The Billion Dollar Boy

by Charles Sheffield

  "And you'll get it. Just as soon as I'm able to give it."

  Krupa sounded polite, but she wouldn't budge. Shelby had stormed back to his cabin, pulled out the official Cheever stationery with its golden letterhead, and prepared to deliver a blast that would make his first letter sound mild.

  "Incompetent staff . . . totally inadequate service . . . disregard of passenger needs . . ."

  Those words were all too weak. He needed something that would produce an earthquake when it hit the boardroom of the Aurora line.

  He looked for inspiration in the bottle at his side, and was astonished to find only half an inch of liquor left.

  Surely he hadn't drunk that much? Someone must have been helping themselves while he was out. A cabin steward, it had to be. He went raging back to the crew quarters, ready to tell Krupa that one of her stewards had to be fired. It was the middle of the sleep period, but he was not going to let that stop him.

  She was not there. Only the dark-haired, dark-faced Irish crewman, Malone, and the chief engineer, Dollfus, were sitting across from each other at the long table. They stared up when Shelby burst in.

  "And now what?" asked Dollfus.

  "There's a thief aboard this ship!"

  "Is there now? And what makes you think that?"

  "I had a bottle in my cabin. I'm sure that last time I looked it was nearly a quarter full. Now it's just about empty."

  "A bottle?" Dollfus caught Malone's eye. "A bottle of what?"

  "Kahlua."

  "Ah. You drink, do you?" Dollfus spoke quietly, almost respectfully.

  "Sure I do." Shelby stuck out his chest and felt less angry. It was too late to worry about what his mother would say if she found out, and anyway he didn't much care. "I've drunk for years."

  "Indeed." Dollfus turned to the other man. "Malone?"

  The Irishman shook his head. "If there's a thief aboard the Bellatrix, that's something more for Krupa than for me. And I can't offer Kahlua, for I've nothing like that. But if it's just a drink that you're wanting, as a replacement like, then I can surely oblige. Hold on, now."

  He turned and began to rummage in a footlocker at the side of the table. He came up with a bottle filled with a clear brown liquid and set it down on the table.

  Shelby stared curiously. The bottle's label was written in a language that he did not recognize. "What is that?"

  Malone raised his eyebrows. "Well, that depends who you are. To some people, it's no more than a drink. But to me and my folk, it's usquebaugh—which means the water of life. It's no match for your Kahlua, I'm sure, but maybe it's better than nothing. Chief, will you do the honors?"

  Dollfus nodded. He reached behind him to produce three plastic glasses. Malone opened the bottle and poured with a steady hand an exactly equal measure of brown liquid into each. In the low gravity provided by the ship's slow rotation, the fluid moved slowly and sluggishly, seeming far more viscous than it was. Malone handed one glass to Dollfas and one to Shelby.

  "To the pride of the Cheevers," he said. He and Dollfas raised their glasses to Shelby and took the liquid down in one gulp.

  Shelby tried to copy their actions exactly as he emptied his glass. There was one split second when the drink felt cold in his throat, then it turned to liquid flame. He gasped. He could feel it trickling down into his stomach, starting a fire every inch of the way.

  "How is it, then?" Malone asked.

  "Just—just fine." Shelby answered through clenched teeth, swallowing saliva between words. "Good strong—flavor."

  "I hoped you'd find it acceptable." Malone was pouring again. "One more for us, then the rest of the bottle is yours. Bottoms up, and no heel taps."

  This time Shelby closed his eyes. The inner burning wasn't such a shock this time, and it didn't take his breath away.

  "You like that, do you?" Malone said. "I hoped you would." He winked at Dollfus.

  "It's—it's real great stuff." Shelby took a deep breath and grabbed the bottle as it was thrust at him. "More of a m-man's drink than Kahlua. But I think I'd better not—I mean, I think I'll have the rest of it—in my cabin."

  He turned and hurried out before they could make any other suggestion.

  The whole ship was silent and almost dark, and as he passed through the dim-lit interior he began to be filled with the strangest sensation. The warmth that had started in his throat and stomach was spreading steadily through his whole body. And it didn't make him feel bad—quite the opposite. He felt a sense of tremendous well-being and confidence, a knowledge that there was nothing that he could not do. Nothing that he would not do. His mind had never been clearer and more forceful.

  He came to the middle section of the ship between the passenger and the crew quarters. One of the observation ports was located here, as well as an airlock with an array of suits beside it.

  Shelby went to the port and peered out. There it was, so near and yet so far. The node was just kilometers away, the round pearly glow of its entry chamber seemingly close enough to touch. The Bellatrix had been carefully parked next to the node, with just enough end-over-end rotation to provide a comfortable pseudo-gravity in the living quarters.

  He opened the bottle of usquebaugh, lifted it to his lips, and took a tentative sip. It didn't burn at all now on the way down.

