Exile-and Glory

by Jerry Pournelle

  Three other job applicants who were still working looked up in annoyance, then went back to their tests. The test monitor, a pretty girl in short skirts, frowned. "You must complete your tests—"

  "I will be damned if I will," Kevin said. He stalked out of the room as the girl pleaded with him to go back and finish.

  That blows that, Kevin thought. Damnation. I thought a deep-space-operations outfit would—

  "Congratulations, Senecal. Come with me, please." An elderly fat man barred his path. "Come on, we're running low on time," the man said. His voice was filled with authority.

  Kevin wanted to tell him to stuff it, but he had nothing to lose. He followed the man through twisting hallways, then into an elevator. The man didn't speak until they got off at the top floor of the Santa Monica office building.

  Downstairs the building had been coldly professional: new, expensive, and utterly without warmth. Up here it was completely different. The carpets were old but comfortable. Holos of space mining operations hung along the walls. People were dressed casually, and worked in small groups, or alone, and some sat in their offices with their feet on the desk and eyes directed to the ceiling. One man was making a paper airplane.

  They went to the end of the hall and into an office. It too was comfortably furnished, and reminded Kevin of Professor Farrington's room.

  "I'm Ben Simington," the fat man said. "Have a seat."

  The chairs were comfortable.

  "Want a drink? Scotch. Yes. I recommend scotch whiskey, a double." Simington went to a wall panel, touched it, and let it swing open. An elaborate wet bar was behind it. He took out glasses carved with strange creatures and poured, then handed one to Kevin. The figure on Kevin's glass was a phoenix. "Cheers," Simington said.

  Kevin lifted the glass and sipped. The whiskey was smooth, much better than any scotch he'd ever had before. "Confused?" Simington asked.

  "Yes."

  "Think about it."

  Kevin did. What data had he? The contrast between the lower floor of the Daedalus building, coldly professional, like hundreds of others all over the city, and the relaxed attitudes of the people on this floor—all of them obviously high-ranking executives even if they didn't act like it—was indeed confusing. This office, plain, but with very expensive carpets and pictures and electronic equipment—Kevin realized that he had, in all his life put together, never spent as much money as this office must have cost, yet the impression was of comfort and utility, not ostentation.

  Then there were the tests. Medical exams, of course, then the others. The first ones had been sensible, related to systems engineering, digging deep into his knowledge. Others were obviously psychological tests, and all big companies used those. But after that—those forms, which asked for things like grandmother's age at death, great-grandfather's occupation, every address at which he ever lived. They'd made no sense, and they got worse as he went along. Why? What would the Daedalus Corporation want with such information?

  Nothing. They couldn't want it. So why ask for it?

  "You expected me to give up on those tests," Kevin said.

  "Let's say we hoped you would. But not too soon. Part of the test score is the time it takes for the applicants to tell us to go to hell. Quit too soon, we don't need you. Not enough motivation. Keep on after it's too obvious the things are useless, and—well, you came off pretty good."

  "But—"

  "Many of the chaps down there still wading through will get jobs," the fat man said. "We need paper shufflers too. But we wouldn't send them out to the Belt. I take it you do still want the job."

  "Yes." Kevin's voice was unnecessarily strong. He realized that, but didn't explain.

  "Why?" Ben Simington prompted.

  "Because there's got to be something better than—" He didn't know how to finish. Better than here, where teenaged gangsters tortured cats and threatened people and the courts protected them. Better than a world where there were regulations upon regulations, where every detail of your working life was supervised by Federal inspectors and union officials, where you could get into trouble for working too hard, where they told you that all the regulation was the price of a stable world economy and then they couldn't protect you from street gangsters. Better than—"Better than always having forms to fill out and people who think the forms are important," he said.

  Simington nodded. "Good. We need people who want their work to make sense. But don't get the idea that it always will, Kevin. Sometimes there's things to be done whether they make sense or not. Still, you won't find too much monkey motion out where you'll be going. You'll have to take care of yourself, but you won't mind that. Wish I could go along. Drink up."

  Kevin took another healthy sip of excellent whiskey. It went down smoothly and warmed him from the inside out—that and the fat man's camaraderie. He liked the feeling. Kevin was intelligent enough to know it was all deliberate, that it was all planned to make him feel welcome, but he liked that too. These people wanted him, and they cared about how he felt.

  They talked for an hour. The fat man looked at Kevin's test scores, his medical records, his file from UCLA—Kevin wondered how he'd gotten that, but didn't ask—and a lot of other subjects. Some didn't seem very important.

  Finally Simington leaned back and looked pensively at the ceiling. "It's that time again," he said. "I have to make up my mind. Are you worth the investment?"

  "I honestly don't know," Kevin said.

  "Neither do I." The fat man sighed. "You'd think I'd have thousands of volunteers," he said. "And I do, but not qualified people. The Belt's not the same as a quick tour in orbit. Don't kid yourself that it is. They're spread thin out there. A couple of thousand people, mostly on Ceres, spread across billions of cubic miles. It's no picnic, Kevin."

