The Little Planet was one of half a dozen spacecraft parked on the space field. Vence, on the periphery of Ziode, was not a route to anywhere and received very little traffic, being very much the terminus of a minor branch as far as interstellar commerce went. The Little Planet had been parked for twenty days, watching other ships arrive and return whence they had come, while Castor tried to wheedle what he wanted out of the local governor.
He undogged the hatch and pulled himself through into a smelly corridor whose grey-painted walls were dimpled with rivets. The Little Planet, he had to admit, was a step down from the Costa. She was an out-of-service short-haul freighter that had spent forty years plying between two adjacent stars. But, with extra fuel, Castor was confident she could make it to Caean.
He squeezed through the inner door and climbed a ladder to the crew compartment. His partners were still sleeping on beds against the walls. Leecher and Rabbish both were snoring. Gadzha slept soundly, pressing the body of his girl possessively up against the bulkhead. Raincoat, who never slept without a weapon, had come adrift from his bedding and was sprawled on the bare floor, the stock of his gun protruding from under the vacated pillow.
The stale odours and clogging air went unnoticed by Castor. He began kicking his partners awake. Raincoat (Castor had never found out whether it was a nickname or a real one; they had once tried to dub Castor ‘Eyes’, but he had soon squashed that) came awake with a start, groping for his missing gun before he oriented himself. The others stirred resentfully.
They all hated him, and all with reason. Gadzha chiefly because Castor had raped three of his girl-friends in the months they had known one another. It was surprising he had risked bringing his current girl along on this jaunt, but the truth was he simply didn’t like to be without a woman. The others hated Castor because he had cheated them, robbed them, insulted them. But that hadn’t stopped them from putting up the money for the Little Planet. Violent and dangerous men, they were nevertheless under Castor’s spell; he had baited them with his tale of the riches to be picked up from the crashed Caeanic spaceship on Kyre. They could take everything he owed them out of his share, he had promised, and there would still be plenty.
But they were growing impatient with the delay, not to say with Castor’s company. For that reason Castor had moved out of the Little Planet to the shack on the edge of town.
‘C’mon,’ Castor urged. ‘This is it. Today.’
Gadzha squinted at him blearily. ‘Sod off. You’ve been telling us that all along.’ He turned back, clamping himself to the girl.
Castor kicked him again. ‘Get up. Ready the ship for take-off. I’ll be back today with the pass.’
Grudgingly they stirred while Castor made them a rough breakfast. Afterwards he spent two hours helping them check the ship. It was all routine, but Castor was being careful.
Eventually he left and trudged across Kass to the Governor’s office. The sun had risen in the sky and the streets had come to life, or what passed for life on Vence. Men in drab coveralls, mostly gem miners, blended like phantoms against the uninspiring background. There were few women: Vence was more a workplace than a colony.
The official residence of the Governor was underground, but he maintained an administrative office in the centre of Kass: a modestly sized building shaped like a long lozenge. At the moment all its slats were open, letting air and nearly horizontal sunlight into the interior compartments.
The Governor sighed as Castor was shown into his office, and gave a smile that was half embarrassed, half resigned. ‘Hello, old chap. You’re early today.’
‘Thought I’d drop in ahead of the queue, and collect what you promised.’
The Governor frowned. ‘Now I didn’t exactly promise…’
Castor threw himself into a chair and stared fixedly. ‘C’mon, we resolved all our difficulties, didn’t we?’
‘Well, I still feel I need more assurance…’ The Governor lowered his head and tucked his short goatee beard into his throat, tailing off.
‘Where’s the risk?’ Castor said reasonably. ‘You are the Governor of a gem-bearing world. We are gem prospectors who know of another world out in the Gulf, and you are giving us permission to check it out. You’re entitled to do that, almost. Even if we’re lying about this world you’re not to know: okay, we deceived you. What’ll they do, demote you? There’s nowhere to demote you to after this dump! Anywhere else has to be better! So that’s the worst that can happen, but it won’t because when we come back we’ll simply report there are no gems there and you close the file.’ He pulled out a plastic bank account card, idly fingering it and whistling suggestively. ‘This is untraceable, after all.’
The Governor took the card from his fingers and looked at the figures on it, smiling. ‘You don’t suppose there are any gems on this planet of yours, do you?’ he asked. ‘Maybe you could bring back a few samples or something.’
Castor laughed explosively. ‘Of course we’ll be bringing back some rocks and soil samples for your records, Governor. We are not amateurs.’
Castor had been working for the past twenty days on the Governor, who had been aghast at the first suggestion that he connive in Castor’s putative scheme. Yet without the pass he could provide it would be impossible to get past the government patrols. Castor was certain that this would be the day; by now the Governor knew in his heart that he would yield eventually.
Before long he was handing Castor the travel pass in the form of a coded tape. ‘Transmit this continually on the specified waveband,’ he instructed. ‘The patrols will let you through.’
In return Castor erased his own odour signature from the bank card and replaced it with the Governor’s, putting his thumb print on the transfer square and thus activating it into the identity of its new owner. The bank deposit represented by the card, had there been anything genuine about it, was now legally the Governor’s.
‘It will run like a dream,’ Castor lied.
Just after midday the Little Planet took off for the Gulf.
The chips rattled through the randomizer and Castor ejected them around the table. Leecher, Rabbish and Raincoat looked at the numbers. ‘Mine takes it,’ said Raincoat. Pieces of paper, written IOUs, passed to him.
‘I’ll stake a thousand,’ Raincoat said excitedly. ‘Who’ll put up a thousand?’
‘Me,’ Castor replied in a flat, uninterested voice. He pushed papers into the centre of the table. Leecher followed suit. Only the gaunt Rabbish dithered, then hung on to his notes.
Raincoat won again.
It was the worst possible habit: gambling with joint proceeds that were yet to be gained. Castor didn’t care. It was no part of his policy to foment harmony among his following.
They were three days out from Vence, and Castor’s relations with his partners had deteriorated still further. He had grown more openly contemptuous, had quarrelled and jeered at every opportunity, giving orders in a coarse, insulting manner. Not even his inadvertent largesse – for he had gambled wantonly, making no effort to win – had softened his companions’ view; for Castor was growing day by day almost inhumanly repugnant. He seemed to be turning into a bizarre travesty of a human being, his movements becoming increasingly unco-ordinated so that he flapped and jerked about the ship like a demented bat. Only the peculiar fascination he exerted prevented his companions from turning on him and, probably, killing him.