TINKER by Jerry Pournelle

A  HUGO-nominated short story first published in GALAXY MAGAZINE, July 1975.

From the universe of HIGH JUSTICE

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TINKER is an amazing time capsule for Pournelle family travel and contains many scenes that started on family road trips or high adventure Boy Scout outings led by Dr. P.

In our case,  the ship was a 1976 International Harvester Scout, orange and white, with rear facing seats so the youngest could learn about motion sickness early on.  It looked like you rented the thing from Uhaul and had all the creature comforts of a tractor.  No matter if it was pulling a trailer with 6 canoes, held on it’s roof 14 backpacks and seated 10 boy scouts inside, it always got 12 miles-to-the-gallon.   Usually we had to wait for the night sky before Jerry began with stories out among the stars.

Jerry indeed taught us all how to swear with humor and creative energy.  “I will be dipped in sh*t!” usually started off a string of 8 or more cuss phrases including “Jesus Christmas on a stick” The insults for bad drivers were filled with obscure animals including the Quagga– a frighteningly dumb zebra from South Africa.   Dangerous drivers that passed too fast or came dangerously close to the edge of a cliff anticipated the phrase ” Think of it as evolution in action”  And God forbid if a kid was late climbing aboard after a pit stop.  You learned ONCE that orders were to be obeyed.

The opening of TINKER comes from a bawdy rhymed  drinking song, but it’s not the right song of our travels.

If Roberta wasn’t within earshot, we constantly begged to learn the “Ode to Eskimo Nelle“, which began in our version as “Oh when a man grows old and his b@lls grow cold, and the tip of his knob turns blue…”  Yes, every 11 year old wanted to learn  this bawdy rhymed  drinking song to hear the tale of Deadeye Dick, his accomplice Mexican Pete and a woman they meet on their travels named Eskimo Nell.

Well that might be another story for later. This is a family story….

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“THE TINKER CAME ASTRIDIN’, ASTRIDIN’ OVER THE
Strand, with his bullocks—”

“Rollo!”

“Yes, ma’am.” I’d been singing at the top of my lungs,
as I do when I’ve got a difficult piloting job, and I’d
forgotten that my wife was in the control cab. I went
back to the problem of setting our sixteen thousand
tons of ship onto the rock.

It wasn’t much of a rock. Jefferson is an irregular-
shaped asteroid about twice as far out as Earth. It
measures maybe seventy kilometers by fifty kilometers,
and from far enough away it looks like an old mud
brick somebody used for a shotgun target. It has a screwy
rotation pattern that’s hard to match with, and since I
couldn’t use the main engines, setting down was a tricky
job.

Janet wasn’t finished. “Roland Kephart, I’ve told you
about those songs.”

“Yeah, sure, hon.” There are two inertial platforms
in Slingshot, and they were giving me different readings.
We were closing faster than I liked.

“It’s bad enough that you teach them to the boys.
Now the girls are—”

I motioned toward the open intercom switch, and
Janet blushed. We fight a lot, but that’s our private
business.

The attitude jets popped. “Hear this,” I said. “I think
we’re coming in too fast. Brace yourselves.” The jets
popped again, short bursts that stirred up dust storms
on the rocky surface below. “But I don’t think—” the
ship jolted into place with a loud clang. We hit hard
enough to shake things, but none of the red lights came
on “—we’ll break anything. Welcome to Jefferson. We’re
down.”

Janet came over and cut off the intercom switch, and
we hugged each other for a second. “Made it again,”
she said, and I grinned.

There wasn’t much doubt on the last few trips, but
when we first put Slingshot together out of the wreckage
of two salvaged ships, every time we boosted out there’d
been a good chance we’d never set down again. There’s
a lot that can go wrong in the Belt, and not many ships
to rescue you.

I pulled her over to me and kissed her. “Sixteen years,”
I said. “You don’t look a day older.”

She didn’t, either. She still had dark red hair, same
color as when I met her at Elysium Mons Station on
Mars, and if she got it out of a bottle she never told me,
not that I’d want to know. She was wearing the same
thing I was, a skintight body stocking that looked as if
it had been sprayed on. The purpose was strictly func-
tional, to keep you alive if Slinger sprung a leak, but
on her it produced some interesting curves. I let my hands
wander to a couple of the more fascinating conic sections,
and she snuggled against me.

She put her head close to my ear and whispered
breathlessly, “Comm panel’s lit.”

“Bat puckey.” There was a winking orange light, show-
ing an outside call on our hailing frequency. Janet
handed me the mike with a wicked grin. “Lock up your
wives and hide your daughters, the tinker’s come to
town,” I told it.

“Slingshot, this is Freedom Station. Welcome back,
Cap’n Rollo.”

“Jed?” I asked.

“Who the hell’d you think it was?”

“Anybody. Thought maybe you’d fried yourself in the
solar furnace. How are things?” Jed’s an old friend. Like
a lot of asteroid Port Captains, he’s a publican. The
owner of the bar nearest the landing area generally gets
the job, since there’s not enough traffic to make Port
Captains a full-time deal. Jed used to be a miner in
Pallas, and we’d worked together before I got out of the
mining business.

We chatted about our families, but Jed didn’t seem as
interested as he usually is. I figured business wasn’t too
good. Unlike most asteroid colonies, Jefferson’s inde-
pendent. There’s no big corporation to pay taxes to, but
on the other hand there’s no big organization to bail
the Jeffersonians out if they get in too deep.

“Got a passenger this trip,” I said.

“Yeah? Rockrat?” Jed asked.

“Nope. Just passing through. Oswald Dalquist. Insur-
ance adjustor. He’s got some kind of policy settlement
to make here, then he’s with us to Marsport.”

There was a’long pause, and I wondered what Jed was
thinking about. “I’ll be aboard in a little,” he said. “Free-
dom Station out.”

Janet frowned. “That was abrupt.”

“Sure was.” I shrugged and began securing the ship.
There wasn’t much to do. The big work is shutting down
the main engines, and we’d done that a long way out
from Jefferson. You don’t run an ion engine toward an
inhabited rock if you care about your customers.

“Better get the big’uns to look at the inertial platforms,
hon,” I said. “They don’t read the same.”

“Sure. Hal thinks it’s the computer.”

“Whatever it is, we better get it fixed.” That would
be a job for the oldest children. Our family divides nicely
into the Big Ones, the Little Ones, and the Baby, with
various subgroups and pecking orders that Janet and I
don’t understand. With nine kids aboard, five ours and
four adopted, the system can get confusing. Jan and I
find it’s easier to let them work out the chain of com-
mand for themselves.

I unbuckled from the seat and pushed away. You
can’t walk on Jefferson, or any of the small rocks. You
can’t quite swim through the air, either. Locomotion is
mostly a matter of jumps.

As I sailed across the cabin, a big grey shape sailed
up to meet me, and we met in a tangle of arms and
claws. I pushed the tomcat away. “Damn it—”

“Can’t you do anything without cursing?”

“Blast it, then. I’ve told you to keep that animal out
of the control cab.”

“I didn’t let him in.” She was snappish, and for that
matter so was I. We’d spent better than six hundred
hours cooped up in a small space with just ourselves,
the kids, and our passenger, and it was time we had
some outside company.

The passenger had made it more difficult. We don’t
fight much in front of the kids, but with Oswald Dalquist
aboard the atmosphere was different from what we’re
used to. He was always very formal and polite, which
meant we had to be, which meant our usual practice of
getting the minor irritations over with had been ex-
changed for bottling them up.

Jan and I had a major fight coming, and the sooner it
happened the better it would be for both of us.
Slingshot is built up out of a number of compart-
ments. We add to the ship as we have to—and when
we can afford it. I left Jan to finish shutting down and
went below to the living quarters. We’d been down
fifteen minutes, and the children were loose.

Papers, games, crayons, toys, kids’ clothing, and books
had all more or less settled on the “down” side. Raquel,
a big bluejay the kids picked up somewhere, screamed
from a cage mounted on one bulkhead. The compart-
ment smelled of bird droppings.

Two of the kids were watching a TV program beamed
out of Marsport. Their technique was to push themselves
upward with their arms and float up to the top of the
compartment, then float downward again until they
caught themselves just before they landed. It took nearly
a minute to make a full circuit in Jefferson’s weak gravity.
I went over and switched off the set. The program was
a western, some horse opera made in the 1940’s.
Jennifer and Craig wailed in unison. “That’s educa-
tional, Dad.”
They had a point, but we’d been through this before.
For kids who’ve never seen Earth and may never go
there, anything about Terra can probably be educational,
but I wasn’t in a mood to argue. “Get this place cleaned
up.”
“It’s Roger’s turn. He made the mess.” Jennifer, being
eight and two years older than Craig, tends to be spokes-
man and chief petty officer for the Little Ones.
“Get him to help, then. But get cleaned up.”
“Yes, sir.” They worked sullenly, flinging the clothing
into corner bins, putting the books into the clips, and
the games into lockers. There really is a place for every-
thing in Slingshot, although most of the time you
wouldn’t know it.
I left them to their work and went down to the next
level. My office is on one side of that, balanced by the
“passenger suite” which the second oldest boy uses when
we don’t have paying customers. Oswald Dalquist was
just coming out of his cabin.
“Good morning, Captain,” he said. In all the time
he’d been aboard he’d never called me anything but
“Captain,” although he accepted Janet’s invitation to use
her first name. A very formal man, Mr. Oswald Dalquist.
“I’m just going down to reception,” I told him. “The
Port Captain will be aboard with the health officer in a
minute. You’d better come down, there will be forms
to fill out.”

“Certainly. Thank you, Captain.” He followed me
through the airlock to the level below, which was shops,
labs, and the big compartment that serves as a main en-
tryway to Slingshot.

Dalquist had been a good passenger, if a little distant.
He stayed in his compartment most of the time, did
what he was told, and never complained. He had very
polished manners, and everything he did was precise, as
if he thought out every gesture and word in advance.
I thought of him as a little man, but he wasn’t really.