  "No." He hadn't expected a picnic. He thought about the vast emptiness of the Belt. It wasn't a place he'd go by choice—but what choices had he? There were plenty of volunteers for the factories orbiting Earth, and what use would Kevin Senecal be to one of them? Officially he was neither engineer nor good mill-hand. He was nothing. It wouldn't be that way in the Belt, and that was something to think about.

  "Wayfarer leaves in four days," Simington said. "Can you be in her?"

  "Four days! Mr. Simington, I don't really know anything about space industries, and I can't learn in four days!"

  "We don't expect you to. Trip out takes nine months. You'll learn more about space operations than you really want to know. Nothing else to do aboard ship. There'll be a reader and plenty of tapes, and some good computing equipment. Simulation programs. Operations games. That's the intellectual stuff. On a practical level, the ship's crew drills you in equipment, p-suits, getting around outside. You'll learn to live in low gravity or you won't live at all. I'm not worried about what you'll know when you get to Ceres. It's whether you'll stick it out that bothers me."

  "I generally finish what I start," Kevin said.

  "Yep. One reason I'm talking to you is because your coach told me how you finished a game with two broken ribs. Didn't play too well, but you finished."

  "That was in high school." Just how far back had Daedalus gone in checking his background? But it made sense: he was going to cost them a lot of money. "I still don't understand why you want me," Kevin said.

  Simington shrugged. "Who do we send out, Kevin? Not superheroes trained for one mission; most of the astronauts came apart when their tour was over. Senior engineers? Why would they go? They're doing all right here. No, we've found our best people are misfits who don't like our modern welfare state. If they've got some other reason to get them headed for the Belt, that's fine; but it's what they do when they get there that counts." The fat man looked down at the data sheets on his desk. "Look, I don't believe in a lot of this psych garbage, but some of it's useful. In some ways I may know you better than you know yourself."

  There wasn't anything Kevin could say to that.

  "Contract's for five years," Simington said. "But
we don't really make a lot of profit on five years. We need people who'll go the course." He went back to studying the read-outs.

  Kevin suddenly wanted very badly to go. Partly it was a competitive urge. He didn't want to be told he wasn't good enough. But there was more, too. Out there he might find a meaningful job and a chance to do something important.

  Earth was running out of metals, of oil, of coal, of everything. The anti-technology organizations had halted nuclear power development and eco-freak rioters had smashed the space-power antenna outside Bakersfield—and investment money to build another couldn't be found. Population was rising and food production wasn't. There were already famines in parts of the world, and the pinch was felt everywhere, even in the United States. And the lawyers continued to gum up everything—in the courts, permit hearings, environmental impact statements.

  The One Earth Society said the answer was to eliminate technology, space industries, everything that wasn't "natural." The costs would be terrible: millions, billions dead, but there was nothing else. Earth must abide, and she could not support a plague of mankind, an epidemic of humanity.

  Kevin remembered Professor Farrington's lecture on that. "Maybe they're right," Farrington had said. "Maybe. But it's for damn sure if there's an alternative this is the time to take it. We can get off the Earth and live in the solar system. Not on one planet, but on nine of them, nine planets, thirty-five moons, and a million asteroids. Right now we can go. If we wait a few years, things will be so desperate down here we'll never make it. This is the first and last opportunity for mankind to be something more than a carnivorous ape crawling on the surface of one insignificant planet."

  Kevin, remembering, nodded to himself. "I want to go," he said. "And I can make it in four days."

  Simington said nothing for a long time. Kevin held his breath. Finally the fat man spoke. "Okay. I can offer you a starting salary of fourteen thousand Swiss francs a year. Five-year contract."

  Kevin made rapid mental calculations. About a hundred and fifty thousand U.S. dollars a year. It wasn't as high as he'd expected; not that high at all in these days of inflation and ultra-taxation. Engineers on Earth made more. Engineers in orbital factories made a lot more. But—it was more than he could get without degrees and a strong union.

  "It's more than you think," Simington was saying. "We pay half that in francs in the Belt, the other half into your account in Zurich. We'll set that up for you. No point in letting Uncle Sugar get his hands on your money. If you don't have too much junk shipped out from Earth, you can save your return passage in about four years."

  "And if I don't save?"

  Simington shrugged. "Your problem. We pay your way out. If you stay ten years with us, we pay your way back in. Don't worry about it. Even if you can't cut it for us, you won't be out of a job. There's a lot more jobs than people in the Belt. You won't starve."

  "I suppose not—"

  "And we give you a sign-up bonus," Simington said. "Thirty-five thousand bucks. You can use that to clean up any Earth-side problems. We'll also provide you with a basic outfit."

  "Sounds good," Kevin said.

