Well, lately there hadn’t been much reason for me to rush home after the day was done, so I followed him down on my sled. We went into the OK Corral, the same bar Caleb and I had followed Mother into the first time we set foot on Ceres. We had to dodge a Salvation Army band thumping out “Bringing in the Sheaves” to get in, but on the inside the bar itself hadn’t changed, except that the bartender was advertising home brew. I cocked an eyebrow at Takemotu.
He nodded. “The real McCoy. Somebody imported a Volksrocket full of malt and hops and bought into the Corral with it. They—”
A waiter bustled up. “What can I get you folks?”
He was short and stocky, with sharp eyes and a way of cocking his head that made him look like an inquisitive sparrow. “Wait a minute,” I said, “I know you.” He looked at me, his eyebrows raised. “Sure,” I said, “a while back you were trying to sell me a cigar out in the square there.”
He smoothed his mustache that for some reason made him look even more birdlike. “Ah yes, those cigars. Well now, that was some time ago.”
“Couple years,” I agreed. “Did you manage to sell them all?”
“Yes indeed, and by the end of that business day.”
“I hope at a fair profit.”
His expression turned cautious. “Fair, yes, I would say fair.”
“And with that profit you bought yourself in here?”
He looked shocked. “Good gracious, no indeed. With the profit on the cigars I invested in city lots here in Piazzi City.”
“I see. How long did it take you to turn them over?”
He smoothed his mustache. “Oh, I think about six months. Yes, not longer than six months. Once I laid my hands on a sonic excavator; it didn’t take long to dig out the lots.”
“I see. And the profit on the lots? Was it fair, too?”
“I’d say it was fair,” he agreed, still cautiously.
“And with them you bought into the Corral.”
“No, with the profit on the lots I invested in a shipment of yeast.”
“Yeast? For—” I gestured toward the bar.
He looked shocked again. “Good heavens no. Fleischmann’s Active Dry Yeast. For the baking of bread.”
“So you sold the yeast.”
“Certainly not. I used the yeast to bake bread, and sold the bread.”
“At a fair profit,” I told Takemotu, who was grinning next to me.
“Fair,” agreed the cigar salesman, “and with the profit on the bread, I bought into the OK Corral. Two beers? Certainly. Oh—and, ma’am?” he said, turning back for a moment. “About those cigars?”
“Yes?”
“There is no smoking in the OK Corral. I’m sure you understand. The atmospheres of space habitats do tend to be somewhat volatile, do they not?”
The beer, when it came, was crisp, clean, and cold, and tasted like beer. One-point-eight AUs out, I couldn’t ask for more. “Kevin,” I said after another pull, “I don’t get it.”
“What don’t you get?”
“How you could lock out the miners that time when they were sick.”
He drained his glass and waved his hand for another round. He belched and said, “Hell, Star, that wasn’t me, that was Lowell.”
“Lowell?”
“Yeah. Lowell was mayor at the time.” He grinned at me. “I was too busy running Takemotu’s Sublight Communications Services to be running anything else.”
“So what happened to him? Lowell.”
The cigar salesman brought the next round through the increasingly crowded room with the air of Pheidippides making it into Athens from Marathon against a stiff wind and a rocky road. When he left again, Takemotu swallowed half his glass in one gulp and said, “Ask Maggie Lu.”
I didn’t, of course. I didn’t have to.
· · ·
After their premiere performance, the Ladies Margaret and Melisande extended their welcome to all and sundry in true Belter fashion. Most Belters deemed the endurance of an after-dinner concert a small price to pay for the kind of dinner they had seen in the Belt only in their dreams. The flow of guests in and out of the Love Boat’s airlock was unceasing. Six months later, the Love Boat departed in as stately a fashion as it had arrived, Lady Margaret and Lady Melisande informing me that they had run dangerously low on truffles and trout. There was deep and sincere mourning Beltwide on the day of their departure.
