“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.