by E. M. Foner
“That’s really strange. I’ve never heard of the old customs terminal.”
“I asked about that,” he replied. “Apparently they demolished it an aeon ago when they changed over to toll transponder technology. But the Stryx are a sentimental race. It’s why we get on so well together, I suppose.”
“That sounds like pretty long odds, the hundred-millionth anything,” Kelly continued, unable to keep a tone of skepticism from creeping into her voice.
“I can’t imagine why anybody would make such a thing up. I certainly didn’t,” he protested innocently, his good eye sparkling away.
The waitress returned with two small, thin glasses of brandy, a large mixed salad, separate bottles of oil and vinegar, and two wooden salad plates with the required implements. Alexander picked up both glasses, passed one to Kelly, and suggested, “A toast, to the long-shots of the galaxy.”
“I can drink to that,” she replied, accepting the glass, and tossing off the brandy. It was as smooth as any hard liquor she could remember, filling her chest and stomach with instant warmth, without a burn. Alexander sipped his own aperitif, removed his gloves, and began to expertly dress the salad with the oil and vinegar. His finely made hands were as brown as his face, but Kelly couldn’t help noticing one small exception.
“I’m sorry to ask, but were you recently widowed?”
Alexander paused, then looked at his hands and shook his head sadly. “I should have kept the gloves on, I see. I wasn’t thinking. Well, the universe moves in mysterious ways.” Then he fished around in his vest pocket and drew out a gold band, which he replaced on his ring finger with a sigh. “You can’t blame a man for trying.”
“Mr. Fantier! Do you mean there is a Mrs. Fantier somewhere wondering why her husband isn’t home for dinner?” Kelly pretended a mock indignation she couldn’t really feel through her relief. He was, after all, some years north of seventy, and if he was really that randy, his wife would probably wish him well elsewhere.
“Back on Earth,” he admitted. “But I came by way of the orbital factories. It’s hard to make a go of transporting small cargos to and from Earth unless you’re in the luxury goods, like handmade soap.”
“Handmade soap? Where’s the market for that?”
“The Tharks eat the stuff up by the ton. It’s like chocolate to them,” he explained. “But all of the machine manufacturing action is on the orbitals. Low-cost raw materials harvested in space by asteroid hunters, no gravity wells to contend with, or atmospheric contamination. That watch you’re wearing is from the Chintoo orbital complex just one tunnel gate from here. It’s my most frequent run.”
Kelly twisted her wrist up to look at her watch. “Yes, I like it very much. A young friend gave it to me as a gift when she took me on a smuggler’s tour of the Shuk. Have you been there?
Alexander pulled up the loose sleeve of his dinner jacket to reveal a half a dozen watches strapped over the white shirtsleeve encasing his forearm. “You might say I travel the same paths as your friend who works with smugglers. Perhaps you could arrange an introduction?”
“No, you misunderstood. My friend doesn’t work with smugglers, she imports legitimate Earth goods and she’s trying to stop them.”
“What are you, some kind of customs agent?”
“Not really. Sort of,” Kelly confessed. “I’m the EarthCent acting ambassador, for whatever that’s worth. It’s difficult to explain, we don’t get a lot of guidance.”
“We’d better get started on our salad or it will be in the way when the food arrives,” Alexander said sourly, and Kelly noticed that he looked a decade older when the sparkle was absent from his one good eye.
“Oh, don’t worry. I never arrest anybody on the first date,” Kelly jested. Alexander looked relieved, then he laughed happily and the life came back into his movements.
“I’m not an easy man to arrest, you know. How do you think I lost the eye and the leg?”
“But why do you do it?” Kelly asked, transferring half of the contents of the salad bowl to her plate. It was clear at this point that this was another of Libby’s working dates, so she may as well learn what she could. Besides, Alexander seemed nice enough for an old married coot. He was just a long way from home and happy not to be eating dinner alone.
