Hartford had a representative on every planet, and they kept him fueled with enough money so that he was always the richest, and usually the most influential, citizen of the planet. If a planetary government tried to evolve away from the rapacious capitalism that guaranteed Hartford a good return on its investment, their representative usually had enough leverage to put it back on the right road.
There were loopholes and technicalities. Most planets didn’t pass the Hartford tax on directly, but used a sliding income tax, so the rich would get poorer and the poor, God bless them, would go home and make more taxpayers rather than riot in the streets.
If you ever patronized the kind of disreputable tavern that caters to pilots and other low types, you may have heard them singing that ancient ballad, “My Heart Belongs to Mother, But Hartford Owns My Ass.”
Hartford owned that fundamental part of everybody on Faraway, too. But that didn’t mean they’d supplied Faraway with a nice modern spaceport, bristling with ships of all sizes and ranges. No, just the biweekly vessel from Steiner that dropped off supplies and picked up some cadmium.
I had to admit there wasn’t much reason for Faraway to have a shortrun, plain old interplanetary ship—what good would it be? All you could do with it would be to orbit Faraway—and it looked bad enough from the ground—or take a joyride out to Biarritz. And there were more entertaining ways to throw away your money, even on Faraway.
It turned out that there actually was one interplanetary ship on Faraway, but it was a museum piece. It had been sitting for two hundred years, the Bonne Chance, the ship Biarritz herself had used to survey the clinker that retained her name by default. It was being held for back taxes, and we picked it up for six figures.
Then the headaches began. Everything was in French—dial markings, instruction manual, log. I got a dictionary and walked around with an indelible pencil, relabeling; and Chaim and I spent a week of afternoons and evenings translating the manual.
The fusion engine was in good shape—no moving parts bigger than a molecule—but the rest of the ship was pretty ragged. Faraway didn’t have much of an atmosphere, but it was practically pure oxygen, and hot. The hull was all pitted and had to be reground. The electronic components of the ship had been exposed to two hundred years of enough ionizing radiation to mutate a couple of fruit flies into a herd of purple cattle. Most of the guidance and communications gimcrackery had to be repaired or replaced.
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 lightyears 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.