of

the planet, the....

Decay.

But, as usual, no one else seemed to notice or to care.

Captain Delafield consulted his watch and stood up. He rapped the table.

“In accordance with the rules of the Trade Commission and the

appropriate governing statutes,” he droned, “certain merchandise will

now be placed on public auction. The Haarland Trading Corporation,

consignee, agrees and consents to divest itself of merchandise from

Consignment 97-W amounting by estimate of the customs authorities to

twenty-five per cent of the total value of all merchandise in said

consignment. All receipts of this auction are to be entered as excise

duties paid by the consignee on said merchandise, said receipts to

constitute payment in full on excise on Consignment 97-W. The clerk will

record; if any person here present wishes to enter an objection let him

do so thank you.” He glanced at a slip of paper in his hand. “I am

requested to inform you that the Haarland Trading Corporation has

entered with the clerk a protective bid of five thousand shields on each

item.” There was a rustle in the hall. Five thousand shields was a lot

of money. “Your auctioneer, Win Fraley,” said Captain Delafield, and sat

down in the first row of seats.

The auctioneer took a long, slow swallow of water, his eyes gleaming

above the glass at the audience. Theatrically he tossed the glass to an

assistant, smacked his hands together and grinned. “Well,” he boomed

genially, “I don’t have to tell you gentlemen that somebody’s going to

get rich tonight. Who knows—maybe it’ll be you? But you can’t make money

without spending money, so without any further ado, let’s get started. I

have here,” he rapped out briskly, “Item Number One. Now you don’t know

and I don’t know exactly what Item Number One contains, but I can tell

you this, they wouldn’t have sent it two hundred and thirty-one lights

if they didn’t think it was worth something. Let’s get this started with

a rush, folks, and I mean with a big bid to get in the right mood. After

all, the more you spend here the less you have to pay in taxes,” he

laughed. “You ready? Here’s the dope. Item Number One——” His assistant

slapped a carton at the extreme left of the line. “——weight two hundred

and fifteen grams, net; fifteen cubic centimeters; one microfilm reel

included. Reminds me,” he reminisced, “of an item just about that size

on the Sirius IV shipment. Turned out to be Maryjane seeds, and I don’t

suppose I have to tell anybody here how much Mr. Leverett made out of

Maryjanes; I bet every one of us has been smoking them ever since. What

do you say, Mr. Leverett? You did all right last time—want to say ten

thousand as a first big bid on Item Number One? Nine thousand? Do I

hear——?”

One of the smaller traders, not working through a professional bidder,

not even decently delegating the work to a junior, bid seventy-five

hundred shields. Like the spokesmen for the other big traders, Ross sat

on his hands during the early stages. Let the small fry give themselves

a thrill and drop out. The big firms knew to a fraction of a shield how

much the small ones could afford to bid on a blind purchase, and the

easiest way to handle them was to let them spend their budgets in a

hurry. Of course the small traders knew all this, and their strategy,

when they could manage it, was to hold back as long as possible. It was

a matter of sensing emotion rather than counting costs; of recognizing

the fraction of a second in which a little fellow made up his mind to

acquire an item and bidding him up—of knowing when he’d gone his limit

and letting him have it at a ruinous price. It was an art, and Ross,

despising it, knew that he did it very, very well.

He yawned and pretended to read a magazine while the first six items

went on the block; the little traders seemed desperate enough to force

the price up without help. He bid on Item Seven partly to squeeze a runt

trader and partly to test his liaison with his professional bidder. It

was perfect; the pro caught his signal—a bored inspection of his

fingernails—while seeming to peek clumsily at the man from Leverett’s.

Ross let the next two pass and then acquired three items in rapid

succession. The fever had spread to most of the bidders by then; they

were starting at ten thousand and up. One or two of the early birds had

spent their budgets and were leaving, looking sandbagged—as indeed they

had been. Ross signaled “take five” to his professional and strolled out

for a cup of coffee.

On the way back he stopped for a moment outside the hall to look at the

stars and breathe. There were the familiar constellations—The Plowman,

the Rocket Fleet, Marilyn Monroe. He stood smoking a cigarette and

yearning toward them until somebody moved in the darkness near him.

“Nice night, Ross,” the man said gloomily.

It was Captain Delafield. “Oh, hello, sir,” Ross said, the world

descending around him again like a too-substantial curtain. “Taking a

breather?”

“Had to,” the captain growled. “Ten more minutes in that place and I

would have thrown. Damned money-grabbing traders. No offense, Ross; just

that I don’t see how you stand the life. Seems to have got worse in my

time. Much worse. You high-rollers goading the pee-wees into shooting

their wads—it didn’t use to be like that. Gallantry. Not stomping a

downed man. I don’t see how you stand it.”

