Swamp gas, you say. How many "starships" have been sold to how many suckers in the last century? Hyperspace is to our age as lost treasure maps and gold mines and oil wells and Florida real estate were to a previous generation of confidence men. I should know; I've sold enough starships in my time.
Yes, and the way to sell them is not to hide out by a garbage dump and not tell anyone about it. You can invest, and this may be your last chance before the stock goes intergalactic. Check out the prospectus. It claims nothing, promises nothing. Believe me, this is not how you sell pirate gold. Call your broker at once. You'll thank me later.
And that is the secret, you see. Not that they are going, but how they're going to get there. The inventors and investors in this new space drive do not intend to turn it over to a grateful government, or have it confiscated by storm troopers. They don't intend to patent it, either. Patent examiners can be bribed, information can leak. If the Heinleiners have a religion, it is Free Enterprise. They intend to sell this new technology, and they intend to become dirty, rotten, filthy, stinking rich from it.
It was a short hike to the nearest entrance to the Heinlein. A few years ago there had been no way in but to stand around and wait for one of the inhabitants to notice you and invite you in or tell you to get lost. Now there were three or four standard air locks. Beyond them were rudimentary reception rooms, "customs shacks" to the Heinleiners. The notoriety of the Big Glitch had forced them to assume an unaccustomed organization, which they went about grudgingly and haphazardly, as was their style. These entrances were manned by volunteers, which were hard to come by in such an individualistic group. I heard later that it was standard procedure to cool your heels for hours at these entrances, waiting for someone to arrive at the security desk.
And if you didn't know somebody, the custom shack was as far as you'd get.
We got lucky. Someone was manning the desk when Poly and I entered. Even better, the name I dropped was still worth something. I'd worried about that, since it had been quite some time since I'd dealt with this person and there had been absolutely no way to get in contact with him other than simply walking up to the door and asking. But the guard at the desk simply nodded, and jerked her thumb at the second lock behind her. Then she went back to the book she was reading.
"Keep your helmet on," I told Poly as we cycled through. "You never know what you'll run into in here."
She soon saw what I meant, and her reaction was the usual one.
"These people must be crazy," she said.
It's not so bad within the ship itself. You see building and renovation happening here and there, but things always look a little loose around a construction site. Then you move out of the ship and into the vast junk pile behind it. And things just don't look right.
Everything has a haphazard, thrown-together look. Tunnel walls are made out of whatever was handy when a new tunnel was needed. Lights are burned out and if you can still see reasonably well, just stay burned out. There are no municipal crews to replace them. If you stumble in the dark, then replace it yourself, citizen! There ain't no City Hall to sue if you trip. Air 'cyclers have flashing yellow, or even red lights. Most Lunarians can go five years without even seeing a flashing green.
"Do they have a death wish?" Poly asked, after a mile of this.
"They have a safety net," I told her, and didn't explain further. But I knew what she meant. People raised to the exacting safety standards of Lunar engineering were always shocked to see how the Heinleiners lived. Sort of like how you might feel to go up in an airplane, then look out the window and see a wing was being held on by two rusty bolts and a wad of gum.
But that wouldn't bother you if you were a bird. Something goes wrong, you just fly to the ground. And that's how the Heinleiners had come to view the world, because they had a safety net in the form of the force-field suit. Maybe we'd all come to view the world that way if they ever decided to sell the technology. If a blowout happened, a field was instantly generated around their bodies from a unit implanted in place of one lung. The unit also contained about an hour of highly compressed oxygen, dispensed directly into the bloodstream. To someone wearing a device like that, a blowout was nothing more than an inconvenience. Thus, Heinleiners didn't waste a lot of time and effort on making things triple-triple-triple redundant. One system and maybe a backup was good enough for them. Many things they made were no better than they had to be. These were busy people—they were going to the stars!—and there was always something else to do.
Of course, it made things a little edgy when you realized their safety net didn't do you a damn bit of good. When I had to go to the enclave, I got my business done quickly, and got out. Which is just how the Heinleiners wanted it.
If you were looking for all the inside dope on the mysterious Heinleiners, you'll have to go elsewhere. I could relate what went on, using assumed names and euphemisms, but it would be ninety percent lies. For one thing, most of the people I met prefer to stay firmly underground at this point. Remember, not that long ago duly appointed representatives of the Lunar state were shooting at them. They're still a little pissed off. Wouldn't you be? For another, I've been shown some things I swore never to talk about, and talking around them would soon leave me with nothing to say.
Then there's the matter of what I was doing in there. Changing my appearance yet again, naturally. Obtaining a few necessary items for Poly—nothing more than little white lies, in her case—and sending her on her way. (Goodbye, sweet Poly, you were a great traveling companion. Sorry about the fingers. And we'll see no more of you in this story.)
But most of my short time there was consumed in several strictly illegal activities involving becoming someone else. We're not talking about phonying up a hopper's license here; this identity had to stand up to close scrutiny for whatever time I'd be spending in Luna. The statute of limitations hasn't expired on any of it, so it would be foolish to set down the details here. And, frankly, you never know when you'll need to pull some of these same tricks again. Better they don't become common knowledge. If you really need to know how to do it, find a criminal and ask him. And be ready to pay.
When you travel around as much as I do, and have lived as long as I have, the one constant you notice is change.
The species is still expanding, though the talk about doing something to correct that has been getting more and more serious. (What, pray tell? Spaying and neutering? Ah, but don't get me started on that.) I'm not denying it is a problem. With the death rate edging closer and closer to zero, about all that has saved us so far is that very few people want more than one or two children. It's not hard to see a time when every bit of rock in the system is honeycombed down to the core with antlike trillions. There's a school of thought that maintains one reason for the Invasion was our overpopulation of the earth. If we keep growing exponentially, the reasoning goes, might the Invaders take notice of us once again?
I don't pretend to understand anything about the Invaders, beyond the fact that it took them three days to nearly annihilate the human race, and that in spite of our bravest efforts, the final score was twenty billion to nothing. I'm not eager for a rematch.
But frankly I sort of like the changes I see in my travels. Almost always it is an expansion of what I saw before, and like my father, I hold to an old-fashioned idea once called "progress." Other than a growing population, there hasn't been a lot of it since the Invasion. Scientific research is at an all-time low. And why not? We live practically as long as we want, in perfect health and vitality. Machines can do practically everything that needs to be done, so that leisure has become our biggest "problem." Biology is well understood, and the practical limits of the exploration of physics have been reached, for now, anyway.