The Billion Dollar Boy

by Charles Sheffield

  Shelby, along with the black bags and the bottle-shaped machine and anything else that was not held down, kept going. He flew on helplessly until his forward motion was slowed and halted by a waiting net, springy but strong.

  He found himself in pitch darkness. He hung there and groaned aloud in fear and misery.

  And a cheerful young voice answered his moan. "See!" it said. "I told you so."

  Another voice answered, "You were right, Gracie. And I thought old Logan was about ready for the scrap heap. Sorry about that, stranger. Welcome aboard!"

  Shelby felt a vibration in the net and heard a loud hissing. At the same time a cold blue-white light filled the space around him. He could finally see where he was. He lay in a big, bare-walled chamber, almost buried by filled black plastic bags. There seemed far more of them than he had seen collected by the machine. The aperture through which he had entered was now closed tight, and white jets of fog were emerging from the walls. He hoped that it was air—his supply was down to a few minutes—but his suit's monitor was not yet showing that the atmosphere around him was safe to breathe.

  Of the bottle-shaped machine there was no sign. Shelby struggled free of the heaps of soft bags. In what his balance centers told him was down, beneath the net, he saw a pair of suited figures. They stood on a sort of catwalk running across the width of the chamber.

  Humans—at last! He had seen enough of machines, here and on the Bellatrix, to last him the rest of his life.

  Clumsily, he scrambled over to the edge of the net and allowed himself to drop gently down onto the catwalk. One of the figures made a gesture toward his helmet, and they both began to take off their suits.

  His suit monitor agreed that there was now breathable air in the chamber. Shelby opened the seals with fingers that felt like somebody else's. It was a huge effort to remove his helmet, but at last he did so.

  The other two, astonishingly 5 were already completely out of their suits. They had managed the whole thing in just a few seconds. Shelby saw a grinning boy of twelve or thirteen, standing next to a girl close to his own age or maybe a bit older.

  They came easily across to him while he was still struggling to open the front of his suit.

  "Here." The boy reached out. "Let me help with that." And then, when he was close enough to sample the air that was leaking out into the chamber, "Phew! What have you been doing in there?"

  Shelby saw no need to reply. The smell made it obvious.

  "You must be feeling rotten," the girl said seriously. She was neatly and efficiently stripping him out of his suit. "I'm Grace Trask. Welcome aboard the Harvest Moon—best ship in the harvester fleet."

  "And I'm Doobie Trask," said the boy. "The brains of the family." He took Shelby's suit, placed the helmet inside, and dropped the whole thing casually to the floor. "I guess owe you an apology. Gracie believed Logan, and I didn't. What can we do for you now?—other than a good long bath."

  Shelby was tempted to say Send me back. He had a low opinion of the Bellatrix, but compared with this place it was a palace. On the other hand, what would Krupa and Malone and Garrity say if they found that he had come all the way out to the Kuiper Belt and then returned without seeing anything more than the inside of his spacesuit? He needed to prove that he had been somewhere and done something.

  "Who's Logan?" he asked. "I'd like to meet him, and some more people as well."

  "Well, you will," Grace Trask said. "After all, Logan was really the one who saved you. But there's plenty of time for that." She wrinkled her nose. "What else do you need?"

  Shelby became aware of his own powerful aroma. The suit had done its best, but that best wasn't nearly good enough. "Well, I guess that a hot shower would feel great."

  "A shower, and a meal?" Doobie asked. "We'll be eating soon."

  "Maybe." And maybe not. At the mention of food Shelby's mouth, throat, and stomach suddenly resonated with the feel and taste of Malone's fiendish usquebaugh. There was one liquid that he would never touch again. "A small meal." Doobie stared at him curiously. "No offense, but you don't look like somebody who eats small meals. But let's get moving and we'll find out. By the way, what's your name?"

  "Shelby Cheever. Actually, it's Shelby Crawford Jerome Prescott Cheever." Shelby paused expectantly. Anywhere on Earth that name would produce instant attention and respect, and then the question, "Are you related in any way to the Jerome Prescott Cheever?"

  "Bit of a mouthful," Doobie said casually. "If you don't mind, Gracie and I will just introduce you to people as Shel. All right?"

  "Fine." Shelby smiled to himself. Apparently Cheever Consolidated Enterprises was not yet a synonym for wealth and power to teenagers out in the Kuiper Belt. The surprise to Grace and Doobie Trask would be that much greater when they learned the truth.

  "A shower, a meal, and meet some people," he went on. "That would be perfect. Let's take maybe four hours. Then I'll have to be heading back."

  Grace Trask had been leading the way, moving from the entry chamber along a bare metal-walled corridor that passed from the cargo holds to the living quarters of the Harvest Moon. Now she paused. She and Doobie stared at each other, then turned to face Shelby. "Getting back?" she said.

  "To the Asteroid Belt. My ticket promised me a trip through the node network, but I can't stay away too long because Mother will give me hell if I do. She'll say the Bellatrix has to finish the cruise and get back to Earth—though I don't know why she'd care. So far she hasn't even looked outside."

