Exile-and Glory

by Jerry Pournelle

  That's all he had to say about it, too, no matter how hard I pressed him on it.

  I didn't have time to worry about it. As we boosted, I was talking with Agamemnon. She passed about half a million kilometers from Jefferson, which is awfully close out here. We'd started boosting before she was abreast of the rock, and now we were chasing her. The idea was to catch up to her just as we matched her velocity. Meanwhile, Agamemnon's crew had their work cut out.

  When we were fifty kilometers behind, I cut the engines to minimum power. I didn't dare shut them down entirely. The fusion power system has no difficulty with restarts, but the ion screens are fouled if they're cooled. Unless they're cleaned or replaced we can lose as much as half our thrust—and we were going to need every dyne.

  We could just make out Agamemnon with our telescope. She was too far away to let us see any details. We could see a bright spot of light approaching us, though: Captain Jason Ewert-James and two of his engineering officers. They were using one of Agamemnon's scooters.

  There wasn't anything larger aboard. It's not practical to carry lifeboats for the entire crew and passenger list, so they have none at all on the larger boostships. Earthside politicians are forever talking about "requiring" lifeboats on passenger-carrying ships, but they'll never do it. Even if they pass such laws, how could they enforce them? Earth has no cops in space. The U.S. and Soviet Air Forces keep a few ships, but not enough to make an effective police force even if anyone out here recognized their jurisdiction, which we don't. Captain Ewert-James was a typical ship captain. He'd formerly been with one of the big British-Swiss lines and had to transfer over to Pegasus when his ship was sold out from under him. The larger lines like younger skippers, which I think is a mistake, but they don't ask my advice.

  Ewert-James was tall and thin, with a clipped mustache and greying hair. He wore uniform coveralls over his skintights, and in the pocket he carried a large pipe which he lit as soon as he'd asked permission.

  "Thank you. Didn't dare smoke aboard Agamemnon—"

  "Air that short?" I asked.

  "No, but some of the passengers think it might be. Wouldn't care to annoy them, you know." His lips twitched just a trifle, something less than a conspirator's grin but more than a deadpan.

  We went into the office. Jan came in, making it a bit crowded. I introduced her as physician and chief officer. "How large a crew do you keep, Captain Kephart?"

  Ewert-James asked.

  "Just us. And the kids. My oldest two are on watch at the moment."

  His face didn't change. "Experienced cadets, eh? Well, we'd best be down to it. Mr. Haply will show you what we've been able to accomplish."

  They'd done quite a lot. There was a lot of expensive alloy bar-stock in the cargo, and somehow they'd got a good bit of it forward and used it to brace up the bows of the ship so she could take the thrust. "Haven't been able to weld it properly, though," Haply said. He was a young third engineer, not too long from being a cadet himself. "We don't have enough power to do welding and run the life support too."

  Agamemnon's image was a blur on the screen across from my desk. It looked like a gigantic hydra, or a bullwhip with three short lashes standing out from the handle. The three arms rotated slowly. I pointed to it. "Still got spin on her."

  "Yes." Ewert-James was grim. "We've been running the ship with that power. Spin her up with attitude jets and take power off the flywheel motor as she slows down."

  I was impressed. Spin is usually given by running a big flywheel with an electric motor. Since any motor is a generator, Ewert-James's people had found a novel way to get some auxiliary power for life-support systems.

  "Can you run for a while without doing that?" Jan asked. "It won't be easy transferring reaction mass if you can't." We'd already explained why we didn't want to shut down our engines, and there'd be no way to supply Agamemnon with power from Slingshot until we were coupled together.

  "Certainly. Part of the cargo is liquid oxygen. We can run twenty, thirty hours without ship's power. Possibly longer."

  "Good." I hit the keys to bring the plot tank results onto my office screen. "There's what I get," I told them. "Our outside time limit is Slinger's maximum thrust. I'd make that twenty centimeters for this load—"

  "Which is more than I'd care to see exerted against the bows, Captain Kephart. Even with our bracing." Ewert-James looked to his engineers. They nodded gravely.

  "We can't do less than ten," I reminded them. "Anything much lower and we won't make Pallas at all."

  "She'll take ten," Haply said. "I think."

  The others nodded agreement. I was sure they'd been over this a hundred times as we were closing.

  I looked at the plot again. "At the outside, then, we've got one hundred and seventy hours to transfer twenty-five thousand tons of reaction mass. And we can't work steadily because you'll have to spin up Agamemnon for power, and I can't stop engines—"

  Ewert-James turned up both corners of his mouth at that. It was the closest thing to a smile he ever gave. "I'd say we best get at it, wouldn't you?"

  Agamemnon didn't look much like Slingshot. We'd closed to a quarter of a klick, and steadily drew ahead of her; when we were past her, we'd turn over and decelerate, dropping behind so that we could do the whole cycle over again.

  Some features were the same, of course. The engines were not much larger than Slingshot's and looked much the same, a big cylinder covered over with tankage and coils, acceleration outports at the aft end. A smaller tube ran from the engines forward, but you couldn't see all of it because big rounded reaction mass canisters covered part of it.

