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 halfclimbed, 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 be 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 Itzkbok 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.”