“I can’t stand it,” Ross said quietly. “Captain Delafield, you don’t

know—I’m so sick to death of the life I’m leading and the work I’m doing

that I’d do anything to get away. Mr. Fallon offered me a purser’s spot

on his ship; I’ve been thinking about it very seriously.”

“Purser? A dirty job. There’s nothing to do except when you’re in port,

and then there’s so much to do that you never get to see the planet. I

don’t recommend it, Ross.”

Ross grunted, thinking. If even the purser’s berth was no way out, what

was left for him? Sixty more years of waiting for a starship and

scheming how to make a profit from its contents? Sixty more years

watching Ghost Town grow by nibbles on Halsey City, watching the traders

wax in savagery as they battled for the ever-diminishing pool of

consumers, watching obscene comedies like Lurline of the Old Landowners

graciously consenting to wed Marconi of the New Nobodies? He said

wearily: “Then what shall I do, Captain? Rot here with the rest of the

planet?”

Delafield shrugged, suprisingly gentle. “You feel it too, Ross? I’m glad

to hear it. I’m not sensitive, thank God, but I know they talk about me.

They say I quit the space-going fleet as soon as I had a chance to grab

off the port captaincy. They’re right; I did. Because I was frightened.”

“Frightened? You?” Delafield’s ribbons for a dozen heroic rescues

gleamed in the light that escaped from the hall.

“Sure, Ross.” He flicked the ribbons. “Each one of these means I and my

men pulled some people out of a jam they got into because of somebody’s

damned stupidity or slow reflexes or defective memory. No; I withdraw

that. The ‘Thetis’ got stove in because of mechanical failure, but all

the rest were human error. There got to be too many for me; I want to

enjoy my old age.

“Ready to face that if you become a purser? I can tell you that if you

don’t like it here you won’t be happy on Sunward and you won’t like the

moons. And you most especially and particularly won’t like being a

purser. It’s the same job you’re doing now, but it pays less, offers you

a six-by-eight cubicle to work and live in, and gives you nothing

resembling a future to aim at. Now if you’ll excuse me I’d better get

back inside. I’ve enjoyed our talk.”

Ross followed the captain gloomily. Nothing had changed inside; Ross

lounged in the doorway inconspicuously picking up the eye of his bidder.

Marconi was gone from the enclosure. Ross looked around hopefully and

found his friend in agitated conversation with an unrecognizable but

also agitated man at the back of the hall. Ross drifted over. Heads were

turning in the front rows. As Ross got within range he heard a couple of

phrases. “——in the ship. Mr. Haarland specially asked for you. Please,

Mr. Marconi!”

“Oh, hell,” Marconi said disgustedly. “Go on. Tell him I’ll be there.

But how he expects me to take care of things here and——” He trailed off

as he caught sight of Ross.

“Trouble?” Ross asked.

“Not exactly. The hell with it.” Marconi stared indecisively at the

auctioneer for a moment. He said obscurely, “Taking your life isn’t

enough; he wants more. And I thought I’d be able to see Lurline tonight.

Excuse me, Ross. I’ve got to get over to the ship.” He hurried out.

Ross looked wonderingly after him, caught the eye of his bidder, and

went back to work. By the time the auction was over and dawn was

breaking in the west, Oldham Trading had bought nine lots of

merchandise: three breathing, five flowering, and one a roll of

microfilm. Ross took his prizes to the office where Charles Oldham was

waiting, much the better for a few drinks and a long nap.

“How much?” demanded Oldham. Evidently they were both supposed to ignore

his hysteria of the night before.

“Fifty-seven thousand,” Ross said dully.

“For nine lots? Good man! With any kind of luck at all——” And Oldham

babbled on and on. He wanted Ross to stay and view the microfilm

projection, stand by for a report from a zoologist and a botanist on the

living acquisitions. He pleaded weariness and Oldham became conciliatory

to the wonderful young up-and-comer who had bid in the merchandise at a

whopping bargain price.

Ross dragged himself from the building, into a cab, and home. Morosely

undressing he lit a cigarette and brooded: well, that was it. What you’d

been waiting for since you were a junior apprentice. The starship came,

you had the alien prizes in your hands and you realized they were as

tawdry as the cheap gimcracks you export every week to Sunward.

He stared out the window, over Ghost Town, to the Field. The sun was

high over the surrounding mountains; he imagined he could pick out the

reflected glimmer from the starship a dozen miles away. Marconi at least

got to examine the ship. Marconi might be there now; he’d been headed

that way when Ross saw him last. And evidently not enjoying it much.