Some of the new Belters, it quickly became evident, were on the run from various law enforcement agencies on Terra, Luna, and/or Terranova. Caleb’s rent-a-cop service was booming, so much so that Piazzi City itself had put out feelers. Caleb, Lodge, and Perry came to me one day. Perry said, “We got an idea,” and told me what it was.
“We thought we’d call it the Star Guard,” Lodge said.
Caleb said nothing, and left with the others when I gave them the go ahead.
Using Lodge’s Patrolmen and Caleb’s security people as a core group, Lodge and Perry began interviewing. Caleb established a rigorous physical that would have a washout rate of eighty-seven percent. With the remaining thirteen percent, they went to work.
The thirteen percent of applicants that survived the training were a breed apart from the rest of us ordinary mortals. We’d thought to recruit some of the vets who had fought in the Eurasian War, but most of them decided they’d seen enough close order drill to last the rest of their lives and passed. “And recruiting from the Patrol is out, other than the detachment that came with us,” I said. Lodge looked at me sideways but didn’t object.
Even within those limits we never lacked for applicants. Surely it was coincidence that so many of our first recruits turned out to be the younger children of wealthy Terran families, seeking after the adventure that was nonexistent on civilized Terra in the vast, rowdy reaches of the Belt. In our first graduating class we had a Hawaiian ali’i, the second son of a Norwegian duke, the great-niece of a former chief justice of the Supreme Court of the American Alliance, the fifth daughter of the king of Thailand, one Kennedy, and two Rothschilds.
“Noblesse oblige?” Mother suggested.
“What about those triplets from Orem, Utah?” I said.
“Not exactly royalty, are they?” she agreed.
“Well, they do come from a long line of heavy-duty mechanics.”
None of the recruits had seen any military service and most were fresh out of school. There wasn’t a size requirement but I noticed that nine of the first ten cadets topped a hundred and eighty centimeters. Six of them massed over eighty kays. It was a pain for the maintenance technicians who had to modify their pressure suits, but it paid off in presence. Just the emergence of one of those young behemoths from an airlock, made twice their actual size by a red-badged pressure suit, was enough to quell riot in the most ardent soul.
Sitting in on one of the training sessions I noticed that one of the exercises involved the mock boarding and taking of a manned ship in space. “Planning a hijack?” I asked Caleb.
“A man can dream,” he said coolly.
“Downstairs they’d call that piracy.”
“We’re not downstairs,” he replied in that same cool voice.
“Men,” Charlie said comfortingly and comprehensively when I stamped down to the dispensary.
“Mommy mad at Daddy again?” Sean asked intelligently, and then abandoned me to play jacks with Alexei. In half a gee the ball took longer coming down and their fat little toddler fingers had time to scoop up more jacks. Sean, not eight weeks older than Alexei, had only recently learned not to eat the jacks after he picked them up and was intent on imparting this useful piece of knowledge to his younger cousin. Sean already had a well-developed sense of family responsibility. Like his father.
“Where’s Paddy? With Caleb?”
“Where else?”
“How’s that working out?”
“The twins are going on four and you want to know how our child-care arrangements are working out?”
Charlie, bles
s her heart, didn’t go all Hippocratic and evoke the “state of the mission depending on the state of the commander’s mind” on me. Instead she said gently, “I want to know how it has been working out lately.”
I fidgeted. “We’re not fighting in front of the kids, if that’s what you mean. Caleb is usually awake before I am. He snags whatever twin comes to hand and is gone by the time I get up.”
“And in the evenings?”
I didn’t answer.
Charlie persisted in that doctorly voice of hers that manages to be gentle and implacable at the same time. “I haven’t seen you together as a family very often during the last month. You haven’t been playing basketball lately, or picnicking in Central Park, or double-teaming Archy on Zork X in the game room. Caleb used to cook gourmet for you once or twice a week. I can’t remember the last time I saw the four of you in the galley at the same time.”
“What is this, a survey? May I remind you that Mother is supposed to be the sociologist in this family?”
