Exile-and Glory

by Jerry Pournelle

  They were silent for a moment. Gulls cried in the wind, and overhead a jet thundered.

  "And now I've done it," she said. "We can go to the Moon. I can arrange more supplies. Valkyrie doesn't cost so much to operate, and we'll have nearly everything we need to build the colony anyway. We can do it, Aeneas. We can found the first lunar colony, and be free of all this."

  "But only if I agree—"

  "Yes."

  "Laurie Jo, would you give up the Moon venture for me?"

  "Don't ask me to. Would you give up your vendetta against Greg for the Moon?"

  He stood and came around the table. She seemed helpless and vulnerable, and he put his hands on her shoulders. She looked up in surprise: his face was quite calm now.

  "No," he said. "But I'll do as you ask. Not for the Moon, Laurie Jo. For you."

  She stood and embraced him, but as they clung to each other she couldn't help thinking, thank God, he's not incorruptible after all. He's not more than human.

  She felt almost sad.

  Two delta shapes, one above the other; below both was the enormous bulk of the expendable fuel tank which powered the ramjet of the atmospheric booster. The big ships sat atop a thick, solid rocket that would boost them to ram speed.

  All that, Laurie Jo thought. All that, merely to get into orbit. And before the spaceplanes and shuttles, there were the disintegrating totem poles. No wonder space was an unattractive gamble until I built my lasers.

  The lasers had not been a gamble for her. A great part of the investment was in the power plants, and they made huge profits. The price she paid for Heimdall and Valkyrie hadn't been in money.

  There were other costs, though, she thought. Officials bribed to expedite construction permits. Endless meetings to hold together a syndicate of international bankers. Deals with people who needed their money laundered. It would have been so easy to be part of the idle rich. Instead of parties I went to meetings, and I've yet to live with a man I love except for those few weeks we had.

  And now I'm almost forty years old, and I have no children. But we will have! The doctors tell me I have a few years left, and we'll make the most of them.

  They were taken up the elevator into the upper ship. It was huge, a squat triangle that could carry forty thousand kilos in one payload, and do it without the 30-g stresses of the laser system. They entered by the crew access door, but she could see her technicians making a final examination of the nuclear engine in the cargo compartment.

  She was placed in the acceleration couch by an Air Force officer. Aeneas was across a narrow passageway, and there were no other passengers. The young A.F. captain had a worried frown, as if he couldn't understand why this mission had suddenly been ordered, and why two strange civilians were going with a cargo for Heimdall.

  You wouldn't want to know, my young friend, Laurie Jo thought. You wouldn't want to know at all.

  Motors whined as the big clamshell doors of the cargo compartment were closed down. The A.F. officer went forward into the crew compartment. Lights flashed on the instrument board mounted in the forward part of the passenger bay, but Laurie Jo didn't understand what they meant.

  "DING."

  "MY GOD, WHAT NOW?"

  "SIGNOR ANTONELLI HAS JUST NOW HEARD THAT YOU ARE GOING UP TO HEIMDALL. HE IS VERY DISTURBED."

  I'll just bet he is, Laurie Jo thought. She glanced across the aisle at Aeneas. He was watching the display.

  "TELL SIGNOR ANTONELLI TO GO PLAY WITH HIMSELF."

  "I HAVE NO TRANSLATION ROUTINE FOR THAT EXPRESSION."

  "I DON'T WANT IT TRANSLATED. TELL HIM TO GO PLAY WITH HIMSELF."

  There was a long pause. Something rumbled in the ship, then there were clanking noises as the gantries were drawn away.

  "MISTER MC CARTNEY IS VERY DISTURBED ABOUT YOUR LAST MESSAGE AND ASKS THAT YOU RECONSIDER."

  "TELL MC CARTNEY TO GO PLAY WITH HIMSELF TOO. CANCEL THAT. ASK MISTER MC CARTNEY TO SPEAK WITH SIGNOR ANTONELLI. I AM TAKING A VACATION. MC CARTNEY IS IN CHARGE. HE WILL HAVE TO MANAGE AS BEST HE CAN."