I stand about six three, and Dalquist wasn’t a lot smaller
than me, but he acted little. He worked for Butterworth
Insurance, which I’d never heard of, and he said he was
a claims adjustor, but I thought he was probably an
accountant sent out because they didn’t want to send
anyone more important to a nothing rock like Jefferson.
Still, he’d been around. He didn’t talk much about
himself, but every now and then he’d let slip a story
that showed he’d been on more rocks than most people;
and he knew ship routines pretty well. Nobody had to
show him things more than once. Since a lot of life-
support gadgetry in Slingshot is Janet’s design, or mine,
and certainly isn’t standard, he had to be pretty sharp
to catch on so quick.

He had expensive gear, too. Nothing flashy, but his
helmet was one of Goodyear’s latest models, his skin-
tight was David Clark’s best with “stretch steel” threads
woven in with the nylon, and his coveralls were a special
design by Abercrombie & Fitch, with lots of gadget pock-
ets and a self-cleaning low-friction surface. It gave him a
pretty natty appearance, rather than the battered look
the old rockrats have.

I figured Butterworth Insurance must pay their adjus-
tors more than I thought, or else he had a hell of an ex-
pense account.

The entryway is a big compartment. It’s filled with
nearly everything you can think of: dresses, art objects,
gadgets and gizmos, spare parts for air bottles, sewing
machines, and anything else Janet or I think we can sell
in the way-stops we make with Slingshot. Janet calls it
the “boutique,” and she’s been pretty clever about what
she buys. It makes a profit, but like everything we do,
just barely.

I’ve heard a lot of stories about tramp ships making
a lot of money. Their skippers tell me whenever we meet.
Before Jan and I fixed up Slingshot I used to believe them.
Now I tell the same stories about fortunes made and
lost, but the truth is we haven’t seen any fortune.
We could use one. Hal, our oldest, wants to go to
Marsport Tech, and that’s expensive. Worse, he’s just the
first of nine. Meanwhile, Barclay’s wants the payments
kept up on the mortgage they hold on Slinger, fuel
prices go up all the time, and the big Corporations are
making it harder for little one-ship outfits like mine to
compete.

We got to the boutique just in time to see two figures
bounding like wallabies across the big flat area that serves
as Jefferson’s landing field. Every time one of the men
would hit ground he’d fling up a burst of dust that fell
like slow-motion bullets to make tiny craters around his
footsteps. The landscape was bleak, nothing but rocks
and craters, with the big steel airlock entrance to Free-
dom Port the only thing to remind you that several
thousand souls lived here.