She raised her eyebrows and waited.
I tried very hard not to sound defensive. “We’ve all been pretty busy.”
Charlie said inexorably, “Busy with Outpost at the expense of your family?”
I remained stubbornly silent. She gave a tiny sigh. “Are either of you showing any special preference in which child you take for the day?”
“How? We can’t tell them apart yet without changing their diapers.” I reflected. “And they don’t wear diapers anymore.”
She smiled broadly. “You must be the only parents I know who are looking forward to adolescence.” I grunted. “How do the twins take to being separated twelve hours each day?”
“They haven’t complained. Why?”
She shrugged. “I’ve always been curious about twins. This is the first chance I’ve had to study their development up close. How do they communicate? Anything special?”
“They’re almost four, of course they’re talking,” I said slowly. “Sometimes Paddy will hand a toy to Sean before he asks for it. Sometimes he’ll finish a sentence she started.” I paused. “Once Caleb took a bad fall in a training session with one of the Guards. It knocked him out. He had Paddy with him that day. I was on 4Vesta with Sean, doing a deal with Valhalla Lode over some industrial diamonds we needed for drill bits. The next thing I knew, Sean was absolutely insisting that we get back to Outpost, that Daddy and Paddy needed us. He wouldn’t take no for an answer.” I shrugged. “The usual.”
“You consider that kind of behavior usual?”
I gave my sister a level look. “Nothing about children has struck me as unusual since Elizabeth signed hello to me from her crib at seven months.”
I think I wanted to hurt her into shutting up, but she surprised me with a half smile. “I remember.” There was a short silence. “It’s every person’s fantasy, you know.”
“What is?”
“Having a twin. The perfect companion. The ultimate confidant. A soul mate. We’re all looking for it, or something close to it. We all pray we’ll find it.”
My chest hurt. I took a deep breath, held it, and let it out slowly. “I thought I had.”
She toyed with the aseptiwand in front of her and said softly, unconsciously echoing her husband’s words, “He’ll get over it, Star. There’s not a problem in the world that can’t be solved by two people sleeping in the same bed every night.”
Yes, I thought, Caleb’s got his side of the bed, and I’ve got mine. “It’s just—”
“What?”
I said slowly, thinking my way through it, “Charlie, any man I marry—”
“Yes?”
“He has to be for me. He has to put me first, put my job before his, before his feelings. He has to put my goals first. If he doesn’t help me in going after them, then he has to at least stay out of my way while I do. I come at a high price. I can’t help it. It’s what I do. It’s what I am.”
I’d put it badly, but she understood. “And you’re thinking that Caleb’s not exactly typecast as your basic follower.”
“I thought it was going to be okay,” I said miserably. “I thought they were both working, the marriage and the job. Now—now, I just don’t know.”
She sighed, and repeated, “He’ll get over it, Star. Wait and see.”
Like I had a choice.
· · ·
They really did call it the Star Guard. “Oh, please,” I said.
“It’s not you,” Perry said, “it’s euphonious.”
“And accurate,” Lodge added. “Guards are hired. Cops are sworn in.”
“Oh.”
When the Star Guard took over security on Ceres, Caleb decreed that no prospector could leave the rock without a year’s supply of food and oh-two. At the main locks of both Piazzi City and Outpost, he instituted another rule: Every vehicle had to carry a serial number prominently displayed on the hull and registered with the Guard, as well as an automatic transmitter that broadcast that serial number at twenty-four-hour intervals when the vehicle was in motion. Each outbound vehicle had to file a flight plan including the crew roster and their next of kin with the nearest Guard checkpoint. If the ship, sled, buggy, flivver, or whatever they were driving didn’t check in on schedule, the Guard would trigger its emergency locator beacon, another requirement for registering with the Guard, and go looking for it. If found alive and in trouble, the survivors would be billed for rescue. If found alive and well, they’d be billed the same for forgetting to check in. If found dead, the crew would be decently cremated and the vehicle and equipment towed back to Ceres for auction, the proceeds to go into a fund opened at the First Terranova National Bank, from which eventually the value of the equipment could be recovered with interest by the crew’s heirs. In the meantime, that fund plus billings paid the Guard’s salary, and would steadily recoup the original outlay Outpost had made on the Guard’s behalf.
