Tinker
By Jerry Pournelle 
From High Justice

"The tinker came astridin', astridin' over the Strand, with his bullocks—"
"Rollo!"
"Yes, ma'am." I'd been singing at the top of my lungs, as I do when I've got a difficult piloting job, and I'd forgotten that my wife was in the control cab. I went back to the problem of setting our sixteen thousand tons of ship onto the rock.
It wasn't much of a rock. Jefferson is an irregular-shaped asteroid about twice as far out as Earth. It measures maybe seventy kilometers by fifty kilometers, and from far enough away it looks like an old mud brick somebody used for a shotgun target. It has a screwy rotation pattern that's hard to match with, and since I couldn't use the main engines, setting down was a tricky job.
Janet wasn't finished. "Roland Kephart, I've told you about those songs."
"Yeah, sure, hon." There are two inertial platforms in Slingshot, and they were giving me different readings. We were closing faster than I liked.
"It's bad enough that you teach them to the boys. Now the girls are—"
I motioned toward the open intercom switch, and Janet blushed. We fight a lot, but that's our private business.
The attitude jets popped. ''Hear this," I said. "I think we're coming in too fast. Brace yourselves." The jets popped again, short bursts that stirred up dust storms on the rocky surface below. "But I don't think—" the ship jolted into place with a loud clang. We hit hard enough to shake things, but none of the red lights came on "—well break anything. Welcome to Jefferson. We're down."
Janet came over and cut off the intercom switch, and we hugged each other for a second. "Made it again," she said, and I grinned.
There wasn't much doubt on the last few trips, but when we first put Slingshot together out of the wreckage of two salvaged ships, every time we boosted out there'd been a good chance we'd never set down again. There's a lot that can go wrong in the Belt, and not many ships to rescue you.
I pulled her over to me and kissed her. "Sixteen years," I said. "You don't look a day older."
She didn't, either. She still had dark red hair, same color as when I met her at Elysium Mons Station on Mars, and if she got it out of a bottle she never told me, not that I'd want to know. She was wearing the same thing I was, a skintight body stocking that looked as if it had been sprayed on. The purpose was strictly functional, to keep you alive if Slinger sprung a leak, but on her it produced some interesting curves. I let my hands wander to a couple of the more fascinating conic sections, and she snuggled against me.
She put her head close to my ear and whispered breathlessly, "Comm panel's lit."
"Bat puckey." There was a winking orange light, showing an outside call on our hailing frequency. Janet handed me the mike with a wicked grin. "Lock up your wives and hide your daughters, the tinker's come to town," I told it.
"Slingshot, this is Freedom Station. Welcome back, Cap'n Rollo."
"Jed?" I asked.
"Who the hell'd you think it was?"
"Anybody. Thought maybe you'd fried yourself in the solar furnace. How are things?" Jed's an old friend. Like a lot of asteroid Port Captains, he's a publican. The owner of the bar nearest the landing area generally gets the job, since there's not enough traffic to make Port Captains a full-time deal. Jed used to be a miner in Pallas, and we'd worked together before I got out of the mining business.
We chatted about our families, but Jed didn't seem as interested as he usually is. I figured business wasn't too good. Unlike most asteroid colonies, Jefferson's independent. There's no big corporation to pay taxes to, but on the other hand there's no big organization to bail the Jeffersonians out if they get in too deep.
"Got a passenger this trip," I said.
"Yeah? Rockrat?" Jed asked.
"Nope. Just passing through. Oswald Dalquist. Insurance adjuster. He's got some kind of policy settlement to make here, then he's with us to Marsport."
There was a long pause, and I wondered what Jed was thinking about. "I'll be aboard in a little," he said. "Freedom Station out."
Janet frowned. "That was abrupt."
"Sure was." I shrugged and began securing the ship. There wasn't much to do. The big work is shutting down the main engines, and we'd done that a long way out from Jefferson. You don't run an ion engine toward an inhabited rock if you care about your customers.
"Better get the big'uns to look at the inertia! platforms, hon," I said. "They don't read the same."
"Sure. Hal thinks it's the computer."
"Whatever it is, we better get it fixed." That would be a job for the oldest children. Our family divides nicely into the Big Ones, the Little Ones, and the Baby, with various subgroups and pecking orders that Janet and I don't understand. With nine kids aboard, five ours and four adopted, the system can get confusing. Jan and I find it's easier to let them work out the chain of command for themselves.
I unbuckled from the seat and pushed away. You can't walk on Jefferson, or any of the small rocks. You can't quite swim through the air, either. Locomotion is mostly a matter of jumps.
As I sailed across the cabin, a big grey shape sailed up to meet me, and we met in a tangle of arms and claws. I pushed the tomcat away. "Damn it—"
"Can't you do anything without cursing?"
