More Wandering Stars

by Jack Dann (ed)

  While I was getting the hold door open, we both heard a faint bass moan, conducted up from the ground through the landing shoes. Chaim asked whether it was the ground settling; I’d never heard it happen before, but said that was probably it. We were right.

  I got the door open and looked out. Biarritz looked just like I’d expected it to: a rock, a pockmarked chunk of useless rock. The only relief from the grinding monotony of the landscape was the silver splash of congealed lead directly below us.

  We seemed to be at a funny angle. I thought it was an optical illusion—if the ship hadn’t been upright on landing, it would have registered on the attitude readout. Then the bright lead splash started moving, crawling away under the ship. It took me a second to react.

  I shouted something unoriginal and scrambled for the ladder to the control room. One short blip from the main engine and we’d be safely away. Didn’t make it.

  The situation was easy enough to reconstruct, afterwards. We’d landed on a shelf of rock that couldn’t support the weight of the Bonne Chance. The sound we had heard was the shelf breaking off, settling down a few meters, canting the ship at about a ten-degree angle. The force of friction between our landing pads and the basalt underfoot was almost negligible, in so little gravity, and we slid downhill until we reached bottom, and then gracefully tipped over. When I got to the control room, after quite a bit of bouncing around in slow-motion, everything was sideways and the controls were dead, dead, dead.

  Chaim was lively enough, shouting and sputtering. Back in the hold, he was buried under a pile of crates, having had just enough time to unstrap them before the ship went over. I explained the situation to him while helping him out.

  “We’re stuck here, eh?”

  “I don’t know yet. Have to fiddle around some.”

  “No matter. Inconvenient, but no matter. We’re going to be so rich we could have a fleet of rescuers here tomorrow morning.”

  “Maybe,” I said, knowing it wasn’t so—even if there were a ship at Faraway, it couldn’t possibly make the trip in less than ten days. “First thing we have to do, though, is put up that dome.” Our suits weren’t the recycling kind; we had about ten hours before we had to start learning how to breathe carbon dioxide.

  We sorted through the jumble and found the various components of the pop-up geodesic. I laid it out on a piece of reasonably level ground and pulled the lanyard. It assembled itself very nicely. Chaim started unloading the ship while I hooked up the life-support system.

  He was having a fine time, kicking crates out the door and watching them float to the ground a couple of meters below. The only one that broke was a case of whiskey—every single bottle exploded, damn it, making a cloud of brownish crystals that slowly dissipated. So Biarritz was the only planet in the universe with a bonded-bourbon atmosphere.

  When Chaim got to his booze, a case of gin, he carried it down by hand.

  We set up housekeeping while the dome was warming. I was still opening boxes when the bell went off, meaning there was enough oxygen and heat for life. Chaim must have had more trust in automatic devices than I had; he popped off his helmet immediately and scrambled out of his suit. I took off my helmet to be sociable, but kept on working at the last crate, the one Chaim had said contained “the Mazel Tov papers.”

  I got the top peeled away and looked inside. Sure enough, it was full of paper, in loose stacks.

  I picked up a handful and looked at them. “Immigration forms?”

  Chaim was sitting on a stack of food cartons, peeling off his suit liner. “That’s right. Our fortune.”

  “‘Mazel Tov Immigration Bureau,’” I read off one of the sheets. “Who—”

  “You’re half of it. I’m half of it. Mazel Tov is the planet under your feet.” He slipped off the box. “Where’d you put our clothes?”

  “What?”

  “This floor’s cold.”

  “Uh, over by the kitchen.” I followed his naked wrinkled back as be clumped across the dome. “Look, you can’t just … name a planet …”

  “I can’t, eh?” He rummaged through the footlocker and found some red tights, struggled into them. “Who says I can’t?”

  “The Confederation! Hartford! You’ve got to get a charter.”

  He found an orange tunic that clashed pretty well and slipped it over his head. Muffled: “So I’m going to get a charter.”