We couldn’t see it, because the horizon’s pretty close
on Jefferson, but out beyond the airlock there’d be the
usual solar furnaces, big parabolic mirrors to melt down
ores. There was also a big trench shimmering just at the
horizon: ice. One of Jefferson’s main assets is water.
About ten thousand years ago Jefferson collided with
the head of a comet and a lot of the ice stayed aboard.
The two figures reached Slingshot and began the long
climb up the ladder to the entrance. They moved fast,
and I hit the buttons to open the outer door so they
could let themselves in.
Jed was at least twice my age, but like all of us who
live in low gravity it’s hard to tell just how old that is.
He has some wrinkles, but he could pass for fifty. The
other guy was a Dr. Stewart, and I didn’t know him.
There’d been another doctor, about my age, the last
time I was in Jefferson, but he’d been a contract man
and the Jeffersonians couldn’t afford him. Stewart was a
young chap, no more than twenty, born in Jefferson
back when they called it Grubstake and Blackjack Dan
was running the colony. He’d got his training the way
most people get an education in the Belt, in front of a
TV screen.
The TV classes are all right, but they have their limits.
I hoped we wouldn’t have any family emergencies here.
Janet’s a TV Doc, but unlike this Stewart chap she’s had
a year residency in Marsport General, and she knows the
limits of TV training. We’ve got a family policy that she
doesn’t treat the kids for anything serious if there’s an-
other doctor around, but between her and a new TV-
trained MD there wasn’t much choice.
“Everybody healthy?” Jed asked.
“Sure.” I took out the log and showed where Janet
had entered “NO COMMUNICABLE DISEASES” and signed
it.
Stewart looked doubtful. “I’m supposed to examine
everyone myself… .”
“For Christ’s sake,” Jed told him. He pulled at his
bristly mustache and glared at the young doc. Stewart
glared back. “Well, ’least you can see if they’re still
warm,” Jed conceded. “Cap’n Rollo, you got somebody
to take him up while we get the immigration forms taken
care of?”
“Sure.” I called Pam on the intercom. She’s second
oldest. When she got to the boutique, Jed sent Dr.
Stewart up with her. When they were gone, he took
out a big book of forms.
For some reason every rock wants to know your en-
tire life history before you can get out of your ship. I
never have found out what they do with all the infor-
mation. Dalquist and I began filling out forms while
Jed muttered.
“Butterworth Insurance, eh?” Jed asked. “Got much
business here?”
Dalquist looked up from the forms. “Very little. Per-
haps you can help me. The insured was a Mr. Joseph
Colella. I will need to find the beneficiary, a Mrs. Bar-
bara Morrison Colella.”
“Joe Colella?” I must have sounded surprised because
they both looked at me. “I brought Joe and Barbara
to Jefferson. Nice people. What happened to him?”
“Death certificate said accident.” Jed said it just that
way, flat, with no feeling. Then he added, “Signed by
Dr. Stewart.”
Jed sounded as if he wanted Dalquist to ask him
a question, but the insurance man went back to his
forms. When it was obvious that he wasn’t going to say
anything more, I asked Jed, “Something wrong with the
accident?”
Jed shrugged. His lips were tightly drawn. The mood
in my ship had definitely changed for the worse, and
I was sure Jed had more to say. Why wasn’t Dalquist
asking questions?
Something else puzzled me. Joe and Barbara were
more than just former passengers. They were friends
we were looking forward to seeing when we got to Jef-
ferson. I was sure we’d mentioned them several times
in front of Dalquist, but he’d never said a word.
We’d taken them to Jefferson about five Earth years
before. They were newly married, Joe pushing sixty
and Barbara less than half that. He’d just retired as a
field agent for Hansen Enterprises, with a big bonus
he’d earned in breaking up some kind of insurance
scam. They were looking forward to buying into the
Jefferson co-op system. I’d seen them every trip since,
the last time two years ago, and they were short of ready
money like everyone else in Jefferson, but they seemed
happy enough.
“Where’s Barbara now?” I asked Jed.
“Working for Westinghouse. Johnny Peregrine’s of-
fice.”
“She all right? And the kids?”
Jed shrugged. “Everybody helps out when help’s
needed. Nobody’s rich.”
“They put a lot of money into Jefferson stock,” I said.
“And didn’t they have a mining claim?”
“Dividends on Jefferson Corporation stock won’t even
r
pay air taxes.” Jed sounded more beat down than I’d
ever known him. Even when things had looked pretty
bad for us in the old days he’d kept all our spirits up
with stupid jokes and puns. Not now. “Their claim
wasn’t much good to start with, and without Joe to work
it—”
His voice trailed off as Pam brought Dr. Stewart
back into our compartment. Stewart countersigned the
log to certify that we were all healthy. “That’s it, then,”
he said. “Ready to go ashore?”
“People waitin’ for you in the Doghouse, Captain
Rollo,” Jed said. “Big meeting.”
“I’ll just get my hat.”
“If there is no objection, I will come too,” Dalquist
said. “I wonder if a meeting with Mrs. Colella can be
arranged?”
“Sure,” I told him. “We’ll send for her. Doghouse
is pretty well the center of things in Jefferson anyway.
Have her come for dinner.”
“Got nothing good to serve.” Jed’s voice was gruff with
a note of irritated apology.
“We’ll see.” I gave him a grin and opened the air-
lock.
There aren’t any dogs at the Doghouse. Jed had one
when he first came to Jefferson, which is why the
name, but dogs don’t do very well in low gravs. Like
everything else in the Belt, the furniture in Jed’s bar is
iron and glass except for what’s aluminum and titanium.
The place is a big cave hollowed out of the rock.
There’s no outside view, and the only things to look
at are the TV and the customers.
There was a big crowd, as there always is in the
Port Captain’s place when a ship comes in. More busi-
ness is done in bars than offices out here, which was
why Janet and the kids hadn’t come dirtside with me.
The crowd can get rough sometimes.
The Doghouse has a big bar running all the way
across on the side opposite the entryway from the main
corridor. The bar’s got a suction surface to hold down
anything set on it, but no stools. The rest of the big
room has tables and chairs and the tables have little
clips to hold drinks and papers in place. There are
also little booths around the outside perimeter for pri-
vacy. It’s a typical layout. You can hold auctions in
the big central area and make private deals in the
booths.
Drinks are served with covers and straws because
when you put anything down fast it sloshes out the
top. You can spend years learning to drink beer in low
gee if you don’t want to sip it through a straw or squirt
it out of a bulb.
The place was packed. Most of the cutomers were
miners and shopkeepers, but a couple of tables were
taken by company reps. I pointed out Johnny Peregrine
to Dalquist. “He’ll know how to find Barbara.”
Dalquist smiled that tight little accountant’s smile
of his and went over to Peregrine’s table.
There were a lot of others. The most important was
Habib al Shamlan, the Iris Company factor. He was
sitting with two hard cases, probably company cops.
The Jefferson Corporation people didn’t have a table.
They were at the bar, and the space between them
and the other Company reps was clear, a little island
of neutral area in the crowded room.
I’d drawn Jefferson’s head honcho. Rhoda Hendrix
was Chairman of the Board of the Jefferson Coporation,
which made her the closest thing they had to a govern-
ment. There was a big ugly guy with her. Joe Horn-
binder had been around since Blackjack Dan’s time.
He still dug away at the rocks, hoping to get rich. Most
people called him Horny for more than one reason.
It looked like this might be a good day. Everyone
stared at us when we came in, but they didn’t pay much
attention to Dalquist. He was obviously a feather mer-
chant, somebody they might have some fun with later
on, and I’d have to watch out for him then, but right
now we had important business.
Dalquist talked to Johnny Peregrine for a minute and
they seemed to agree on something because Johnny
nodded and sent one of his troops out. Dalquist went
over into a corner and ordered a drink.
There’s a protocol to doing business out here. I had
a table all to myself, off to one side of the clear area
in the middle, and Jed’s boy brought me a big mug of
beer with a hinged cap. When I’d had a good slug
I took messages out of my pouch and scaled them out
to people. Somebody bought me another drink, and
there was a general gossip about what was happen-
ing around the Belt.
AI Shamlan was impatient. After a half hour, which
is really rushing things for an Arab, he called across,
his voice very casual, “And what have you brought us,
Captain Kephart?”
I took copies of my manifest out of my pouch and
passed them around. Everyone began reading, but Johnny
Peregrine gave a big grin at the first item.
“Beef!” Peregrine looked happy. He had 500 workers
to feed.
“Nine tons,” I agreed.
“Ten francs,” Johnny said. “I’ll take the whole lot.”
“Fifteen,” al Shamlan said.
I took a big glug of beer and relaxed. Jan and I’d
taken a chance and won. Suppose somebody had flung
a shipment of beef into transfer orbit a couple of years
ago? A hundred tons could be arriving any minute, and
mine wouldn’t be worth anything.
Janet and I can keep track of scheduled ships, and
we know pretty well where most of the tramps like
us are going, but there’s no way to be sure about
goods in the pipeline. You can go broke in this racket.
There was more bidding, with some of the store-
keepers getting in the act. I stood to make a good
profit, but only the big corporations were bidding on
the whole lot. The Jefferson Corporation people hadn’t
said a word. I’d heard things weren’t going too well
for them, but this made it certain. If miners have any
money, they’ll buy beef. Beef tastes like cow. The stuff
you can make from algae is nutritious, but at best it’s
not appetizing, and Jefferson doesn’t even have the
plant to make textured vegetable proteins—not that
TVP is any substitute for the real thing.
Eventually the price got up to where only Iris and
Westinghouse were interested in the whole lot and I
broke the cargo up, seven tons to the big boys and
the rest in small lots. I didn’t forget to save out a
couple hundred kilos for Jed, and I donated half a ton
for the Jefferson city hall people to throw a feed with.
The rest went for about thirty francs a kilo.
That would just about pay for the deuterium I burned
up coming to Jefferson. There was some other stuff,
lightweight items they don’t make outside the big
rocks like Pallas, and that was all pure profit. I felt
pretty good when the auction ended. It was only the
preliminaries, of course, and the main event was what
would let me make a couple of payments to Barclay’s
on Slinger’s mortgage, but it’s a good feeling to know
you can’t lose money no matter what happens.
There was another round of drinks. Rockrats came
over to my table to ask about friends I might have run
into. Some of the storekeepers were making new deals,
trading around things they’d bought from me. Dalquist
came over to sit with me.
“Johnny finding your client for you?” I asked.
He nodded. “Yes. As you suggested, I have in-
vited her to dinner here with us.”
“Good enough. Jan and the kids will be in when
the business is over.”
Johnny Peregrine came over to the table. “Boosting
cargo this trip?”
“Sure.” The babble in the room faded out. It was
time to start the main event.
The launch window to Luna was open and would
be for another couple hundred hours. After that, the
fuel needed to give cargo pods enough velocity to put
them in transfer orbit to the Earth-Moon system would
go up to where nobody could afford to send down any-
thing massy.
