"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."
"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 long-liner 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 Goddamned 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 Haariand's."
Marconi looked frightened and his hand involuntarily went to his breast pocket. He swallowed and asked, "Where are they from?"
Delafield grimaced and said, "Home."
Marconi exploded, "Oh, no!"
"That's all I can get out of them. I suppose their trajectory can be analyzed, and there must be books. We haven't been in the ship yet. Nobody goes in until it gets sprayed, rayed, dusted, and busted down into its component parts. Too many places for nasty little mutant bacteria and viruses to lurk."
"Sure, Captain. 'Home,' eh? They're pretty simple?"
"Happy little morons. Fifteen of them, ranging in age from one month to what looks like a hundred and twenty. All they know is 'home' and 'we wish to see the representative of the Haarland Trading Corporation.' First the old woman said it. Then the next in line—he must be about a hundred—said it. Then a pair of identical twins, fifty-year-old women, said it in chorus. Then the rest of them on down to the month-old baby, and I swear to God he tried to say it. Well, you're the Haarland Trading Corporation. Go on in."
2
THEY were all naked. Why not? There's no weather in a space ship. All of them laughed when Ross and Marconi came in through the lock except the baby, who was nursing at the breast of a handsome woman. Then-laughter was what attracted Ross immediately. Cheerful— no meanness in it. The happy yelping of puppies at play with, a red rubber bone.
A stab went through him as the pleasure in their simple happiness turned to recollection and recognition. His wife of a decade ago. . . . Ross studied them with amazement, expecting to find her features in their features, her figure in theirs. And failed. Yet they reminded him inescapably of his miserable year with that half-a-woman, but they were physically no kin of hers.
They were just cheerful laughers who he knew were less than human.
The cheerful laughers exposed unblemished teeth in all their mouths, including that of the hundred-and-twenty-year-old matriarch. Why not? If you put calcium and fluorides into a closed system, they stay there.
The old woman stopped laughing at them long enough to say to Marconi, "We wish to see the representative of the Haarland——"
"Yes, I know. I'm the representative of the Haarland Trading Corporation. Welcome to Halsey's Planet. May I ask what your name is, ma'am?"
"Ma," she said genially.
"Pleased to meet you, Ma. My name's Marconi."