  "ACKNOWLEDGED."

  "Hear this. Liftoff in thirty seconds. Twenty-nine. Twenty-eight. Twenty seven . . ."

  The count reached zero, and there was nothing for an eternity. Then the ship lifted, pushing her into the couch. After a few moments there was nothing, another agonizing moment before the ramjets caught. Even inside the compartment they could hear the roaring thunder before that, too, began to fade. The ship lifted, leveled, and banked to go on course for the trajectory that would take it into an orbit matching Heimdall's.

  "GET MC CARTNEY ON THE LINE."

  There was silence.

  Out of range, she thought. She smiled and turned to Aeneas. "We did it," she said.

  "Yes."

  "You don't sound very excited."

  He turned and smiled, and his hand reached out for hers, but they were too far apart. The ship angled steeply upward, and the roar of the ramjets grew louder again, then there was more weight as the rockets cut in. Seconds later the orbital vehicle separated from the carrier.

  Laurie Jo looked through the thick viewport. The islands below were laid out like a map, their outlines obscured by cotton clouds far below them. The carrier ship banked off steeply and began its descent as the orbiter continued to climb.

  Done, she thought. But she looked again at Aeneas, and he was staring back toward the United States and the world they had left behind.

  "They don't need us, Aeneas," she said carefully.

  "No. They don't need me at all."

  She smiled softly. "But I need you. I always will."

  Tinker

  "The tinker came astridin', astridin' over the Strand, with his bullocks—"

  "Rollo!"

  "Yes, ma'am." I'd been singing at the top of my lungs, as I do when I've got a difficult piloting job, and I'd forgotten that my wife was in the control cab. I went back to the problem of setting our sixteen thousand tons of ship onto the rock.

  It wasn't much of a rock. Jefferson is an irregular-shaped asteroid about twice as far out as Earth. It measures maybe seventy kilometers by fifty kilometers, and from far enough away it looks like an old mud brick somebody used for a shotgun target. It has a screwy rotation pattern that's hard to match with, and since I couldn't use the main engines, setting down was a tricky job.

  Janet wasn't finished. "Roland Kephart, I've told you about those songs."

  "Yeah, sure, hon." There are two inertial platforms in Slingshot, and they were giving me different readings. We were closing faster than I liked.

  "It's bad enough that you teach them to the boys. Now the girls are—"

  I motioned toward the open intercom switch, and Janet blushed. We fight a lot, but that's our private business.

  The attitude jets popped. "Hear this," I said. "I think we're coming in too fast. Brace yourselves." The jets popped again, short bursts that stirred up dust storms on the rocky surface below. "But I don't think—" the ship jolted into place with a loud clang. We hit hard enough to shake things, but none of the red lights came on "—we'll break anything. Welcome to Jefferson. We're down."

  Janet came over and cut off the intercom switch, and we hugged each other for a second. "Made it again," she said, and I grinned.

  There wasn't much doubt on the last few trips, but when we first put Slingshot together out of the wreckage of two salvaged ships, every time we boosted out there'd been a good chance we'd never set down again. There's a lot that can go wrong in the Belt, and not many ships to rescue you.

  I pulled her over to me and kissed her. "Sixteen years," I said. "You don't look a day older."

  She didn't, either. She still had dark red hair, same color as when I met her at Elysium Mons Station on Mars, and if she got it out of a bottle she never told me, not that I'd want to know. She was wearing the same thing I was, a skintight body stocking that looked as if it had been sprayed on. The purpose was strictly functional, to keep you alive if Slinger sprung a leak, but on he
r it produced some interesting curves. I let my hands wander to a couple of the more fascinating conic sections, and she snuggled against me.

  She put her head close to my ear and whispered breathlessly, "Comm panel's lit."