There’s a lot of traffic to Luna. It’s cheaper, at the
right time, to send ice down from the Belt than it is
to carry it up from Earth. Of course, the Lunatics
have to wait a couple of years for their water to get
there, but there’s always plenty in the pipeline. Luna
buys metals, too, although they don’t pay as much as
Earth does.
“I’m ready if there’s anything to boost,” I said.
“I think something can be arranged,” al Shamlan said.
“Hah!” Hornbinder was listening to us from his place
at the bar. He laughed again. “Iris doesn’t have any
dee for a big shipment. Neither does Westinghouse. You
want to boost, you’ll deal with us.”
I looked to al Shamlan. It’s hard to tell what he’s think-
ing, and not a lot easier to read Johnny Peregrine, but
they didn’t look very happy. “That true?” I asked.
Hornbinder and Rhoda Hendrix came over to the
table. “Remember, we sent for you,” Rhoda said.
“Sure.” I had their guarantee in my pouch. Five
thousand francs up front, and another five thousand if
I got here on time. I’d beaten their deadline by twenty
hours, which isn’t bad considering how many million
kilometers I had to come. “Sounds like you’ve got a
deal in mind.”
She grinned. She’s a big woman, and as hard as the
inside of an asteroid. I knew she had to be sixty, but
she had spent most of that time in low gee. There wasn’t
much cheer in her smile. It looked more like the tomcat
does when he’s trapped a rat. “Like Horny says, we have
all the deuterium. If you want to boost for Iris and
Westinghouse, you’ll have to deal with us.”
“Bloody hell.” I wasn’t going to do as well out of
this trip as I’d thought.
Hornbinder grinned. “How you like it now, you god-
dam bloodsucker?”
“You mean me?” I asked.
“Fucking A. You come out here and use your god-
dam ship a hundred hours, and you take more than we
get for busting our balls a whole year. Fucking A, I
mean you.”
I’d forgotten Dalquist was at the table. “If you think
boostship captains charge too much, why don’t you
buy your own ship?” he asked.
“Who the hell are you?” Horny demanded.
Dalquist ignored him. “You don’t buy your own
ships because you can’t afford them. Ship owners have
to make enormous investments. If they don’t make
good profits, they won’t buy ships, and you won’t get
your cargo boosted at any price.”
He sounded like a professor. He was right, of course,
but he talked in a way that I’d heard the older kids
use on the little ones. It always starts fights in our fam-
ily and it looked like having the same result here.
“Shut up and sit down, Horny.” Rhoda Hendrix was
used to being obeyed. Hornbinder glared at Dalquist,
but he took a chair. “Now let’s talk business,” Rhoda
said. “Captain, it’s simple enough. We’ll charter your ship
for the next seven hundred hours.”
“That can get expensive.”
She looked to al Shamlan and Peregrine. They didn’t
look very happy. “I think I know how to get our money
back.”
“There are times when it is best to give in gracefully,”
al Shamlan said. He looked to Johnny Peregrine
and got a nod. “We are prepared to make a fair agree-
ment with you, Rhoda. After all, you’ve got to boost your
ice. We must send our cargo. It will be much cheaper for
all of us if the cargoes go out in one capsule. What are
your terms?”
‘‘No deal,” Rhoda said. “We’ll charter Cap’n Rollo’s
ship, and you deal with us.”
“Don’t I get a say in this?” I asked.
“You’ll get yours,” Hornbinder muttered.
Fifty thousand,” Rhoda said. “Fifty thousand to
charter your ship. Plus the ten thousand we promised
to get you here.”
“That’s no more than I’d make boosting your ice,” I
said. I usually get five percent of cargo value, and the
customer furnishes the dee and reaction mass. That ice
was worth a couple of million when it arrived at Luna.
Jefferson would probably have to sell it before then, but
even with discounts, futures in that much water would
sell at over a million new francs.
“Seventy thousand, then,” Rhoda said.
There was something wrong here. I picked up my beer
and took a long swallow. When I put it down, Rhoda
was talking again. “Ninety thousand. Plus your ten. An
even hundred thousand francs, and you get another
one percent of whatever we get for the ice after we sell
it.”
“A counteroffer may be appropriate,” al Shamlan said.
He was talking to Johnny Peregrine, but he said it
loud enough to be sure that everyone else heard him.
“Will Westinghouse go halves with Iris on a charter?”
Johnny nodded.
Al Shamlan’s smile was deadly. “Charter your ship to
us, Captain Kephart. One hundred and forty thousand
francs, for exclusive use for the next six hundred hours.
That price includes boosting a cargo capsule, provided
that we furnish you the deuterium and reaction mass.”
“One fifty. Same deal,” Rhoda said.
“One seventy five.”
“Two hundred.” Somebody grabbed her shoulder and
tried to say something to her, but Rhoda pushed him
away. “I know what I’m doing. Two hundred thousand.”
Al Shamlan shrugged. “You win. We can wait for the
next launch window.” He got up from the table. “Com-
ing, Johnny?”
“In a minute.” Peregrine had a worried look. “Ms.
Hendrix, how do you expect to make a profit? I assure
you that we won’t pay what you seem to think we will.”
“Leave that to me,” she said. She still had that look:
triumphant. The price didn’t seem to bother her at all.
“Hum.” A1 Shamlau made a gesture of bafflement.
“One thing, Captain. Before you sign with Rhoda, you
might ask to see the money. I would be much sur-
prised if Jefferson Corporation has two hundred thou-
sand.” He pushed himself away and sailed across the
bar to the corridor door. “You know where to find me
if things don’t work out, Captain Kephart.”
He went out, and his company cops came right after
him. After a moment Peregrine and the other corpora-
tion people followed.
I wonder what the hell I’d got myself into this time.
Rhoda Hendrix was trying to be friendly. It didn’t
really suit her style.
I knew she’d come to Jefferson back when it was
called Grubstake and Blackjack Dan was trying to set
up an independent colony. Sometime in her first year
she’d moved in with him, and pretty soon she was han-
dling all his financial deals. There wasn’t any nonsense
about freedom and democracy back then. Grubstake was
a big opportunity to get rich or get killed, and not much
more.
When they found Blackjack Dan outside without a
helmet, it turned out that Rhoda was his heir. She was
the only one who knew what kind of deals he’d made
anyway, so she took over his place. A year later she in-
vented the Jefferson Corporation. Everybody living on
the rock had to buy stock, and she talked a lot about
sovereign rights and government by the people. It takes
a lot of something to govern a few thousand rockrats,
and whatever it is, she had plenty. The idea caught on.
Now things didn’t seem to be going too well, and her
face showed it when she tried to smile. “Glad that’s
all settled,” she said. “How’s Janet?”
“The family is fine, the ship’s fine, and I’m fine,” I
said.
She let the phony grin fade out. “OK, if that’s the
way you want it. Shall we move over to a booth?”
“Why bother? I’ve got nothing to hide,” I told her.
“Watch it,” Hornbinder growled.
“And I’ve had about enough of him,” I told Rhoda.
“If you’ve got cargo to boost, let’s get it boosted.”
“In time.” She pulled some papers out of her pouch.
“First, here’s the charter contract.”
It was all drawn up in advance. I didn’t like it at all.
The money was good, but none of this sounded right.
“Maybe I should take al Shamlan’s advice and—”
“You’re not taking the Arab’s advice or their money
either,” Hornbinder said.
“—and ask to see your money first,” I finished.
“Our credit’s good,” Rhoda said.
“So is mine as long as I keep my payments up. I can’t
pay off Barclay’s with promises.” I lifted my beer and
flipped the top just enough to suck down a big gulp.
Beer’s lousy if you have to sip it.
“What can you lose?” Rhoda asked. “OK, so we don’t
have much cash. We’ve got a contract for the ice. Ten
percent as soon as the Lloyd’s man certifies the stuff’s
in transfer orbit. We’ll pay you out of that. We’ve got
the dee, we’ve got reaction mass, what the hell else do
you want?”
“Your radiogram said cash,” I reminded her. “I don’t
even have the retainer you promised. Just paper.”
“Things are hard out here.” Rhoda nodded to herself.
She was thinking just how hard things were. “It’s not
like the old days. Everything’s organized. Big companies.
As soon as we get a little ahead, the big outfits move in
and cut prices on everything we sell. Outbid us on every-
thing we have to buy. Like your beef.”
“Sure,” I said. “I’m facing tough competition from
the big shipping fleets, too.”
“So this time we’ve got a chance to hold up the big
boys,” Rhoda said. “Get a little profit. You aren’t hurt.
You get more than you expected.” She looked around to
the other miners. There were a lot of people listening to
us. “Kephart, all we have to do is get a little ahead, and
we can turn this rock into a decent place to live. A place
for people, not corporation clients!” Her voice rose and
her eyes flashed. She meant every word, and the others
nodded approval.
“You lied to me,” I said.
“So what? How are you hurt?” She pushed the con-
tract papers toward me.
“Excuse me.” Dalquist hadn’t spoken very loudly,
but everyone looked at him. “Why is there such a hurry
about this?” he asked.
“What the hell’s it to you?” Hornbinder demanded.
“You want cash?” Rhoda asked. “All right, I’ll give
you cash.” She took a document out of her pouch and
slammed it onto the table. She hit hard enough to raise
herself a couple of feet out of her chair. It would have
been funny if she wasn’t dead serious. Nobody laughed.
“There’s a deposit certificate for every goddam cent
we have!” she shouted. “You want it? Take it all. Take
the savings of every family in Jefferson. Pump us dry.
Grind the faces of the poor! But sign that charter!”
“Cause if you don’t,” Hornbinder said, “your ship
won’t ever leave this rock. And don’t think we can’t
stop you.”
“Easy.” I tried to look relaxed, but the sea of faces
around me wasn’t friendly at all. I didn’t want to look at
them so I looked at the deposit paper. It was genuine
enough: you can’t fake the molecular documents Zurich
banks use. With the Jefferson Corporation Seal and the
right signatures and thumbprints that thing was worth
exactly 78,500 francs.
It would be a lot of money if I owned it for myself. It
wasn’t so much compared to the mortgage on Stinger.
It was nothing at all for the total assets of a whole com-
munity.
“This is our chance to get out from under,” Rhoda was
saying. She wasn’t talking to me. “We can squeeze the
goddam corporation people for a change. All we need
is that charter and we’ve got Westinghouse and the Arabs
where we want them!”
Everybody in the bar was shouting now. It looked
ugly, and I didn’t see any way out.
“OK,” I told Rhoda. “Sign over that deposit certificate,
and make me out a lien on future assets for the rest.
I’ll boost your cargo—”
“Boost hell, sign that charter contract,” Rhoda said.
“Yeah, I’ll do that too. Make out the documents.”
“Captain Kephart, is this wise?” Dalquist asked.
“Keep out of this, you little son of a bitch.” Horny
moved toward Dalquist. “You got no stake in this. Now
shut up before I take off the top—”
Dalquist hardly looked up. “Five hundred francs to
the first man who coldcocks him,” he said carefully. He
took his hand out of his pouch, and there was a bill in
it.
There was a moment’s silence, then four big miners
started for Horny.
When it was over, Dalquist was out a thousand, be-
198
cause nobody could decide who got to Hornbinder first.
Even Rhoda was laughing after that was over. The
mood changed a little; Hornbinder had never been very
popular, and Dalquist was buying for the house. It didn’t
make any difference about the rest of it, of course. They
weren’t going to let me off Jefferson without signing that
charter contract.