"Blast it, then. I've told you to keep that animal out of the control lab."
"I didn't let him in." She was snappish, and for that matter so was I. We'd spent better than six hundred hours cooped up in a small space with just ourselves, the kids, and our passenger, and it was time we had some outside company.
The passenger had made it more difficult. We don't fight much in front of the kids, but with Oswald Dalquist aboard the atmosphere was different from what we're used to. He was always very formal and polite, which meant we had to be, which meant our usual practice of getting the minor irritations over with had been exchanged for bottling them up.
Jan and I had a major fight coming, and the sooner it happened the better it would be for both of us.

Slingshot is built up out of a number of compartments. We add to the ship as we have to—and when we can afford it. I left Jan to finish shutting down and went below to the living quarters. We'd been down fifteen minutes, and the children were loose.
Papers, games, crayons, toys, kids' clothing, and books had all more or less settled on the "down" side. Raquel, a big bluejay the kids picked up somewhere, screamed from a cage mounted on one bulkhead. The compartment smelled of bird droppings.
Two of the kids were watching a TV program beamed out of Marsport. Their technique was to push themselves upward with their arms and float up to the top of the compartment, then float downward again until they caught themselves just before they landed. It took nearly a minute to make a full circuit in Jefferson's weak gravity.
I went over and switched off the set. The program was a western, some horse opera made in the 1940's.
Jennifer and Craig wailed in unison. "That's educational. Dad."
They had a point, but we'd been through this before. For kids who've never seen Earth and may never go there, anything about Terra can probably be educational, but I wasn't in a mood to argue. "Get this place cleaned up."
"It's Roger's turn. He made the mess." Jennifer, being eight and two years older than Craig, tends to be spokesman and chief petty officer for the Little Ones.
"Get him to help, then. But get cleaned up."
"Yes, sir." They worked sullenly, flinging the clothing into corner bins, putting the books into the clips, and the games into lockers. There really is a place for everything in Slingshot, although most of the time you wouldn't know it.
I left them to their work and went down to the next level. My office is on one side of that, balanced by the "passenger suite" which the second oldest boy uses when we don't have paying customers. Oswald Dalquist was just coming out of his cabin.
"Good morning, Captain," he said. In all the time he'd been aboard he'd never called me anything but "Captain," although he accepted Janet's invitation to use her first name. A very formal man, Mr. Oswald Dalquist.
"I'm just going down to reception," I told him. "The Port Captain will be aboard with the health officer in a minute. You'd better come down, there will be forms to fill out."
"Certainly. Thank you, Captain." He followed me through the airlock to the level below, which was shops, labs, and the big compartment that serves as a main entryway to Slingshot.
Dalquist had been a good passenger, if a little distant. He stayed in his compartment most of the time, did what he was told, and never complained. He had very polished manners, and everything he did was precise, as if he thought out every gesture and word in advance.
I thought of him as a little man, but he wasn't really. I stand about six three, and Dalquist wasn't a lot smaller than me, but he acted little. He worked for Butterworth Insurance, which I'd never heard of, and he said he was a claims adjuster, but I thought he was probably an accountant sent out because they didn't want to send anyone more important to a nothing rock like Jefferson.
Still, he'd been around. He didn't talk much about himself, but every now and then he'd let slip a story that showed he'd been on more rocks than most people; and he knew ship routines pretty well. Nobody had to show him things more than once. Since a lot of life-support gadgetry in Slingshot is Janet's design, or mine, and certainly isn't standard, he had to be pretty sharp to catch on so quick.
He had expensive gear, too. Nothing flashy, but his helmet was one of Goodyear's latest models, his skintight was David Clark's best with "stretch steel" threads woven in with the nylon, and his coveralls were a special design by Abercrombie & Fitch, with lots of gadget pockets and a self-cleaning low-friction surface. It gave him a pretty natty appearance, rather than the battered look the old rockrats have.
I figured Butterworth Insurance must pay their adjustors more than I thought, or else he had a hell of an expense account.
The entryway is a big compartment. It's filled with nearly everything you can think of: dresses, art objects, gadgets and gizmos, spare parts for air bottles, sewing machines, and anything else Janet or I think we can sell in the way-stops we make with Slingshot. Janet calls it the "boutique," and she's been pretty clever about what she buys. It makes a profit, but like everything we do, just barely.
I've heard a lot of stories about tramp ships making a lot of money. Their skippers tell me whenever we meet. Before Jan and I fixed up Slingshot I used to believe them. Now I tell the same stories about fortunes made and lost, but the truth is we haven't seen any fortune.
We could use one. Hal, our oldest, wants to go to Marsport Tech, and that's expensive. Worse, he's just the first of nine. Meanwhile, Barclay's wants the payments kept up on the mortgage they hold on Slinger, fuel prices go up all the time, and the big Corporations are making it harder for little one-ship outfits like mine to compete.