Ross wondered vaguely if anybody really enjoyed anything. He stubbed out

his cigarette.

As he fell asleep he was remembering what Delafield had told him about

the moons and the planet ports. His dreams were of the cities of other

planets, and every one of them was populated by aloof Delafields and

avaricious Oldhams.

..... 3

“WAKE up, Ross,” Marconi was saying, joggling him. “Come on, wake up.”

Ross thrust himself up on an elbow and opened his eyes. He said with a

tongue the size of his forearm in a dust-lined mouth: “Wha’ time is it?

Wha’ the hell are you doing here, for that matter?”

“It’s around noon. You’ve slept for three hours; you can get up.”

“Uh.” Ross automatically reached for a cigarette. The smoke got in his

eyes and he rubbed them; it dehydrated and seared what little healthy

tissue appeared to be left in his mouth. But it woke him up a little.

“What are you doing here?” he demanded.

Marconi’s hand was involuntarily on his breast pocket again, the one in

which he carried Lurline’s picture. He said harshly: “You want a job?

Topside? Better than purser?” He wasn’t meeting Ross’s eye. His gaze

roved around the apartment and lighted on a coffee maker. He filled it

and snapped it on. “Get dressed, will you?” he demanded.

Ross sat up. “What’s this all about, Marconi? What do you want, anyway?”

Marconi, for his own reasons, became violently angry. “You’re the

damnedest question-asker I ever did meet, Ross. I’m trying to do you a

favor.”

“What favor?” Ross asked suspiciously.

“You’ll find out. You’ve been bellyaching to me long enough about how

dull your poor little life is. Well, I’m offering you a chance to do

something big and different. And what do you do? You crawfish. Are you

interested or aren’t you? I told you: It’s a space job, and a big one.

Bigger than being a purser for Fallon. Bigger than you can imagine.”

Ross began to struggle into his clothes, no more than half

comprehending, but stimulated by the magic words. He asked, puzzling

sleepily over what Marconi had said, “What are you sore about?” His

guess was that Lurline had broken a date—but it seemed to be the wrong

time of day for that.

“Nothing,” Marconi said grumpily. “Only I have my own life to live.” He

poured two cups of coffee. He wouldn’t answer questions while they

sipped the scalding stuff. But somehow Ross was not surprised when,

downstairs, Marconi headed his car along the winding road through Ghost

Town that led to the Yards.

Every muscle of Ross’s body was stiff and creaky; another six hours of

sleep would have been a wonderful thing. But as they drove through the

rutted streets of Ghost Town he began to feel alive again. He stared out

the window at the flashing ruins, piecing together the things Marconi

had said.

“Watch it!” he yelled, and Marconi swerved the car around a tumbled

wall. Ross was shaking, but Marconi only drove faster. This was crazy!

You didn’t race through Ghost Town as though you were on the pleasure

parkways around the Great Blue Lake; it wasn’t safe. The buildings had

to fall over from time to time—nobody, certainly, bothered to keep them

in repair. And nobody bothered to pick up the pieces when they fell,

either, until the infrequent road-mending teams made their rounds.

But at last they were out of Ghost Town, on the broad highway from

Halsey City to the port. The administration building and car park was

just ahead.

It was there that Marconi spoke again. “I’m assuming, Ross, that you

weren’t snowing me when you said you wanted thrills, chills, and change

galore.”

“That’s not the way I put it. But I wasn’t snowing you.”

“You’ll get them. Come on.”

He led Ross across the field to the longliner, past a gaggle of

laughing, chattering Sonnies and Mas. He ignored them.

The longliner was a giant of a ship, a blunt torpedo a hundred meters

tall. It had no ports—naturally enough; the designers of the ship

certainly didn’t find any reason for its idiot crew to look out into

space, and landings and takeoffs would be remote-controlled. Two hundred

years old it was; but its metal was as bright, its edges as sharp, as

the newest of the moon freighters at the other end of the hardstand. Two

hundred years—a long trip, but an almost unimaginably long distance that

trip covered. For the star that spawned it was undoubtedly almost as far

away as light would travel in two centuries’ time. At 186,000 miles per

second, sixty seconds in a minute, sixty minutes in an hour. Ross’s

imagination gave up the task. It was far.

He stared about him in fascination as they entered the ship. He gaped at

sterile, gray-walled cubicles, each of which contained the same chair

and cot—no screen or projector for longliners. Ross remembered his rash

words of the day before about shipping out on a longliner, and

shuddered.

“Here we are,” said Marconi stopping before a closed door. He knocked

and entered.

