Moore swallowed.
“Who was it? I’ve heard something—”
Hill bit off the name. Moore swallowed again as if the name meant something. As if it were right.
“I … I’ll tell you, guy,” said Moore. “It’s none of my business, but I … well … I might be able to fix things up for you. It’s risky, though, butting in on something that ain’t my business.”
“How much?” said Hill shortly.
“Oh … f-five hundred,” said Moore uneasily.
Hill stared at him. Hard. Then he pulled a roll out of his pocket. He displayed it.
“I got credits,” he said huskily. “But I’m givin’ you just one hundred of ‘em. I’ll give you nine hundred more when I’m all set. That’s twice what you asked for. But that’s all, see? I got a reason to get off Earth, and tonight, I’ll pay to manage it. But if I’m double-crossed, somebody gets hurt!”
Moore grinned nervously. “No double-crossing in this,” he said quickly. “Just well … it is ticklish.”
“Yeah,” said Hill. He waved a battered-knuckled hand. “Get goin’. Tell those guys I’m willin’ to pay. But I get stowed away, or I’ll fix that guy who sold me his place so he’ll tell all he knows! I’m goin’ to Pluto, or else!”
Moore said cautiously: “M-maybe you’ll have to pay out a little more, but not much! But you’ll get there! I’ve heard … just heard, you understand … that the gang here smuggles a fella into the Pipeline yard and up into the nose of a carrier loaded with grub. Champagne and all that. He can live high on the way, and not worry because out on Pluto they’re so anxious to get a man to work that they’ll square things. They need men bad, out on Pluto! They pay five hundred credits a day!”
“Yeah,” said Hill grimly. “They need ‘em so bad there ain’t no extradition either. I’m int’rested in that, too. Now get goin’ and fix me up!”
The Pipeline was actually a two-billion-mile arrangement of specks in infinity. Each of the specks was a carrier. Each of the carriers was motorless and inert. Each was unlighted. Each was lifeless. But—some of them had contained life when they started.
The last carrier out from Earth, to be sure, contained nothing but its proper cargo of novelties, rocket fuel, canned goods, and plastic base. But in the one beyond that, there was what had been a hopeful stowaway. A man, with his possessions neatly piled about him. He’d been placed up in the nose of the carrier, and he’d waited, mousy-still, until the spacetug connected with the tow ring and heaved the carrier out to the beginning of the Pipeline. As a stowaway, he hadn’t wanted to be discovered. The carrier ahead of that—many millions of miles farther out—contained two girls, who had heard that stenographers were highly paid on Pluto, and that there were so few women that a girl might take her pick of husbands. The one just before that had a man and woman in it. There were four men in the carrier beyond them.
The hundred-foot cylinders drifting out and out and out toward Pluto contained many stowaways. The newest of them still looked quite human. They looked quite tranquil. After all, when a carrier is hauled aloft at four gravities acceleration the air flows out of the bilge-valves very quickly, but the cold comes in more quickly still. None of the stowaways had actually suffocated. They’d frozen so suddenly they probably did not realize what was happening. At sixty thousand feet the temperature is around seventy degrees below zero. At a hundred and twenty thousand feet it’s so cold that figures simply haven’t any meaning. And at four gravities acceleration you reach a hundred and twenty thousand feet before you’ve really grasped the fact that you paid all your money to be flung unprotected into space. So you never quite realize that you’re going on out into a vacuum which will gradually draw every atom of moisture front every tissue of your body.
But, though there were many stowaways, not one had yet reached Pluto. They would do so in time, of course. But the practice of smuggling stowaways to Pluto had only been in operation for a year and a half. The first of the deluded ones had not quite passed the halfway mark. So the stowaway business should be safe and profitable for at least a year and a half more. Then it would be true that a passenger entered the Pipeline from Earth and a passenger reached Pluto on the same day. But it would not be the same passenger, and there would be other differences. Even then, though, the racket would simply stop being profitable, because there was no extradition either to or from Pluto.
So the carriers drifting out through emptiness with, their stowaways were rather ironic, in a way. There were tragedies within them, and nothing could be done about them. It was ironic that the carriers gave no sign of the freight they bore. They moved quite sedately, quite placidly, with a vast leisure among the stars.
The battered youngish man said coldly, “Well? You fixed it?”
Moore grinned nervously.
“Yeah. It’s all fixed. At first they thought you might be an undercover man for the passenger lines, trying to catch the Pipeline smuggling passengers so they could get its charter canceled. But they called up the man whose place you took, and it’s straight. He said he gave you his place and told you to see Crowder.”
Hill said angrily: “But he stalled me!”
Moore licked his lips.
“You’ll get the picture in a minute. We cross the street and go in the Pipeline yard. You have to slip the guard something. A hundred credits for looking the other way.”
Hill growled:
“No more stalling!”
“No more stalling,” promised Moore. “You go out to Pluto in the next carrier.”
They went out of the Pluto Bar. They crossed the street, which was thin, black, churned-up mud from the catawheel trucks which hauled away each day’s arrival of freight from Pluto. They moved directly and openly for the gateway. The guard strolled toward them.
“Slim,” said Moore, grinning nervously, “meet my friend Hill.”
“Sure!” said the guard.
He extended his hand, palm up. Hill put a hundred credit note in it.
“O.K.,” said the guard. “Luck on Pluto, fella.”
He turned his back. Moore snickered almost hysterically and led the way into the dark recesses of the yard. There was the landing field for the space tugs. There were six empty carriers off to one side. There was one in a loading pit, sunk down on a hydraulic platform until only its nose now showed aboveground. It could be loaded in its accelerating position, that way, and would not need to be upended after reaching maximum weight.
“Take-off is half an hour before sunrise today,” said Moore jerkily. “You’ll know when it’s coming because the hydraulic platform shoves the carrier up out of the pit. Then you’ll hear the grapnel catching in the tow ring. Then you start. The tug puts you in the Pipeline and hangs around and picks up the other carrier coming back.”
“That’s speed!” said Hill, “Them scientists are great stuff, huh? I start off in that, and before I know it I’m on Pluto!”
“Yeah,” said Moore. He smirked with a twitching, ghastly effect. “Before you know it. Here’s the door where you go in.”
Crowder came around the other side of the carrier’s cone-shaped nose. He scowled at Hill, and Hill scowled back.
“You sounded phony to me,” said Crowder ungraciously. “I wasn’t going to take any chances by admitting anything. Moore told you it’s going to cost you extra?”
“For what?” demanded Hill, bristling.
“Because you’ve got to get away fast,” said Crowder evenly. “Because there’s no extradition from Pluto. We’re not in this for our health. Two thousand credits more.”
Hill snarled:
“Thief—” Then he said sullenly. “O.K.”
“And my nine hundred,” said Moore eagerly.