  "It is good. We take care of our people. Notice I haven't said anything about owing us for passage and bounty. Some outfits pay higher, but their people owe for passage out. Some never do save it back. We don't work that way."

  Sure, Kevin thought. But you're out to make a profit like the others.

  Profit. Most of his professors had acted as if profits were nasty. Only Farrington seemed to think differently. And Wiley Ralston, of course. Not that the professors had any control; international firms survived despite the intellectuals' contempt. The welfare state could tax U.S. corporations practically out of existence, but they couldn't get their hands on the internationals, or the space operations firms.

  "What kind of work?" Kevin asked.

  Simington's grin was wide. "Everything! Mining operations, living quarters, refinery design, ships and transport, agriculture—it all needs doing. Terrific opportunity."

  If it's that great, why do you need me? Kevin wondered. But it sounded exciting, and besides, what other choice did he have? "I'll take it."

  Simington nodded. "Report here, ready to leave, in two days."

  They flew him down to the Baja California spaceport in a windowless transport. He crouched with his gear among empty cargo containers and tried not to think of what was coming next. There was only one other passenger, a man more than twice Kevin's age, shorter by five inches but weighing almost as much as Kevin did—built like a lineman rather than a half back. He had dark hair and brown eyes and a fine network of thin red lines around his mouth and across the bridge of his nose. He drank heavily from a hip flask.

  "Drink?" he asked.

  "No thanks."

  The man shrugged. "Headed for Wayfarer?" When Kevin nodded the man's grin broadened. He put out his hand. "Me, too. Bill Dykes."

  Kevin took the offered hand. Dykes's grip was firm. "Kevin Senecal." He waited for Dykes to comment on the name, but he didn't.

  "Sure you don't want that drink? You look nervous."

  "No, I'm not nervous," Kevin said. "Wish they had windows back here. I'd like to see Baja."

  "Not much to see," Dykes said. "Railroads, power lines, highways, looks just like anyplace else now. Not like it was a few years ago when there wasn't but one road down here. Damndest thing. Of all the places in the world to put a spaceport, I'd have thought Baja would be the last."

  The airplane engines thrummed on. Kevin was glad of someone to talk with. It took his mind off what was to come. Deep space, the Belt—but more terrifying was the way he'd get out there. "Good location," Kevin said. "Further south than Canaveral, so there's more eastward velocity. Takes less energy to get the pods in orbit. And it's on the ecliptic. Anything launched from there has an easier time of it getting to the Belt—" Kevin stopped, because he could see he was boring his companion. "Sorry. You know all this."

  "Some," Dykes admitted.

  "You've been up before?"

  Dykes nodded. "Orbital factories. Three years in the General Motors satellite. Didn't want to join up for another hitch. Took my pay back to Earth."

  "But—you must have saved a lot—"

  "Sure, but the IRS got most of it." Dykes took another drink. "And I couldn't get a dirt-side job. My union's full of One Earthers. They say space technology takes jobs away from people on Earth. Sweet Lord, they fixed up an initiation fee that would've wiped me out! Tried working without a union, but you know how that is. Got beat up about as many times as I had a day's work."

  Dykes didn't seem broken up about his problems. He smiled cheerfully and took another drink, a long one this time. "So I took what was left of my savings and headed for the Moon."

  "Oh." The Moon might be a good place to work. "Hansen colony?" Kevin asked.

  "Naw, couldn't get on there. If MacKenzie and Hansen had been hiring, I'd probably still be up. No Mickey Mouse crap with Hansen, they tell me. Just hard work. Naw, I tried a little prospecting, a little mining. Luna America's no good. Regulations, bureaucrats, lawyers, taxes—hell, it's no different from Earth. No chance to get anywhere."

  "So you're going to the Belt?"

  "Sure. So're you. What in hell are you so nervous about?"

  Kevin laughed. "Didn't know it showed that much. I—have you been up in a laser pod before?"

  "Yeah. Four times. Lived through all but the second one."

  "Huh?"

  "That one killed me." Dykes held his serious expression for a moment, then grinned. "Look, there's nothing to worry about."

  "Sure," Kevin said. "Sure. Say, if you don't mind, I'll have a drink after all."

  The plane set down in morning tropical heat. There was no wind. The airfield was located near the launching facility, but a large concrete terminal building blocked their view of the laser field beyond. They watched their baggage loaded onto a cart, then went into the terminal.

  There were few formalit
ies. Kevin showed his ticket and was checked off a list. "First time up?" the clerk asked. When Kevin admitted it, he was sent down a long stairway.

  "See you," Dykes called.

  The passage led to a waiting room. There were a dozen other people there, mostly men older than he was, but a few women, and one family with two children. There was also a remarkably pretty girl. Kevin tentatively smiled at her, but she didn't respond, so he took out a book and began reading.

  Presently a man in white coveralls came in and waited for their attention. He didn't say anything, just stood there until they were all looking at him. He looked at the two children and shuddered.