We got to the boutique just in time to see two figures bounding like wallabies across the big flat area that serves as Jefferson's landing field. Every time one of the men would hit ground he'd fling up a burst of dust that fell like slow-motion bullets to make tiny craters around his footsteps. The landscape was bleak, nothing but rocks and craters, with the big steel airlock entrance to Freedom Port the only thing to remind you that several thousand souls lived here.
We couldn't see it, because the horizon's pretty close on Jefferson, but out beyond the airlock there'd be the usual solar furnaces, big parabolic mirrors to melt down ores. There was also a big trench shimmering just at the horizon: ice. One of Jefferson's main assets is water. About ten thousand years ago Jefferson collided with the head of a comet and a lot of the ice stayed aboard.
The two figures reached Slingshot and began the long climb up the ladder to the entrance. They moved fast, and I hit the buttons to open the outer door so they could let themselves in.
Jed was at least twice my age, but like all of us who live in low gravity it's hard to tell just how old that is. He has some wrinkles, but he could pass for fifty. The other guy was a Dr. Stewart, and I didn't know him. There'd been another doctor, about my age, the last time I was in Jefferson, but he'd been a contract man and the Jeffersonians couldn't afford him. Stewart was a young chap, no more than twenty, born in Jefferson back when they called it Grubstake and Blackjack Dan was running the colony. He'd got his training the way most people get an education in the Belt, in front of a TV screen.
The TV classes are all right, but they have their limits. I hoped we wouldn't have any family emergencies here. Janet's a TV Doc, but unlike this Stewart chap she's had a year residency in Marsport General, and she knows the limits of TV training. We've got a family policy that she doesn't treat the kids for anything serious if there's another doctor around, but between her and a new TV-trained MD there wasn't much choice.
"Everybody healthy?" Jed asked.
"Sure." I took out the log and showed where Janet had entered "no communicable diseases" and signed it.
Stewart looked doubtful. "I'm supposed to examine everyone myself. ..."
"For Christ's sake," Jed told him. He pulled at his bristly mustache and glared at the young doc. Stewart glared back. "Well, 'least you can see if they're still warm," Jed conceded. "Cap'n Rollo, you got somebody to take him up while we get the immigration forms taken care of?"
"Sure." I called Pam on the intercom. She's second oldest. When she got to the boutique, Jed sent Dr. Stewart up with her. When they were gone, he took out a big book of forms.
For some reason every rock wants to know your entire life history before you can get out of your ship. I never have found out what they do with all the information. Dalquist and I began filling out forms while Jed muttered.
"Butterworth Insurance, eh?" Jed asked. "Got much business here?"
Dalquist looked up from the forms. "Very little. Perhaps you can help me. The insured was a Mr. Joseph Colella.  I will need to find the beneficiary, a Mrs. Barbara Morrison Colella."
"Joe Colella?" I must have sounded surprised because they both looked at me. "I brought Joe and Barbara to Jefferson. Nice people. What happened to him?"
"Death certificate said accident." Jed said it just that way, flat, with no feeling. Then he added, "Signed by Dr. Stewart."
Jed sounded as if he wanted Dalquist to ask him a question, but the insurance man went back to his forms. When it was obvious that he wasn't going to say anything more, I asked Jed, "Something wrong with the accident?"
Jed shrugged. His lips were tightly drawn. The mood in my ship had definitely changed for the worse, and I was sure Jed had more to say. Why wasn't Dalquist asking questions?
Something else puzzled me. Joe and Barbara were more than just former passengers. They were friends we were looking forward to seeing when we got to Jefferson. I was sure we'd mentioned them several times in front of Dalquist, but he'd never said a word.
We'd taken them to Jefferson about five Earth years before. They were newly married, Joe pushing sixty and Barbara less than half that. He'd just retired as a field agent for Hansen Enterprises, with a big bonus he'd earned in breaking up some kind of insurance scam. They were looking forward to buying into the Jefferson co-op system. I'd seen them every trip since, the last time two years ago, and they were short of ready money like everyone else in Jefferson, but they seemed happy enough.
"Where's Barbara now?" I asked Jed.
"Working for Westinghouse. Johnny Peregrine's office."
"She all right? And the kids?"
Jed shrugged. "Everybody helps out when help's needed. Nobody's rich."
"They put a lot of money into Jeffereson stock," I said. "And didn't they have a mining claim?"
"Dividends on Jefferson Corporation stock won't even pay air taxes." Jed sounded more beat down than I'd ever known him. Even when things had looked pretty bad for us in the old days he'd kept all our spirits up with stupid jokes and puns. Not now. "Their claim
wasn't much good to start with, and without Joe to work it—"
His voice trailed off as Pam brought Dr. Stewart back into our compartment. Steward countersigned the log to certify that we were all healthy. "That's it, then," he said. "Ready to go ashore?"