Rhoda sent over to city hall to have the documents
made out. When they came, I signed, and half the
people in the place signed as witnesses. Dalquist didn’t
like it, but he ended up as a witness too. For better or
worse, Slingshot was chartered to the Jefferson Corpora-
tion for seven hundred hours.
The surprise came after I’d signed. I asked Rhoda
when she’d be ready to boost.
“Don’t worry about it. You’ll get the capsule when you
need it.”
“Bloody hell! You can’t wait to get me to sign—”
“Aww, just relax, Kephart.”
“I don’t think you understand. You have half a mil-
lion tons to boost up to what, five, six kilometers a sec-
ond?” I took out my pocket calculator. “Sixteen tons of
deuterium and eleven thousand reaction mass. That’s a
bloody big load. The fuel feed system’s got to be built.
It’s not something I can just strap on and push off—”
“You’ll get what you need,” Rhoda said. “We’ll let you
know when it’s time to start work.”
Jed put us in a private dining room. Janet came in
later and I told her about the afternoon. I didn’t think
she’d like it, but she wasn’t as upset as I was.
“We have the money,” she said. “And we got a good
price on the cargo, and if they ever pay off we’ll get
more than we expected on the boost charges. If they
don’t pay up—well, so what?”
“Except that we’ve got a couple of major companies
unhappy, and they’ll be here long after Jefferson folds
up. Sorry, Jed, but—”
He bristled his mustache. “Could be. I figure on gettin’
along with the corporations too. Just in case.”
“But what did all that lot mean?” Dalquist asked.
“Beats me.” Jed shook his head. “Rhoda’s been mak-
ing noises about how rich we’re going to be. New fur-
nace, another power plant, maybe even a ship of our
own. Nobody knows how she’s planning on doing it.”
“Could there have been a big strike?” Dalquist asked.
“Iridium, one of the really valuable metals?”
“Don’t see how,” Jed told him. “Look, mister, if
Rhoda’s goin’ to bail this place out of the hole the big
boys have dug for us, that’s great with me. I don’t ask
questions.”
Jed’s boy came in. “There’s a lady to see you.”
Barbara Morrison Colella was a small blonde girl,
pug nose, blue eyes. She looks like somebody you’d see
on Earthside TV playing a dumb blonde.
Her degrees said “family economics,” which I guess on
Earth doesn’t amount to much. Out here it’s a specialty.
To keep a family going out here you better know a lot of
environment and life-support engineering, something
about prices that depend on orbits and launch windows,
a lot about how to get something to eat out of rocks, and
maybe something about power systems, too.
She was glad enough to see us, especially Janet, but
we got another surprise. She looked at Dalquist and
said, “Hello, Buck.”
“Hello. Surprised, Bobby?”
“No. I knew you’d be along as soon as you heard.”
“You know each other, then,” I said.
“Yes.” Dalquist hadn’t moved, but he didn’t look like
a little man any longer. “How did it happen, Bobby?”
Her face didn’t change. She’d lost most of her smile
when she saw Dalquist. She looked at the rest of us, and
pointed at Jed. “Ask him. He knows more than I do.”
“Mr. Anderson?” Dalquist prompted. His tone made
it sound as if he’d done this before, and he expected to
be answered.
If Jed resented that, he didn’t show it. “Simple enough.
Joe always seemed happy enough when he came in here
after his shift—”
Dalquist looked from Jed to Barbara. She nodded.
“—until the last time. That night he got stinking
drunk. Kept mutterin’ something about ‘Not that way.
There’s got to be another way.’ ”
“Do you know what that meant?”
“No,” Jed said. “But he kept saying it. Then he got
really stinking and I sent him home with a couple of the
guys he worked with.”
“What happened when he got home?” Dalquist asked.
“He never came home, Buck,” Barbara said. “I got
worried about him, but T couldn’t find him. The men he’d
left here with said he’d got to feeling better and left
them—”
“Damn fools,” Jed muttered. “He was right out of it.
Nobody should go outside with that much to drink.”
“And they found him outside?”
“At the refinery. Helmet busted open. Been dead five,
six hours. Held the inquest right in here, at that table al
Shamlan was sitting at this afternoon.”
“Who held the inquest?” Dalquist asked.
“Rhoda.”
“Doesn’t make sense,” I said.
“No.” Janet didn’t like it much either. “Barbara, don’t
you have any idea of what Joe meant? Was he worried
about something?”
“Nothing he told me about. He wasn’t—-we weren’t
fighting, or anything like that. I’m sure he didn’t—”
“Humpf.” Dalquist shook his head. “What damned
fool suggested suicide?”
“Well,” Jed said, “you know how it is. If a man takes
on a big load and wanders around outside, it might as
well be suicide. Hornbinder said we were doing Barbara
a favor, voting it an accident.”
Dalquist took papers out of his pouch. “He was right,
of course. I wonder if Hornbinder knew that all Hansen
employees receive a paid-up insurance policy as one of
their retirement benefits?”
“I didn’t know it,” I said.
Janet was more practical. “How much is it worth?”
“I am not sure of the exact amounts,” Dalquist said.
“There are trust accounts involved also. Sufficient to get
Barbara and the children back to Mars and pay for their
living expenses there. Assuming you want to go?”
“I don’t know,” Barbara said. “Let me think about it.
Joe and I came here to get away from the big companies.
I don’t have to like Rhoda and the city hall crowd to
appreciate what we’ve got in Jefferson. Independence is
worth something.”
“Indeed,” Dalquist said. He wasn’t agreeing with her,
and suddenly we all knew he and Barbara had been
through this argument before. I wondered when.
“Janet, what would you do?” Barbara asked.
Jan shrugged. “Not a fair question. Roland and I
made that decision a long time ago. But neither of us is
alone.” She reached for my hand across the table.
As she said, we had made our choice. We’ve had
plenty of offers for Slingshot, from outfits that would be
happy to hire us as crew for Slinger. It would mean no
more hustle to meet the mortgage payments, and not a
lot of change in the way we live—but we wouldn’t be
our own people anymore. We’ve never seriously con-
sidered taking any of the offers.
“You don’t have to be alone,” Dalquist said.
“I know, Buck.” There was a wistful note in Barbara’s
voice. They looked at each other for a long time. Then
we sat down to dinner.
I was in my office aboard Slingshot. Thirty hours had
gone by since I’d signed the charter contract, and I still
didn’t know what I was boosting, or when. It didn’t make
sense.
Janet refused to worry about it. We’d cabled the
money on to Marsport, all of Jefferson’s treasury and
what we’d got for our cargo, so Barclay’s was happy for a
while. We had enough deuterium aboard Slinger to get
where we could buy more. She kept asking what there
was to worry about, and I didn’t have any answer.
I was still brooding about it when Oswald Dalquist
tapped on the door.
I hadn’t seen him much since the dinner at the
Doghouse, and he didn’t look any different, but he wasn’t
the same man. I suppose the change was in me. You
can’t think of a man named “Buck” the same way you
think of an Oswald.
“Sit down,” I said. That was formality, of course. It’s
no harder to stand than sit in the tiny gravity we felt.
“I’ve been meaning to say something about the way you
handled Horny. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anybody do
that.”
His smile was thin, and I guess it hadn’t changed
either, but it didn’t seem like an accountant’s smile any
more. “It’s an interesting story, actually,” he said. “A
long time ago I was in a big colony ship. Long passage,
nothing to do. Discovered the other colonists didn’t know
much about playing poker.”
We exchanged grins again.
“I won so much it made me worry that someone
would take it away from me, so I hired the biggest man
in the bay to watch my back. Sure enough, some chap
accused me of cheating, so I called on my big friend—”
“Yeah?”
“And he shouted ‘Fifty to the first guy that decks him.’
Worked splendidly, although it wasn’t precisely what I’d
expected when I hired him—”
We had our laugh.
“When are we leaving, Captain Kephart?”
“Beats me. When they get the cargo ready to boost, I
guess.”
“That might be a long time,” Dalquist said.
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“I’ve been asking around. To the best of my
knowledge, there are no preparations for boosting a big
cargo pod.”
“That’s stupid,” I said. “Well, it’s their business. When
we go, how many passengers am I going to have?”
His little smile faded entirely. “I wish I knew. You’ve
guessed that Joe Colella and I were old friends. And
rivals for the same girl.”
“Yeah. I’m wondering why you—hell, we talked
about them on the way in. You never let on you’d ever
heard of them.”
He nodded carefully. “I wanted to be certain. I only
know that Joe was supposed to have died in an accident.
He was not the kind of man accidents happen to. Not
even out here.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“Only that Joe Colella was one of the most careful
men you will ever meet, and I didn’t care to discuss my
business with Barbara until I knew more about the situ-
ation in Jefferson. Now I’m beginning to wonder—”
“Dad!” Pam was on watch, and she sounded excited.
The intercom box said again, “Dad!”
“Right, sweetheart.”
“You better come up quick. There’s a message coming
through. You better hurry.”
“MAYDAY MAYDAY MAYDAY.” The voice was
cold and unemotional, the way they are when they really
mean it. It rolled off the tape Pam had made.
MAYDAY MAYDAY MAYDAY. THIS IS PEGASUS LINES
BOOSTSHIP AGAMEMNON OUTBOUND EARTH TO PAL-
LAS. OUR MAIN ENGINES ARE DISABLED. I SAY AGAIN,
MAIN ENGINES DISABLED. OUR VELOCITY RELATIVE
TO SOL IS ONE FOUR ZERO KILOMETERS PER SECOND,
I SAY AGAIN, ONE HUNDRED FORTY KILOMETERS PER
SECOND. AUXILIARY POWER IS FAILING. MAIN EN-
GINES CANNOT BE REPAIRED. PRESENT SHIP MASS IS
54,000 TONS. SEVENTEEN HUNDRED PASSENGERS
ABOARD. MAYDAY MAYDAY MAYDAY.
“Lord God.” I wasn’t really aware that I was talking.
The kids had crowded into the control cabin, and we
listened as the tape went on to give a string of numbers,
the vectors to locate Agamemnon precisely. I started to
punch them into the plotting tanks, but Pam stopped me.
“I already did that, Dad.” She hit the activation switch
to bring the screen to life.
It showed a picture of our side of the solar system, the
inner planets and inhabited rocks, along with a block of
numbers and a long thin line with a dot at the end to
represent Agamemnon. Other dots winked on and off:
boostships.
We were the only one that stood a prayer of a chance
of catching up with Agamemnon.
The other screen lit, giving us what the Register knew
about Agamemnon. It didn’t look good. She was an
enormous old cargo-passenger ship, over thirty years
old—and out here that’s old indeed. She’d been built for
a useful life of half that, and sold off to Pegasus Lines
when P&L decided she wasn’t safe.
Her auxiliary power was furnished by a plutonium
pile. If something went wrong with it, there was no way
to repair it in space. Without auxiliary power, the life-
support systems couldn’t function. I was still looking at
her specs when the comm panel lit. Local call, Port Cap-
tain’s frequency.
“Yeah, Jed?” I said.
“You’ve got the Mayday?”
“Sure. I figure we’ve got about sixty hours max to fuel
up and still let me catch her. I’ve got to try it, of course.”
“Certainly, Captain.” The voice was Rhoda’s. “I’ve
already sent a crew to start work on the fuel pod. I
suggest you work with them to be sure it’s right.”
“Yeah. They’ll have to work damned fast.” Slingshot
doesn’t carry anything like the tankage a run like this
would need.
“One more thing, Captain,” Rhoda said. “Remember
that your ship is under exclusive charter to the Jefferson
Corporation. We’ll make the legal arrangements with
Pegasus. You concentrate on getting your ship ready.”