  "Bat puckey." There was a winking orange light, showing an outside call on our hailing frequency. Janet handed me the mike with a wicked grin. "Lock up your wives and hide your daughters, the tinker's come to town," I told it.

  "Slingshot, this is Freedom Station. Welcome back, Cap'n Rollo."

  "Jed?" I asked.

  "Who the hell'd you think it was?"

  "Anybody. Thought maybe you'd fried yourself in the solar furnace. How are things?" Jed's an old friend. Like a lot of asteroid Port Captains, he's a publican. The owner of the bar nearest the landing area generally gets the job, since there's not enough traffic to make Port Captains a fulltime deal. Jed used to be a miner in Pallas, and we'd worked together before I got out of the mining business.

  We chatted about our families, but Jed didn't seem as interested as he usually is. I figured business wasn't too good. Unlike most asteroid colonies, Jefferson's independent. There's no big corporation to pay taxes to, but on the other hand there's no big organization to bail the Jeffersonians out if they get in too deep.

  "Got a passenger this trip," I said.

  "Yeah? Rockrat?" Jed asked.

  "Nope. Just passing through. Oswald Dalquist. Insurance adjuster. He's got some kind of policy settlement to make here, then he's with us to Marsport."

  There was a long pause, and I wondered what Jed was thinking about. "I'll be aboard in a little," he said. "Freedom Station out."

  Janet frowned. "That was abrupt."

  "Sure was." I shrugged and began securing the ship. There wasn't much to do. The big work is shutting down the main engines, and we'd done that a long way out from Jefferson. You don't run an ion engine toward an inhabited rock if you care about your customers.

  "Better get the big'uns to look at the inertial platforms, hon," I said. "They don't read the same."

  "Sure. Hal thinks it's the computer."

  "Whatever it is, we better get it fixed." That would be a job for the oldest children. Our family divides nicely into the Big Ones, the Little Ones, and the Baby, with various subgroups and pecking orders that Janet and I don't understand. With nine kids aboard, five ours and four adopted, the system can get confusing. Jan and I find it's easier to let them work out the chain of command for themselves.

  I unbuckled from the seat and pushed away. You can't walk on Jefferson, or any of the small rocks. You can't quite swim through the air, either. Locomotion is mostly a matter of jumps.

  As I sailed across the cabin, a big grey shape sailed up to meet me, and we met in a tangle of arms and claws. I pushed the tomcat away. "Damn it—"

  "Can't you do anything without cursing?"

  "Blast it, then. I've told you to keep that animal out of the control lab."

  "I didn't let him in." She was snappish, and for that matter so was I. We'd spent better than six hundred hours cooped up in a small space with just ourselves, the kids, and our passenger, and it was time we had some outside company.

  The passenger had made it more difficult. We don't fight much in front of the kids, but with Oswald Dalquist aboard, the atmosphere was different from what we're used to. He was always very formal and polite, which meant we had to be, which meant our usual practice of getting the minor irritations over with had been exchanged for bottling them up.

  Jan and I had a major fight coming, and the sooner it happened the better it would be for both of us.

  Slingshot is built up out of a number of compartments. We add to the ship as we have to—and when we can afford it. I left Jan to finish shutting down and went below to the living quarters. We'd been down fifteen minutes, and the children were loose.

  Papers, games, crayons, toys, kids' clothing, and books had all more or less settled on the "down" side. Raquel, a big bluejay the kids had picked up somewhere, screamed from a cage mounted on one bulkhead. The compartment smelled of bird droppings.

  Two of the kids were watching a TV program beamed out of Marsport. Their technique was to push themselves upward with their arms and float up to the top of the compartment, then float downward again until they caught themselves just before they landed. It took nearly a minute to make a full circuit in Jefferson's weak gravity.

  I went over and switched off the set. The program was a western, some horse opera made in the 1940s.

  Jennifer and Craig wailed in unison. "That's educational, Dad."

