"Yes, but I doubt anyone will accumulate them. It's more a keepsake and a marketing tool. I am given to understand the atmosphere there is not conducive to trust in the government's economic policies right now. Myat says people are worried they will even confiscate gold jewelry, which has never happened before."
"In that case, I have to wonder. Are you sure they won't confiscate these?" Irwin asked.
"If they do it won't do them much good. They'll get twenty five grams at most, and we'll never send anymore down. We can afford to lose that much to see what they are going to do," Huian assured him.
"Good, I'm satisfied then," Irwin said. His assistant sat a foam-board box on the desk. "Is there anything else I can do for you today?"
"Not unless you can tell the Earthies to send up some coffee," Huian said, laughing.
Irwin reached in his desk and got the one kilo bag of Sunda Hejo Jeff gave him. He was really looking forward to enjoying it, but Huian was far too important a customer to pass up such a good chance to please her.
"A small token of our esteem," he said, sitting it across the desk, close to her edge.
"You are a miracle worker!" Huian said, not trying to hide her amazement at all.
"Your banker should have some...connections," Irwin said, pleased with her shock. "We're working on getting more in time. It's still difficult unfortunately." He didn't want her thinking he had a regular supply. She might think he was holding out on her if he didn't have more soon.
"My husband will be so impressed," Huian said. "When I told him I brought Myat's gold to you and Mr. Singh he said I'd done exactly the right thing. He praised both of you, but there hasn't been any coffee in our household for a long time, thank you."
Irwin just smiled and nodded like it wasn't that big a deal.
* * *
"What's that noise?" Jeff asked as soon as he stepped in.
"Your little friend Eric came by and asked if I had a square meter he could use to run his machine for the bank. He said his mom is super touchy, and wouldn't let him do it at home."
"I can easily believe that from what little I've seen of her. We've had some...run-ins already. How much is he paying you?" Jeff asked April.
"It's for the bank, I never considered charging him."
"He's charging me a tenth of a percent for the idea and assembling the bits," Jeff told her.
"That doesn't sound like much," April said.
Jeff regretted saying anything. He didn't want April to think him cheap.
"That's just for the bits," Jeff assured her. "He'll make more for other work too."
"He seems to have adapted away from Earth think really fast. He had his buddy with him who built the machine. They've been back and modified it a couple times. It runs five hundred cards at a load now and has optical scanners that stop it if something jams up. Then it calls him on com. But it hasn't yet. So the kid seems to know what he's doing," April said.
Jeff walked over to see the machine, and had to bend a bit to get deeper in the low overhead by the ports. It was in where April had finally put a few bagged tomato plants. It looked like junk, but it worked fine. It was half way through the current five hundred cards.
"Doesn't the noise bother you?" Jeff asked.
"No, I'm not here that often. Just like now, we're going out to eat. He's never asked to load it in the evening. I think his family expects him to be home then. Besides, it's the sound of money being made. It's hard to dislike that," April said.
"Good point. It sounds better already," Jeff joked.
* * *
"That was brilliant to give Huian coffee," Jeff said. "April constantly has to advise me on social things. I probably wouldn't have thought of it. I read in a banking journal that there was a period of time when banks gave gifts for opening an account. It seems they were legally limited what interest they could pay, so they'd throw in a toaster as a prize to get around that."
"What sort of a toaster?" Irwin asked, not sure he wasn't joking.
"The sort you plug in the wall socket and put sliced bread in it," Jeff said. When Irwin looked dubious he explained further. "It was a post war period and there was a lot of pent up demand for simple consumer goods, and the prices for such things was much higher than later when productivity increased a great deal. They put prizes in boxes of laundry detergent and snacks even. So you have sort of reinvented that."
"I wish I had more, and some bottles of liquor," Irwin said. "I could create some serious goodwill among my important customers like the Lees, before supply gets back to normal."
"I'm making whiskey, but by the time it's ready to taste we'll have Earth whiskey again," Jeff said.