  Up forward the arms grew out of another cylinder. They jutted out at equal angles around the hull, three big arms to contain passenger decks and auxiliary systems. The arms could be folded in between the reaction mass canisters, and would be when we started boosting. All told she was over four hundred meters long, and with the hundred-meter arms thrust out she looked like a monstrous hydra slowly spinning in space.

  "There doesn't seem to be anything wrong aft," Buck Dalquist said. He studied the ship from the screens, then pulled the telescope eyepiece toward himself for a direct look.

  "Failure in the superconductor system," I told him. "Broken lines. They can't contain the fusion reaction long enough to get it into the MHD system."

  He nodded. "So Captain Ewert-James told me. I've asked for a chance to inspect the damage as soon as it's convenient."

  "Eh? Why?"

  "Oh, come now, Captain." Dalquist was still looking through the telescope. "Surely you don't believe in Rhoda Hendrix as a good luck charm?"

  "But—"

  "But nothing." There was no humor in his voice, and when he looked across the cabin at me, there was none in his eyes. "She bid far too much for an exclusive charter, after first making certain that you'd be on Jefferson at precisely the proper time. She has bankrupted the corporate treasury to obtain a corner on deuterium. Why else would she do all that if she hadn't expected to collect it back with profit?"

  "But—she was going to charge Westinghouse and Iris and the others to boost their cargo. And they had cargo of their own—"

  "Did they? We saw no signs of it. And she bid far too much for your charter."

  "Damn it, you can't mean this," I said, but I didn't mean it. I remembered the atmosphere back at Jefferson. "You think the whole outfit was in on it?"

  He shrugged. "Does it matter?"

  The fuel transfer was tough. We couldn't just come alongside and winch the stuff over. At first we caught it on the fly: Agamemnon's crew would fling out hundred-ton canisters, then use the attitude jets to boost away from them, not far, but just enough to stand clear.

  Then I caught them with the bow pod. It wasn't easy. You don't need much closing velocity with a hundred tons before you've got a hell of a lot of energy to worry about. Weightless doesn't mean massless.

  We could only transfer about four hundred tons an hour that way. After the first ten-hour st
retch I decided it wouldn't work. There were just too many ways for things to go wrong.

  "Get rigged for tow," I told Captain Ewert-James. "Once we're hooked up I can feed you power, so you don't have to do that crazy stunt with the spin. I'll start boost at about a tenth of a centimeter. It'll keep the screens hot, and we can winch the fuel pods down."

  He was ready to agree. I think watching me try to catch those fuel canisters, knowing that if I made a mistake his ship was headed for Saturn and beyond, was giving him ulcers.

  First he spun her hard to build up power, then slowed the spin to nothing. The long arms folded alongside, so that Agamemnon took on a trim shape. Meanwhile I worked around in front of her, turned over and boosted in the direction we were traveling, and turned again.

  The dopplers worked fine for a change. We hardly felt the jolt as Agamemnon settled nose to nose with us. Her crewmen came out to work the clamps and string lines across to carry power. We were linked, and the rest of the trip was nothing but hard work.

  We could still transfer no more than four hundred tons an hour, meaning bloody hard work to get the whole twenty-five thousand tons into Slinger's fuel pod, but at least it was all downhill. Each canister was lowered by winch, then swung into our own fuel-handling system, where Slinger's winches took over. Cadmium's heavy: a cube about two meters on a side holds a hundred tons of the stuff. It wasn't big, and it didn't weigh much in a tenth of a centimeter, but you don't drop the stuff either.

  Finally it was finished, and we could start maximum boost: a whole ten centimeters, about a hundredth of a gee. That may not sound like much, but think of the mass involved. Slinger's sixteen hundred tons were nothing, but there was Agamemnon too. I worried about the bracing Ewert-James had put in the bows, but nothing happened.

  Three hundred hours later we were down at Pallasport. As soon as we touched in, my ship was surrounded by Intertel cops.

  The room was paneled in real wood. That doesn't sound like much unless you live in the Belt, but think about it: every bit of that paneling was brought across sixty million kilometers.

  Pallas hasn't much for gravity, but there's enough to make sitting down worth doing. Besides, it's a habit we don't seem to be able to get out of. There was a big conference table across the middle of the room, and a dozen corporation reps sat at it. It was made of some kind of plastic that looks like wood; not even the Corporations Commission brings furniture from Earth.

  Deputy Commissioner Ruth Carr sat at a table at the far end, across the big conference table from where I sat in the nominal custody of the Intertel guards. I wasn't happy about being arrested and my ship impounded. Not that it would do me any good to be unhappy . . . .

  All the big outfits were represented at the conference table. Lloyd's and Pegasus Lines, of course, but there were others, Hansen Enterprises, Westinghouse, Iris, GE, and the rest.

  "Definitely sabotage, then?" Commissioner Carr asked. She looked much older than she really was; the black coveralls and cap did that. She'd done a good job of conducting the hearings, though, even sending Captain Ewert-James and his engineers out to get new photographs of the damage to Agamemnon's engines. He passed them up from the witness box, and she handed them to her experts at their place to her right. They nodded over them.

