by Joe Haldeman
“Its interesting enough,” he said. Two other people had come into the bar. He looked at them blandly. “Why don’t we move to a table?”
He got the bartender’s attention and ordered another cup of coffee, and must have seen my expression—the tariff on two cups of coffee would keep me drunk for a week—and ordered me up a large jar of beer. We carried them to a table and he switched on the sound damper, which was the kind that works both ways.
“Can I trust you to keep a secret?” He took a cautious sip of his coffee.
“Sure. One more won’t hurt.”
He looked at me for a long time. “How would you like to get a share of a couple of million CU’s?”
A ticket back cost about a hundred thousand. “That depends on what I’d have to do.” I wouldn’t have, for instance, jumped off a high building into a vat of boiling lead. Boiling water, yes.
“I can’t say, exactly, because I really don’t know. There may be an element of danger, there may not be. Certainly a few weeks of discomfort.”
“I’ve had several of those, here.”
He nodded at the insignia on my fading fatigue jacket. “You’re still licensed to pilot?”
“Technically.”
“Bonded?”
“No, like I told you, I had to skip out. My bond’s on Perrin’s World. I don’t dare—”
“No problem, really. This is a system job.” You need to be bonded for interstellar flight, but planet-to-planet, within a stellar system, there’s not that much money involved.
“System job? Here? I didn’t know Rigel had any other—”
“Rigel has one other planet, catalogued as Biarritz. It never got chartered or officially named because there’s nothing there.”
“Except something you want.”
“Maybe something a lot of people want.”
But he wouldn’t tell me any more. We talked on until noon, Chaim feeling me out, seeing whether he could trust me, whether he wanted me as a partner. There were plenty of pilots stranded on Faraway; I later found out that he’d talked to a half-dozen or so before me.
We were talking about children or some damn thing when he suddenly sat up straight and said, “All right. I think you’ll be my pilot.”
“Good … now, just what—”
“Not yet, you don’t need to know yet. What’s your credit number?”
I gave it to him and he punched out a sequence on his credit flash. “This is your advance,” he said; I checked my flash and, glory, I was fifty thousand CU’s richer. “You get the same amount later, if Biarritz doesn’t pan out. If it works, you’ll also get a percentage. We’ll talk about that later.”
The other fifty thousand was all I wanted—get back to civilization and I could hire a proxy to go to Perrin and rescue my bond. Then I’d be in business again.
“Now. The first thing you have to do is get us a ship. I’ll arrange the financing.” We left the bar and went to Faraway’s only public (or private) stenographer, and he made out a letter of credit for me.
“Any kind of a ship will do,” he said as I walked him back to his hotel. “Anything from a yacht to a battlewagon. We just have to get there. And back.”
On any civilized world, I could have stepped into a booth and called Hartford; then strolled down to the nearest port and picked up a vessel: local, interplanetary or, if I was bonded and could wait a day or two, interstellar. But Faraway was Faraway, so it was a little more complicated.
Let me digress, in case you were born less than twenty years ago and fell asleep in history class.
Back then, we had two governments: the Confederation we all know and love, and New Hartford Transportation Rentals, Ltd. There was nothing on paper that connected the Confederation with Hartford, but in reality they were as intertwined as the skeins of a braid.
New Hartford Transportation Rentals, Ltd., owned virtually all of the basic patents necessary for interstellar travel as well as every starship, including the four clunkers left over from George VIII’s disastrous imperialistic experiment.
Tired of your planet? Seek religious freedom, adventure, fresh air? Want to run from creditors? Get enough people together and Hartford would lease you a ship—for an astronomical sum, but at very generous rates. In fact, the first couple of generations hardly paid anything at all (while the interest built up), but then—
Talk about the sins of the fathers coming home to roost! Once a colony began to be a going concern, Hartford was empowered to levy a tax of up to fifty percent on every commercial transaction. And Hartford would carefully keep the tax down to a level where only the interest on the loan was being paid—the principal resting untouched, to provide Hartford an income in perpetuity. It was a rigged game (enforced by the Confederation), and everybody knew it. But it was the only game in town.