  “Just like that.”

  He started strapping on his boots and looked at me with amusement. “No, not ‘just like that.’ Let’s make some coffee.” He filled two cups with water and put them in the heater.

  “You can’t just charter a rock with two people on it.”

  “You’re right. You’re absolutely right.” The timer went off. “Cream and sugar?”

  “Look—no, black—you mean to say you printed up some fake—”

  “Hot.” He handed me the cup. “Sit down. Relax. I’ll explain.”

  I was still in my suit, minus the helmet, so sitting was no more comfortable than standing. But I sat.

  He looked at me over the edge of his cup, through a veil of steam rising unnaturally fast. I made my first million when I was your age.”

  “You’ve got to start somewhere.”

  “Right. I made a million and paid eighty-five percent of it to the government of Nueva Argentina, who skimmed a little off the top and passed it on to New Hartford Transportation Rentals, Ltd.”

  “Must have hurt.”

  “It made me angry. It made me think. And I did get the germ of an idea.” He sipped.

  “Go on.”

  “I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of the Itzkbok Shipping Agency.”

  “No … it probably would have stuck in my mind.”

  “Very few people have. On the surface, it’s a very small operation. Four interplanetary ships, every one of them smaller than the Bonne Chance. But they’re engaged in interstellar commerce.”

  “Stars must be pretty close together.”

  “No … they started about twenty years ago. The shortest voyage is about half over. One has over a century to go.”

  “Doesn’t make any sense.”

  “But it does. It makes sense on two levels.” He set down the cup and laced his fingers together.

  “There are certain objects whose value almost has to go up with the passage of time. Jewelry, antiques, works of art. These are the only cargo I deal with. Officially.”

  “I see. I think.”

  “You see half of it. I buy these objects on relatively poor planets and ship them to relatively affluent ones. I didn’t have any trouble getting stockholders. Hartford wasn’t too happy about it, of course.”

  “What did they do?”

  He shrugged. “Took me to court. I’d studied the law, though, before I started Itzkhok. They didn’t press too hard—my company didn’t make one ten-thousandth of Hartford’s annual profit—and I won.”

  “And made a credit or two.”

  “Some three billion, legitimate profit. But the important thing is that I established a concrete legal precedent where none had existed before.”

  “You’re losing me again. Does this have anything to do with …”

  “Everything, patience. With this money, and money from other sources, I started building up a fleet. Through a number of dummy corporations … buying old ships, building new ones. I own or am leasing some two thousand ships. Most of them are loaded and on the pad right now.”

  “Wait, now.” Economics was never my strong suit, but this was obvious. “You’re going to drive your own prices down. There can’t be that big a market for old paintings and—”

  “Right, precisely. But most of these ships aren’t carrying such specialized cargo. The closest one, for instance, is on Tangiers, aimed for Faraway. It holds nearly a hundred thousand cubic meters of water.”

  “Water …”

  “Old passenger liner, flooded the damn thing. Just left a little room for ice expansion, in case the he
ating—”

  “Because on Faraway—”

  “—on Faraway there isn’t one molecule of water that men didn’t carry there. They recycle every drop but have to lose one percent or so annually.

  “Tonight or tomorrow I’m going to call up Faraway and offer to sell them 897,000 kilograms of water. At cost. Delivery in six years. It’s a long time to wait, but they’ll be getting it for a hundredth of the usual cost, what Hartford charges.”

  “And you’ll lose a bundle.”

  “Depends on how you look at it. Most of my capital is tied up in small, slow spaceships; I own some interest in three-quarters of the interplanetary vessels that exist. If my scheme works, all of them will double in value overnight.

  “Hartford, though, is going to lose more than a bundle. There are 237 other planets, out of 298, in a position similar to Faraway’s. They depend on Hartford for water, or seed, or medical supplies, or something else necessary for life.”

  “And you have deals set up—”

  “For all of them, right. Underbidding Hartford by at least a factor of ten.” He drank off the rest of his coffee in a gulp.