“Yeah, OK. Out.” I switched the comm system to
Record. “Agamemnon, this is cargo tug Slingshot. I have
your Mayday. Intercept is possible, but I cannot carry
sufficient fuel and mass to decelerate your ship. I must
vampire your dee and mass, I say again, we must trans-
fer your fuel and reaction mass to my ship.
“We have no facilities for taking your passengers
aboard. We will attempt to take your ship in tow and
decelerate using your deuterium and reaction mass. Our
engines are modified General Electric Model five-niner
ion-fusion. Preparations for coming to your assistance
are under way. Suggest your crew begin preparations for
fuel transfer. Over.”
Then I looked around the cabin. Janet and our oldest
were ashore. “Pam, you’re in charge. Send that, and
record the reply. You can start the checklist for boost. I
make it about two-hundred centimeters acceleration, but
you’d better check that. Whatever it is, we’ll need to
secure for it. Also, get in a call to find your mother. God
knows where she is.”
“Sure, Dad.” She looked very serious, and I wasn’t
worried. Hal’s the oldest, but Pam’s a lot more thorough.
The Register didn’t give anywhere near enough data
about Agamemnon. I could see from the recognition pix
that she carried her reaction mass in strap-ons alongside
the main hull, rather than in detachable pods right
forward the way Slinger does. That meant we might have
to transfer the whole lot before we could start
deceleration.
She had been built as a general-purpose ship, so her
hull structure forward was beefy enough to take the
thrust of a cargo pod—but how much thrust? If we were
going to get her down, we’d have to push like hell on her
bows, and there was no way to tell if they were strong
enough to take it.
I looked over to where Pam was aiming our high-gain
antenna for the message to Agamemnon. She looked like
she’d been doing this all her life, which I guess she had
been, but mostly for drills. It gave me a funny feeling to
know she’d grown up sometime in the last couple of
years and Janet and I hadn’t really noticed.
“Pamela, I’m going to need more information on
Agamemnon,” I told her. “The kids had a TV cast out of
Marsport, so you ought to be able to get through. Ask for
anything they have on that ship. Structural strength,
fuel-handling equipment, everything they’ve got.”
“Yes, sir.”
“OK. I’m going ashore to see about the fuel pods. Call
me when we get some answers, but if there’s nothing im-
portant from Agamemnon just hang onto it.”
“What happens if we can’t catch them?” Philip asked.
Pam and Jennifer were trying to explain it to him as I
went down to the lock.
Jed had lunch waiting in the Doghouse. “How’s it
going?” he asked when I came in.
“Pretty good. Damned good, all things considered.”
The refinery crew had built up fuel pods for Slinger be-
fore, so they knew what I needed, but they’d never made
one that had to stand up to a full fifth of a gee. A couple
of centimeters is hefty acceleration when you boost big
cargo, but we’d have to go out at a hundred times that
“Get the stuff from Marsport?”
“Some of it.” I shook my head. The whole operation
would be tricky. There wasn’t a lot of risk for me, but
Agamemnon was in big trouble.
“Rhoda’s waiting for you. Back room.”
“You don’t look happy.”
Jed shrugged. “Guess she’s right, but it’s kind of
ghoulish.”
“What—?”
“Go see.”
Rhoda was sitting with a trim chap who wore a clipped
mustache. I’d met him before, of course: B. Elton, Esq.,
the Lloyd’s rep in Jefferson. He hated the place and
couldn’t wait for a transfer.
“I consider this reprehensible,” Elton was saying when
I came in. “I hate to think you are a party to this,
Captain Kephart.”
“Party to what?”
“Ms. Hendrix has asked for thirty million francs as
salvage fee. Ten million in advance.”
I whistled. “That’s heavy.”
“The ship is worth far more than that,” Rhoda said.
“If I can get her down. There are plenty of problems
—hell, she may not be fit for more than salvage,” I said.
“Then there are the passengers. How much is Lloyd’s
out if you have to pay off their policies? And lawsuits?”
Rhoda had the tomcat’s grin again. “We’re saving you
money, Mr. Elton.”
I realized what she was doing. “I don’t know how to
say this, but it’s my ship you’re risking.”
“You’ll be paid well,” Rhoda said. “Ten percent of
what we get.”
That would just about pay off the whole mortgage. It
was also a hell of a lot more than the commissioners in
Marsport would award for a salvage job.
“We’ve get heavy expenses up front,” Rhoda was say-
ing. “That fuel pod costs like crazy. We’re going to miss
the launch window to Luna.”
“Certainly you deserve reasonable compensation,
but—”
“But nothing!” Rhoda’s grin was triumphant. “Captain
Kephart can’t boost without fuel, and we have it all. That
fuel goes aboard his ship when you’ve signed my
contract, Elton, and not before.”
Elton looked sad and disgusted. “It seems a cheap—”
“Cheap!” Rhoda got up and went to the door. “What
the hell do you know about cheap? How goddamn many
times have we heard you people say there’s no such
thing as an excess profit? Well, this time we got the
breaks, Elton, and we’ll take the excess profits. Think
about that.”
Out in the bar somebody cheered. Another began
singing a tune I’d heard in Jefferson before. Pam
says the music is very old, she’s heard it on TV casts,
but the words fit Jefferson. The chorus goes “There’s
gonna be a great day!” and everybody out there shouted it.
“Marsport will never give you that much money,”
Elton said.
“Sure they will.” Rhoda’s grin got even wider, if that
was possible. “We’ll hold onto the cargo until they do—”
“Be damned if I will!” I said.
“Not you at all. I’m sending Mr. Hornbinder to take
charge of that. Don’t worry, Captain Kephart, I’ve got
you covered. The big boys won’t bite you.”
“Hornbinder?”
“Sure. You’ll have some extra passengers this run—”
“Not him. Not in my ship,” I said.
“Sure he’s going. You can use some help—”
Like hell. “I don’t need any.”
She shrugged. “Sorry you feel that way. Just remem-
ber, you’re under charter.” She gave the tomcat grin
again and left.
When she was gone, Jed came in with beer for me
and something else for Elton. They were still singing
and cheering in the other room.
“Do you think this is fair?” Elton demanded.
Jed shrugged. “Doesn’t matter what I think. Or what
Rollo thinks. Determined woman, Rhoda Hendrix.”
“You’d have no trouble over ignoring that charter
contract,” Elton told me. “In fact, we could find a rea-
sonable bonus for you—”
“Forget it.” I took the beer from Jed and drank it all.
Welding up that fuel pod had been hot work, and I
was ready for three more. “Listen to them out there,”
I said. “Think I want them mad at me? They see this as
the end of their troubles.”
“Which it could be,” Jed said. “With a few million
to invest we can make Jefferson into a pretty good
place.”
Elton wasn’t having any. “Lloyd’s is not in the busi-
ness of subsidizing colonies that cannot make a living—”
“So what?” I said. “Rhoda’s got the dee and nobody
else has enough. She means it, you know.”
“There’s less than forty hours,” Jed reminded him. “I
think I’d get on the line to my bosses, was I you.”
“Yes.” Elton had recovered his polish, but his eyes
were narrow. “I’ll just do that”
They launched the big fuel pod with strap-on solids,
just enough thrust to get it away from the rock so I
could catch it and lock on. We had hours to spare, and I
took my time matching velocities. Then Hal and I went
outside to make sure everything was connected right.
Hornbinder and two friends were aboard against all
my protests. They wanted to come out with us, but I
wasn’t having any. We don’t need help from ground-
pounders. Janet and Pam took them to the gallery for
coffee while I made my inspection.
Slingshot is basically a strongly built hollow tube with
engines at one end and clamps at the other. The cab-
ins are rings around the outside of the tube. We also
carry some deuterium and reaction mass strapped on to
the main hull, but for big jobs there’s not nearly enough
room there. Instead, we build a special fuel pod that
straps onto the bow. The reaction mass can be lowered
through the central tube when we’re boosting.
Boost cargo goes on forward of the fuel pod. This time
we didn’t have any going out, but when we caught up to
Agamemnon she’d ride there, no different from any
other cargo capsule. That was the plan, anyway. Taking
another ship in tow isn’t precisely common out here.
Everything matched up. Deuterium lines, and the ele-
vator system for handling the mass and getting it into the
boiling pots aft; it all fit. Hal and I took our time, even
after we were sure it was working, while the Jefferson
miners who’d come up with the pod fussed and worried.
Eventually I was satisfied, and they got onto their bikes
to head for home. I was still waiting for a call from
Janet.
Just before they were ready to start up she hailed us.
She used an open frequency so the miners could hear.
“Rollo, I’m afraid those crewmen Rhoda loaned us will
have to go home with the others.”
“Eh?” One of the miners turned around in the sad-
dle.
“What’s the problem, Jan?” I asked.
“It seems Mr. Hornbinder and his friends have very
bad stomach problems. It could be quite serious. I think
they’d better see Dr. Stewart as soon as possible.”
“Goddam. Rhoda’s not going to like this,” the foreman
said. He maneuvered his little open-frame scooter over
to the airlock. Pam brought his friends out and saw
they were strapped in.
“Hurry up!” Hornbinder said. “Get moving!”
“Sure, Horny.” There was a puzzled note in the fore-
man’s voice. He started up the bike. At maximum
thrust it might make a twentieth of a gee. There was no
enclosed space, it was just a small chemical rocket with
saddles, and you rode it in your suit.
“Goddamit, get moving,” Hornbinder was shouting. If
there’d been air you might have heard him a klick away.
“You can make better time than this!”
I got inside and went up to the control cabin. Jan was
grinning.
“Amazing what calomel can do,” she said.
“Amazing.” We took time off for a quick kiss be-
fore I strapped in. I didn’t feel much sympathy for
Horny, but the other two hadn’t been so bad. The one to
feel sorry for was whoever had to clean up their suits.
Ship’s engines are complicated things. First you take
deuterium pellets and zap them with a big laser. The dee
fuses to helium. Now you’ve got far too much hot gas at
far too high a temperature, so it goes into an MHD
system that cools it and turns the energy into electricity.
Some of that powers the lasers to zap more dee. The
rest powers the ion drive system. Take a metal, pre-
ferably something with a low boiling point like cesium,
but since that’s rare out here cadmium generally has to
do. Boil it to a vapor. Put the vapor through ionizing
screens that you keep charged with power from the fu-
sion system.
Squirt the charged vapor through more charged plates
to accelerate it, and you’ve got a drive. You’ve also got
a charge on your ship, so you need an electron gun to
get rid of that.
There are only about nine hundred things to go
wrong with the system. Superconductors for the mag-
netic fields and charge plates: those take cryogenic sys-
tems, and those have auxiliary systems to keep them
going. Nothing’s simple, and nothing’s small, so out of
Slingshot’s sixteen hundred metric tons, well over a thou-
sand tons is engine.
Now you know why there aren’t any space yachts
flitting around out here. Slinger’s one of the smallest ships
in commission, and she’s bloody big. If Jan and I hadn’t
happened to hit lucky by being the only possible buyers
for a couple of wrecks, and hadn’t had friends at
Barclay’s who thought we might make a go of it, we’d
never have owned our own ship.
When I tell people about the engines, they don’t ask
what we do aboard Slinger when we’re on long pas-
sages, but they’re only partly right. You can’t do any-
thing to an engine while it’s on. It either works or it
