“Hmm,” Conrad said, considering that. Now he did crouch down, with little effort but considerable care, to examine the dark speck down inside the tube. It was a difficult object to see, because the light waves coming off it were so incredibly distorted, but if his eyes could not be trusted, his sense of touch, the feeling of the gravity field as a physical entity, was much stronger down here. He fancied he could even sense the pinpoint shape of the object generating that field. And around it, his imagination whirled, envisioning tiny pumps and other machineries of unimaginable power. “We need a conveyor belt, then. Metaphorically, of course; the actual hardware would be completely different. But there will be some sort of physical drip line around this hole, right? Some distance past which the neutrons will refuse to condense. So we shovel matter in until that perimeter is filled, and then we slurp away the liquid neutronium into a reservoir somewhere, and fill the space up again. If you keep doing that, eventually you'll fill your reservoir with the gigaton of neutronium you need, to be stable enough to wrap as a neuble.”
“You'd have to do it awfully fast,” Money said skeptically.
“So do it awfully fast. What's stopping you? I didn't do the grav-field engineering for the Gravittoir, but I had a hand in the design of the physical machinery, as well as the structures that housed it. It seems to me you can do something similar here, using grav lasers to move and hold and compress the material while you're working it. It's a hard problem, but those are always the interesting ones. Right?”
“True,” Money said thoughtfully. “I can't think of anything physically impossible about the idea. When we get back to the ship we can run some numbers and see what we come up with. But you may have just invented a cheap way of mass-producing neutronium. You could be famous!”
Conrad snorted. “To invent something, wouldn't I have to understand it? I couldn't build a machine like that if my life depended on it.”
“Proposer and co-inventor, then,” Money said with growing enthusiasm. “We could split the credit or something. Bring in others if we have to. Do the details matter? If it can be built, I can build it. This could mean big value on the Instelnet's intellectual property market. You could be rich.”
Conrad snorted again, and it became a laugh. “So we sell the blueprints to the Queendom. For what, cookie recipes? We need physical objects, Mr. Izolo. More than anything, we need print plates. Without a surplus of those, being rich seems rather a moot point. Come to think of it, I am rich.”
“Yah, maybe,” Money said, with a laugh of his own. “But I'm not.”
“I've got to get out of this business,” Conrad said half a shift later as he settled into his first mate's chair, back onboard Newhope.
“Where have I heard that before?” said Yinebeb Fecre, the only other person on the bridge. Conrad suppressed a flicker of irritation. To the people who knew him in Denver, this was Feck the Facilitator, a major figure in the Revolt, though part of Conrad still remembered him by the less flattering nickname he'd received at camp. Which was foolish, because at the moment Feck was his Astrogation officer, his Information and Systems Awareness, and also his Helm.
Even with hypercomputers to support him it was quite a workload, and Feck had once done a tour of duty as the ship's engineer as well. After Xmary, he probably knew more about running this old tub than any four other people combined. Between the two of them, the captain and the crew-unto-himself third officer, they practically ran the ship themselves. Leaving Conrad to play—badly—at diplomacy and labor relations.
“No,” he said, “I mean it this time. I don't like who I'm becoming out here, in the wilds of Security Space. Anyway, if my only bargaining power stems from the threat of Ho Ng, then we might as well cut out the middleman and send in Ho directly. I got killed again today—twice!—and the hell of it is, I deserved it. Truly. If I had to listen to the news I deliver to these people, I'd kill me too. It isn't their fault things have got this bad.”
“Economic downturns happened even in the Queendom,” Feck pointed out reasonably. “Sometimes all you can do is just ride it out. At least we're immorbid, true? It's not like you're asking people to work themselves to death. A few decades and we're over the hump, and then it's smooth sailing for the rest of eternity.”
“Sure,” Conrad said, unconvinced. Then, feeling a strong urge to shift the subject: “You've changed a lot since we were kids.”
“Is that good?”
“Certainly,” Conrad said. “Why wouldn't it be?”
“Because I was a shithead back then?” Feck laughed. “You've changed, too. What I'm saying is, the old Conrad is still there—you've got the same basic character. You always were one to agonize over the status quo. But you're wiser now, and more . . . I don't know. More thoughtful? More reflective? I suppose we all are.”
A slight tremor shook the ship, and checking his board, Feck twiddled a couple of controls and said, “Center of gravity shifts. The ertial shield is feeling ticklish today. We'll need to shift some water ballast before we unmoor.”
And this was amazing, too. A statement like that had a lot of knowledge backing it up, and Conrad had a hard time reconciling that with the clueless, rather fruity kid Feck had been. He still looked the same, or nearly so.
Conrad said, “When did you become such a grade-A spaceman? You've been on Newhope a long time, I know, but so have a few others. I can tell you firsthand, people don't absorb everything by osmosis. To know everything—really everything—takes a lot of work. What made you decide . . . to be that person?”
Feck laughed. “You have to ask? You boys got to play space pirate, while I was stuck on the ground babysitting.”
“You organized a revolution,” Conrad observed.
But Feck just waved that off. “I organized a small riot. We knew what we were doing, but the odds were against us from the beginning. Obviously. The chaos lasted barely an hour, and we were lucky to have that much. Whereas you guys were running riot through the Kuiper Belt for months. You think I wasn't jealous? Hell, I still am. And when it was over, you guys got all the best training slots. Because you already had space experience, see? And of course that meant you got to be the crew of Newhope, and then the first to explore the planet, to carve the streets there. By the time you woke me up, there was nothing really raw left to do. I've been playing catch-up ever since. If I can't be a pioneer, I figure I'll at least be the best goddamn space jockey you ever saw.”
“There was nothing romantic about the pirate's life,” Conrad told him darkly. “I fall into that trap myself sometimes, but when I really think back . . . Ugh. There was a lot of violence, a lot of death. It wasn't fun at all. We were terrified, every day.”
“But you were standing up for what you believed in. That's a very powerful thing. It's possible you don't realize how fortunate you are. Or were. But I do.”
That thought just deepened Conrad's sour mood. “What are we standing up for now? You and I are the exact opposite of space pirates, Feck. We are the enforcers of an ugly little police state.”
Feck smiled again, though this time it was bittersweet. “Well, that's not without its own sort of romance. Ugly or not, the colony needs us. What would happen if we weren't doing this? If nobody was? What I'm saying is, there really is a kind of nobility in doing the things that need doing, even when they're personally distasteful. Especially then, I guess.”