Such as the one he now asked.
"What about food? The dog gonna need food?"
"He has his own." He looked at me and raised an eyebrow. "He doesn't eat much," I explained. "It's a small dog." I could feel myself getting too elaborate. My father always said to keep your lies simple, and never answer a question you're not asked. But he kept looking, so I shoved the license closer to him and let the P$20 bill peek out from under it. His eyes shifted, and he picked up the license and shoved it into a machine. The bill was gone. He handed the license back to me with a new stamp on it. I really hated to do this, since anyone who knew about Toby might be able to trace me through him, but I had no choice.
He took a yellow form from a stack and started filling it in with a pencil. It was almost Dickensian, and a blatant waste of time since he had a voice-capable computer at his elbow, but Pluto, like most planets, had some archaic and fiercely protected labor laws. Reading upside down, I saw him fill in the spot for breed of dog as Bitching Freeze.
Finally he slapped a shipping tag on the side of the Pantech, and I watched it trundle away on a conveyor belt into unknown depths. Now I was in a big hurry.
There was a convenience store at the train station. I filled a grocery bag full of granola bars, jerky, honey, corn syrup, and as many other items of concentrated fat, sugar, and carbohydrates as I could carry. Then I set off in search of the sort of merchant you can always find hanging around a spaceport. The sort who doesn't display his wares on shelves, or hang out a sign.
She wasn't too hard to find. Most drugs are legal on Pluto, and even the ones they try to control are readily available if you know where to look—as has always been the case. I was directed to a back booth of a coffee shop on one of the lower levels. I sipped a hot chocolate while we haggled about price, then she left and I sat looking out a big picture window overlooking the freight-sorting yard. Millions of crates and parcels slid down ramps and along conveyors until they fetched up at the doors that would soon open and disgorge their loads onto shuttle trucks.
The pusher returned with a small plastic envelope, and told me the quickest way to the yard.
This place was probably more dangerous than Pearl. The mechanized mayhem of the Vegas was predictable, most of it was smart, and programmed to be on the lookout for fragile humans getting in the way. Not so in the freight yard. If you didn't stay on your toes something might roll up behind you and crush you like a bug under silent wheels. I moved quickly, following the homer beacon in my pocket, and soon I was standing where the Pantechnicon had come to rest, midway down a line of larger crates.
I was about to activate it when a movement in the corner of my eye made me stop and duck down. I looked up cautiously... and let out a deep breath. Two lines over a man was on his hands and knees, crawling under the metal frame of a conveyor. This was all right with me; cops never crawl, and they never look furtive. Neither do yard bulls. They can sneak just fine, but they do it with entirely different body language.
In fact... I thought I knew this guy.
I gave a low whistle, three notes known to hoboes throughout the system, and he looked up at me and grinned.
"Sparks," he said, in a husky voice.
"Lou? Is that the uke man?"
"You don't believe me, I'll play you a tune."
Ukulele Lou was a legend in his own time. He was rumored to have some sort of brain damage, which made his conversations a little hard to follow, and he was crazy as a mudlark. But his memory for music was amazing. He claimed to know words and music to fifteen thousand songs, and I'd never doubted him. He was wearing a battered pressure suit. His precious ukulele was in his hand.
I swear, the helmet faceplate had a crack in it. It made me sweat just to think about it. Lou and some of the other 'bos always traveled this way, and without the comforts of top-of-the-line luggage.
"Where you bound?" I asked him.
"Where else? Uranus." He pronounced it your-anus.
Where else, indeed? I'm largely ignorant of these things, but my understanding was that due to orbital dynamics, nearly all the outer planet commerce for the last decade, and for a few decades to come, was the triangle of Pluto, Uranus, and Neptune, then back to Pluto, in that order. It had to do with the relative positions of the planets. Pluto had for some years been at the lowest point in its orbit, which meant it was closer to the sun than Neptune. Uranus was about sixty degrees ahead, and Neptune clear around the sun from Uranus. No orbit in the outer planets that gets you there in a reasonable time is a truly economical orbit, but going against the direction of planetary motion is the least economical orbit of all. It's like stepping off a moving train. Before you go anywhere else, you first have to kill your own motion.
"What about you?" Lou asked.
"Uranus," I confirmed. I pronounced it Urine-us. Was there ever an orb so inelegantly named? Nobody's ever agreed on how to say it, and both ways stink.
"The Bard's World?" he asked, with a cackle.
"Where else?"
"Can't get them stars outta your eyes, is that it? Gonna stand at the corner of Columbia and Paramount and gawk at the names in the pavement? Buy a map to the stars' condos? See how your feet fit in Henry Collyer's footsteps?"
I ignored the ribbing and saluted him. "Good luck, Lou," I said.
"Break a leg," he urged. Then he pried up a corner of a three-story packing crate and squeezed himself inside. I could hear him working, faintly, as I activated the shelter on the Pantech.
I did a little research on tramps and hoboes while struggling through an ill-advised update of The Grapes of Wrath. ("Kenneth Valentine struggles through this ill-advised update as Tom Joad, an asteroid miner thrown out of work when the 'Tailings Crisis' of '86 shuts down all operations. He would have been better off playing this material for laughs, of which there are many, few of them intended."—Daily Cereal) Back then it was boxcars on freight trains, and you would weep in terror to know what these men went through. They rode in them, on them, and under them—"riding the rods"—their bodies inches from the murderous wheels.
Then, as now, the owners of the railroads were aware of the informal passengers, and then, as now, they didn't like it much. What they did about it depended largely on where you hopped the freight, or where you got off.
The clerk I'd bribed had been fully aware of my real intentions. Declaring a live animal was the most common ruse to obtain air and water en route. He'd heard that story about the dog before. (Ironically, I really had a dog, of course, but he would not need any consumables.)
Maybe that clerk meant what he said when he wrote "bitching freeze." It would be one hell of a bitchin' freeze if anything went wrong with any of the Pantech's systems along the way. Or any of the freighter's systems, for that matter, and let's face it, they just aren't as careful about things as they are in even the worst passenger liner. You lose a passenger and it's lawsuit time. If the Pantech sprang a leak I'd be little more than spoiled freight, who shouldn't have been in there in the first place. Like those old 'bos who fell off the rods; gathered up, bagged, and tossed in a hole in potter's field. Maybe a token effort to contact the kinfolk.
We are used to a high standard of safety, and fear of vacuum is the most common phobia, one I share with eighty percent of humanity. Though I believe I have it in a greater degree than most.
Then there are the old space rats like Ukulele Lou. Cracked faceplate and all. He seemed immune to the fears that now began to bore into my spine like an electrified dental drill.