Brim felt a wave of apprehension grip his chest. Had he just walked into an IGL trap? He tensed and his eyes darted toward the exit.
"Calm yourself, m'boy," Amps said with a chuckle. "If I were in cahoots with IGL, you'd already be on your way back to the ship. Now sit yourself on the counter here and put away a couple of those energy bars. While you're doing that, I'll see if I can't find someone who can get you a job. If you don't mind construction, you'll have no trouble finding a job in this city."
Brim looked the friar in the eye and decided he might as well trust him. "I'll work at damned near any kind of construction job, Father," he said, meaning every word.
When Brim was most of the way through his third energy bar, Amps looked up and chuckled. "You were hungry, weren't you, Wilf?"
"Not anymore, Father," Brim answered, grinning with his mouth still half full.
"Good," Amps laughed. "Put several more of those bars in your pocket and then look at this," he directed, tilting his display to face outward. "The agent you want to see has a storefront about ten c'lenyts from here, on the other side of City Mount Hill. I'll lend you fare for the interurban. You can return it at any alms box—when you're feeling a little more flush than today." Then he chuckled. "We'll just call ourselves even on the energy bars, though," he added. "It gets pretty hot around here in the summer, and you can imagine what they'd be like, melted in an alms box."
Within two metacyctes, Brim was talking to a burly clerk dressed in a green checked shirt and light tan trousers made of something that looked a lot like canvas. His reddish hair was long and tied at the nape of his neck by a small black ribbon. He had a strong chin, a short, bulbous nose, bushy ginger eyebrows, and intense, watery green eyes that didn't let go once they fastened onto you. A sign on his desk announced, ARGYLE G. BEAVERTON, FACTOR.
"What sort of work do you do, Brim—normally, I mean?" Beaverton asked in a gruff voice.
Brim shrugged hopelessly. "I'm a Helmsman," he said.
"Hmm," Beaverton quipped with mock deliberation, "we haven't quite finished our entry for the Mitchell Trophy Race yet, but when we do, we'll be sure to look you up."
"Couldn't ask for more than that," Brim returned wryly. It was clear that there was no escaping Mitchell's xaxtdamned race or its awful reminder of Margot's pregnancy and his failure as a man. Grimly he forced himself back to the present. "Do you suppose somebody out there might have something else for me to do?" he asked, managing a smile of sorts.
The man consulted his terminal. "Well," he declared with a chuckle, "we've got more construction jobs than we can fill in a million years. Ever drive a grav loader, for instance? I could place a hundred loader jockeys this morning."
Brim felt his spirits soar. "You bet," he said "I put in a couple of years driving those things when I was a kid. Where do I sign up?"
Beaverton bit his lip. "I may have put that the wrong way," he admitted with a frown. "What I meant to ask was, do you have a license to operate a grav loader?"
"A license?" Brim asked. "We never needed a license back home."
"Unfortunately," the man said, "you need one here. It's all part of the guild system, and rigidly enforced."
"A guild system," Brim mused. "Well, I guess grav loaders are out, then."
"Plenty more jobs where that one came from," Beaverton assured him. "Ever do any work with synthetic roof tiles?"
"No. Afraid not."
"Surveying?"
"Um, no."
"Woodworking? Cabinetry?"
"A little, but..."
"Glazing?"
"No."
"Hmm. How about gardening?"
"Well..."
"Yeah, I understand. You are a little shy on experience, I guess."
"I can drive just about any kind of rig."
"Not without a guild license, you can't. And guilds take a residency of at least a year. When I talked to Friar Amps, I sort of got the idea you hadn't been here too long."
"I haven't," Brim admitted.
"Hmm..." Suddenly, Beaverton snapped his fingers. "I'll just bet you'd be good with one of those particle beam axes," he exclaimed. "You know, the open grid cages about the size of an oil drum with handles on the side and top—got a big cathode injector filament inside, firing through a tube of focusing coils. They use 'em to cut foundations out of rock where there isn't a lot of working room—instead of blasting."
Brim frowned. He wasn't very familiar with heavy construction equipment, but every little boy who had grown up anywhere near an excavation knew that particle beam axes could make more noise than a supernova at a hundred irals. "Yeah," he said, searching his memory. "I think they're powered from some sort of portable beatron—on a gravity sled, aren't they?"
"You've got it—that thick connecting hose is really the power transmission line." Beaverton looked up from the display. "Dirtiest, hardest, noisiest job you can get. Guilds won't have anything to do with them—too damned dangerous. But the pay's right, if you can stand the dust and the noise— and you don't kill yourself."
"The pay's good?"
"It's gotta be," Beaverton said. "Otherwise, they couldn't get anybody to run one. Not with all the other jobs around."
"I'll take it," Brim said on a sudden hunch. "Sounds like just what I'm looking for."
Brim stood shirtless beneath the late afternoon sun, mopping sweat from his brow with a great red handkerchief. (He now carried one wherever he went.) Overhead, cries from angry seabirds interspersed with the din of heavy construction machinery. His present building site was close by Grand Harbor, not far from the big Imperial Fleet base. He could often smell the clean odor of the sea, along with a lot of construction dust. On the job, his teeth always felt gritty.
Nearby, surveyors dressed in the bright green and yellow colors of their guild were busily verifying the corner he had just melted in solid rock for the foundation of a government office building. Not a bad job of it, he judged, in spite of the cramped space. Corners were tough; they took a delicate touch—and this one especially, because of the irregular shape the building would take when it went up.
Brim smiled to himself as he rested, just a little smugly perhaps. The construction company had called him specially for the job. Operating the bulky machine turned out to be elementary for someone accustomed to aiming objects the size of a starship, and he'd quickly established himself as the best beam axe operator in the area. In nearly five months of arduous work, he'd found a permanent place to live, was making good credits—for a sweat laborer—and was back to the superb physical shape he'd maintained while he was an officer in the Fleet. He even managed a small weekly offering in one of the the ten-million-odd alms boxes the Gradygroats maintained throughout the city.
Abruptly he turned his eyes skyward to watch an ebony destroyer thunder up from the bay and bank steeply over the construction site, its many turrets and antennas silhouetted against the bright blue sky.
The ship was still low enough when it passed overhead that he could see its Helmsman through the bridge Hyperscreens. His breath caught while the ground shook to the beat of its mighty gravs, and he watched with enchantment until it had flown out of sight. Clearly, he might be out of the starship business, but the business was far from being out of him.
Above him, at the edge of the excavation, a colorfully dressed lunchtime crowd had gathered to watch.