doesn’t, and all you have to do with it is see it gets fed.
It’s when the damned things are shut down that the
work starts, and that takes so much time that you make
sure you’ve done everything else in the ship when you
can’t work on the engines. There’s a lot of maintenance,
as you might guess when you think that we’ve got to
make everything we need, from air to zweiback. Living
in a ship makes you appreciate planets.
Space operations go smooth, or generally they don’t
go at all. I looked at Jan and we gave each other a
quick wink. It’s a good luck charm we’ve developed.
Then I hit the keys, and we were off.
It wasn’t a long boost to catch up with Agamemnon.
I spent most of it in the contoured chair in front of the
control screens. A fifth of a gee isn’t much for dirtsiders,
but out here it’s ten times what we’re used to. Even the
cats hate it.
The high gees saved us on high calcium foods and
the drugs we need to keep going in low gravs, and of
course we didn’t have to put in so much time in the
exercise harnesses, but the only one happy about it
was Dalquist. He came up to the control cap about an
hour out from Jefferson.
“I thought there would be other passengers,” he said.
“Really? Barbara made it pretty clear that she wasn’t
interested in Pallas. Might go to Mars, but—”
“No, I meant Mr. Hornbinder.”
“He, uh, seems to have become ill. So did his friends.
Happened quite suddenly.”
Dalquist frowned. “I wish you hadn’t done that.”
“Really? Why?”
“It might not have been wise, Captain.”
I turned away from the screens to face him. “Look,
Mr. Dalquist, I’m not sure what you’re doing on this
trip. I sure didn’t need Rhoda’s goons along.”
“Yes. Well, there’s nothing to be done now in any
event.”
“Just why are you aboard? I thought you were in a
hurry to get back to Marsport—”
“Butterworth interests may be affected, Captain. And
I’m in no hurry.”
That’s all he had to say about it, too, no matter how
hard I pressed him on it.
I didn’t have time to worry about it. As we boosted,
I was talking with Agamemnon. She passed about half a
million kilometers from Jefferson, which is awfully close
out here. We’d started boosting before she was abreast
of the rock, and now we were chasing her. The idea was
to catch up to her just as we matched her velocity. Mean-
while, Agamemnon’s crew had their work cut out.
When we were fifty kilometers behind, I cut the en-
gines to minimum power. I didn’t dare shut them down
entirely. The fusion power system has no difficulty with
restarts, but the ion screens are fouled if they’re cooled.
Unless they’re cleaned or replaced we can lose as much
as half our thrust—and we were going to need every
dyne.
We could just make out Agamemnon with our tele-
scope. She was too far away to let us see any details. We
could see a bright spot of light approaching us, though:
Captain Jason Ewert-James and two of his engineering
officers. They were using one of Agamemnon’s scooters.
There wasn’t anything larger aboard. It’s not prac-
tical to carry lifeboats for the entire crew and passenger
list, so they have none at all on the larger boostships.
Earthside politicians are forever talking about “requir-
ing” lifeboats on passenger-carrying ships, but they’ll
never do it. Even if they pass such laws, how could they
enforce them? Earth has no cops in space. The U.S.
and Soviet Air Forces keep a few ships, but not enough
to make an effective police force even if anyone out
here recognized their jurisdiction, which we don’t.
Captain Ewert-James was a typical ship captain.
He’d formerly been with one of the big British-Swiss
lines and had to transfer over to Pegasus when his
ship was sold out from under him. The larger lines like
younger skippers, which I think is a mistake, but they
don’t ask my advice.
Ewert-James was tall and thin, with a clipped mus-
tache and greying hair. He wore uniform coveralls over
his skintights, and in the pocket he carried a large pipe
which he lit as soon as he’d asked permission.
“Thank you. Didn’t dare smoke aboard Agamem-
non—”
“Air that short?” I asked.
“No, but some of the passengers think it might be.
Wouldn’t care to annoy them, you know.” His lips
twitched just a trifle, something less than a conspirator’s
grin but more than a deadpan.
We went into the office. Jan came in, making it a bit
crowded. I introduced her as physician and chief officer.
“How large a crew do you keep, Captain Kephart?”
Ewert-James asked.
“Just us. And the kids. My oldest two are on watch at
the moment.”
His face didn’t change. “Experienced cadets, eh? Well,
212
we’d best be down to it. Mr. Haply will show you what
we’ve been able to accomplish.”
They’d done quite a lot. There was a lot of ex-
pensive alloy bar-stock in the cargo, and somehow they’d
got a good bit of it forward and used it to brace up the
bows of the ship so she could take the thrust. “Haven’t
been able to weld it properly, though,” Haply said. He
was a young third engineer, not too long from being a
cadet himself. “We don’t have enough power to do weld-
ing and run the life support too.”
Agamemnon’s image was a blur on the screen across
from my desk. It looked like a gigantic hydra, or a bull-
whip with three short lashes standing out from the han-
dle. The three arms rotated slowly. I pointed to it
“Still got spin on her.”
“Yes.” Ewert-James was grim. “We’ve been running
the ship with that power. Spin her up with attitude jets
and take power off the flywheel motor as she slows down.”
I was impressed. Spin is usually given by running a big
flywheel with an electric motor. Since any motor is a
generator, Ewert-James’s people had found a novel way to
get some auxiliary power for life-support systems.
“Can you run for a while without doing that?” Jan
asked. “It won’t be easy transferring reaction mass if you
can’t.” We’d already explained why we didn’t want to
shut down our engines, and there’d be no way to supply
Agamemnon with power from Slingshot until we were
coupled together.
“Certainly. Part of the cargo is liquid oxygen. We can
run twenty, thirty hours without ship’s power. Possibly
longer.”
“Good.” I hit the keys to bring the plot tank results
onto my office screen. “There’s what I get,” I told them.
“Our outside time limit is Stinger’s maximum thrust. I’d
make that twenty centimeters for this load—”
“Which is more than I’d care to see exerted against
the bows, Captain Kephart. Even with our bracing.”
Ewert-James looked to his engineers. They nodded
gravely.
“We can’t do less than ten,” I reminded them. “Any-
thing much lower and we won’t make Pallas at all.”
“She’ll take ten,” Haply said. “I think.”
The others nodded agreement. I was sure they’d been
over this a hundred times as we were closing.
I looked at the plot again. “At the outside, then, we’ve
got one hundred and seventy hours to transfer twenty-
five thousand tons of reaction mass. And we can’t work
steadily because you’ll have to spin up Agamemnon for
power, and I can’t stop engines—”
Ewert-James turned up both corners of his mouth at
that. It was the closest thing to a smile he ever gave. “I’d
say we best get at it, wouldn’t you?”
Agamemnon didn’t look much like Slingshot. We’d
closed to a quarter of a klick, and steadily drew ahead
of her; when we were past her, we’d turn over and
decelerate, dropping behind so that we could do the
whole cycle over again.
Some features were the same, of course. The engines
were not much larger than Slingshot’s and looked much
the same, a big cylinder covered over with tankage and
coils, acceleration outports at the aft end. A smaller tube
ran from the engines forward, but you couldn’t see all of
it because big rounded reaction mass canisters covered
part of it.
Up forward the arms grew out of another cylinder.
They jutted out at equal angles around the hull, three
big arms to contain passenger decks and auxiliary sys-
tems. The arms could be folded in between the reaction
mass canisters, and would be when we started boosting.
All told she was over four hundred meters long, and
with the hundred-meter arms thrust out she looked like
a monstrous hydra slowly spinning in space:
“There doesn’t seem to be anything wrong aft,” Buck
Dalquist said. He studied the ship from the screens, then
pulled the telescope eyepiece toward himself for a direct
look.
“Failure in the superconductor system,” I told him.
“Broken lines. They can’t contain the fusion reaction long
enough to get it into the MHD system.”
He nodded. “So Captain Ewert-James told me. I’ve
asked for a chance to inspect the damage as soon as it’s
convenient.”
“Eh? Why?”
“Oh, come now, Captain.” Dalquist was still looking
through the telescope. “Surely you don’t believe in
Rhoda Hendrix as a good luck charm?”
“But—”
“But nothing.” There was no humor in his voice, and
when he looked across the cabin at me, there was none
in his eyes. “She bid far too much for an exclusive char-
ter, after first making certain that you’d be on Jefferson
at precisely the proper time. She has bankrupted the
corporate treasury to obtain a corner on deuterium.
Why else would she do all that if she hadn’t expected
to collect it back with profit?”
“But—she was going to charge Westinghouse and Iris
and the others to boost their cargo. And they had cargo
of their own—”
“Did they? We saw no signs of it. And she bid far
too much for your charter.”
“Damn it, you can’t mean this,” I said, but I didn’t
mean it. I remembered the atmosphere back at Jefferson.
“You think the whole outfit was in on it?”
He shrugged. “Does it matter?”
The fuel transfer was tough. We couldn’t just come
alongside and winch the stuff over. At first we caught it
on the fly: Agememnon’s crew would fling out hundred-
ton canisters, then use the attitude jets to boost away
from them, not far, but just enough to stand clear.
Then I caught them with the bow pod. It wasn’t easy.
You don’t need much closing velocity with a hundred
tons before you’ve got a hell of a lot of energy to worry
about. Weightless doesn’t mean massless.
We could only transfer about four hundred tons an
hour that way. After the first ten-hour stretch I decided
it wouldn’t work. There were just too many ways for
things to go wrong.
“Get rigged for tow,” I told Captain Ewert-James.
“Once we’re hooked up I can feed you power, so you
don’t have to do that crazy stunt with the spin. I’ll start
boost at about a tenth of a centimeter. It’ll keep the
screens hot, and we can winch the fuel pods down.”
He was ready to agree. I think watching me try to
catch those fuel canisters, knowing that if I made a mis-
take his ship was headed for Saturn and beyond, was
giving him ulcers.
First he spun her hard to build up power, then slowed
the spin to nothing. The long arms folded alongside, so
that Agamemnon took on a trim shape. Meanwhile I
worked around in front of her, turned over and boosted
in the direction we were traveling, and turned again.
The dopplers worked fine for a change. We hardly felt
the jolt as Agamemnon settled nose to nose with us.
Her crewmen came out to work the clamps and string
lines across to carry power. We were linked, and the
rest of the trip was nothing but hard work.
We could still transfer no • more than four hundred
tons an hour, meaning bloody hard work to get the whole
twenty-five thousand tons into Slinger’s fuel pod, but at
least it was all downhill. Each canister was lowered by
winch, then swung into our own fuel-handling system,
where Slinger’s winches took over. Cadmium’s heavy: a
cube about two meters on a side holds a hundred tons
of the stuff. It wasn’t big, and it didn’t weigh much in a
tenth of a centimeter, but you don’t drop the stuff either.
Finally it was finished, and we could start maximum
boost: a whole ten centimeters, about a hundredth of a
gee. That may not sound like much, but think of the
mass involved. Slinger’s sixteen hundred tons were noth-
ing, but there was Agamemnon too. I worried about the
bracing Ewert-James had put in the bows, but nothing
happened.