  Krupa had suggested using a machine to take Shelby through the network, and he had scoffed at the idea. But she didn't have to know. In fact, he wouldn't even need a machine. He knew exactly how to put a suit on. His trip with Garrity had proved that there was no big deal to flying in any direction you liked. As for the network entry chamber, from this distance there was no way a person could possibly miss it.

  Why not? He had no idea how to get back, but they would take care of that easily enough at the other end. They would have to—his ticket clearly called for a two-way trip through the network.

  Shelby moved over to the rack of suits and picked out the same one that he had worn on his visit to CM-67. He put it on and puzzled his way through the thirty-six checkpoints, pausing before he closed the helmet for a final mouthful of Malone's whiskey. The suit insisted that two of the seals were wrong. He fiddled with them until the signal came at last that the suit was properly closed.

  He was ready to go. Wasn't he?

  He stared at his own hand. Whoops! Couldn't take the bottle, it would probably explode when the air was pumped out. He laid Malone's gift, a little reluctantly, on the rack of suits. Usquebaugh. The water of life. What a perfect name.

  As he entered the airlock, a bizarre machine that looked like a pair of interlocking sets of deer antlers came writhing across to him. Its clucking, clattering, and clicking were nothing more than an annoying buzz in his indifferent ear. He ignored the display unit that it held out insistently toward him.

  He'd use a machine when he felt like he needed a machine. Right now he certainly didn't. He was able to do anything that a dumb machine could do, and a whole lot better.

  Strange. The thought filled his head as the airlock quietly cycled, and hard vacuum replaced the air around him. Strange how fixated people in space were with their damned machines. He couldn't see any use for them at all. Didn't need them at all.

  The network node was sitting right in front of him as he drifted out of the lock. It looked as big and chilly as a hunter's moon in his native Virginian sky.

  He stared at it until his eyes watered and blurred his vision. Yes, there really was a Virginia, although half the crew of the Bellatrix might not realize it. They had not been born on Earth. They probably never went closer to the surface of the planet than low orbit. He knew more about really important things than the lot of them put together.

  Where was the Earth, anyway?

  He peered all around. Several planets over there near the Sun, but which was which? He couldn't tell.

  Well, it wouldn't matter in a few minutes. The Kuiper Belt was so far from the sun that only Jupiter, according to the travel brochures, could be seen without a tele
scope.

  Shelby allowed himself to drift slowly toward the node. He was in no hurry. He did not know that an unauthorized exit from the Bellatrix had just been recorded. Had he known, it would only have made him move faster. He felt not a trace of guilt about what he was doing. Hadn't the cruise line promised a transfer through the node network, for anyone who was interested? It was their fault if he had been forced to take matters into his own hands. Nobody told a Cheever, specially not Shelby Crawford Jerome Prescott Cheever, what he could and couldn't do.

  The node was closer now. He guessed that it was at least forty meters across. There would be no problem hitting it dead center—provided that he was allowed to. More pesky machines were in his way. They had emerged from within the pearly radiance of the node itself and were right in front of him, trying to block his path. Two of them were holding out funny-looking consoles covered with buttons and little display screens. He waved them out of the way. When they did not move he increased his speed and barged right on through.

  They avoided him at the last minute. He could hear excited squeaks on his suit radio. They sounded like pure gibberish. On the other hand, his own head was suddenly spinning and he was not sure he would have understood them regardless of the language.

  Come on, machines! He laughed out loud as he soared through the hazy aperture of the node. Don't give up! Catch me if you can.

  And then suddenly everything was not so fine. As he passed into the node he felt his whole body begin to rotate in one direction while the inside of his head went in another. It made no difference if his eyes were open or closed. The rainbow internal glow of the node was turning a hundred ways at once. He was riding a giant multicolored whirligig that every few seconds chose to vanish and reassemble itself and turn all the different parts of him in multiple different directions.

  It was almost a relief when a final spin took him in a direction where there were no directions. He felt himself twisted out of space itself; and in that ultimate nowhere blackness he felt nothing at all.

  Chapter Three

  SOUND returned before sight. Shelby could squeeze his eyes shut against the bright, bluish light, but there was no way to keep out of his ears the harsh clunk-clunk-clunk that came in over his suit radio. It drove hot metallic spikes of pain through his head.

  He groaned and muttered, "Stop that. No more." His mouth was dry and clotted, and when he touched his tongue to his front teeth they tasted furred and acid. He knew he had thrown up—how many times?—but his suit could cope with that. It was designed to absorb everything tangible What it could not do was go inside his head and wipe away the nausea and pain and the taste of vomit.

  If only that noise would stop!

  He lay until he could stand it no longer, then opened his swollen eyes. At first he saw nothing. He was in some sort of low-acceleration field, and its gentle force was pressing him face-down onto something soft. He lifted his head—there was bag after puffy bag of black plastic beneath him—and peered out through his suit's visor. His first impression was of endless open space. His world had become nothing but a glowing field of swirling blue and indigo. It took a few more seconds to realize that a slender lattice of dark supporting struts imposed a regular pattern upon the chaotic background.

