Vietnam and Other Alien Worlds (18 page)

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.

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.

“Go on.”

“I don't suppose you've ever heard of the Itzkhok Shipping Agency.”

“No…it probably would have stuck in my mind.”

“Very few people have. On the surface, it's a very small operation. Four interplanetary ships, every one of them smaller than the
Bonne Chance.
But they're engaged in interstellar commerce.”

“Stars must be pretty close together.”

“No…they started about twenty years ago. The shortest voyage is about half over. One has over a century to go.”

“Doesn't make any sense.”

“But it does. It makes sense on two levels.” He set down the cup and laced his fingers together.

“There are certain objects whose value almost has to go up with the passage of time. Jewelry, antiques, works of art. These are the only cargo I deal with. Officially.”

“I see. I think.”

“You see half of it. I buy these objects on relatively poor planets and ship them to relatively affluent ones. I didn't have any trouble getting stockholders. Hartford wasn't too happy about it, of course.”

“What did they do?”

He shrugged. “Took me to court. I'd studied the law, though, before I started Itzkhok. They didn't press too hard—my company didn't make one ten-thousandth of Hartford's annual profit—and I won.”

“And made a credit or two.”

“Some three billion, legitimate profit. But the important thing is that I established a concrete legal precedent where none had existed before.”

“You're losing me again. Does this have anything to do with…”

“Everything, patience. With this money, and money from other sources, I started building up a fleet. Through a number of dummy corporations…buying old ships, building new ones. I own or am leasing some two thousand ships. Most of them are loaded and on the pad right now.”

“Wait, now.” Economics was never my strong suit, but this was obvious. “You're going to drive your own prices down. There can't be that big a market for old paintings and—”

“Right, precisely. But most of these ships aren't carrying such specialized cargo. The closest one, for instance, is on Tangiers, aimed for Faraway. It holds nearly a hundred thousand cubic meters of water.”

“Water…”

“Old passenger liner, flooded the damn thing. Just left a little room for ice expansion, in case the heating—”

“Because on Faraway—”

“—on Faraway there isn't one molecule of water that men didn't carry there. They recycle every drop but have to lose one percent or so annually.

“Tonight or tomorrow I'm going to call up Faraway and offer to sell them 897,000 kilograms of water. At cost. Delivery in six years. It's a long time to wait, but they'll be getting it for a hundredth of the usual cost, what Hartford charges.”

“And you'll lose a bundle.”