  "Getting back," Grace said again, as though she hadn't heard one word that Shelby had said. "To the Asteroid Belt and Earth."

  "That's right. You got it. We have four hours, maybe five."

  "Shel, just where do you think you are?"

  "In the Kuiper Belt, in the mining region." Shelby thought suddenly of the swirling cloud of blue and indigo. It was like nothing he had ever heard of—and the sky outside the ship had contained nothing as bright as Sol, even diminished by fifteen billion kilometers of distance.

  "Isn't that where I am?" he asked, almost in a whisper; but from their faces he already knew the answer.

  "Where you are," said Grace, slowly and carefully, "is not in the Kuiper Belt. It's not anywhere close to the Kuiper Belt. I don't know how you got here or why you came, but you are on board the independent harvester Harvest Moon. And we are in the middle of the Messina Dust Cloud. We are twenty-seven light-years from Earth, the Asteroid Belt, the Kuiper Belt, and anything else in the vicinity of Sol."

  She moved to stand right in front of him. "I hate to tell you this, Shel. But you're an awful long way from home."

  At first Shelby thought that Grace Trask was making a mountain out of nothing.

  So he had screwed up using the node network, and accidentally jumped to a node much farther out than his intended goal of the Kuiper Belt. Big deal. That wasn't important. From everything he had heard, physical distance didn't mean much when you used the node network.

  You used more energy, of course, and you would receive a bigger bill for the service. But so what? Such things had nothing to do with Shelby. His army of accountants back on Earth were employed to deal with those sorts of matters. As for the cost, he could hop out to the Messina Dust Cloud and back every day for the rest of his life and still not make a dent in his trust funds.

  His confidence persisted through a brain-restoring shower followed by a simple meal that he, Grace, and Doobie ate together tucked away in a corner of the Harvest Moon's cramped galley. While Shelby wolfed down food—his appetite had miraculously returned—Doobie prattled nonstop about the superior talents aboard their ship and the marvels of the Messina Cloud.

  "Thirty-one independent harvesters at work now," he said, "but not one to match us. Muv knows the Cloud like the back of her hand. She finds the pockets of stable transuranics like she can smell 'em. We're smack in the middle of one now."

  Shelby didn't actually know what transuranics were and he was reluctant to ask. "You mean the t
ransuranics come from way out here?" he asked.

  "Every last gram of 'em, from the Messina Cloud. Have to." Doobie stared hard at Shelby. "You say you're from Earth. I guess that explains it."

  "Explains what?"

  "Why you don't seem to know scut about anything. I don't blame you," Doobie went on, with a sweeping generosity that made Shelby fume. "Way I see it, when you're one of fourteen billion trying to figure out where your next meal comes from, you don't have time to worry none about much else."

  Shelby decided, in that same instant, that he was somehow going to take Doobie to Earth and show him the Cheever estate; the Cheever model city, too, and the Cheever sea farms, and maybe a few dozen of the Cheever model factories.

  "Stable transuranics only come from the Messina Cloud," Doobie continued. "In fact, until they put a node here, nobody knew they was even possible."

  "But what are they?" Shelby didn't mind asking anymore. His time would come to tell Doobie and Grace something of his life on Earth.

  "Transuranics?" Doobie stared at Shelby open-mouthed. "Whoo! You telling me you don't know even that? You do know the table of the elements by heart, don't you?"

  "No." Shelby's private tutors had mentioned it, or at least he thought they had. But there seemed no reason why anyone in his right mind would want to commit that sort of thing to memory.

  "You will," Doobie said mysteriously. "Anyway, there's ninety-two natural elements. Hydrogen's the lightest, uranium's the heaviest. You can make heavier ones yet, but trouble is, the transuranics aren't stable—they're radioactive, and they decay over time into other things."

  "I do know that much." Shelby didn't like Doobie's know-it-all attitude, but what he found harder to take was Grace Trask's sympathetic silence.

  "Ah—but sometimes they don't decay," said Doobie. "Here, in the Messina Cloud, there are stable transuranic elements."

  "But if everywhere else they're not stable—"

  "They're not naturally stable, even here. Somebody or something made them stable, using a technique nobody understands yet. Near as we can figure it"—Doobie spoke with the casual self-confidence of someone who might well have done the research work himself—"something pretty bad happened here maybe two million years ago. That's when the whole dust cloud was created. But we don't really know, because anything around here at that time was created. Who knows? Maybe sometime the same thing will happen again."

  "So what are you doing here?" It seemed crazy to Shelby that anyone would discover a danger spot and go there voluntarily.

  "I just told you." Doobie spoke as though to a small and backward child. "For the transuranics! People have to make a living, you know. I suppose you don't?"

  The temptation was great, but Shelby restrained himself. He would reveal exactly who he was when he had a larger audience. More than two people deserved to watch Doobie Trask's mouth drop open in amazement.

  "What I don't see is how you knew the stable transuranics were here," he said mildly. "Twenty-seven light-years is a long way. And finding a network node right where you want it seems too good to be true."