It was a cubicle like the others, but there were reels stacked on the

floor and a projector. Sitting on the cot in a just-awakened attitude

was old man Haarland himself. Beady-eyed, Ross thought. Watchful.

Haarland asked: “Ross?”

“Yes, sir,” Marconi said. There was tension in his voice and attitude.

“Do you want me to stay, sir?”

Haarland growled: “Good God, no. You can get out. Sit down, Ross.”

Ross sat down. Marconi, carefully looking neither to right or left, went

out and closed the door. Haarland stretched, scratched, and yawned. He

said: “Ross, Marconi tells me you’re quite a fellow. Sincere, competent,

a good man to give a tough job to. Namely, his.”

“Junior-Fourth Trader?” Ross asked, bewildered.

“A little more dramatic than that—but we’ll come to the details in a

minute. I’m told you were ready to quit Oldham for a purser’s berth.

That’s ethical. Would you consider it unethical to quit Oldham for

Haarland?”

“Yes—I think I would.”

“Glad to hear it! What if the work had absolutely nothing to do with

trading and never brings you into a competitive situation with Oldham?”

“Well——” Ross scratched his jaw. “Well, I think that would be all right.

But a Junior Fourth’s job, Mr. Haarland——” The floor bucked and surged

under him. He gasped, “What was that?”

“Blastoff, I imagine,” Haarland said calmly. “We’re taking off. Better

lie down.”

Ross flopped to the floor. It was no time to argue, not with the

first-stage pumps thundering and the preheaters roaring their threat of

an imminent four-G thrust.

It came like thunder, slapping Ross against the floor plates as though

he were glued to them. He felt every tiny wrinkle in every weld he lay

on, and one arm had fallen across a film reel. He heaved, and succeeded

in levering it off the reel. It thwacked to the floor as though sandbags

were stacked meters-high atop it.

Blackout came very soon.

He awoke in free fall. He was orbiting aimlessly about the cubicle.

Haarland was strapped to the cot, absorbed in manipulating the portable

projector, trying to thread a free-floating film. Ross bumped against

the old man; Haarland abstractedly shoved him off.

He careened from a bulkhead and flailed for a grip.

“Oh,” said Haarland, looking up. “Awake?”

“Yes, awake!” Ross said bitterly. “What is all this? Where are we?”

The old man said formally, “Please forgive my cavalier treatment of you.

You must not blame your friend Marconi; he had no idea that I was

planning an immediate blastoff with you. I had an assignment for him

which he—he preferred not to accept. Not to mince words, Ross, he quit.”

“Quit his job?”

The old man shook his head. “No, Ross. Quit much more than the job of

working for me. He quit on an assignment which is—I am sorry if it

sounds melodramatic—absolutely vital to the human race.” He suddenly

frowned. “I—I think,” he added weakly. “Bear with me, Ross. I’ll try to

explain as I go along. But, you see, Marconi left me in the lurch. I

needed him and he failed me. He felt that you would be glad to take it

on, and he told me something about you.” Haarland glowered at Ross and

said, with a touch of bitterness, “A recommendation from Marconi, at

this particular point, is hardly any recommendation at all. But I

haven’t much choice—and, besides, I took the liberty of calling that

pompous young fool you work for.”

“Mister Haarland!” Ross cried, outraged. “Oldham may not be any prize

but really——”

“Oh, you know he’s a fool. But he had a lot to say about you. Enough so

that, if you want the assignment, it’s yours. As to the nature of the

assignment itself——” Haarland hesitated, then said briskly, “The

assignment itself has to do with a message my organization received via

this longliner. Yes, a message. You’ll see. It has also to do with

certain facts I’ve found in its log which, if I can ever get this damned

thing working——There we are.”

He had succeeded in threading the film.

He snapped on the projector. On the screen appeared a densely packed

block of numerals, rolling up and being replaced by new lines as fast as

the eye could take them in. Haarland said, “Notice anything?”

Ross swallowed. “If that stuff is supposed to mean anything to me,” he

declared, “it doesn’t.”

Haarland frowned. “But Marconi said——Well, never mind.” He snapped off

the projector. “That was the ship’s log, Ross. It doesn’t matter if you

can’t read it; you wouldn’t, I suppose, have had much call for that sort

of thing working for Oldham. It is a mathematical description of the

routing of this ship, from the time it was space-launched until it

arrived here yesterday. It took a long time, Ross. The reason that it

took a long time is partly that it came from far away. But, even more,

there is another reason. We were not this ship’s destination! Not the

original destination. We weren’t even the first alternate—or the second

alternate. To be exact, Ross, we were the seventh choice for this ship.”

