Halsey's Planet is dying, and nobody with any sense wants to leave. That's the trap: the trade routes are dead, the colonial economy has collapsed, and the only thing growing is the weeds in Ghost Town, that abandoned ruin beyond the city where Ross watches the decay spread like a stain. He trades in futures at Oldham Trading Corporation, but his own future looks like a slow suffocation in a world that's given up. Then the ship arrives from the stars, carrying the first visitors in decades, and suddenly the universe is speaking again. They have urgent business with a fellow trader, and their message about Earth is either a warning or a promise or both. Ross has spent years dreaming of the sky, and now the sky has answers. This is Pohl and Kornbluth at their corrosive, blackly funny best: a 1954 satire that saw exactly where consumer culture was heading and wrote it as apocalypse. Sharp, bleak, and disturbingly prescient.