  “What’s to stop Hartford from underbidding you?”

  “Absolutely nothing.” He got up and started preparing another cup. “They’ll probably try to, here and there. I don’t think many governments will take them up on it.

  “Take Faraway as an example. They’re in a better position than most planets, as far as their debt to Hartford, because the Second Empire financed the start of their colonization. Still, they owe Hartford better than ten billion CU’s—their annual interest payment comes to several hundred million.

  “They keep paying it, not because of some abstract obligation to Hartford. Governments don’t have consciences. If they stopped paying, of course, they’d dry up and die in a generation. Until today, they didn’t have any choice in the matter.”

  “So what you’re doing is giving all of those planets a chance to welsh on their debts.”

  “That bothers you?” He sat back down, balanced the cup on his knee.

  “A little. I don’t love Hartford any more than—”

  “Look at it this way. My way. Consider Hartford as an arm of the government, the Confederation.”

  “I’ve always thought it was the other way around.”

  “In a practical sense, yes. But either way. A government sends its people out to colonize virgin lands. It subsidizes them at first; once the ball is rolling, it collects allegiance and taxes.

  “The ‘debt’ to Hartford is just a convenient fiction to justify taking these taxes.”

  “There are services rendered, though. Necessary to life.”

  “Rendered and paid for, separately. I’m going to prove to the ‘colonies’ that they can provide these services to each other. It will be even easier once Hartford goes bankrupt. There’ll be no monopoly on starships. No Confederation to protect patents.”

  “Anarchy, then.”

  “Interesting word. I prefer to call it revolution … but yes, things will be pretty hectic for a while.”

  “All right. But if you wanted to choreograph a revolution, why didn’t you pick a more comfortable planet to do it from? Are you just hiding?”

  “Partly that. Mostly, though, I wanted to do everything legally. For that, I needed a very small planet without a charter.”

  “I’m lost again.” I made myself another cup of coffee and grieved for the lack of bourbon. Maybe if I went outside and took a deep breath …

  “You know what it takes to charter a planet?” Chaim asked me.

  “Don’t know the numbers. Certain population density and high enough gross planetary product.”

  “The figures aren’t important. They look modest enough on paper. The way it works out, though, is that by the time a planet is populated enough and prosperous enough to get its independence, it’s almost guaranteed to be irretrievably in debt to Hartford.”

  “That’s what all those immigration forms are for. Half of those stacks are immigration forms and the other half, limited powers of attorney. I’m going to claim this planet, name it Mazel Tov, and accept my own petition for citizenship on behalf of 4,783 immigrants. Then I make one call, to my lawyer.” He named an Earth-based interplanetary law firm so well-known that even I had heard of it.

  “They will call about a hundred of these immigrants, each of whom will call ten more, then ten more, and so on. All prearranged. Each of them then pays me his immigration fee.”

  “How much is that?”

  “Minimum, ten million CU’s.”

  “God!”

  “It’s a bargain. A new citizen gets one share in the Mazel Tov Corporation for each million he puts in. In thirty minutes MTC should have almost as much capital behind it as Hartford has.”

  “Where could you find four thousand—”

  “Twenty years of persuasion. Of coordination. I’ve tried to approach every living man of wealth whose fortune is not tied up with Hartford or the Confederation. I’ve showed them my plan—especially the safeguards on it that make it a low-risk, high-return investment—and every single one of them has signed up.”

  “Not one betrayal?”

  “No—what could the Confederation or Hartford offer in return? Wealth? Power? These men already have that in abundance.

  “On the other hand, I offer them a gift beyond price: independence. And incidentally, no taxes, ever. That’s the first article of the charter.”

  He let me absorb that for a minute. “It’s too facile,” I said. “If your plan works, everything will fall apart for the Confederation and Hartford—but look what we get instead. Four thousand—some independent robber barons, running the whole show. That’s an improvement?”