"Why didn't you tell me? How much are you making?" Irwin demanded.
"I have two hundred liters circulating through charcoal to age it," Jeff said. "It's a byproduct of lunar food production. I expect I'll have that much every three or four months for the near future. It should increase as our food production goes up and I have more waste to work with."
"If you get to where you are making more alcohol than you can sell as whiskey you can sell the straight clear stuff for mix, or add some simple flavoring and call it vodka.
"Heather demanded the first ten liters from setting it up for her personal use, and now she has rights on the second run of two hundred liters. She and April are also partners in the enterprise that is responsible for this, so I could hardly deny her. I have no idea how she flavored it," Jeff said.
"You can sell it as futures right now you know. Just like the water from the snowballs, that's all sold ahead before they return," Irwin urged him. "Ultra-premium Earth whiskey was going for near a thousand dollars a seven hundred fifty milliliter bottle at Home, before the flu."
"I'm not sure it's going to be any good, much less premium," Jeff said. "I've never done this and it's an experiment at this point. It would be a huge embarrassment to sell futures and then it's crap nobody wants to drink."
"You're not a big drinker are you?" Irwin asked.
"Not at all. I may have a few drinks with friends when we go to a club, but I don't care for a lot of it. It has to taste good. I think I had something at April's place, the Fox and Hare, five or six months ago. That's how long it's been since I had a drink."
"I can assure you...if it doesn't make you blind or kill you somebody will buy this stuff." Irwin said.
"That's horrible. I don't want to be associated with an inferior product. People would probably make fun of it, and that reputation will rub off on the other things you do. Remember April's brother grew mushrooms and the spores got away from him? Some people mocked him as the Mushroom King until his dying day. They still find them on air filters occasionally.
"I'd much rather make good beer or champagne, but that's difficult. This is what I had the materials to try. If it's any good I'll make more money holding it back and letting it age," Jeff pointed out. "I don't even consider myself qualified to taste it. When it has a little more color and smells better I'll have somebody taste it that knows whiskey. I'm not sure if it's even going to resemble any Earth whiskeys."
"I will assemble a few friends, who happen to know about such things, and volunteer myself to help you. We have enough group experience to give you an expert panel," Irwin assured him.
"I'm not going to bring the whole lot until I'm sure it's ready, but I'll have a liter sent from the moon when it has some color," Jeff decided.
"Most of it is bottled in three quarters of a liter units," Irwin said, "so a full liter will be fine. It'll make it stand out as different in the market too. Just being from the moon will make it a novelty."
"Good, because I already have some bottles designed," Jeff said. "I'd hate to change them. Thank you, Irwin. I appreciate the help."
"That's what friends are for," Irwin assured him, keeping a carefully controlled face.
* * *
"We can make the pressure vessels, and the locks are no problem if you can get the servo motors made on Home," Heath
er agreed, "but we are too short on carbon to make plastic for internal fittings and furniture. If we make the interior from sintered steel it's going to be heavy. Although we can make wire and do open grid shapes for seats. How were you going to lift this stuff from Central?"
"I have...another project. I'm going to put the motor from one of...from that, in an unmanned sort of a tug. It will lift the cans into lunar orbit and make a return landing on an automated beacon. The can will be pushed to Home by just about any shuttle that has a docking clamp on the nose," Jeff said. "Then when the project is done I can recover the motor for my other project."
"Make a third motor," Heather advised him. "This sounds like a much cheaper way to lift cargo than a manned shuttle. I don't know why we didn't do this already."
"We weren't lifting that much from Central a year ago," Jeff pointed out.
"Good point. Now we have food and carbon dioxide to lift. Any reason you can't clamp a can on this motor base and use it to drop freight to us?" Heather asked.
"No, although you aren't importing that much yet. Did you have something in mind?"
"Yeah, sounds like a good way to bring in snowball water for now. At least as standby freight while we don't have much else to keep it busy."
"That'll double the price of the water," Jeff cautioned her.