  They had a point, but we'd been through this before. For kids who've never seen Earth and may never go there, anything about Terra can probably be educational, but I wasn't in a mood to argue. "Get this place cleaned up."

  "It's Roger's turn. He made the mess." Jennifer, being eight and two years older than Craig, tends to be spokesman and chief petty officer for the Little Ones.

  "Get him to help, then. But get cleaned up."

  "Yes, sir." They worked sullenly, flinging the clothing into corner bins, putting the books into the clips, and the games into lockers. There really is a place for everything in Slingshot, although most of the time you wouldn't know it.

  I left them to their work and went down to the next level. My office is on one side of that, balanced by the "passenger suite" which the second oldest boy uses when we don't have paying customers. Oswald Dalquist was just coming out of his cabin.

  "Good morning, Captain," he said. In all the time he'd been aboard he'd never called me anything but "Captain," although he accepted Janet's invitation to use her first name. A very formal man, Mr. Oswald Dalquist.

  "I'm just going down to reception," I told him. "The Port Captain will be aboard with the health officer in a minute. You'd better come down, there will be forms to fill out."

  "Certainly. Thank you, Captain." He followed me through the airlock to the level below, which was shops, labs, and the big compartment that serves as a main entryway to Slingshot.

  Dalquist had been a good passenger, if a little distant. He stayed in his compartment most of the time, did what he was told, and never complained. He had very polished manners, and everything he did was precise, as if he thought out every gesture and word in advance.

  I thought of him as a little man, but he wasn't really. I stand about six three, and Dalquist wasn't a lot smaller than me, but he acted little. He worked for Butterworth Insurance, which I'd never heard of, and he said he was a claims adjuster, but I thought he was probably an accountant sent out because they didn't want to send anyone more important to a nothing rock like Jefferson.

  Still, he'd been around. He didn't talk much about himself, but every now and then he'd let slip a story that showed he'd been on more rocks than most people; and he knew ship routines pretty well. Nobody had to show him things more than once. Since a lot of life-support gadgetry in Slingshot is Janet's design, or mine, and certainly isn't standard, he had to be pretty sharp to catch on so quick.

  He had expensive gear, too. Nothing flashy, but his helmet was one of Goodyear's latest models, his skintight was David Clark's best with "stretch steel" threads woven in with the nylon, and his coveralls were a special design by Abercrombie & Fitch, with lots of gadget pockets and a self-cleaning low-friction surface. It gave him a pretty natty appearance, rather than the battered look the old rockrats have.

  I figured Butterworth Insurance must pay their adjusters more than I thought, or else he had a hell of an expense account.

  The entryway is a big compartment. It's filled with nearly everything you can think of: dresses, art objects, gadgets and gizmos, spare parts for air bottles, sewing machines, and anything else Janet or I think we can sell in the way-stops we make with Slingshot. Janet calls it the "boutique," and she's been pretty clever about what she buys. It makes a profit, but like everything we do, just barely.

  I've heard a lot of stories about tramp ships making a lot of money. Their skippers tell m
e whenever we meet. Before Jan and I fixed up Slingshot I used to believe them. Now I tell the same stories about fortunes made and lost, but the truth is we haven't seen any fortune.

  We could use one. Hal, our oldest, wants to go to Marsport Tech, and that's expensive. Worse, he's just the first of nine. Meanwhile, Barclay's wants the payments kept up on the mortgage they hold on Slinger, fuel prices go up all the time, and the big Corporations are making it harder for little one-ship outfits like mine to compete.

  We got to the boutique just in time to see two figures bounding like wallabies across the big flat area that serves as Jefferson's landing field. Every time one of the men would hit ground he'd fling up a burst of dust that fell like slow-motion bullets to make tiny craters around his footsteps. The landscape was bleak, nothing but rocks and craters, with the big steel airlock entrance to Freedom Port the only thing to remind you that several thousand souls lived here.