The Billion Dollar Boy

by Charles Sheffield

  "That's your department. You tell me. The hundred kilometers is nominal. If we have to wait closer to the collection cable, that's what we'll do. You make arrangements to catch the corry with Cheever in it. The moment you tell me you have it, I take us out of there."

  "But if you head back toward the Harvest Moon—"

  "I don't. I take us between the reefs." She saw his expression. "Not threading the eye of either, because I value my skin more than that. I'll take us along an equipotential between the two reefs, where the disturbing field is a minimum."

  Knute looked dubious. "That puts us smack in the middle of a sounder alley."

  "It does, but that's all right. We won't be disturbing any sounders we might see and there's no reason for them to take any interest in us. The main point is we'll be in a blackout region for the Harvest Moon. So far as they're concerned, their corry and a length of collection cable will simply have vanished. With any luck they'll assume Cheever and Grace Trask went into one or other of the reefs. Not even Lana Trask will follow them there."

  "I don't like it, Pearl." Knute Crispin was bending low over the page, his eyebrows in a single black line. "At least two rakehells, the Galway Galleon and the Smiling Buddha, disappeared in that sounder alley between Portland and Lizard."

  "After they spent weeks there, looking for starfires and shwartzgeld. Probably got sucked into a reef eye by going too close. We'll just be passing through, straight in and straight out." Pearl Mossman picked up the piece of paper sitting between them and held it out across the table. "Look, Knute, either we do this at the max or we don't do it at all. When things get hot we won't have time to give each other pep talks. Which are you? In or out?"

  "I'm in. You know me." Knute shrugged. He took the paper and smoothed it on the table surface. "I'd rather ride to hell in a dogcart than sit and do nothing. But I like to be sure we're prepared for the downside."

  "Prepare all you like." Pearl Mossman stood up. "Take a look at that sheet, too. You'll have plenty of time for it, because I don't propose to bother with any more of this damned harvesting. Shelby Cheever is a bigger fish than twenty holdfuls."

  "You bet. Catch him"—Knute made a grabbing movement with both hands—"and we'll be richer than any harvester crew in history."

  "Catch him alive, Knute." Pearl turned to leave the cabin and added over her shoulder, "Just try to remember that detail when you get your hands on him, and hold down your enthusiasm. Cheever's not good for much when he's alive; but he's of no use at all to us dead."

  Chapter Thirtee

  "Dodman's and Plymouth to Portland and Lizard, Tacking past Beachy from Ushant or Wight . . ."

  THE longest corry session was over, and Grace was singing to herself as Doobie and Shel tallied the final few dozen bags. It was already far past the usual working hours, and the boys were drooping with fatigue. Grace sat in her shirtsleeves at the very apex of the corry, looking down on the two youths working below. Her voice was not loud, but it was clear and true and it echoed splendidly off the bare walls.

  Doobie squinted up at her in the gloom. "Hoy! You wailing up there. What you think you're doing? When you coming down to do your share?"

  "I am doing my share—first-class entertainment for you, free of charge." But Grace climbed gracefully down the struts to deck level. "All right, Doob, I'll take over. It's nearly the last time. One more this year, according to Jilter, and we'll be all done."

  "We're that near full holds?" Doobie bowed and stretched at the hips, easing his aching back. "I don't believe it. We weren't that close this time last year."

  "Go ask, if you don't believe me." Grace grinned at Shelby as Doobie instantly turned and headed out of the cargo hold. "Now that was a tactical error. Little brother won't be back 'til we're long done tallying and stowing."

  "What were you doing up at the apex?"

  "Now don't you start." Grace paused with the automatic tallier in her hand. "I was singing. Are you going to tell me people don't sing where you come from?"

  It occurred to Shelby that in his immediate circle they did not—not, at least, from sheer happiness. He had heard more spontaneous singing in two months with the harvester fleet than in all the rest of his life.

  "I didn't mean that," he said. "Of course I know you were singing. But that song—with the names of the reefs in it. Did you make it up yourself?"

  He went on tallying as he spoke, and without the use of the tallier. It had been a surprise and a peculiar pleasure to learn that he was the only person on board who could maintain a running count in his head and never lose it, while talking about anything else at the same time—even about numbers.

  "I didn't make up that song," Grace said. "Wish I had. But it's not about reefs in the Messina Cloud. It's hundreds of years old, and it's about places on Earth."

  "But those are real reef names. We passed Ushant Reef a couple of weeks ago, and tomorrow we'll be approaching Portland and Lizard."

  "That's just an accident. I guess that when the Cloud was first being explored, people got lazy. They went back and gave names to the reefs out of history books, from the seas and ports and danger points of Earth. And they stole the tunes, too, from old sea chanteys."

  "So there's really no such thing as genuine Cloud songs, made for here and sung here?"

  "Not yet. Not good ones. One day, though, there will be. There's a Cloud poetry competition every year at Confluence. Of course, you were too busy running around with Nicky Rasmussen and his friends to think of going"—a touch of resentment still in her voice—"but anyone can enter. I went to it."

