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 E.T.A. 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
