Search the Sky (Sci-Fi Classic). Cyril M. Kornbluth

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