“Smuggle? To make a living,” he said simply. “I was in the old surface navy when the Stryx came. Do you remember ships that sailed on water? Now that was a real challenge, navigating the dividing line between air and sea. The flyboys and the submariners have it easy, you’re either up or down. But sailors, we were right in between.”
“You mean the Stryx put the navy out of business? I never thought of that.”
“That’s a good way to describe it. After the Stryx came, the population began emptying out into the stars. All of a sudden, there wasn’t a lot of need for policing the oceans or projecting force around the globe. At the same time, the tax base fell off a cliff, so there was no money for the military. The whole government budget basically turned into a pension fund.”
“So you lost your job?” Kelly asked, helping herself to another serving of salad.
“I was just a couple years from a pension myself, but I don’t care about that. Yes, I lost my career, but my experience qualified me for a lend/lease of a third-hand ship from one of the less advanced species the Stryx had helped in the past. I’d had enough of commanding men and following orders from on high by that point, so I opted for the smallest vessel they had, a deep space prospecting ship.”
“An asteroid chaser?”
“Same thing. And I’ve done my share of that, along with carrying small cargoes, mainly resupplies to remote outposts. But I’ve been slowing down the last decade, can’t do as much of the maintenance work or loading as I once could. Trading in the smaller, high-value cargoes, is the only way I could keep her going.”
“Your ship?” Kelly asked, with a guilty look at the salad, most of which she’d polished off while he was talking.
“Yes. It’s funny. Most people actually hate space. They just can’t get used to the weightlessness on a small ship when it’s not under thrust, or they’re too careless to survive when a little mistake can translate into breathing vacuum. I reckon I’ve carried everything without asking too many questions, including some stuff I’m not real proud of, but I love it out here and I’d do anything to keep my ship going,” he concluded simply.
Kelly found herself touched by Alexander’s condensed life story. She poured him a glass of wine to cover her embarrassment as he tilted the empty salad bowl towards himself, perhaps in hopes of spotting an olive at the bottom. Fortunately, the waitress appeared with the potato pancake and a new set of plates.
“The paella will be out in five minutes,” she informed them. “Can I bring you another bottle?”
“Yes,” they answered together, and shared a guilty smile. Alexander cut the tortilla de patata like it was a pie and slid a wedge onto Kelly’s plate with his knife before cutting himself a piece.
“How about you?” he asked. “How does one become an acting ambassador?”
“In my case, by getting kidnapped and settling contract disputes out of my own pocket,” Kelly replied. “But don’t let me give you the wrong impression, I love my job as much as you do yours. It’s just nothing like diplomacy was back on Earth. I guess the Stryx put an end to that along with your navy.”
“I often wondered why the nations of Earth never put together a space navy, to protect our common interests,” Alexander mused between bites of potato pancake washed down with wine. “I don’t suppose you EarthCenters know anything about that.”
“I’m afraid it’s never come up,” Kelly told him. “Maybe the Stryx figure that not having our own fleet will keep us out of trouble until we get to the point that we can handle it. I haven’t seen much of the advanced species at war, thank the stars, but I understand that some of them have ships that can destroy planetary systems. And the Stryx mastery of energy makes the adv
anced species all look like children.”
“Yeah. Pax Stryxa, the Earth forces veterans call it. Not that any of us are wishing for the old days, war is always messy.” He helped himself to another slice of the potato tortilla, serving Kelly at the same time. The saltiness kept the wine flowing.
“So, let’s say you were in my shoes, and you were the only government representation for the human merchants on the station. What would you tell them when they complained that smuggling is ruining their profits, and bad quality counterfeits are giving Earth products a bad name?” Kelly intentionally kept her tone light so he wouldn’t feel like she was attacking him.
“I may be an old sailor, but I know something about business as well. If I arrived with a cargo of legitimate Earth goods and rented a booth down in the Shuk to sell them cheaper than my neighbors, they would chase me out, even if they had to hire some rough boys to do the job for them. There’s no such thing as a free market. It’s all fixed one way or another.”
