"Well, welcome to the Consolidated Outworlds, kamrada. Your UTCs won't buy you merte out here."
The guy's manners were growing on me like an itchy wan. "What do you take from aliens?"
"Gold, precious metals, gems, anything. Hey, I got fares to take. Okay?"
"Sony to put you to any trouble, but we're in a pickle."
"Yeah, yeah. One troy ounce of gold'll do it. Apiece, that is."
"Jake." It was Darla, holding out some gold coins to me. I took them. They were very old pieces. South African gold. Amazed, I turned to her and was about to ask where she'd gotten them, but she smiled, sphinxlike, and I knew. That bottomless pack again. I looked at the coins. They were probably worth more as collector's items than as specie ― on the black market, of course. The CA handled all gold. I handed them to Krause.
"Jesus Christ." He jingled them, feeling their weight. "Where'd you snag these, a museum?" He bit into one, checked the tiny toothmark. Something about pure gold; you can tell. "Yeah, they'll do. But… uh, you're two short, right?"
"I'm afraid that cleans us out. Is it possible that some arrangements could be made? Otherwise we'll be stranded here."
"Sony, no credit. But… well, maybe we can work something out. Know what I mean?"
"Such as?"
He was eyeing Darla. "Like to buy you and your friends a drink. In my cabin, of course. Can't fraternize with the passengers 'cept at the Captain's table, but what the Old Man don't know… unnerstand?" He took more tickets. "Yeah, in my cabin, especially your femamikas here―" He did a double take, finally noticing Susan's breasts. "Sure would be my pleasure."
"Look, friend―" "Jake, take it easy." To Krause, Darla said, "I'd love to lift a few with you, sailor, but my friend Susan's a teetotaler. You and I can have a pretty good time, though, just the two of us." She actually winked at him. "Deal?"
He laughed. "I dunno, three heads are better sometimes." He must have noticed my face turning black, and sobered up. "Yeah, sure. Just you and me."
I held out my hand. "Our money, please."
Darla took my arm. "Wait a minute."
"Hand it over, sailor. We'll startuke it."
"Suit yourself," Krause said, reluctantly handing me the coins, "but hikers don't have much luck around here. Limit's four passengers per vehicle, big extra charge for more."
Yeah, sure. "We'll take our chances."
"You're going to be sony come high tide, kamrada."
When we got back to the beach, Darla was ready to kill me. "Startuke it? Who's going to pick up five of us plus an alien anthropoid?"
"We'll go in different vehicles."
"Feel lucky today? I don't." She stamped a boot in the sand. "Damn it, Jake, sometimes I don't understand you. Do you actually think I'd let that cretin get near me? Sure, I'd go to his cabin, even have a few with him. But you'd be surprised what else I have in that pack. Little transparent capsules that make you very sick for a long, long time. And they work fast. Wouldn't kill him, of course. Understand? Besides, even if I had to sleep with him…" She didn't finish.
She was right. "Sorry, Darla. I should have finessed it."
"But you have to take every trick, don't you?" She was furious with me ― and proud of me, all at once.
"Jake, Roland?" John was standing at the waterline, letting little waves lap over his feet. "Is it my imagination," he asked, "or is the water getting higher?"
"He's right," Roland said. "I've been noticing it. And there's the cause." He pointed to the eastern sky.
The edge of a huge white disk was showing above the horizon. A moon, and a big one, twice Luna's size, I guess-timated. The tides would be fierce, and high tide here could mean complete inundation. Great.
"What should we do?" John asked.
"I'm going back to him," Darla said. "I hope he's still in a mood to deal."
She was so right I wanted to strangle her. "Hold it a minute. There's got to be another way. He could be trouble."
"Not the type. I've met his ilk before, the chubby little fart. You stay here. I can handle him."
"Maybe one of the other men…"
She gave me a world-weary look. "Jake."
"Right." I gave it up. Our relationship was about as well-defined as ghosts in a fog. Not only did I not have a leg to stand on, the leg had nothing to stand on.
"What's that noise?" Roland asked.
I tore the beeping key from my pants pocket. "Sam! Sam, is that you?"
"Who the hell were you expecting, the Chairman of the Colonial Politburo? Of all the goddamn stupid things you've done, boy, this has to be the grand prizewinner. There's three things any moron can learn in life without too much trouble, but you can't seem to get 'em straight. Want to know what they are? I'll tell you. Don't spit out the port at Mach one, don't eat blue snow on Beta Hydri IV, and don't ever poke your nose through a potluck portal! Common sense, right ― and you'd think any pudknocker'd pick that up real easy, but not you, boy, not by a long shot―"
We laughed and laughed and laughed.
14
"And another thing," Sam was saying when we finally found him, "what the hell's the idea of not telling me where you're going?" He was mad as heck. "Too busy at the time. Sony." "Well, maybe you were, at that," he grumbled. "I hate to bring it up, but where the hell have you been?" "Rescuing Petrovich, or whatever his name is." "Petrovsky! I thought he was cylinder-skin. My god, Sam, how? And why?"
The others were crowded in the aft cabin, discovering how many bodies could fit into a sauna stall ― except for Darla, who was whipping up a quick brunch. They were making a lot of noise. It was good to be back home.
"Well, it was like this," Sam said. "There I am,cutting vacuum like nobody's business. Must've hit Mach point four five there for a stretch ― Stinky's a genius, by the way ― and I'm calling you and calling you and not getting an answer. Then I see the flash and sure enough it's gammashine, and I'm saying to myself, well, scratch OIK male offspring, but I think ― maybe not, what with that strange buggy you were driving. I figure maybe you're just disabled and can't key for help. So I start scanning on infrared for survivors. What did I know? Last thing I expected was that you'd shot the portal. Anyway, I pick something up out there about three klicks from the commit markers, and I pull off the road onto the ice and go on out. And there's this cop in a vacuum suit lying on his back in the middle of nowhere, no sign of his batmobile, but his ejection sled's in pieces all over the place. He's frozen solid to the ice and there's something funny about his left hand."
"Hand?" I said.
"Yeah, he didn't have one. Instead, there's this big frozen gob of blood on the end of his arm, looking like a cherry ice pop. Damnedest thing you ever saw. But the rest of him was in one piece… and he was alive."
"Jesus." And I knew what he'd done too. He'd angled the blast of his descent rockets to push him away from the cylinders' grav field instead of setting him comfortably down, but how he'd survived that desperate gamble was beyond me. The severed hand wasn't hard to explain either. It was a miracle that the tangled line hadn't cut him in two. "How'd you get him into the cabin?"
"First I had to unfreeze him from the ice. I put the exciter gun on wide beam and cooked him a bit until he could move. Then he hauled himself in. There couldn't have been an unbroken bone in his body, but he did it. Then there was the problem of his arm. If I recycled the cab and brought it up to room temperature, he'd bleed to death. If I kept it vacuum, he'd have frozen. The suit had self-sealed but he was half icicle already. So I had to figure out a way to pressurize and keep the temp below zero. They just don't make life-support gear like that ― had a hell of a time bypassing the right systems."