Ross let go of his stanchion, floated a yard, and flailed back to it.

“That’s ridiculous, Mr. Haarland,” he protested. “Besides, what has all

this to do with——”

“Bear with an old man,” said Haarland, with an amused gleam in his eye.

There was very little he could do but bear with him, Ross thought

sourly. “Go on,” he said.

Haarland said professorially, “It is conceivable, of course, that a

planet might be asleep at the switch. We could believe it, I suppose, if

it seemed that the first-choice planet somehow didn’t pick the ship up

when this longliner came into radar range. In that event, of course, it

would orbit once or twice on automatics, and then select for its first

alternate target—which it did. It might be a human failure in the GCA

station—once.” He nodded earnestly. “Once, Ross. Not six times. No

planet passes up a trading ship.”

“Mr. Haarland,” Ross exploded, “it seems to me that you’re contradicting

yourself all over the place. Did six planets pass this ship up or didn’t

six planets pass this ship up? Which is it? And why would anybody pass a

longliner up anyhow?”

Haarland asked, “Suppose the planets were vacant?”

“What?” Ross was shaken. “But that’s silly! I mean, even I know that the

star charts show which planets are inhabited and which aren’t.”

“And suppose the star charts are wrong. Suppose the planets have become

vacant. The people have died off, perhaps; their culture decayed.”

Decay. Death and decay.

Ross was silent for a long time. He took a deep breath. He said at last,

“Sorry. I won’t interrupt again.”

Haarland’s expression was a weft of triumph and relief. “Six planets

passed this ship up. Remember Leverett’s ship fifteen years ago? Three

planets passed that one before it came to us. Nine different planets,

all listed on the traditional star charts as inhabited, civilized,

equipped with GCA radars, and everything else needed. Nine planets out

of communication, Ross.”

Decay, thought Ross. Aloud he said, “Tell me why.”

Haarland shook his head. “No,” he said strongly, “I want you to tell me.

I’ll tell you what I can. I’ll tell you the message that this ship

brought to me. I’ll tell you all I know, all I’ve told Marconi that he

isn’t man enough to use, and the things that Marconi will never learn,

as well. But why nine planets that used to be pretty much like our own

planet are now out of communication, that you’ll have to tell me.”

Forward rockets boomed; the braking blasts hurled Ross against the

forward bulkhead. Haarland rummaged under the cot for space suits. He

flung one at Ross.

“Put it on,” he ordered. “Come to the airlock. I’ll show you what you

can use to find out the answers.” He slid into the pressure suit, dived

weightless down the corridor, Ross zooming after.

They stood in the airlock, helmets sealed. Wordlessly Haarland opened

the pet cocks, heaved on the lock door. He gestured with an arm.

Floating alongside them was a ship, a ship like none Ross had ever seen

before.

..... 4

PICTURE Leif’s longboat bobbing in the swells outside Ambrose Light,

while the twentieth-century liners steam past; a tiny, ancient thing,

related to the new giants only as the Eohippus resembles the horse.

The ship that Haarland revealed was fully as great a contrast. Ross knew

spaceships as well as any grounder could, both the lumbering interplanet

freighters and the titanic longliners. But the ship that swung around

Halsey’s Planet was a midget (fueled rocket ships must be huge); its

jets were absurdly tiny, clearly incapable of blasting away from

planetary gravity; its entire hull length was unbroken and sheer (did

the pilot dare fly blind?).

The coupling connections were being rigged between the ships. “Come

aboard,” said Haarland, spryly wriggling through the passage. Ross,

swallowing his astonishment, followed.

The ship was tiny indeed. When Ross and Haarland, clutching handholds,

were drifting weightlessly in its central control cabin, they very

nearly filled it. There was one other cabin, Ross saw; and the two

compartments accounted for a good nine-tenths of the cubage of the ship.

Where that left space for the combustion chambers and the fuel tanks,

the crew quarters, and the cargo holds, Ross could not imagine. He said:

“All right, Mr. Haarland. Talk.”

Haarland grinned toothily, his expression eerie in the flickering violet

light that issued from a gutter around the cabin’s wall.

“This is a spaceship, Ross. It’s a pretty old one—fourteen hundred

years, give or take a little. It’s not much to look at, compared with

the up-to-date models you’re used to, but it’s got a few features that

you won’t find on the new ones. For one thing, Ross, it doesn’t use

rockets.” He hesitated. “Ask me what it does use,” he admitted, “and I

can’t tell you. I know the name, because I read it: nucleophoretic

drive. What nucleophoresis is and how it works, I can’t say. They call

it the Wesley Effect, and the tech manual says something about squared

miles of acceleration. Does that mean anything to you? No. How could it?

