DECAY. Ross stood on the traders’ ramp, overlooking the Yards, and the word kept bobbing to the top of his mind. Decay. About all of Halsey’s Planet there was the imperceptible reek of decay. The clean, big, bustling, efficient spaceport only made the sensation stronger. From where he stood on the height of the Ramp, he could see the Yards, the spires of Halsey City ten kilometers away—and the tumble-down gray acres of Ghost Town between. Ross wrinkled his nose. He wasn’t a man given to brooding

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. Their 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

“WAKE up, Ross,” Marconi was saying, joggling him. “Come on, wake up.” Ross thrust himself up on an elbow and opened his eyes. He said with a tongue the size of his forearm in a dust-lined mouth: “Wha’ time is it? Wha’ the hell are you doing here, for that matter?” “It’s around noon. You’ve slept for three hours; you can get up.” “Uh.” Ross automatically reached for a cigarette. The smoke got in his eyes and he rubbed them; it dehydrated and seared what little healthy tissue appeared to be left

PICTURE Leif’s longboat bobbing in the swells outside Ambrose Light, while the twentieth-century liners steam past; a tiny, ancient thing, related to the new giants only as the Eohippus resembles the horse. The ship that Haarland revealed was fully as great a contrast. Ross knew spaceships as well as any grounder could, both the lumbering interplanet freighters and the titanic longliners. But the ship that swung around Halsey’s Planet was a midget (fueled rocket ships must be huge); its jets wer

ROSS was lucky. The second listed inhabited planet was still inhabited. He had not quite stopped shuddering from the first when the approach radar caught him. The first planet was given in the master charts as “Ragansworld. Pop. 900,000,000; diam. 9400 m.; mean orbit 0.8 AU,” and its co-ordinates went on to describe it as the fourth planet of a small G-type sun. There had been some changes made: the co-ordinates now intersected well inside a bright and turbulent gas cloud. It appeared that suppr

FROM birth to puberty you were an infant. From puberty to Dobermann’s age, a junior. For ten years after that you went to school, learning the things you had neither the need nor the right to know before. And then you were Of Age. Being Of Age meant much, much more than voting, Ross found out. For one thing, it meant freedom to marry—after the enforced sexlessness of the junior years and the directed breeding via artificial insemination of the Scholars. It meant a healthy head start on seniority

THEY were well within detection range of Azor’s radar, if any, and yet there had been no beeping signal that the planet’s GCA had taken over and would pilot them down. Another blank? He studied the surface of the world under his highest magnification and saw no signs that it had been devastated by war. There were cities—intact, as far as he could tell, but not very attractive. The design ran to huge, gloomy piles that mounted toward central towers. Azor was a big world which showed not much wate

“STUPID old bat,” Ross muttered. They were walking aimlessly down Fifteen Street, the nicely-landscaped machine tool works behind them. Helena said timidly: “You really shouldn’t talk that way, Ross. She is older than you, after all. Old heads are——” “——wisest,” he wearily agreed. “Also the most conservative. Also the most rigidly inflexible; also the most firmly closed to the reception of new ideas. With one exception.” She reeled under the triple blasphemy and then faintly asked: “What’s the e

THE guard spat disgustedly. “Fine lot of wrecks we’re getting,” she complained. “Not like the old days. They used to send real men here.” She glowered at Ross and Bernie, holding their commitment papers loosely in her hand. “And for treason, too!” she added. “Used to be it took guts to commit a crime against the state.” She shook her head, then made a noise of distaste and scribbled initials on the commitment papers. She handed them back to the pilot who had brought them up from Azor, who grinne

IT took Ross a while to learn a lesson, but when he learned it, it stuck. This time, he promised himself, no spaceport . They sneaked into the solar system that held fabulous old Earth from far outside the ecliptic, where the chance of radar detection was least; they came to a relative dead halt millions of miles from the planet and cautiously scanned the surrounding volume of space with their own radar. No ships seemed to be in space. Earth’s solar system turned out to be a trivial affair, only

THE doctor said with weak belligerence, “Who do you think I am? Jones? I had to leave your friends behind. I had enough trouble getting those hoods to let me take you along. After all, I’m not a miracle-worker.” Ross said sullenly, “Okay, okay.” He glowered out of the car window and spat out a tendril of red hair that had come loose from the fringe surrounding his mouth. The trouble with a false beard was that it itched, worse than the real article, worse than any torment Ross had ever known. Bu

ROSS awoke, clearheaded and alert. Helena and Bernie were looking at him apprehensively. He understood and said grudgingly, “Sorry I flipped. I didn’t mean to scare you. Everything seemed to go black——” They smothered him with relieved protestations that they understood perfectly and Helena wouldn’t stick hairpins into the Wesley Drive ever again. Even if the ship hadn’t blown up. Even if she had rescued the men from “Minerva.” “Anyway,” she said happily, “we’re off Earth. At least, it’s suppose

THEIR second day on the bum they accumulated a great deal of change and crowded into a telephone booth. The plan was to try to locate their starship and find out what, if anything, could be done for Sam Jones. An automatic Central conferred with an automatic Information and decided that they wanted the Captain of the Port, Baltimore Rocket Field. They got the Port Captain on the wire and Ross asked after the starship. The captain asked, “Who wan’sta know, huh?” Ross realized he had overdone it a

THERE was a home base, a gigantic island called Australia, to which they took Ross and Doc Jones in a little car that sprouted no wings and flashed no rockets, but flew. They lived underground there, invisible to goggling passengers and crewmen aboard the “rockets.” (They weren’t rockets. They were turbo-jets. But it made the children happy to think that they had rockets, so iron filings were added to the hot jet stream, and they sparkled in magnificent display.) There they were born, and there

The Space Merchants was not only one of the best-reviewed science-fiction novels in 1953, it was one of the most widely reviewed. Favorable notices appeared in journals ranging from Printer’s Ink to science-fiction magazines, from Tide magazine to the great national dailies. That novel firmly established Messrs. Pohl and Kornbluth as a team, although they had collaborated before under pen names and had established reputations singly. Their new novel, Search the Sky , has the same wit, the same p