Heather shrugged. "We're not getting enough anywhere else. I'm thinking I might have a solution for some of your interior partitions and such for your cans."
"Oh really? Are you taking up tree farming?" Jeff asked.
"All in good time," Heather assured him. "For now, I have one of Mo's guys making a sort of rock foam. Have you ever seen pumice?"
"I think I had some tooth polish with that in it," Jeff recalled. "It's gritty."
"That's the crushed stuff," Heather said. "The stuff looks like grey foam before it's crushed. It's a little heavier, but I'll ask what he can do to make it lighter. He's already adding fiber to make it less prone to fracture, and I know he has already been working on making panels from it, because that's how we intended to use it for interior walls and partitions. It glues just fine and you can run a self-tapping screw into the stuff too."
"That's encouraging. I'm going to ask Mo if he can come up with a lock mechanism that doesn't require electric motors. Copper and silver are just horribly expensive right now," Jeff said.
"Do you have any data for motors with aluminum windings?" Heather asked.
"I doubt it. I'll search, but I think I'd need them designed. It shouldn't be that difficult. Why?"
"If you can make a workable design in aluminum we had a bit of it from the regolith, but the same or nearly the same design should work for calcium. The Rock owners have a ton of calcium they'd love to sell," Heather said. "And it should extrude easily. I have no idea if it work hardens however."
Jeff nodded. "Yeah, I think it's time to start learning to use it. I doubt we're ever going to have enough copper. But I'll put the motor out on the vacuum side, because I doubt we can protect the calcium from air and moisture now. That's the sort of thing that takes four or five generations of design to get all the bugs out. We might even make them in vacuum."
"Why not?" Heather asked, amused. "We have plenty of it...I do have a question though."
"Sure...What's that?" Jeff asked, catching a sudden change in her tone...
"If you're going to have a couple hundred immigrants living in these modules, a couple kilometers from Home. Some of them will commute, and some probably just work from their quarters. Are they going to be citizens of Home or outsiders? Will they be eligible to pay taxes and vote? Will they want to? Are they going to pay air and water fees to Mitsubishi? Because it sounds like they won't see much benefit from that. And will Home citizens accept them? I'm a Home citizen still, even though I spend most of my time at Central. I've never had anybody challenge it. Of course if they reject them it may put me out the lock too. Unless they grandfather me in. So I have a real interest. I'd find out some answers to those sort of questions before you start lifting cans for Home," Heather counseled.
"Oh boy. Nothing is ever simple," Jeff said.
* * *
"They launched the next snowball expedition," Deloris informed Barak at shift change.
"Same basic design ship as the Yuki-onna?" Barak wondered.
"Yes, but they changed the way the motors are mounted on the ice after the amount of time it took you and Hanson to get them positioned. Basically you get them in position now and set off a bunch of charges that drive anchors in the ice," Deloris said. "No more manually setting anchors."
"Do you still have to trench and lay the feeds?" he wondered.
"They'll need to lay them out, but not bury them now. They have staples to pin them to the ice every meter. Then the anchors and pinions get plugged into power temporarily, and it heats the tip. Theory is it melts the ice around the end, and it refreezes in the ice much more securely than with just barbs and friction holding it."
"If their iceball is pretty dense like ours that should work," Barak decided. "If they test and find out it is too 'fluffy' they better go find another one."
"That's what I told them," Deloris said. "They also did the sort of testing you recommended."
"Oh really? They mentioned it to you? Or did you ask?" Barak wondered.
"They volunteered it. The coordinator said they had a great deal of resistance to the questions," Deloris said. "Several people dropped out of the program rather than have family and previous workmates questioned. There was so much resistance that they felt they either had to validate the procedure or drop it in the future.
"So they went to the trouble and expense of determining who would have been on the questionnaire for the people refusing, as many as they could, and tried to interview them. He said the ones who dropped out had references that either clammed up and refused to talk, or were openly hostile. Hostile to the candidate, and even hostile to the questioner for being associated with that person in any way."