  "It would be, if we had." Grace from her close inspection of Shelby seemed to suspect that he was hiding something, but her friendly manner did not change. "Actually, it worked the other way round. Over a century and a half ago the Messina Cloud was noticed as a peculiar little blob in space with strange spectral emission lines. It was only a few light-hours across, and nobody had any idea what might be here. But a photon information packet was sent out at light speed to investigate. When it arrived it discovered the stable transuranics. After that the packet used the cloud's own materials to fabricate the first node. That was just tiny, but with a little one in place materials could be sent through to make it bigger. Everything was bootstrapped like that until there was finally a node big enough for the Harvest Moon and the other independent harvesters to come through. And then we were off and running."

  Shelby might not know much about transuranics, but his father's business sense had been delivered with his genes.

  "Doesn't figure," he said. "It must have cost a fortune to put that node in place. Who paid for it?"

  "We did. And we do." Grace's voice was bitter. "The cost of our node was covered long ago, but every independent harvester who works the Messina Cloud still pays the node tax. That's where most of our profits go—back to some bloodsucking finance shark on Earth. Every gram of transuranics pays its toll, and what do we see in return? Nothing."

  Shelby had a vague recollection that Cheever Enterprises held a market corner in bringing superheavy elements down to Earth. It didn't seem the moment to mention that. The arrival of three more people in the galley while Grace was still talking came as a distinct relief.

  The newcomers formed a mixed trio. The man leading the way was tall and imposing and overweight. His white hair was receding, but he made up for that with a flourishing set of bushy white side-whiskers that framed a ruddy face. As he walked, he kept turning to the man behind him.

  "If I've told you once, I've told you a million times," he grumbled. "The corries are designed to dock themselves. You don't need to be in there a-doing. You start to dabble and you're guaranteed to have trouble."

  "Yes, Thurgood. I won't do it again. I promise." The man following was short and of a slight build, and his pale gray eyes and unlined brow gave him a look of guileless innocence.

  "You do, do you?" Thurgood's face went redder with frustration. "And haven't you told me that same thing a million times? And still you're at it."

  "Maybe. Maybe I have told you that. I'm not sure."

  "Well, I'm sure." The fat man snorted. "As sure as Doobie there will steal your food from the galley. But every time when we're on final approach, you start in on them controls again and throw me head over teakettle, and I finish smack up in the cargo with even the machines laughing at me. I'm telling you, Scrimshander Limes"—the way he spoke the words sounded more like an oath than a name—"I'm telling you that if you do it one more time, then as sure as my name's Thurgood Trask I'll—I'll . . ."

  It sounded serious, but Shelby saw Grace Trask's delighted grin. Whatever it was between Thurgood Trask and Scrimshander Limes, it had been going on for a long time.

  "I won't do it anymore." Scrimshander spoke contritely.

  "You better not. Or there'll be consequences." Thurgood Trask turned and caught sight of Doobie, who happened to be winking at Shelby. The big man once more addressed the man walking behind him. "There will be consequences. For instance, you might find, Scrimshander Limes, that instead of being partnered with me, who helps you every way he can, you'll be harvesting the cloud with a young lout who lacks the decency to show respect to his elders and betters even when they happen to be his own flesh and blood and they never ask anything more of him than an uncle should be able to expect from a nephew. You wouldn't want that, would you?"

  Scrimshander hesitated. He gave the impression that he had become lost somewhere in the middle of Thurgood Trask's last speech. "No, Thurgood," he said at last. "I wouldn't want that. Would I?"

  "You certainly would not."

  "Then I wouldn't."

  "All right, then. Enough said." Thurgood Trask sniffed and stepped forward to inspect the contents of the galley."

  "I cooked that," Doobie said at once. "It's mine."

  "Are you going to eat it?"

  "I dunno. I might."

  "That's quite enough, Doobie." The woman who had entered behind the other two spoke for the first time. "Uncle Thurgood and Scrimshander will eat as much of that food as they like. And you can introduce me to our accidental visitor, and let me welcome him aboard."

  She was short and slenderly built, and her voice was low and pleasant. But Shelby had been observing pecking-order ladders since he was an infant. He had no doubt who was in charge.

  He stepped toward the woman. "I'm Shelby. Shelby Cheever." Again he waited for the name to have its magical effect, and again he was disappointed.

&nbs
p; The woman merely held out her hand. "Lana Trask. Captain of the Harvest Moon; and mother, for my sins, of these two." She smiled at Grace and Doobie. "I hope they've been looking after you."

  "Just fine, thanks." Shelby shook her hand vigorously. "I'm really grateful. And I'll prove it, believe me I will. You may not realize just who your ship has picked up." He stood a little straighter, put one hand in his pocket, and stuck out his belly. He coughed in a self-conscious way. "My full name is Shelby Crawford Jerome Prescott Cheever. When you send me back I'm going to make sure that you get a reward— a big one. Money. And how's a new ship sound to you?" He glanced around the galley with its battered fixtures. "Seems to me the Harvest Moon's a little bit old and dirty and creaky."

  Grace Trask's action should have warned him. She turned her head so that Shelby could see her face and Lana Trask could not, and mouthed "No!"