  "And you entered?"

  "No. I didn't have the nerve."

  "So who won?"

  "Nobody. There's a standing rule: Unless some poem is judged really, really good, no one will be declared a winner."

  "But if everyone is afraid to enter . . ."

  "They're not all like me." Grace realized that she had admitted, for the first time to anyone except her mother, that she wrote poetry. "Some people enter, and instead of being really, really good they are really, really awful. I'd be ashamed to stand up there and spout what they wrote, but they don't seem embarrassed at all. They might not seem so bad, except that there's first-rate Cloud verse to compare them with."

  She had given up any pretense of tallying. Now she stood perfectly still, closed her eyes, and declaimed: "It is ours to sweep through the ringing deep where Azrael's outposts are, Or buffet a path through the Pit's red wrath when God goes out to war, Or hang with the reckless Seraphim on the rein of a red-maned star. Well? What do you think of that?"

  "It's gibberish. It doesn't mean anything."

  "You want bells on it? It's the sound that matters. And it describes us. We do sweep through the ringing deep. We do go further than rebel comet dared—that's from another verse of the same poem—every time we jump through the node network to reach the Cloud."

  "Recite some more to me." And when Grace did so, a quite different and sad poem that began, These were never your true love's eyes, why do you feign that you love them?, and then still another and very strange one, When I left Rom for Lalage's sake, by the Legions' Road to Rimini, he shook his head and said, "You're right. It's the sounds more than the sense. But I thought you said there were no good Cloud poets?"

  "That isn't by a Cloud poet. It's an old Earth poet. I know a fair amount of his poetry, but if you really want to hear it you should ask Uncle Thurgood."

  "Thurgood?" That was the last name Shelby would have guessed for a person interested in poetry. The bluff red face and bushy white side-whiskers seemed the very opposite of the romantic mush that Shelby had learned to think of as "poetic."

  "You heard right. Uncle Thurgood knows whole long poems by heart. He'll sit there and recite 'McAndrew's Hymn' or 'The Mary Gloster' for as long as you'll sit and listen. One of the big disappointments of his life was to go to Earth and learn that the work of his favorite poet is banned there."

  "I've never heard of any of the poems
that you quoted. But banned—on Earth?"

  "I'm not joking. Muv says it's because the poet told the truth about women, that we defeat men hands down any time it comes to a real crunch. We're more focused and more ruthless. But Uncle Thurgood says no, that's not the reason. It's that the writer liked machines and people who work with machines, he respected what they do, and he wrote poems showing that the lives of engineers and miners and pilots have their own excitement and romance. That's exactly the way people feel in the Kuiper Belt, or out here in the Cloud. But the people who run Earth can't stand that idea, Uncle Thurgood says, because they do everything in their power to prevent the use of machines there. It's as though they want everyone to stay poor, when we could all be rich."

  The people who run Earth. That sounded suspiciously like J. P. Cheever, of Cheever Consolidated Enterprises. Did anyone on Earth have more to do with the running of the planet? For the first time in weeks Shelby thought of Earth and of his own family. It was just as well that no one except Grace believed what he had told them. If they had believed, he might have received not their respect but their contempt.

  Grace yawned, a gigantic gape that showed her tongue and her back teeth. She pointed the tallier at a last pile of bags. "Let's compare counts and get this over with. I'd like to hit Muv with a status report before she goes to sleep. We've certainly done our bit. I want to make sure she keeps her side of the bargain."

  Shelby found himself yawning in sympathy. He shivered, allowed the yawn to stretch to its luxurious completion, and said, "Two thousand and seventy-nine, according to my tally. Not counting the bag that came up empty because of a collector defect."

  "Right on the button." Grace stared at her tallier, and then at Shelby's empty hands. "With no tallier. You've got to teach me how you do that."

  "Sure. As soon as you teach me to sing in tune." Shelby entered the final tally in the wall terminal. "Go see your mother before anyone else does. If we're really so close to full holds, the last collection run is going to be done right by the Portland and Lizard Reefs. We don't want Thurgood or Scrimshander jumping in to take our place." He pointed to the pouch on Grace's belt, where the Cauthen starfire hung in its usual place. "I don't deserve my share of that. But I'd like the chance to earn a piece of one for myself."

  Lana Trask had not reneged on her promise. What she had done, facing the enticing prospect of full holds before any other harvester, was add a little insurance policy.

  It was Grace who came to Shelby with a scowling face, saying, "We can go out today. But we won't be the only ones. Muv is expecting that what we bring back will give us full holds, but she thinks two other ships, the Coruscation and The Pride of Dundee may be close to the same state. She wants to make sure that all cables are reeled and stored by the time we're done, so that the Harvest Moon can head for the node the moment the tally is completed. Scrim is going to be out there, too, in his own corry. He'll be reeling in cables."