But it works, Ross. It works well enough so that this little ship will

get you where you’re going very quickly. The stars, Ross—it will take

you to the stars. Faster than light. What the top speed is I have no

idea; but there is a ship’s log here, too. And it has a three-month

entry—three months, Ross!—in which this little ship explored the solar

systems of fourteen stars.”

Wide-eyed, Ross held motionless. Haarland paused. “Fourteen hundred

years,” he repeated. “Fourteen hundred years this ship has been floating

out here. And for all that time, the longliners have been crawling from

star to star, while little hidden ships like this one could have carried

a thousand times as much goods a million times faster. Maybe the time

has come to get the ships out of hiding. I don’t know. I want to find

out; I want you to find out for me. I’ll be specific, Ross. I need a

pilot. I’m too old, and Marconi turned it down. Someone has to go out

there——” he gestured to the blind hull and the unseen stars beyond—“and

find out why nine planets are out of communication. Will you do it?”

Ross opened his mouth to speak, and a thousand questions competed for

utterance. But what he said, barely aloud, was only: “Yes.”

The far-off stars—more than a thousand million of them in our galaxy

alone. By far the greatest number of them drifted alone through space,

or with only a stellar companion as utterly unlivable by reason of heat

and crushing gravity as themselves. Fewer than one in a million had a

family of planets, and most even of those could never become a home for

human life.

But out of a thousand million, any fraction may be a very large number,

and the number of habitable planets was in the hundreds.

Ross had seen the master charts of the inhabited universe often enough

to recognize the names as Haarland mentioned them: Tau Ceti II, Earth,

the eight inhabitable worlds of Capella. But to realize that this

ship—this ship!—had touched down on each of them, and on a hundred more,

was beyond astonishment; it was a dream thing, impossible but

unquestioned.

Through Haarland’s burning, old eyes, Ross looked back through fourteen

centuries, to the time when this ship was a scout vessel for a

colonizing colossus. The lumbering giant drove slowly through space on

its one-way trip from the planet that built it—was it semi-mythical

Earth? The records were not clear—while the tiny scout probed each star

and solar system as it drew within range. While the mother ship was

covering a few hundred million miles, the scout might flash across

parsecs to scan half a dozen worlds. And when the scout came back with

word of a planet where humans could survive, they christened it with the

name of the scout’s pilot, and the chartroom labored, and the ship’s

officers gave orders, and the giant’s nose swerved through a half a

degree and began its long, slow deceleration.

“Why slow?” Ross demanded. “Why not use the faster-than-light drive for

the big ships?”

Haarland grimaced. “I’ve got to answer that one for you sooner or

later,” he said, “but let me make it later. Anyway, that’s what this

ship was: a faster-than-light scout ship for a real longliner. What

happened to the longliner the records don’t show; my guess is the

colonists cannibalized it to get a start in constructing homes for

themselves. But the scout ship was exempted. The captain of the

expedition had it put in an orbit out here, and left alone. It’s been

used a little bit, now and then—my great-grandfather’s father went clear

to 40 Eridani when my great-grandfather was a little boy, but by and

large it has been left alone. It had to be, Ross. For one thing, it’s

dangerous to the man who pilots it. For another, it’s dangerous to—the

Galaxy.”

Haarland’s view was anthropomorphic; the danger was not to the immense

and uncaring galaxy, but to the sparse fester of life that called itself

humanity.

When the race abandoned Earth, it was a gesture of revulsion. Behind

them they left a planet that had decimated itself in wars; ahead lay a

cosmos that, in all their searches, had revealed no truly sentient life.

Earth was a crippled world, the victim of its playing with nuclear

fission and fusion. But the techniques that gave them a

faster-than-light drive gave them as well a weapon that threatened solar

systems, not cities; that could detonate a sun as readily as uranium

could destroy a building. The child with his forbidden matches was now

sitting atop a munitions dump; the danger was no longer a seared hand or

blinded eye, but annihilation.

And the decision had been made: secrecy. By what condign struggles the

secrecy had been enforced, the secrecy itself concealed. But it had

worked. Once the radiating colonizers had reached their goals, the

nucleophoretic effect had been obliterated from their records and,

except for a single man on each planet, from their minds.

Why the single man? Why not bury it entirely?

Haarland said slowly, “There was always the chance that something would

go wrong, you see. And—it has.”

Ross said hesitantly, “You mean the nine planets that have gone out of

communication?”

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 C^2 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 in 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

geodesics 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.

Marconi was there.

