Chaim was hunched over the transceiver, talking to somebody while he studied his own scribblings in a notebook.
“We’re stuck here,” I said.
He nodded at me and kept up the conversation. “—that’s right. Forty thousand bushels, irradiated, for five hundred thousand CU’s… so what? So it’s a gift. It’s guaranteed. Delivery in about seven years, you’ll get details… all right, fine. A pleasure to do business. Thank you, sir.”
He switched off and leaned back and laughed. “They all think I’m crazy!”
“We’re stuck here,” I said again.
“Don’t worry about it, don’t worry,” he said, pointing to an oversized credit flash attached to the transceiver. It had a big number on it that was constantly changing, going up. “That is the total assets of Mazel Tov Corporation.” He started laughing again.
“Minims?”
“No, round credits.”
I counted places. “A hundred and twenty-eight billion… credits?”
“That’s right, right. You want to go to Faraway? We’ll have it towed here.”
“A hundred and twenty-nine billion?” It was really kind of hard to grasp.
“Have a drink—celebrate!” There was a bowl of ice and a bottle of gin on the floor beside him. God, I hate gin.
“Think I’ll fix a cup of tea.” By the time I’d had my cup, cleaned up, and changed out of my suit, Chaim was through with his calls. The number on the credit flash was up to 239,605,967,000 and going up slowly.
He took his bottle, glass, and ice to his bunk and asked me to start setting up the rescue mission.
I called Hartford headquarters on Earth. Six people referred me to their superiors and I wound up talking to the Coordinator of Interstellar Transit himself. I found out that bad news travels fast.
“Mazel Tov?” his tinny voice said. “I’ve heard of you, new planet out by Rigel? Next to Faraway?”
“That’s right. We need a pickup and we can pay.”
“Oh, that’s not the problem. Right now there just aren’t any ships available. Won’t be for several months. Maybe a year.”
“What? We only have three months’ worth of air!” By this time Chaim was standing right behind me, breathing gin into my ear.
“I’m really very sorry. But I thought that by the time a planet gets its charter, it should be reasonably self-sufficient.”
“That’s murder!” Chaim shouted.
“No, sir,” the voice said. “Just unfortunate planning on your part. You shouldn’t have filed for—” Chaim reached over my shoulder and slapped the switch off, hard. He stomped back to his bunk—difficult to do with next to no gravity—sat down and shook some gin into his glass. He looked at it and set it on the floor.
“Who can we bribe?” I asked.
He kept staring at the glass. “No one. We can try, but I doubt that it’s worth the effort. Not with Hartford fighting for its life. Its corporate life.”
“I know lots of pilots we could get, cheap.”
“Pilots,” Chaim said without too much respect.
I ignored the slur. “Yeah. Hartford programs the main jump. Nobody’d get a jump to Rigel.”
We sat in silence for a while, the too-sober pilot and the Martian-Russian Jew who was the richest person in the history of mankind. Less than too sober.
“Sure there’s no other ship on Faraway?”
“I’m sure,” I said. “Took me a half day to find someone who remembered about the Bonne Chance.”
He considered that for a minute. “What does it take to build an interplanetary ship? Besides money.”
“What, you mean could they build one on Faraway?”
“Right.”
“Let me see.” Maybe. “You need an engine. A cabin and life-support stuff. Steering jets or gyros. Guidance and commo equipment.”
“Well?”
“I don’t know. The engine would be the hard part. They don’t have all that much heavy industry on Faraway.”
“No harm in finding out.”
I called Faraway. Talked to the mayor. He was an old pilot (having been elected by popular vote) and I finally reached him at the University Club, where he was surrounded by other old pilots. I talked to him about engineering. Chaim talked to him about money. Chaim shouted and wept at him about money. We made a deal.
Faraway having such an abundance of heavy metals, the main power generator for the town, the only settlement on the planet, was an old-fashioned fission generator. We figured out a way they could use it.
After a good deal of haggling and swearing, the citizens of Faraway agreed to cobble together a rescue vehicle. In return, they would get control of forty-nine percent of the stock of Mazel Tov Corporation.
Chaim was mad for a while, but eventually got his sense of humor back. We had to kill two months with six already-read books and a fifty-bottle case of gin. I read War and Peace twice. The second time I made a list of the characters. I made crossword puzzles out of the characters’ names. I learned how to drink gin, if not how to like it. I felt like I was going slowly crazy—and when the good ship Hello There hove into view, I knew I’d gone ’round the bend.
The Hello There was a string of fourteen buildings strung along a lattice of salvaged beams; a huge atomic reactor pushing it from the rear. The buildings had been uprooted whole, life-support equipment and all, from the spaceport area of Faraway. The first building, the control room, was the transplanted University Club, Olde English decorations still intact. There were thirty pairs of wheels along one side of the “vessel,” the perambulating shantytown.
We found out later that they had brought along a third of the planet’s population, since most of the buildings on Faraway were without power and therefore uninhabitable. The thing (I still can’t call it a ship) had to be put on wheels because they had no way to crank it upright for launching. They drove it off the edge of a cliff and pulled for altitude with the pitch jets. The pilot said it had been pretty harrowing and after barely surviving the landing I could marvel at his power of understatement.
The ship hovered over Mazel Tov with its yaw jets and they lowered a ladder for us. Quite a feat of navigation. I’ve often wondered whether the pilot could have done it sober.
The rest, they say, is history. And current events. As Chaim had predicted Hartford went into receivership, MTC being the receiver. We did throw out all of the old random bastards and install our own handpicked ones.
I shouldn’t bitch. I’m still doing the only thing I ever wanted to do. Pilot a starship; go places, do things. And I’m moderately wealthy, with a tenth-share of MTC stock.
It’d just be a lot easier to take, if every ex-bum on Faraway didn’t have a hundred times as much. I haven’t gone back there since they bronzed the University Club and put it on a pedestal.
HOWARD SCHWARTZ
The Celestial Orchestra
Howard Schwartz writes: “Beginning with Ezekiel’s vision of the chariot in the heavens, the chariot has been one of the key motifs in Jewish literature. In the Talmud it is said that no more than three may discuss the mysteries of the Chariot (Ma’asch Merkavah) at one time. This was because such discussions were a form of mystical contemplation that the rabbis feared, based on the story of the four who entered Paradise (Hagigah 14b): ‘Four sages entered Paradise, Ben Azzai, Ben Zoma, Elisha ben Abuyah and Rabbi Akiba. Ben Azzai looked and died. Ben Zoma looked and lost his mind. Elisha ben Abuyah cut the shoots (became an apostate). Only Rabbi Akiba entered in peace and departed in peace.’ It was reasoned that if three of the greatest Talmudic sages were destroyed by mystical contemplation, it was too dangerous for the masses. On the other hand, there was an esoteric sect that attempted to duplicate this journey into Paradise. The resulting texts are called Hekhaloth (palaces). In these texts journeys to Paradise took place in one of several ways: by journeying heavenward in the Merkavah, by using a magical amulet, or by climbing up Jacob’s ladder. The chariot was the most common method.”