“The architecture.” Dar pointed to the wooden beams. “Don’t they know how to make steel?”
“Oh, they know how, well enough.” Sam smiled. “I asked about it on my way out here. Seems there’s very little free metal on Falstaff. Even the iron’s all locked up in rust, in the soil.”
“Oh.” Dar pursed his lips. “So what do I use for money here—nails?”
Sam started, surprised. “How’d you guess?”
“You’re kidding!”
“Think so, do you? Well, just try to pay for something with an I.D.E. BTU credit here.”
“I’ll take your word for it.” Dar stopped by a storefront, looking up at the sign. “I think this is the place we’re looking for. Maybe they do money-changing here.”
“Makes sense,” Sam agreed, “so probably they don’t.”
They went into the ticket office of Outworld Interstellar Starship Enterprises, Unltd.
“Help you?” the clerk grunted around his sausage, his eyes on the newsfax. He was grossly fat, and jowly, like all the Falstavians they’d seen. In fact, Dar was beginning to feel like a freak—he was slim.
“Uh, yeah. We’d like to book passage to Terra.”
“Sure thing.” The man pulled out two tickets without even looking. “That’ll be two hundred pounds. Next ship lifts at fourteen hundred hours, May third.”
Dar froze with his hand on his wallet. “May third!? But it’s only April fifth!”
“Too bad, isn’t it?” the clerk commiserated. “You just missed the last boat—two days ago.”
“But we can’t wait! We’ve got to get to Terra fast!”
The clerk shrugged. “I just sell the tickets, buddy—I don’t schedule the ships. Y’ want ‘em, or not?”
“Uh, not just yet, thanks.” Dar turned to Sam, looking helpless.
“Do you change money here?” she said briskly.
The clerk looked up. “Money? Yeah, sure! Whacha got?”
“I.D.E. therms—ten of them,” Sam said with a meaningful stare at Dar.
“Oh.” The clerk seemed disappointed. “Well, we’ll take anything, I guess. Put ‘em up here.” He pulled out a small cloth sack and set it on the counter; it clanked.
Dar paused with his cash halfway to the counter “What’s that?”
“Money,” the clerk looked up, frowning. “For ten I.D.E. therms, you get two pounds.”
“Two pounds?” Dar bleated, aghast. “You must think your pound’s worth an awful lot!”
“A pound of ten-penny nails?” The clerk eyed Dar as if doubting his sanity. “Buddy, around here, that’s worth a hell of a lot!”
“Oh.” Dar glanced at Sam out of the corner of his eye; she nodded. He sighed and laid his bills down on the counter “Okay, here you are. Say, uh—is there any connection to Terra sooner than next month?”
“Well, if y’ really wanna know …” The clerk leaned forward confidentially. “I got this buddy, see, an’ he’s got an inside track on this nice, used space yacht…”
“Uh, thanks anyway.” Dar took a step back. “I, uh, haven’t done all that much piloting lately.”
Sam bit the inside of her cheek.
“Oh.” The clerk leaned back with a look of disgust. “No high-grade, huh? Well, suit yourself.” He turned back to the newsfax.
“Uh, yeah.” Dar scooped up the moneybag. “We’ll, uh, get back to you.”
“You an’ what miner?” But the clerk lifted an affable hand anyway. “Good luck, chum.”
“Well, he tried to sound friendly, I suppose,” Dar said as they came out of the office.
“Not really. Around here, ‘chum’ doesn’t mean ‘friend’—it means ‘fishbait.’ The garbage kind.”
“Oh.” Dar frowned. “What was all that stuff about ‘high-grade’? And why would we come back with a miner?”
“The kind who digs up ore,” Sam explained. “High-grade ore.”
Dar glanced at her, but she wasn’t smiling. He shrugged. “Really serious about this iron thing, aren’t they?”
A ground car went past, hissing steam from its turbine. The body was wooden; the boltheads were plastic.
“Very,” Sam agreed.
Dar’s head swiveled, tracking the ground car. “What do they make the engine out of?”
“A very high-temperature plastic,” Sam answered. “But I understand they’re short on radios.”
Dar turned back to her, frowning. “That does require metal, doesn’t it? But how does the newsfax work?”
“Optical-fiber cables; they’ve got no shortage of silicon. And it can print by heat-transfer.”
Dar shook his head, flabbergasted. “Well, at least they don’t have traffic jams.”
“Sausage, sir?” inquired a rotund pushcart proprietor.
Dar stopped, suddenly realizing that darn near every passerby had a sausage in his mouth, chewing placidly. “Well, I guess I shouldn’t look out of place. Yeah, we’ll take two.” He fished in his moneybag, and brought out …
… a large nail.
He looked up at Sam, horrified.
She frowned, and nodded toward the peddler, who was holding out two sausages on a scrap of plastic. Dar stared from her to the hotdogs and back. Then he shrugged, took the sausages, and dropped the spike in the peddler’s palm. He turned away, with two three-penny nails and a brad for change. “What do they do around here when the Revenue Service comes calling?”
“They pay their tacks, like honest citizens. What’s the matter? Culture shock?”
Dar shook his head. “Couldn’t be; I can’t find the conductor.”
“Around here,” Sam said slowly, “I think that’s some kind of political office. You need a drink.”
“Good idea.” Dar nodded numbly. “I used to favor a cocktail called a ‘rusty nail.’ ”
“On this planet, that’s an obscenity.” Sam steered him through a swinging door. “I think you’d better have an old-fashioned.”
“I think I already have,” Dar muttered.
The tavern was dim, in the best tradition of alcohol stations. They stepped up to the bar.
“Orderzh? Orderzh?” the bartender slurred, blinking.
“Uh, an old-fashioned and a martinus.” Sam seemed fascinated by the blinking.
“Two bitsh.” The bartender pushed buttons.
Dar laid down a ten-penny nail.
“Two from a ten-pin,” the bartender muttered. Its hand sucked up the nail; a door in its chest slid open, and ejected two glasses of clear liquid and one glass of amber. It rolled away down the bar to the next customer, leaving two flat-head screws and a drill behind it.
“I’d count your change, if I were you,” the patron two stools down advised. He wore a dark brown robe belted with a length of coaxial cable; the crown of his head was shaved in a neat circle. The yellow handle of a small screwdriver peeked from his breast pocket. “That bartender isn’t too reliable today.”
“I thought his lights weren’t blinking in the right pattern!” Sam said triumphantly. “What’s the matter with him?”
“You’d have to say he’s drunk, I suppose,” the shave-pate answered. “You see, the tavernkeeper couldn’t afford wire for his conductors, so he had to use tubes of saline solution. Well, that means the bartender has to have a little fluid added every morning, and it seems someone spiced his morning pickup with metallic salts today. That increased conductivity, of course, and threw all his circuits off.”
“Which is why I got two when I only ordered one. Oh, well.” Sam shrugged and took a sip. “I should gripe?”
“Sounds like an expensive prank, for this neck of the woods,” Dar commented.
“No, not really. It’s free metal that’s in short supply on Falstaff. Compounds are plentiful.”
“You seem to know quite a bit about it.” Dar held up his glass and peered through it warily. “From your clothing, I would’ve thought you were a friar—but you talk like an engineer.”
“I’m both, really.” The stranger grinned and held out a hand. “Father Marco Ricci, O.S.V., at your service.”