Hartford had a representative on every planet, and they kept him fueled with enough money so that he was always the richest, and usually the most influential, citizen of the planet. If a planetary government tried to evolve away from the rapacious capitalism that guaranteed Hartford a good return on its investment, their representative usually had enough leverage to put it back on the right road.
There were loopholes and technicalities. Most planets didn’t pass the Hartford tax on directly, but used a sliding income tax, so the rich would get poorer and the poor, God bless them, would go home and make more taxpayers rather than riot in the streets.
If you ever patronized the kind of disreputable tavern that caters to pilots and other low types, you may have heard them singing that ancient ballad, “My Heart Belongs to Mother, But Hartford Owns My Ass.”
Hartford owned that fundamental part of everybody on Faraway, too. But that didn’t mean they’d supplied Faraway with a nice modern spaceport, bristling with ships of all sizes and ranges. No, just the bi-weekly vessel from Steiner that dropped off supplies and picked up some cadmium.
I had to admit there wasn’t much reason for Faraway to have a short-run, plain old interplanetary ship—what good would it be? All you could do with it would be to orbit Faraway—and it looked bad enough from the ground—or take a joyride out to Biarritz. And there were more entertaining ways to throw away your money, even on Faraway.
It turned out that there actually was one interplanetary ship on Faraway, but it was a museum piece. It had been sitting for two hundred years, the Bonne Chance, the ship, Biarritz herself had used to survey the clinker that retained her name by default. It was being held for back taxes, and we picked it up for six figures.
Then the headaches began. Everything was in French-dial markings, instruction manual, log. I got a dictionary and walked around with an indelible pencil, relabeling; and Chaim and I spent a week of afternoons and evenings translating the manual.
The fusion engine was in good shape—no moving parts bigger than a molecule—but the rest of the ship was pretty ragged. Faraway didn’t have much of an atmosphere, but it was practically pure oxygen, and hot. The hull was all pitted and had to be reground. The electronic components of the ship had been exposed to two hundred years of enough ionizing radiation to mutate a couple of fruit flies into a herd of purple cattle. Most of the guidance and communications gimcrackery had to be repaired or replaced.
We kept half the drifter population of Faraway—some pretty highly trained drifters, of course—employed for over a week, hammering that antique wreck into some kind of shape. I took it up alone for a couple of orbits and decided I could get it twenty AU’s and back without any major disaster.
Chaim was still being the mystery man. He gave me a list of supplies, but it didn’t hold any clue as to what we were going to do once we were on Biarritz: just air, water, food, coffee and booze enough for two men to live on for a few months. Plus a prefab geodesic hut for them to live in.
Finally, Chaim said he was ready to go and I set up the automatic sequencing, about two hours of systems checks that were supposed to assure me that the machine wouldn’t vaporize on the pad when
I pushed the Commence button. I said a pagan prayer to Norbert Weiner and went down to the University Club for one last round or six. I could afford better bars, with fifty thousand CU’s on my flash, but didn’t feel like mingling with the upper classes.
I came back to the ship a half-hour before the sequencing was due to end, and Chaim was there, watching the slavies load a big crate aboard the Bonne Chance. “What the hell is that?” I asked him.
“The Mazel Tov papers,” he said, not taking his eyes off the slavies.
“Mazel Tov?”
“It means good luck, maybe good-bye. Doesn’t translate all that well. If you say it like this”—and he pronounced the words with a sarcastic inflection—“it can mean ‘good riddance’ or ‘much good shall it do you.’ Clear?”
“No.”
“Good.” They finished loading the crate and sealed the hold door. “Give me a hand with this.” It was a gray metal box that Chaim said contained a brand-new phased-tachyon transceiver.