He had trouble meeting Ross’s eyes, but his handclasp was firm and his

voice warmly friendly—and a little envious. “The very best, Ross,” he

said. “I—I wish——” He hesitated and stammered. He said, in a flood,

“Damn it, I should be going! Do a good job, Ross—and I hope you don’t

hate me.” And he left while Ross, disturbed, went in to see old man

Haarland.

Haarland spared no time for sentiment. “You’re cleared for space

flight,” he growled. “According to the visa, you’re going to Sunward—in

case anyone asks you between here and the port. Actually, let’s hear

where you _are_ going.”

Ross said promptly, “I am going on a mission of exploration and

reconnaissance. My first proposed destination is Ragansworld; second

Gemser, third Azor. If I cannot make contact with any of these three

planets, I will select planets at random from the master charts until I

find some Wesley Drive families somewhere. The contacts for the first

three planets are: On Ragansworld, Foley Associates; on Gemser, the

Franklin Foundation; on Azor, Cavallo Machine Tool Company. F-T-L

contacts on other planets are listed in the appendix to the master

charts. The co-ordinates for Ragansworld are——”

“Skip the co-ordinates,” mumbled Haarland, rubbing his eyes. “What do

you do when you get in contact with a Wesley Drive family?”

Ross hesitated and licked his lips. “I—well, it’s a little hard——”

“Dammit,” roared Haarland, “I’ve told you a _thousand_ times——”

“Yessir, I know. All I meant was I don’t exactly understand what I’m

looking for.”

“If I knew what you were to look for,” Haarland rasped, “I wouldn’t have

to send you out looking! Can’t you get it through your thick head?

_Something_ is wrong. I don’t know what. Maybe I’m crazy for bothering

about it—heaven knows, I’ve got troubles enough right here—but we

Haarlands have a tradition of service, and maybe it’s so old that we’ve

kind of forgotten just what it’s all about. But it’s not so old that

I’ve forgotten the family tradition. If I had a son, he’d be doing this.

I counted on Marconi to be my son; now all I have left is you. And

that’s little enough, heaven knows,” he finished bitterly.

Ross, wounded, said by rote: “On landing, I will attempt at once to make

contact with the local Wesley Drive family, using the recognition codes

given me. I will report to them on all the data at hand and suggest the

need for action.”

Haarland stood up. “All right,” he said. “Sorry I snapped at you. Come

on; I’ll go up to the ship with you.”

And that was the way it happened. Ross found himself in the longliner,

then with Haarland in the tiny, ancient, faster-than-light ship which

had once been tender to the ship that colonized Halsey’s Planet. He

found himself shaking hands with a red-eyed, suddenly-old Haarland,

watching him crawl through the coupling to the longliner, watching the

longliner blast away.

He found himself setting up the F-T-L course and throwing in the drive.

..... 5

ROSS was lucky. The second listed inhabited planet was still inhabited.

He had not quite stopped shuddering from the first when the approach

radar caught him. The first planet was given in the master charts as

“Ragansworld. Pop. 900,000,000; diam. 9400 m.; mean orbit 0.8 AU,” and

its co-ordinates went on to describe it as the fourth planet of a small

G-type sun. There had been some changes made: the co-ordinates now

intersected well inside a bright and turbulent gas cloud.

It appeared that suppressing the F-T-L drive had not quite annihilated

war.

But the second planet, Gemser—there, he was sure, was a world where

nothing was seriously awry.

He left the ship mumbling a name to himself: “Franklin Foundation.” And

he was greeted by a corporal’s guard of dignified and ceremonially

dressed men; they smiled at him, welcomed him, shook his hand, and

invited him to what seemed to be the local equivalent of the

administration building. He noticed disapprovingly that they didn’t seem

to go in for the elaborate decontamination procedures of Halsey’s

Planet, but perhaps, he thought, they had bred disease-resistance into

their bloodlines. Certainly the four men in his guide party seemed hale

and well-preserved, though the youngest of them was not less than sixty.

“I would like,” he said, “to be put in touch with the Franklin

Foundation, please.”

“Come right in here,” beamed one of the four, and another said:

“Don’t worry about a thing.” They held the door for him, and he walked

into a small and sybaritically furnished room. The second man said,

“Just a few questions. Where are you from?”

Ross said simply, “Halsey’s Planet,” and waited.

Nothing happened, except that all four men nodded comprehendingly, and

the questioner made a mark on a sheet of paper. Ross amplified,

“Fifty-three light years away. You know—another star.”

“Certainly,” the man said briskly. “Your name?”

