Part 3

“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.