They contributed an imposing appearance. Caleb and Lodge trained them as close to physical and mental perfection as it was possible to come, Perry Austin provided a living legend to follow, and the first ten Star Guards lost no time in making their own reputation. In Piazzi City they never interfered with the casinos, drugstores, saloons, or whorehouses springing up around Paradise Alley, but anyone found and convicted of cheating or robbery was turned over to Lodge, given a speedy and public trial, and, if convicted, a blue ticket to Terra on the first available ship.
When the Patrol fanned out into the Belt, their task increased literally by geometric proportions.
The first scoutships of the Department of Space’s Surveying and Mapping Division divided the Belt into 360 degrees, which was easy for them to say. The prime meridian of this arbitrary longitudinal carving up ran through Ceres. The orbit of Mars, more or less the inner shore of the Belt, is approximately 1.4 billion kilometers in circumference. Jupiter, the Belt’s outer shore, has an orbital circumference of almost five billion kilometers. This means, without even leaving the plane of planetary rotation, that one degree of Belt can be equal to anything between 4 million to 13.4 million kilometers.
But of course one must leave the plane of rotation, for many asteroids are inclined to that plane, some to the tune of forty and more degrees. 944Hidalgo travels forty-three degrees out of the plane, and at aphelion approaches the orbit of Saturn to boot, which brings up the problem of elliptical orbits that I refuse to go into. To make the game even more fun, there are the Hirayama families, groups of rocks traveling together in similar orbits that may be the remnants of gigantic collisions among asteroids. Then there are the Kirkwood gaps, caused by Jupiter’s immense gravitational field, the eccentricity of the Apollo asteroids, and the Trojan asteroids, traveling fore and aft of Jupiter and on which the first big uranium strike had been made.
Faced with these statistics I said, “You know what we need?”
“A faster solarsled,” Perry replied laconically.
“I knew we should have brought along just one transportation engi
neer!”
“And Bob Shackleton his own solarsled,” Lodge grumbled.
“He take off on yours?”
“For only the two hundredth time.”
Of course the main body of the Belt is more compact than what I have just described, considerably inside the orbit of Jupiter and outside the orbit of Mars, and the average velocity of asteroids relative to each other is only five kilometers. But the rarest ore with the highest grade had a distressing habit of being discovered inconveniently distant, out of plane and sideways to Outpost. After a while the Guard measured each new strike and every new registry for Guard service by how long it would take to get there.
Ten, twenty, thirty plus degrees downarm, millions of klicks from headquarters, more often than not completely cut off from Outpost and their officers, the Star Guard was all the law there was. Sometimes individual Guards were obliged to assume the roles of judge, jury, and executioner at one and the same time. They helped mining partnerships gone sour divide their outfits, adjudicated disputes over mining claims, and acted as executors to the estates of miners who died.
No quarrel was too small or too large to arbitrate. When 6423Emmie Lou declared war on 5291No Moss over a missing kilo of Outpost Kona Premium, it was tiny Star Guard Bhumibol Dila who stepped in to mediate before a fifth life was lost. When strife erupted between two claims on 2Pallas over a missing shaker table, it was Star Guard Kleng Qvist who found the table under a disguising layer of paint and forced its return. He then fined the thieves a hundred times what the table was worth, not so much for the theft, he informed them, as for the time the altercation had taken away from his regular patrol. When two miners on 4Vesta decided to split the sheets and then couldn’t decide how to divide up one AtPak, Star Guard John Smith took it outside and threw it into orbit, with the heartily expressed approval of neighboring claims.
A Handful of Stars (Star Svensdotter #2) Page 19