  He allowed his head to fall forward onto the padded bags. He must be in a ship, but it was a ship like none he had ever seen or heard of; little more than a framework, a cobweb-thin skeleton of narrow beams that arched up from the floor where he lay to form a curving birdcage above him.

  There must be more to it than that. Something below the floor was providing a steady acceleration. And somebody, some damnable body, was sending the excruciating thump-thump-thump over his suit's radio that made any form of rest impossible.

  Shelby lifted his head again and stared around. He found that the hazy blue background was creeping past the dark lattice of struts. The birdcage he lay in was turning, slowly and steadily. And when he looked more closely he saw that the backdrop was not uniform. Brighter points of light lay scattered within it.

  Stars, blazing through a fog of gas and dust? Nothing that he had read about the Kuiper Belt suggested the presence there of a great dust cloud. And no fog or stars could explain the rhythmic clash of sound that still plagued his ears.

  Shelby turned his head, wincing at the pain. He lay near the center of a circular floor maybe fifteen meters across. The bags beneath him stretched away on his left to a low circular wall or partition. They were piled up to the top. On his right, though, the floor was still partially clear. As he watched, another bag came sailing over and landed in one of the open spots. Shelby caught a glimpse of the long, spidery arm that had delivered it, but the body of the thrower was hidden on the other side of the wall.

  He sighed, lifted himself up, and crawled on hands and knees to his right. When he came to the wall he raised himself farther and peered over the edge.

  The arm belonged not to a person but to a machine. It was shaped like an outsized version of Malone's bottle of usquebaugh, with a tangled snakes' nest of wires where the cap should have been. Eight skinny arms grew out from the smooth golden sides.

  Two of those arms clamped the machine securely to the outside of the wall. Two more were reaching out into space, feeling their way along what seemed like an endless thick black wire. Every forty meters or so, a rough-surfaced sphere about a meter across was hung on the cable like a silver bead on a necklace. The ship was moving along the wire, and as a new bead came within reach an arm of the machine reached out and detached a filled sack from the side of the bead. It hurled it in-board to an unoccupied site on the floor, while another pair of arms neatly attached an empty sack to replace the full one. The rhythmic thump and clatter in Shelby's ears coincided with the detachment of the full bag and its empty replacement.

  Shelby stared out along the line of the dark cable. Like a necklace, it was not straight but formed a great arc in space.

  The center of the arc seemed to lie in the same direction as the apex of the birdcage arch above him.

  He raised his head farther and stared straight up. Sure enough, something was out there. It was partly obscured by the lattice of arching struts, but he saw an ugly, lumpy doughnut shape. The cable seemed to curve all the way from the ship where Shelby lay, to run behind the squashed silver ring.

  He was feeling more wretched than ever, but his aching brain threw at him an overall image of what he was seeing. The structure that he lay in was traveling steadily along the great circle of the cable. It was moving like this so that the machine clinging to the wall could reach out and take something every few meters from another bead. The silver open disk above his head lay at the center of the cable's arc. The gentle force that held Shelby to the floor was not the acceleration of a drive, as he had at first assumed, but the centrifugal force produced as he and the ship swung around that center like a stone on the end of a string.

  It was an explanation that seemed to explain nothing; and although the multi-armed machine might be perfectly comfortable in the near-vacuum of space, there was a limit to how long Shelby could survive inside his suit. His monitor showed that he had only enough air for about one more hour.

  Five minutes ago he had felt ready to die; now he was worried that he might. He raised himself higher above the rim of the wall.

  "Hey!" His call was feeble and croaking. "Hey! Is anybody there? Can anyone hear this radio?"

  No welcome human voice answered, but a screeching noise like high-pitched static added to the regular clanking in his earpiece. The sound was repeated several times, with a twenty-second pause between. The snakes' nest of wires on the machine's head writhed with new energy, but otherwise it seemed to take no notice. It calmly continued its work, lobbing filled sacks past Shelby onto unoccupied areas of the floor. The field of stars and dust cloud continued to turn steadily about them. The disk above neither grew nor shrank in apparent size.

  And that was all, for nearly an hour. Shelby was ready to t
hrow himself over the wall into open space—anything was better than sitting helpless until you went into a carbon dioxide coma—when he suddenly found himself in free-fall. The machine stopped throwing bags into the space where he was sitting and swung nimbly in over the wall. Before Shelby had time to worry about floating away into nowhere, a new force pressed him to the floor.

  This time, however, it was a true acceleration. Above his head the squashed disk began to grow in size. It was huge, and as they came closer Shelby could see several round openings in the broad outer side of it. The apex of the birdcage was heading straight for one of them.

  He expected the ship to fly on through to the interior, and was preparing for that when the struts above him suddenly sprang apart from each other, changing the closed tulip bud of the lattice into the form of a broad open flower. The ship stopped abruptly as the struts met the side of the disk.