  "I'd say definitely so," Captain Ewert-James was saying. "There was an attempt to lay the charge pattern such that it might be mistaken for meteorite damage. In fact, had not Mr. Dalquist been so insistent on a thorough examination, we might have let it go at that. On close inspection, though, it seems very probable that a series of shaped charges were used."

  Ruth Carr nodded to herself. She'd heard me tell about Rhoda's frantic efforts to charter my ship. One of Ewert-James's officers testified that an engineering crewman jumped ship just before Agamemnon boosted out of Earth orbit. The Intertel people had dug up the fact that he'd lived on Jefferson two years before, and were trying to track him down now—he'd vanished.

  "The only possible beneficiary would be the Jefferson Corporation," Mrs. Carr said. "The concerns most harmed are Lloyd's and Pegasus Lines—"

  "And Hansen Enterprises," the Hansen rep said. Ruth Carr looked annoyed, but she didn't say anything. I noticed that the big outfits felt free to interrupt her and wondered if they did that with all the commissioners, or just her because she hadn't been at the job very long.

  The Hansen man was an older chap who looked as if he'd done his share of rock mining in his day, but he spoke with a Harvard accent. "There is a strong possibility that the Jefferson Corporation arranged the murder of a retired Hansen employee. As he was insured by a Hansen subsidiary, we are quite concerned."

  "Quite right." Mrs. Carr jotted notes on the pad in front of her. She was the only one there I'd seen use note paper. The others whispered into wrist recorders. "Before we hear proposed actions, has anyone an objection to disposing of the matter concerning Captain Kephart?" Nobody said anything.

  "I find that Captain Kephart has acted quite properly, and that the salvage fees should go to his ship."

  I realized I'd been holding my breath. Nobody wanted my scalp so far as I knew, and Dalquist had been careful to show I wasn't involved in whatever Rhoda had planned—but still, you never know what'll happen when the big boys have their eye on you. It was a relief to hear her dismiss the whole business, and the salvage fees would pay off a big part of the mortgage. I wouldn't know just how much I'd get until the full Commission back in Marsport acted, but it couldn't come to less than a million francs. Maybe more.

  "Now for the matter of the Jefferson Corporation."

  "Move that we send sufficient Intertel agents to take possession of the whole damn rock," the Lloyd's man said.

  "Second." Pegasus Lines.

  "Discussion?" Ruth Carr asked.

  "Hansen will speak against the motion," the Hansen rep said. "Mr. Dalquist will speak for us."

  That surprised hell out of me. I wondered what would happen, and sat quite still, listening. I had no business in there, of course. If there hadn't been some suspicion that I might have been in on Rhoda's scheme I'd never have heard this much, and by rights I ought to have left when she made her ruling, but nobody seemed anxious to throw me out.

  "First, let me state the obvious," Dalquist said. "An operation of this size will be costly. The use of naked force against an independent colony, no matter how justified, will have serious repercussions throughout the Belt—"

  "Let 'em get away with it and it'll really be serious," the Pegasus man said.

  "Hansen Enterprises has the floor, Mr. Papagorus," Commissioner Carr said.

  Dalquist nodded his thanks. "My point is that we should consider alternatives. The proposed action is at least expensive and distasteful, if not positively undesirable."

  "We'll concede that," the Lloyd's man said. The others muttered agreement. One of the people representing a whole slew of smaller outfits whispered, "Here comes the Hansen hooker. How's Dalquist going to make a profit from this?"

  "I further point out," Dalquist said, "that Jefferson is no more valuable than many other asteroids. True, it has good minerals and water, but no richer resources than other rocks we've not developed. The real value of Jefferson is in its having a working colony and labor force—and it is highly unlikely that they will work very hard for us if we land company police and confiscate their homes."

  Everybody was listening now. The chap who'd whispered earlier threw his neighbor an "I told you so" look.

  "Secondly. If we take over the Jefferson holdings, the result will be a fight among ourselves over the division of the spoils."

  There was another murmur of assent to that. They could all agree that something had to be done, but nobody wanted to let the others have the pie without a cut for himself.

  "Finally. It is by no means clear that any large number of Jefferson inhabitants were involved in this conspiracy. Chairman Hendrix, certainly. I could name two or three others. For the rest—who knows?"

  "Al
l right," the Lloyd's man said. "You've made your point. If landing Intertel cops on Jefferson isn't advisable, what do we do? I am damned if we'll let them get away clean."

  "I suggest that we invest in the Jefferson Corporation," Dalquist said.

  The Doghouse hadn't changed. There was a crowd outside in the main room. They were all waiting to hear how rich they'd become. When I came in, even Hornbinder smiled at me.

  They were getting wild drunk while Dalquist and I met with Rhoda in the back room. She didn't like what he was saying.

  "Our syndicate will pay off the damage claims due to Pegasus Lines and Lloyd's," Dalquist told her. "And pay Captain Kephart's salvage fees. In addition, we will invest two million francs for new equipment. In return you will deliver forty percent of the Jefferson Corporation stock to us."