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  “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 were 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.

  • • • • Four

  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 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 wor
ld, 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.