  And it was Shelby who brought Grace back to reality, saying, "Come off it, Grace. You're worried about Scrim"? Can you imagine him finding a starfire, even if he tripped over one? Think yourself lucky that it's Scrimshander Limes who'll be out there with us, and not somebody like Jilter."

  Grace nodded, slowly and reluctantly; but her real reassurance came only when they were outside, swinging in their corry along the dark length of the outer collection cable. Scrimshander was working the inner cable more than thirty kilometers away, closer to the Harvest Moon, but even from that distance they could see his corry's wild swings away from its assigned position. Every wrong move was followed at once by a violent overcompensation. The cable he was attached to and trying to reel in jerked and writhed like a live snake.

  "Yea!" Grace said. "Yippee! Ride 'em, Scrimmy!" But she spoke over the private channel, so that only Shelby could hear her and be so convulsed with laughter that he could not do his own job properly. It should not much matter. He had checked before they came outside, and the harvester was already so close to full holds that Grace and Shelby could return with half a load and still put the Harvest Moon over the top in the amount of stored transuranics. The only thing that could now make a noticeable difference to the commercial success of the voyage would be the finding of another starfire, and in fifteen more minutes they would be free to release the corry from the cable and fly over to test their luck nearer to the Portland and Lizard Reefs. Shelby could hardly wait. Already the field tugging at the corry was more than a standard gravity, and only their coupling with the thick collection cable held them in position.

  Shelby gave a short pulse of the corry's drive, just to get a feel for the forces on them. He felt a new sympathy for Scrimshander Limes. The presence of the reefs made the response of the corries quite different from usual. He switched to the general communication channel, intending to compare notes with Scrim, and heard only a blare of random noise.

  "Don't waste your time, Shel," Grace said over the private channel. She had guessed what he was doing. "We're in a communications dead spot between the reefs. Signals over any sort of distance are blotted out by static. Just relax and let the cable hold us steady."

  She was leaning over the side and inspecting the state of the next collector as she spoke, and her voice rose suddenly in pitch and volume. "Didn't you hear me? I said steady!"

  There was a good reason for her scream. Shelby had not touched the drive controls, but he felt random acceleration forces as the whole sky began to roll dizzily about him. At first he thought that the corry must have come completely loose. Then he saw the collection cable. They were still attached to it, but the continuous six-hundred-kilometer loop of hawser whose constant curvature permitted the corry a smooth progression along it was gone. In its place was a short section of a few kilometers that writhed and twisted and snapped at both ends like a whip. Collection beads were flung clear and vanished into space. It was simple luck that pinned Shelby and Grace to the corry's floor, rather than casting them free into open space or flinging them against the cable.

  "Don't touch the drive!" Grace shouted. She, like Shelby, had realized the problem. The cable had broken, and until the transients of released tension had died down it was not safe to apply any other forces. Clinging to handholds on the flat floor, she came crawling across to the corry's control boss, where Shelby was holding on desperately. Beyond her he could see the changing sky. The corry was hurtling away from the Harvest Moon, heading toward the dark vortices of the Lizard and Portland Reefs. It was impossible from his viewing angle to tell if they were going to fly right into one of them.

  He looked back the way that they had come. With the outer cable broken—but how could a cable possibly break in two places at once?—the crew of the Harvest Moon would have their hands full for quite a while. He and Grace had to find their own way back to the harvester. The return flight would have been trivial in ordinary open space. But here, in the anomalous fields created by the two reefs, he didn't know how difficult it might be.

  Grace was finally by his side, clinging as he was to the central control boss of the corry. She did what Shelby ought to have done at once, hitting the release sequence that separated the corry from the writhing length of broken cable. The irregular movements ended in an instant. They were flying, smoothly but fast, along a line that passed right between the two reefs.

  Shelby found that he could breathe again. They had been lucky. It should not be difficult to turn the corry around and head right back the way they had come.

  Grace must have been thinking the same thing. She was at the controls, steadying and gently rotating the corry. Shelby, conditioned by two months of life aboard a harvester, automatically checked his own suit monitor and leaned over to see Grace's. They each had enough air for at least twenty-four hours. It should be ample. If they were not back aboard the Harvest Moon in that time, they would never get there.

  "How far?" he asked Grace, not really expecting an answer. He just wanted to hear her voice. "How far do you think we are from home?
"

  "I don't know." Like him she peered back the way that they had come, although they both knew that they could not possibly see the Harvest Moon at such a distance. "We're still moving really fast. Maybe a couple of thousand kilometers?"

  And it was at that precise moment, just as Grace said the word "thousand," that Shelby felt reality slip away completely. Because there, moving across the sky in front of them, he saw a familiar shape. It was the Harvest Moon—not two thousand kilometers away, but apparently close enough to touch.

  Grace, with her years of experience in the Cloud, saw at once what Shelby could not. To him all harvesters looked the same. She knew them as individuals. They had small structural differences and unique patterns of lights.