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 desper-
ately. “All of the city was inhabited hundreds of years ago —the city was twice as big as it is now. How come?”
Marconi shrugged. “Dumjo.”
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 Lur-line. “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 specula-
tively. “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 ‘long-liner.’ 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 hun. 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.