“That may be true,” Kelly admitted, “I don’t really know much about it. But if you were in my shoes, I’m sure that’s not what you’d be telling them.”
“Touche,” Alexander declared, and poured them both another glass. It seemed to be growing warmer in the restaurant, perhaps from the ovens or the growing crowd, Kelly reasoned.
“I would tell them to concentrate on the merchandise that doesn’t put Earth at a huge cost disadvantage to start,” Alexander continued. “Forget about anything made out of metal unless it requires skilled hand assembly, like a genuine wind-up watch. Anything else can be manufactured on the orbitals by dumb robots, the mechanicals. Space rocks come in one side and finished goods go out the other. It’s just stupid trying to compete with that in an open market. You’d need to have one of those branded luxury botiques on the retail deck.”
“That’s pretty much what I’ve told EarthCent myself, but isn’t there anything else we could do?”
“Well, human labor is pretty cheap, of course, so the price differential isn’t really that big on a lot of Earth goods at the factory gate. If you could get goods off the planet and to the markets without spending ten times as much on shipping as on manufacturing, things wouldn’t look so grim. I heard that a consortium is building a couple space elevators on Earth, which should make the price of getting goods up to ships much more affordable. But the main cost has always been the tunnel rates, so tell it to the Stryx.”
“I will tell them,” Kelly said thoughtfully, as the steaming paella arrived. “That smells delicious, Alexander. I’m glad you chose this place.”
“Wait until dessert,” he said slyly and winked his good eye. “You’ll be begging to take me home.”
“Actually, that could be a bit difficult. The door of my apartment has been increasingly reluctant to allow me admittance in recent weeks. A bit of confusion over the rental terms,” she explained. “I’m sort of camping in my office.”
“If you need a place, you’re welcome to come bunk in my ship,” he offered generously. “I’m on the station until I can scare up a new cargo.”
“Why, thank you, Alexander. And this tastes as good as it looks.”
Alexander refilled her glass and showed his teeth in a wolfish smile.
“Just so you know, there’s only one bunk on my ship, and it’s narrow.”
Eighteen
By the end of the fourth day of the tournament, Paul had worked his way up to the ninth overall seed based on total points. The bookies who had taken Joe’s money against long odds that the boy would finish in the top ten weren’t happy. The atmosphere in the gaming room was growing tense, and Jeeves privately suggested to Joe that they all spend some time looking through the junk piles at Mac’s Bones before the next evening’s play, to take Paul’s mind off the coming match.
So the next morning, Joe led Paul, Laurel, Jeeves and Beowulf into the back forty of the junkyard. First they passed between the piles and aisles of parts and sorted scrap that characterized the area around the ice harvester module, junk which Joe had catalogued over the last three years. The organized chaos soon gave way to unidentifiable sections of hulls which had been rudely cut into chunks that would fit between the floor and ceiling, and barriers formed of smaller items that may have been remnants of space collisions or individual parts and machines.
“Stay together and don’t climb over anything that looks like it could shift,” Joe warned Paul and Laurel. “If Beowulf whines, that means he hears or sees a problem, so stop what you’re doing and be prepared to jump clear. We’re looking for anything that looks whole, that might be saleable if Jeeves can identify it. I don’t need help identifying scrap for the smelter. Any questions?”
“Where will you and Jeeves be?” Paul asked.
“We’ll be working the wide passage here, with the compact stacks. It’s mainly stuff that’s been crushed already, so it won’t be very interesting, and we should get through it quickly. OK?” Beowulf nodded in agreement and herded the two youngsters towards a low mound of large items, as Joe followed Jeeves down the aisle.
“Such treasures,” Jeeves commented as he rolled between the stacks of smallish, crushed mystery craft, and mounds of random parts. “Let’s see. I don’t suppose you read Bentlian, do you?”
“Never even heard of it,” Joe admitted with a groan, preparing himself for a long morning.