"No kidding?" Barak said. "Who'd have thought it?"
"He said the main candidate for XO elicited such hostile reactions when they mentioned his name that they were afraid they might be assaulted before they could disassociate themselves from him. That was from his own brother and a former commanding officer. Our guys admitted it could have been a disaster if he hadn't been weeded out."
"Just think," Barak told her, "there isn't an Earth nation now where you could ask those sort of questions without committing a crime."
Deloris nodded agreement, thinking hard. "That's going to affect how we pick our crews now, but for me, personally, it's going to change how I regard the crews of Earthie ships and deal with them. Knowing they can't screen for defective people I'm going to be a lot more careful and not automatically expect I'll get a rational response if we have some conflict to resolve."
"Sounds smart," Barak agreed. "Sounds like that needs to go in the training manual too."
"You're right. It should be official, and the why of it documented in careful detail. I'll submit that idea too," Deloris promised.
* * *
"Captain Li is coming up on the next flight of Dionysus' Chariot," Jeff said.
"Oh, good. I want to see him, "April responded. "May I take both of you to the Fox and Hare? I haven't been there since I went with you. I know we pay to be on his boat, but I'd love to return his hospitality. I feel he and his crew go way beyond what they need to do, just for paying customers."
"Yes. I'll leave time for that. Actually...I wondered if you'd extend a different sort of hospitality to him for two nights?"
"Really?" April asked, raising an eyebrow extra high.
"Yes," Jeff said, looking terribly embarrassed. "I simply can't find anywhere to bed him down. Not even a hot slot. I'm down to the point of needing to answer one of those ads offering floor space with strangers. I hate to do that to Li. It would hardly give him a good first impression of Home. I can get an air mattress, but not a room."
&nb
sp; "Oh good. You weren't going to put him in with me," April said, in mock relief.
"Nor Gunny," Jeff said trying to cover his embarrassment with humor.
"I'd rather have you as a guest and let you put Li in with Walter," April suggested. "They've met each other, so you wouldn't be putting him in with a stranger."
"Is that acceptable then?" Jeff asked, strangely distressed.
"Well of course. Why do you need to ask?" Sometimes April couldn't figure Jeff out.
"I've never invited myself over," Jeff said. He could see from the look on April's face she didn't get it. "It makes all the difference in the world to me," he tried to explain. "I don't presume."
"Do you remember that I set the door to your palm?" she reminded him.
"Yeah. I'm being stupid again, aren't I?"
"Yes, but very sweetly, in your own way," April said to soften it.
"Thank you. I very much appreciate it, and he'll love the club," Jeff predicted.
* * *
"Mr Singh, I have your next ten thousand seals," Eric said.
"That's great. Can you bring them by my office, please? I have another forty thousand for you."
"Wow, I had no idea we'd be making so many," Eric admitted.
"Is that a problem?" Jeff asked, but pleasantly.
"No, no, I want the work," Eric was quick to say. "I'm just wondering if I'm going to wear my welcome thin at April's cubic."
"April? How's that?" Jeff asked, refusing to admit any knowledge of their arrangement.
"She, uh, did me a favor and let me run the machine in her apartment, but forty thousand is going to take weeks to run, even if I run two or three loads a day."
"That seems like a reasonable time frame, but that's between you and April," Jeff agreed.
"Yeah, I'll pick up the new cards and seals, I better bring a cargo cart for forty thousand. And I better find a new place pretty quickly," Eric decided.
"Whatever arrangement you wish to make," Jeff said, agreeably.
"Thank you, Mr. Singh. I'll come around within the hour," he promised. Wow, now what was he going to do? Dick might be able to weasel some space at his dad's shop, but there was no place secure there. Crime was very low on Home, but not to where he wanted to leave a stack of a thousand gold certificates sitting on the shop floor unattended. They didn't even lock the doors there, and they had constant traffic in and out. Huh. He'd think of something.
They Said It Would Be Easy (April Book 7) Page 21