The message was from his office. RADAR REPORTS HIGH VELOCITY SPACECRAFT ON AUTOCONTROLS. FIRST APPROXIMATION TRAJECTORY INDICATES INTERSTELLAR ORIGIN. PROBABLE ETA YARDS 1500. NO RADIO MESSAGES RECEIVED. DON’T HAVE TO TELL YOU TO GET ON THIS IMMEDIATELY AND GIVE IT YOUR BEST. OLDHAM.
Ross looked at Marconi, whose expression was perturbed. “Bet I know what your message says,” he offered with an uneasy quaver in his voice.
Marconi said: “I’ll bet you do. Oldham’s radar setup on Sunward always has been better than Haarland’s. Better location. Man, you are in trouble! Let’s get out there and hope nobody’s missed you so far.”
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 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.