  “Who can say? But that’s revolution: throw the old set of bastards out and install your own set. At least it’ll be different. Time for a change.”

  I got up. “Look, this is too much, too fast. I’ve got to think about it. Digest it. Got to check out the ship, too.”

  Chaim went along with me halfway to the air lock. “Good, good. I’ll start making calls.” He patted the transceiver with real affection. “Good thing this baby came along when it did. It would have been difficult coordinating this thing, passing notes around. Maybe impossible.”

  It didn’t seem that bloody easy, even with all those speedy little tachyons helping us. I didn’t say anything.

  It was a relief to get back into my own element, out of the dizzying fumes of high finance and revolution. But it was short-lived.

  Things started out just dandy. The reason the control board was dead was that its cable to the fuel cells had jarred loose. I plugged it back in and set up a systems check. The systems check ran for two seconds and quit. What was wrong with the ship was number IV-A-I-a. It took me a half-hour to find the manual, which had slid into the head and nestled up behind the commode.

  “IV” was fusion power source. “IV-A” was generation of magnetic field for containment thereof. “IV-A-I” was disabilities of magnetic field generator. And “IV-A-I-a,” of course, was permanent disability. It had a list of recommended types of replacement generators.

  Well, I couldn’t run down to the store and pick up a generator. And you can’t produce an umpty-million-gauss fusion mirror by rubbing two sticks together. So I kicked Mlle. Biarritz’s book across the room and went back to the dome.

  Chaim was hunched over the transceiver, talking to somebody while he studied his own scribblings in a notebook.

  “We’re stuck here,” I said.

  He nodded at me and kept up the conversation. “—that’s right. Forty thousand bushels, irradiated, for five hundred thousand CU’s … so what? So it’s a gift. It’s guaranteed. Delivery in about seven years, you’ll get details … all right, fine. A pleasure to do business. Thank you, sir.”

  He switched off and leaned back and laughed. “They all think I’m crazy!”

  “We’re stuck here,” I said again.
/>   “Don’t worry about it, don’t worry,” he said, pointing to an oversized credit flash attached to the transceiver. It had a big number on it that was constantly changing, going up. “That is the total assets of Mazel Tov Corporation.” He started laughing again.

  “Minims?”

  “No, round credits.”

  I counted places. “A hundred and twenty-eight billion … credits?”

  “That’s right, right. You want to go to Faraway? We’ll have it towed here.”

  “A hundred and twenty-nine billion?” It was really kind of hard to grasp.

  “Have a drink—celebrate!” There was a bowl of ice and a bottle of gin on the floor beside him. God, I hate gin.

  “Think I’ll fix a cup of tea.” By the time I’d had my cup, cleaned up, and changed out of my suit, Chaim was through with his calls. The number on the credit flash was up to 239,605,967,000 and going up slowly.

  He took his bottle, glass, and ice to his bunk and asked me to start setting up the rescue mission.

  I called Hartford headquarters on Earth. Six people referred me to their superiors and I wound up talking to the Coordinator of Interstellar Transit himself. I found out that bad news travels fast.

  “Mazel Tov?” his tinny voice said. “I’ve heard of you, new planet out by Rigel? Next to Faraway?”

  “That’s right. We need a pickup and we can pay.”

  “Oh, that’s not the problem. Right now there just aren’t any ships available. Won’t be for several months. Maybe a year.”

  “What? We only have three months’ worth of air!” By this time Chaim was standing right behind me, breathing gin into my ear.

  “I’m really very sorry. But I thought that by the time a planet gets its charter, it should be reasonably self-sufficient.”

  “That’s murder!” Chaim shouted.

  “No, sir,” the voice said. “Just unfortunate planning on your part. You shouldn’t have filed for—” Chaim reached over my shoulder and slapped the switch off, hard. He stomped back to his bunk—difficult to do with next to no gravity—sat down and shook some gin into his glass. He looked at it and set it on the floor.

  “Who can we bribe?” I asked.