Ross told him, but with a considerable feeling of deflation. He thought

wryly of his own feelings about the longlines and the far stars; he

remembered the stir and community excitement that a starship meant back

home. Still, Ross told himself. Halsey’s Planet might be just a back

eddy in the main currents of civilization. Quite possibly on another

world—this one, for instance—travelers from the stars were a

commonplace. The field hadn’t seemed overly busy, though; and there was

nothing resembling a spaceship. Unless—he thought with a sudden sense of

shock—those rusting hulks clumped together at the edge of the field had

once been spaceships. But that was hardly likely, he reassured himself.

You just don’t let spaceships rust.

“Sex?” the man asked, and “Age?” “Education?” “Marital status?” The

questions went on for more time than Ross quite understood; and they

seemed far from relevant questions for the most part; and some of them

were hard questions to answer. “Tau quotient?” for instance; Ross

blinked and said, with an edge to his voice:

“I don’t know what a tau quotient is.”

“Put him down as zero,” one of the men advised, and the interlocutor

nodded happily.

“Working-with-others rating?” he asked, beaming.

Ross said with controlled irritation, “Look, I don’t know anything about

these ratings. Will you take me to somebody who can put me in touch with

the Franklin Foundation?”

The man who was sitting next to him patted him gently on the shoulder.

“Just answer the questions,” he said comfortably. “Everything will be

all right.”

Ross flared, “The hell everything will——”

Something with electrified spikes in it hit him on the back of the neck.

Ross yelled and ducked away; the man next to him returned a little rod

to his pocket. He smiled at Ross. “Don’t feel bad,” he said

sympathetically. “Go ahead now, answer the questions.”

Ross shook his head dazedly. The pain was already leaving his neck, but

he felt nauseated by the suddenness and sharpness of it; he could not

remember any pain quite like that in his life. He stood up waveringly

and said, “Wait a minute, now——”

This time it was the man on the other side, and the pain was about twice

as sharp. Ross found himself on the floor, looking up through a haze.

The man on his right kept the rod in his hand, and the expression on his

face, while in no way angry, was stern. “Bad boy,” he said tenderly.

“Why don’t you want to answer the questions?”

Ross gasped, “God damn it, all I want is to see somebody! Keep your

dirty hands off me, you old fools!” And that was a mistake, as he

learned in the blessedly few minutes before he passed out completely

under the little rods held by the gentle but determined men.

He answered all the questions—bound to a chair, with two of the men

behind him, when he had regained consciousness. He answered every one.

They only had to hit him twice.

When they untied him the next morning, Ross had caught on to the local

folkways quite well. The fatherly fellow who released him said, “Follow

me,” and stood back, smiling but with one hand on one of the little

rods. And Ross was careful to say:

“Yes, sir!”

They rode in a three-wheeled car, and entered a barracks-like building.

Ross was left alone next to a bed in a dormitory with half a hundred

beds. “Just wait here,” the man said, smiling. “The rest of your group

is out at their morning session now. When they come in for lunch you can

join them. They’ll show you what to do.”

Ross didn’t have too long to wait. He spent the time in conjecture as

confused as it was fruitless; he had obviously done something wrong, but

just what was it?

If he had had twice as long he would have got no farther toward an

answer than he was: nowhere. But a noise outside ended his speculations.

He glanced toward the curiously shaped door—all the doors on this planet

seemed to be rectangular. A girl of about eighteen was peering inside.

She stared at Ross and said, “Oh!” Then she disappeared. There were

footsteps and whispers, and more heads appeared and blinked at him and

were jerked back.

Ross stood up in wretched apprehension. All of a sudden he was fourteen

years old again, and entering a new school where the old hands were

giggling and whispering about the new boy. He swore sullenly to himself.

A new face appeared, halted for an inspection of Ross, and walked

confidently in. The man was a good forty years old, Ross thought;

perhaps a kind of overseer in this institution—whatever kind of

institution it was. He approached Ross at a sedate pace, and he was

followed through the door in single file by a couple score men and

women. They ranged in age, Ross thought wonderingly, from the leader’s

forty down to the late teens of the girl who had first peered in the

door, and now was at the end of the procession.

The leader said, “How old are you?”

“Why, uh——” Ross figured confusedly: this planet’s annual orbital period

was roughly forty per cent longer than his own; fourteen into his age,

multiplied by ten, making his age in their local calculations....

“Why, I’m nineteen of your years old, about. And a half.”

“Yes. And what can you do?”

“Look here, sir. I’ve been through all this once. Why don’t you go and

ask those gentlemen who brought me here? And can anybody tell me where

the Franklin Foundation is?”

The fortyish fellow, with a look of outrage, slapped Ross across the

mouth. Ross knocked him down with a roundhouse right.