They grabbed sandwiches from the snack bar on the way out and munched them while the Yards jeep took them to the ready line. Skirting the freighters in their pits, slipping past the enormous overhaul sheds, they saw excited debates going on. Twice they were passed by Yards vehicles heading toward the landing area. Halfway to the line they heard the recall sirens warning everybody and everything out of the ten seared acres surrounded by homing and Ground-
Controlled Approach radars. That was where the big ones were landed.
The ready line was jammed when they got there. Ships from one or another of the five moons that circled Halsey’s planet were common; the moons were the mines. Even the weekly 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 pat-
tern. 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 Mend. 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.”