Three hundred hours later we were down at Pal-
lasport. As soon as we touched in my ship was sur-
rounded by Intertel cops.
The room was paneled in real wood. That doesn’t
sound like much unless you live in the Belt, but think
about it: every bit of that paneling was brought across
sixty million kilometers.
Pallas hasn’t much for gravity, but there’s enough to
make sitting down worth doing. Besides, it’s a habit we
don’t seem to be able to get out of. There was a big
conference table across the middle of the room, and
a dozen corporation reps sat at it. It was made of some
kind of plastic that looks like wood; not even the Cor-
porations Commission brings furniture from Earth.
Deputy Commissioner Ruth Carr sat at a table at the
far end, across the big conference table from where I
sat in the nominal custody of the Intertel guards. I
wasn’t happy about being arrested and my ship im-
pounded. Not that it would do me any good to be un-
happy. . ..
All the big outfits were represented at the conference
table. Lloyd’s and Pegasus Lines, of course, but there
were others, Hansen Enterprises, Westinghouse, Iris, GE,
and the rest.
“Definitely sabotage, then?” Commissioner Carr asked.
She looked much older than she really was; the black
coveralls and cap did that. She’d done a good job of
conducting the hearings, though, even sending Captain
Ewert-James and his engineers out to get new photo-
graphs of the damage to Agamemnon’s engines. He passed
them up from the witness box, and she handed them to
her experts at their place to her right.
They nodded over them.
“I’d say definitely so,” Captain Ewert-James was say-
ing. “There was an attempt to lay the charge pattern
such that it might be mistaken for meteorite damage.
In fact, had not Mr. Dalquist been so insistent on a
thorough examination, we might have let it go at that.
On close inspection, though, it seems very probable that
a series of shaped charges were used.”
Ruth Carr nodded to herself. She’d heard me tell
about Rhoda’s frantic efforts to charter my ship. One of
Ewert-James’s officers testified that an engineering crew-
man jumped ship just before Agamemnon boosted out
of Earth orbit. The Intertel people had dug up the fact
that he’d lived on Jefferson two years before, and were
trying to track him down now—he’d vanished.
“The only possible beneficiary would be the Jefferson
Corporation,” Mrs. Carr said. ‘The concerns most harmed
are Lloyd’s and Pegasus Lines—”
“And Hansen Enterprises,” the Hansen rep said. Ruth
Carr looked annoyed, but she didn’t say anything. I
noticed that the big outfits felt free to interrupt her and
wondered if they did that with all the commissioners, or
just her because she hadn’t been at the job very long.
The Hansen man was an older chap who looked as if
he’d done his share of rock mining in his day, but he
spoke with a Harvard accent. “There is a strong possibility
that the Jefferson Corporation arranged the murder of a
retired Hansen employee. As he was insured by a Hansen
subsidiary, we are quite concerned.”
“Quite right.” Mrs. Carr jotted notes on the pad in
front of her. She was the only one there I’d seen use
note paper. The others whispered into wrist recorders.
“Before we hear proposed actions, has anyone an objec-
tion to disposing of the matter concerning Captain
Kephart?”
Nobody said anything.
“I find that Captain Kephart has acted quite properly,
and that the salvage fees should go to his ship.”
I realized I’d been holding my breath. Nobody wanted
my scalp so far as I knew, and Dalquist had been careful
to show I wasn’t involved in whatever Rhoda had planned
—but still, you never know what’ll happen when the big
boys have their eye on you. It was a relief to hear her
dismiss the whole business, and the salvage fees would
pay off a big part of the mortgage. I wouldn’t know just
how much I’d get until the full Commission back in
Marsport acted, but it couldn’t come to less than a million
francs. Maybe more.
“Now for the matter of the Jefferson Corporation.”
“Move that we send sufficient Intertel agents to take
possession of the whole damn rock,” the Lloyd’s man
said.
“Second.” Pegasus Lines.
“Discussion?” Ruth Carr asked.
“Hansen will speak against the motion,” the Hansen
rep said. “Mr. Dalquist will speak for us.”
That surprised hell out of me. I wondered what would
happen, and sat quite still, listening. I had no business
in there, of course. If there hadn’t been some suspicion
that I might have been in on Rhoda’s scheme I’d never
have heard this much, and by rights I ought to have left
when she made her ruling, but nobody seemed anxious
to throw me out.
“First, let me state the obvious,” Dalquist said. “An
operation of this size will be costly. The use of naked
force against an independent colony, no matter how jus-
tified, will have serious repercussions throughout the
Belt—”
“Let ’em get away with it and it’ll really be serious,”
the Pegasus man said.
“Hansen Enterprises has the floor, Mr. Papagorus,”
Commissioner Carr said.
Dalquist nodded his thanks. “My point is that we
should consider alternatives. The proposed action is at
least expensive and distasteful, if not positively undesir-
able.”
“We’ll concede that,” the Lloyd’s man said. The others
muttered agreement. One of the people representing a
whole slew of smaller outfits whispered, “Here comes
the Hansen hooker. How’s Dalquist going to make a
profit from this?”
“I further point out,” Dalquist said, “that Jefferson
is no more valuable than many other asteroids. True, it
has good minerals and water, but no richer resources than
other rocks we’ve not developed. The real value of Jeffer-
son is in its having a working colony and labor force—
and it is highly unlikely that they will work very hard for
us if we land company police and confiscate their homes.”
Everybody was listening now. The chap who’d whis-
pered earlier threw his neighbor an “I told you so” look.
“Secondly. If we take over the Jefferson holdings, the
result will be a fight among ourselves over the division
of the spoils.”
There was another murmur of assent to that. They
could all agree that something had to be done, but nobody
wanted to let the others have the pie without a cut for
himself.
“Finally. It is by no means clear that any large num-
ber of Jefferson inhabitants were involved in this con-
spiracy. Chairman Hendrix, certainly. I could name two
or three others. For the rest—who knows?”
“All right,” the Lloyd’s man said. “You’ve made your
point. If landing Intertel cops on Jefferson isn’t advisable,
what do we do? I am damned if we’ll let them get away
clean.”
“I suggest that we invest in the Jefferson Corpora-
tion,” Dalquist said.
The Doghouse hadn’t changed. There was a crowd
outside in the main room. They were all waiting to hear
how rich they’d become. When I came in, even Horn-
binder smiled at me.
They were getting wild drunk while Dalquist and I
met with Rhoda in the back room. She didn’t like what
he was saying.
“Our syndicate will pay off the damage claims due
to Pegasus Lines and Lloyd’s,” Dalquist told her. “And
pay Captain Kephart’s salvage fees. In addition, we will
invest two million francs for new equipment. In return
you will deliver forty percent of the Jefferson Corpora-
tion stock to us.”
He wasn’t being generous. With a forty percent bloc
it was a cinch they could find enough more among
the rockrats for a majority. Some of them hated every-
thing Rhoda stood for.
“You’ve got to be crazy,” Rhoda said. “Sell out to a
goddam syndicate of corporations? We don’t want any
of you here!”
Dalquist’s face was grim. “I am trying to remain
polite, and it is not easy, Ms. Hendrix. You don’t seem
to appreciate your position. The corporation represen-
tatives have made their decision, and the Commission
has ratified it. You will either sell or face something
worse.”
“I don’t recognize any commissions,” Rhoda said.
“We’ve always been independent, we’re not part of your
goddam fascist commission. Christ almighty, you’ve found
us guilty before we even knew there’d be a trial! We
weren’t even heard!”
“Why should you be? As you say, you’re indepen-
dent. Or have been up to now.”
“We’ll fight, Dalquist. Those company cops will never
get here alive. Even if they do—”
“Oh, come now.” Dalquist made an impatient ges-
ture. “Do you really believe we’d take the trouble of
sending Intertel police, now that you’re warned? Hardly.
We’ll merely seize all your cargo in the pipeline and
see that no ship comes here for any reason. How long
will it be before your own people throw you out and
come to terms with us?”
That hit her hard. Her eyes narrowed as she thought
about it. “I can see you don’t live to enjoy what you’ve
done—”
“Nonsense.”
I figured it was my turn. “Rhoda, you may not be-
lieve this, but I heard him argue them out of sending
the cops without any warning at all. They were ready
to do it.”
The shouts came from the bar as Jed opened the
door to see if we wanted anything. “There’s gonna be
a great day!”
“Everything all right here?” Jed asked.
“No!” Rhoda shoved herself away from the table
and glared at Dalquist. “Not all right at all! Jed, he’s—”
“I know what he’s saying, Rhoda,” Jed told her.
“Cap’n Rollo and I had a long talk with him last
night.”
“With the result that I’m speaking to you at all,”
Dalquist said. “Frankly, I’d rather see you dead.” His
face was a bitter mask of hatred, and the emotionless
expression fell away. He hated Rhoda. “You’ve killed
the best friend I ever had, and I find that I need you
anyway. Captain Anderson has convinced me that it
yill be difficult to govern here without you, which is
why you’ll remain nominally in control after this sale
is made.”
“No. No sale.”
“There will be. Who’ll buy from you? Who’ll sell
to you? This was a unanimous decision. You’re not
independent, no matter how often you say you are.
There’s no place for your kind of nationalism out here.”
“You bastards. The big boys. You think you can do
anything you like to us.”
Dalquist recovered his calm as quickly as he’d lost
it. I think it was the tone Rhoda used; he didn’t want
to sound like her. I couldn’t tell if I hated him or not.
“We can do whatever we can agree to do,” Dalquist
said. “You seem to think the Corporations Commission
is some kind of government. It isn’t. It’s just a means
for settling disputes. We’ve found it more profitable
to have rules than to have fights. But we’re not with-
out power, and everyone’s agreed that you can’t be let
off after trying what you did.”
“So we pay for it,” led said.
Dalquist shrugged. “There’s no government out here.
Are you ready to bring Rhoda to trial? Along with all
the others involved?”
Jed shook his head. “Doubt it—”
“And there’s the matter of restitution, which you
can’t make anyway. And you’re bankrupt, since you
sent no cargo to Luna and the launch window s closed.
“Just who the hell is this syndicate?” Rhoda de-
manded.
Dalquist’s expression didn’t change, but there was
a note of triumph in his voice. He’d won, and he knew
it. “The major sums are put up by Hansen Enterprises.”
“And you’ll be here at their rep.”
He nodded. “Certainly. I’ve been with Hansen most
of my life, Ms. Hendrix. The company trusts me to
look out for its best interests. As I trusted Joe Colella.
Until he retired he was my best field agent.”
She didn’t say anything, but her face was sour.
“You might have got away with this is you hadn’t
killed Joe,” Dalquist said. “But retired or not, he was
a Hansen man. As I’m sure you found when he dis-
covered your plan. We take care of our people, Ms.
Hendrix. Hansen is a good company.”
“For company men.” Jed’s voice was flat. He looked
around the small back room with its bare rock walls, but I
think he was seeing through those walls, out through the
corridors, beyond the caves where the rockrats tried to make homes.
“A good outfit for company men. But it won’t be the same for us.”

Outside they were still singing about the great days coming.