“Not surprising. They either died out or left this galaxy over a million years ago. The plate on the drive unit there translates, ‘Change filter every five hundred and seventy point two light years.’ Is that useful?”
“No, Jeeves, it’s not.” Joe struggled not to let the robot know it could get under his skin at will. “I’m really just looking for a general identification of what this stuff is, I don’t care about the specifics or cultural references.”
“Then let’s get started. Bottom of this pile, junk, melt it down. Middle of the pile, junk. Top of the pile, wait, that might be interesting.” Jeeves paused, playing his sensor attachment over the length of the accordioned metal. “No, that’s junk too.”
Joe marked a big yellow “X” on the stack with his grease pencil, as Jeeves rolled to the next pile.
“Junk, junk, junk,” the robot proclaimed. “You’ve got yourself some real winners here.”
Joe marked a big yellow “X” on the second stack, and the Stryx rolled on.
“Junk, junk, junk.” Jeeves seemed to be taking perverse pleasure in the sound of the word, and didn’t even slow as he passed the stack. “Junk, junk, junk. Junk, junk, junk. Junk, junk, junk.”
Joe chased behind the robot, marking piles for processing as bulk. And in less than fifteen minutes, they finished with the section. Not surprisingly, the junkyard was turning out to be full of junk.
“Pretty much as I expected,” Joe commented as they headed back to where the kids were working. “I’ll start towing it out into the station’s cold parking area and building a raft that I can drag to one of the orbital factories, or maybe I’ll hire that job out. Thanks for the help.”
“Joe, Jeeves! Hurry up. Laurel’s found something!” Paul called as they rounded the corner. Even Beowulf seemed excited, barking in impatience as the man and the robot approached the object that the girl had uncovered.
Studded with convex glass lenses surrounding an obsidian door, it looked like a cross between an alien movie camera and a commercial oven. Laurel had just finished rubbing the grime off what looked like a control plate, which featured a large circular dial and a blinking green light. Whatever the thing was, it appeared to be functional.
“Stand back here,” Jeeves commanded, indicating a spot on the floor. “No, a little further back and a bit to the right. I’m pretty sure I know what this is.”
The three humans and the dog watched in rapt attention as the robot rolled up to the device, inspected it for a moment, and then produced a series of high-pitched whistles. The blinking green light turned to a solid blue, and Jeeves reached out with a pincer and twis
ted the dial to the left. A loud ticking began as the line on the dial began to march back towards its base position, and Jeeves rolled back to rejoin the group.
“It’s a time displacer, and it appears to still be working,” Jeeves announced. “I’ve set it to displace us thirty seconds into the past, just as a test.”
“A time displacer?” Paul asked. “Wow, I always thought time travel was impossible.”
“It’s one of the technologies the older Stryx decided not to discuss with humans,” Jeeves explained rapidly. “But seeing that you have the equipment right here, it doesn’t make sense to hide it from you. Five, four, three, two, one,” he counted down as the dial slowed and the clicking stopped.
A series of brilliant flashes happened so rapidly that Joe thought it might have been a single long flash that ran through all of the colors. There was no other sensation, and Beowulf, who was always sensitive to jumps and tunnel transferences, didn’t even whimper. For a moment, everyone stood frozen.
“It’s a time displacer, and it appears to still be working,” Jeeves proclaimed. “I’ve set it to displace us thirty seconds into the past, just as a test.”
The humans looked at each other in shocked silence, then Paul broke into laughter.
“Stop kidding around, Jeeves. I pulled the station time onto my heads-up right before that thing flashed us, and it hasn’t gone backwards.”
Joe and Laurel looked a little chagrined that they hadn’t thought of it, but Joe was actually relieved to find he didn’t have a time travel machine in the back yard, whatever it might have been worth.
“So what is it, really?” Laurel asked. Jeeves rolled forward, whistling in some alien language, and the door of the device dropped down to reveal a glowing blue cube. The robot removed it and brought it back to the waiting group.