When he came, in his mental play back, to Sam's last remark, it brought him to attention. "What are _you_ going to do?"
Sam eyed the end of his cigar stub. "I'm not going back."
This required no diagram to be understood. But, under Imperial decrees, the suggested offense carried even heavier punishment than faking membership in a guild. Deserting was almost treason. "Keep talking," Max said gruffly.
"Let's run over where we touch this cruise. Garson's Planet--domed colonies, like Luna and Mars. In a domed colony you do exactly what the powers-that-be say, or you stop breathing. You might hide out and have a new identity grafted on, but you would still be in the domes. No good, there's more freedom even back on Terra. Nu Pegasi VI, Halcyon--not bad though pretty cold at aphelion. But it is still importing more than it exports which means that the Imperials run the show and the locals will help dig out a wanted man. Now we come to Nova Terra, Beta Aquarii X-- and that, old son, is what the doctor ordered and why the preacher danced."
"You've been there?"
"Once. I should have stayed. Max, imagine a place like Earth, but sweeter than Terra ever was. Better weather, broader richer lands ... forests aching to be cut, game that practically jumps into the stew pot. If you don't like settlements, you move on until you've got no neighbors, poke a seed in the ground, then jump back before it sprouts. No obnoxious insects. Practically no terrestrial diseases and no native diseases that like the flavor of our breed. Gushing rivers. Placid oceans. Man, I'm telling you!"
"But wouldn't they haul us back from there?"
"Too big. The colonists _want_ more people and they won't help the Imperials. The Imperial Council has a deuce of a time just collecting taxes. They don't even try to arrest a deserter outside the bigger towns." Sam grinned. "You know why?"
"Why?"
"Because it didn't pay. An Imperial would be sent to Back-and-Beyond to pick up someone; while he was looking he would find some golden-haired daughter of a rancher eyeing him--they run to eight or nine kids, per family and there are always lots of eligible fillies, husband-high and eager. So pretty quick he is a rancher with a beard and a new name and a wife. He was a bachelor and he hasn't been home lately--or maybe he's married back on Terra and doesn't want to go home. Either way, even the Imperial Council can't fight human nature."
"I don't want to get married."
"That's your problem. But best of all, the place still has a comfortable looseness about it. No property taxes, outside the towns. Nobody would pay one; they'd just move on, if they didn't shoot the tax collector instead. No guilds--you can plow a furrow, saw a board, drive a truck, or thread a pipe, all the same day and never ask permission. A man can do anything and there's no one to stop him, no one to tell him he wasn't born into the trade, or didn't start young enough, or hasn't paid his contribution. There's more work than there are men to do it and the colonists just don't care."
Max tried to imagine such anarchy and could not, he had never experienced it. "But don't the guilds object?"
"What guilds? Oh, the mother lodges back earthside squawked when they heard, but not even the Imperial Council backed them up. They're not fools--and you don't shovel back the ocean with a fork."
"And that's where you mean to go. It sounds lovely," Max said wistfully.
"I do. It is. There was a girl--oh, she'll be married now; they marry young--but she had sisters. Now here is what I figure on--and you, too, if you want to tag along. First time I hit dirt I'll make contacts. The last time I rate liberty, which will be the night before the ship raises if possible, I'll go dirtside, then in a front door and out the back and over the horizon so fast I won't even be a speck. By the time I'm marked 'late returning' I'll be hundreds of miles away, lying beside a chuckling stream in a virgin wilderness, letting my beard grow and memorizing my new name. Say the word and you'll be on the bank, fishing."
Max stirred uneasily. The picture aroused in him a hillbilly homesickness he had hardly been aware of. But he could not shuffle off his proud _persona_ as a spaceman so quickly. "I'll think about it."
"Do that. It's a good many weeks yet, anyhow." Sam got to his feet. "I'd better hurry back before Ole Massa Dumont wonders what's keeping me. Be seeing you, kid--and remember: it's an ill wind that has no turning.
7 ELDRETH
Max's duties did not take him above "C" deck except to service the cats' sand boxes and he usually did that before the passengers were up. He wanted to visit the control room but he had no opportunity, it being still higher than passengers' quarters. Often an owner of one of the seven dogs and three cats in Max's custody would come down to visit his pet. This sometimes resulted in a tip. At first his cross-grained hillbilly pride caused him to refuse, but when Sam heard about it, he swore at him dispassionately. "Don't be a fool! They can afford it. What's the sense?"
"But I would exercise their mutts anyhow. It's my job." He might have remained unconvinced had it not been that Mr. Gee asked him about it at the end of his first week, seemed to have a shrewd idea of the usual take, and expected a percentage--"for the welfare fund."
Max asked Sam about the fund, was laughed at. "That's a very interesting question. Are there any more questions?"
"I suppose not."
"Max, I like you. But you haven't learned yet that when in Rome, you shoot Roman candles. Every tribe has its customs and what is moral one place is immoral somewhere else. There are races where a son's first duty is to kill off his old man and serve him up as a feast as soon as he is old enough to swing it--civilized races, too. Races the Council recognizes diplomatically. What's your moral judgment on that?"
Max had read of such cultures--the gentle and unwarlike Bnathors, or the wealthy elephantine amphibians of Paldron who were anything but gentle, probably others. He did not feel disposed to pass judgment on nonhumans. Sam went on, "I've known stewards who would make Jelly Belly look like a philanthropist. Look at it from his point of view. He regards these things as prerogatives of his position, as rightful a part of his income as his wages. Custom says so. It's taken him years to get to where he is; he expects his reward."
Sam, Max reflected, could always out-talk him.
But he could not concede that Sam's thesis was valid; there were things that were right and others that were wrong and it was not just a matter of where you were. He felt this with an inner conviction too deep to be influenced by Sam's cheerful cynicism. It worried Max that he was where he was as the result of chicanery, he sometimes lay awake and fretted about it.
But it worried him still more that his deception might come to light. What to do about Sam's proposal was a problem always on his mind.
The only extra-terrestrial among Max's charges was a spider puppy from the terrestrian planet Hespera. On beginning his duties in the _Asgard_ Max found the creature in one of the cages intended for cats; Max looked into it and a sad, little, rather simian face looked back at him. "Hello, Man."
Max knew that some spider puppies had been taught human speech, after a fashion, but it startled him; he jumped back. He then recovered and looked more closely. "Hello yourself," he answered. "My, but you are a fancy little fellow." The creature's fur was a deep, rich green on its back, giving way to orange on the sides and blending to warm cream color on its little round belly.