If you’re young enough to take the phased-tachyon process for granted, just step in a booth and call Sirius, I should point out that when Chaim and I met, they’d only had the machines for a little over a year. Before that, if you wanted to communicate with someone light-years away, you had to write out your message and put it on a Hartford vessel, then wait around weeks, sometimes months, while it got shuffled from planet to planet (at Hartford’s convenience) until it finally wound up in the right person’s hands.
Inside, I secured the box and called the pad authorities, asking them for our final mass. They read it off and I punched the information into the flight computer. Then we both strapped in.
Finally the green light flashed. I pushed the Commence button down to the locked position, and in a few seconds the engine rumbled into life. The ship shook like the palsied old veteran that it was, and climbed skyward trailing a cloud of what must have been the most polluting exhaust in the history of transportation: hot ionized lead, slightly radioactive. Old Biarritz had known how to economize on reaction mass.
I’d programmed a quick-and-dirty route, one and a half G’s all the way, flip in the middle. Still it was going to take us two weeks. Chaim could have passed the time by telling me what it was all about, but instead he just sat around reading—War and Peace and a tape of Medieval Russian folk tales—every now and then staring at the wall and cackling.
Afterwards, I could appreciate his fetish for secrecy (though God knows enough people were in on part of the secret already). Not to say I might have been tempted to double-cross him. But his saying a couple of million were involved was like inviting someone to the Boston Tea Party, by asking him if he’d like to put on a loincloth and help you play a practical joke.
So I settled down for two weeks with my own reading, earning my pay by pushing a button every couple of hours to keep a continuous systems check going. I could have programmed the button to push itself, but hell …
At the end of two weeks, I did have to earn my keep. I watched the “velocity relative to destination” readout crawl down to zero and looked out the viewport. Nothing.
Radar found the little planet handily enough. We’d only missed it by nine thousand and some kilometers; you could see its blue-gray disc if you knew where to look.
There’s no trick to landing a ship like the Bonne Chance if you have a nice heavy planet. It’s all automated except for selecting the exact patch of earth you want to scorch (port authorities go hard on you if you miss the pad). But a feather-light ball of dirt like Biarritz is a different proposition—there just isn’t enough gravity, and the servomechanisms don’t respond fast enough. They’ll try to land you at the rock’s center of mass, which in this case was underneath forty-nine kilometers of solid basalt. So you have to do it yourself, a combination of radar and dead reckoning—more a docking maneuver than a landing.
So I crashed. It could happen to anybody.
I was real proud of that landing at first. Even old Chaim congratulated me. We backed into the surface at less than one centimeter per second, all three shoes touching down simultaneously. We didn’t even bounce.
Chaim and I were already suited up, and all the air had been evacuated from the ship; standard operating procedure to minimize damage in case something did go wrong. But the landing had looked perfect, so we went on down to start unloading.
What passes for gravity on Biarritz comes to barely one-eightieth of a G. Drop a shoe and it takes it five seconds to find the floor. So we half-climbed, half-floated down to the hold, clumsy after two weeks of living in a logy G-and-a-half.
While I was getting the hold door open, we both heard a faint bass moan, conducted up from the ground through the landing shoes. Chaim asked whether it was the ground settling; I’d never heard it happen before, but said that was probably it. We were right.
I got the door open and looked out. Biarritz looked just like I’d expected it to: a rock, a pockmarked chunk of useless rock. The only relief from the grinding monotony of the landscape was the silver splash of congealed lead directly below us.
We seemed to be at a funny angle. I thought it was an optical illusion—if the ship hadn’t been upright on landing, it would have registered on the attitude readout. Then the bright lead splash started moving, crawling away under the ship. It took me a second to react.
I shouted something unoriginal and scrambled for the ladder to the control room. One short blip from the main engine and we’d be safely away. Didn’t make it.
