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

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 wasn’t merely money that filled the atmosphere with electric tingles. The glamor of time-travel was on them. The crew aboard that ship were travelers of time as well as space. The crew that had launched the ship was dust. The crew that served it now had never seen a planet.

      There was even some humility in the crowd. There were thoughtful ones among them who reflected that it was not, after all, a very great feat to hitch a rocket to a shell and lob it across a few million miles to a neighboring planet. It was eclipsed by the tremendous deed whose climax they were about to witness. The thoughtful ones shrugged and sighed as they thought that even the starship booming down toward Halsey’s Planet—fitted with the cleverest air replenishers and the most miraculously efficient waste converters—was only a counter in the game whose great rule was the mass-energy formulation of the legendary Einstein: that there is no way to push a material object past the speed of light.

      A report swept the field that left men reeling in its wake. Radar Track confirmed that the ship was of unfamiliar pattern. All hope that it might be a starship launched from this very spot on the last leg of a stupefying round trip was officially dead. The starship was foreign.

      “Wonder what they have?” Marconi muttered.

      “Trader!” Ross sneered ponderously. He was feeling better; the weight of depression had been lifted for the time being, either by his confession or the electric atmosphere. If every day were like this, he thought vaguely....

      “Let’s not kid each other,” Marconi was saying exuberantly. “This is an event, man! Where are they from, what are they peddling? Do I get a good cut at their wares? It could be fifty thousand shields for me in commission alone. Lurline and I could build a tower house on Great Blue Lake with that kind of money, with a whole floor for her parents! Ross, you just don’t know what it is to really be in love. Everything changes.”

      A jeep roared up and slammed to a stop; Ross blinked and yelled: “Here it comes!”

      They watched the ground-controlled approach with the interest of semiprofessionals and concealed their rising excitement with shop talk.

      “Whups! There goes the high-power job into action.” Marconi pointed as a huge dish antenna swiveled ponderously on its mast. “Seems the medium-output dishes can’t handle her.”

      “Maybe the high-power dish can’t either. She might be just plain shot.”

      “Standard, sealed GCA doesn’t get shot, my young friend. Not in a neon-atmosphere tank it doesn’t.”

      “Maybe along about the fifth generation they forgot what it was and cut it open with an acetylene torch to see what was inside.”

      “Bad luck for us in that case, Ross.” The ship steadied on a due-west course and flashed across the heavens and over the horizon.

      “Somebody decided a braking ellipse or two was in order. What about line of sight?”

      “No sweat. The GCA jockey—and I’d bet it’s Delafield himself—pushes a button that hooks him into the high-power dish at every rocket field on Halsey’s. It’s been all thought out. There’s a potential fortune aboard that longliner and Fields Administration wants its percentage for servicing and accommodating.”

      “Wonder what they have?”

      “I already asked that one, Ross.”

      “So you did.”

      They lapsed into silence until the rocket boomed in again from the east, high and slow. The big dish swiveled abruptly and began tracking again.

      “He’ll try to bring her down this time. Yes! There go fore and stabilizing jets.”

      Flame jutted from the silvery speck high in the blue; its apparent speed slowed to a crawl. It vanished for a second as steering jets turned her slowly endwise. They caught sight of the stern jets when they blasted for the descent.

      It was uneventful—just the landing of a very, very big rocket. When a landing is successful it is like every other successful landing ever made.

      But the action that the field whirled into immediately following the landing was far from routine. The bullhorns roared that all traders, wipers, rubbernecks, and visitors were to get behind the ready lines and stay there. All Class-Three-and-higher Field personnel were to take stations for longliner clearance. The weapons and decontamination parties were to take their stations immediately. Captain Delafield would issue all future orders and don’t let any of the traders talk you out of it, men. Captain Delafield would issue all future orders.

      Ross watched in considerable surprise as Field men working with drilled precision broke out half a dozen sleek, needle-nosed guns from an innocent-looking bay of the warehouse and manhandled them into position. From another bay a large pressure tank was hauled and backed against the lock of the starship. Ross could see the station medic bustlingly supervise that, and the hosing of white gunk onto the juncture between tank and ship.

      Delafield crossed the stretch from the GCA complex to the tank, vanished into it through a pressure-fitted door and that was that. The tank had no windows.

      Ross said to Marconi, wonderingly: “What’s all this about? There was Doc Gibbons handling the pressure tank, there was Chunk Blaney rolling out a God-damned cannon I never knew was there—how many more little secrets are there that I don’t know about?”

      Marconi grinned. “They have gun drill once a month, my young friend, and they never say a word about it. Let the right rabble-rouser get hold of the story and he might sail into office on a platform of ‘Keep the bug-eyed monsters off of Halsey’s Planet.’ You have to have reasonable precautions, military and medical, though—and this is the straight goods—there’s never been any trouble of either variety.”

      The conversation died and there was a long, boring hour of nothing. At last Delafield appeared again. One of the decontamination party ran up in a jeep with a microphone.

      “What’ll it be?” Ross demanded. “Alphabetic order? Or just a rush?”

      The announcement floored him. “Representative of the Haarland Trading Corporation please report to the decontamination tank.”

      The representative of the Haarland Trading Corporation was Marconi.

      “Hell,” Ross said bitterly. “Good luck with them, whoever they are.”

      Marconi brooded for a moment and then said gruffly, “Come on along.”

      “You mean it?”

      “Sure. Uh—naturally, Ross, you’ll give me your word not to make any commercial offers or inquiries without my permission.”

      “Oh. Naturally.” They started across the field and were checked through the ready line, Marconi cheerfully presenting his identification and vouching for Ross.

      Captain Delafield, at the tank, snapped, “What are you doing here, Ross? You’re Oldham’s man. I distinctly said——”

      “My responsibility, Captain. Will that do it?” Marconi asked.

      Delafield snapped, “It’ll be your fundament if Haarland hears about it. Actually it’s the damnedest situation—they asked for Haarland’s.”

      Marconi