The situation was easy enough to reconstruct, afterwards. We’d landed on a shelf of rock that couldn’t support the weight of the Bonne Chance. The sound we had heard was the shelf breaking off, settling down a few meters, canting the ship at about a ten-degree angle. The force of friction between our landing pads and the basalt underfoot was almost negligible, in so little gravity, and we slid downhill until we reached bottom, and then gracefully tipped over. When I got to the control room, after quite a bit of bouncing around in slow-motion, everything was sideways and the controls were dead, dead, dead.
Chaim was lively enough, shouting and sputtering. Back in the hold, he was buried under a pile of crates, having had just enough time to unstrap them before the ship went over. I explained the situation to him while helping him out.
“We’re stuck here, eh?”
“I don’t know yet. Have to fiddle around some.”
“No matter. Inconvenient, but no matter. We’re going to be so rich we could have a fleet of rescuers here tomorrow morning.”
“Maybe,” I said, knowing it wasn’t so—even if there were a ship at Faraway, it couldn’t possibly make the trip in less than ten days. “First thing we have to do, though, is put up that dome.” Our suits weren’t the recycling kind; we had about ten hours before we had to start learning how to breathe carbon dioxide.
We sorted through the jumble and found the various components of the pop-up geodesic. I laid it out on a piece of reasonably level ground and pulled the lanyard. It assembled itself very nicely. Chaim started unloading the ship while I hooked up the life-support system.
He was having a fine time, kicking crates out the door and watching them float to the ground a couple of meters below. The only one that broke was a case of whiskey—every single bottle exploded, damn it, making a cloud of brownish crystals that slowly dissipated. So Biarritz was the only planet in the universe with a bonded-bourbon atmosphere.
When Chaim got to his booze, a case of gin, he carried it down by hand.
We set up housekeeping while the dome was warming. I was still opening boxes when the bell went off, meaning there was enough oxygen and heat for life. Chaim must have had more trust in automatic devices than I had; he popped off his helmet immediately and scrambled out of his suit. I took off my helmet to be sociable, but kept on working at the last crate, the one Chaim had said contained “the Mazel Tov papers.”
I got the top peeled away and looked inside. Sure enough, it was full of paper, in loose stacks.
&nb
sp; I picked up a handful and looked at them. “Immigration forms?”
Chaim was sitting on a stack of food cartons, peeling off his suit liner. “That’s right. Our fortune.”
“‘Mazel Tov Immigration Bureau,’” I read off one of the sheets. “Who—”
“You’re half of it. I’m half of it. Mazel Tov is the planet under your feet.” He slipped off the box. “Where’d you put our clothes?”
“What?”
“This floor’s cold.”
“Uh, over by the kitchen.” I followed his naked wrinkled back as he clumped across the dome. “Look, you can’t just… name a planet …”
“I can’t, eh?” He rummaged through the footlocker and found some red tights, struggled into them. “Who says I can’t?”
“The Confederation! Hartford! You’ve got to get a charter.”
He found an orange tunic that clashed pretty well and slipped it over his head. Muffled: “So I’m going to get a charter.”
“Just like that.”
He started strapping on his boots and looked at me with amusement. “No, not ‘just like that.’ Let’s make some coffee.” He filled two cups with water and put them in the heater.
“You can’t just charter a rock with two people on it.”
“You’re right. You’re absolutely right.” The timer went off. “Cream and sugar?”
“Look—no, black—you mean to say you printed up some fake—”
“Hot.” He handed me the cup. “Sit down. Relax. I’ll explain.”
I was still in my suit, minus the helmet, so sitting was no more comfortable than standing. But I sat.
He looked at me over the edge of his cup, through a veil of steam rising unnaturally fast. “I made my first million when I was your age.”
“You’ve got to start somewhere.”
“Right. I made a million and paid eighty-five percent of it to the government of Nueva Argentina, who skimmed a little off the top and passed it on to New Hartford Transportation Rentals, Ltd.”
“Must have hurt.”
“It made me angry. It made me think. And I did get the germ of an idea.” He sipped.