"People waitin' for you in the Doghouse, Captain Rollo," Jed said. "Big meeting."
"I'll just get my hat."
"If there is no objection, I will come too," Dalquist said. "I wonder if a meeting with Mrs. Colella can be arranged?"
"Sure," I told him. "We'll send for her. Doghouse is pretty well the center of things in Jefferson anyway. Have her come for dinner."
"Got nothing good to serve." Jed's voice was gruff with a note of irritated apology.
"Well see." I gave him a grin and opened the airlock.

There aren't any dogs at the Doghouse. Jed had one when he first came to Jefferson, which is why the name, but dogs don't do very well in low gravs. Like everything else in the Belt, the furniture in Jed's bar is iron and glass except for what's aluminum and titanium. The place is a big cave hollowed out of the rock. There's no outside view, and the only things to look at are the TV and the customers.
There was a big crowd, as there always is in the Port Captain's place when a ship comes in. More business is done in bars than offices out here, which was why Janet and the kids hadn't come dirtside with me. The crowd can get rough sometimes.
The Doghouse has a big bar running all the way across on the side opposite the entryway from the main corridor. The bar's got a suction surface to hold down anything set on it, but no stools. The rest of the big room has tables and chairs and the tables have little clips to hold drinks and papers in place. There are also little booths around the outside perimeter for privacy. It's a typical layout. You can hold auctions in the big central area and make private deals in the booths.
Drinks are served with covers and straws because when you put anything down fast it sloshes out the top. You can spend years learning to drink beer in low gee if you don't want to sip it through a straw or squirt it out of a bulb.
The place was packed. Most of the customers were miners and shopkeepers, but a couple of tables were taken by company reps. I pointed out Johnny Peregrine to Dalquist. "He'll know how to find Barbara."
Dalquist smiled that tight little accountant's smile of his and went over to Peregrine's table.
There were a lot of others. The most important was Habib al Shamlan, the Iris Company factor. He was sitting with two hard cases, probably company cops.
The Jefferson Corporation people didn't have a table. They were at the bar, and the space between them and the other Company reps was clear, a little island of neutral area in the crowded room.
I'd drawn Jefferson's head honcho. Rhoda Hendrix was Chairman of the Board of the Jefferson Coporation, which made her the closest thing they had to a government. There was a big ugly guy with her. Joe Hornbinder had been around since Blackjack Dan's time. He still dug away at the rocks, hoping to get rich. Most people called him Horny for more than one reason.
It looked like this might be a good day. Everyone stared at us when we came in, but they didn't pay much attention to Dalquist. He was obviously a feather merchant, somebody they might have some fun with later on, and I'd have to watch out for him then, but right now we had important business.
Dalquist talked to Johnny Peregrine for a minute and they seemed to agree on something because Johnny nodded and sent one of his troops out. Dalquist went over into a corner and ordered a drink.
There's a protocol to doing business out here. I had a table all to myself, off to one side of the clear area in the middle, and Jed's boy brought me a big mug of beer with a hinged cap. When I'd had a good slug I took messages out of my pouch and scaled them out to people. Somebody bought me another drink, and there was a general gossip about what was happening around the Belt.
Al Shamlan was impatient. After a half hour, which is really rushing things for an Arab, he called across, his voice very casual, "And what have you brought us, Captain Kephart?"
I took copies of my manifest out of my pouch and passed them around. Everyone began reading, but Johnny Peregrine gave a big grin at the first item.
"Beef!" Peregine looked happy. He had 500 workers to feed.
"Nine tons," I agreed.
"Ten francs," Johnny said. "I'll take the whole lot."
"Fifteen," al Shamlan said.
I took a big glug of beer and relaxed. Jan and I'd taken a chance and won. Suppose somebody had flung a shipment of beef into transfer orbit a couple of years ago? A hundred tons could be arriving any minute, and mine wouldn't be worth anything.
Janet and I can keep track of scheduled ships, and we know pretty well where most of the tramps like us are going, but there's no way to be sure about goods in the pipeline. You can go broke in this racket.
There was more bidding, with some of the storekeepers getting in the act. I stood to make a good profit, but only the big corporations were bidding on the whole lot. The Jefferson Corporation people hadn't said a word. I'd heard things weren't going too well for them, but this made it certain. If miners have any money, they'll buy beef. Beef tastes like cow. The stuff you can make from algae is nutritious, but at best it's not appetizing, and Jefferson doesn't even have the plant to make textured vegetable proteins—not that TVP is any substitute for the real thing.
Eventually the price got up to where only Iris and Westinghouse were interested in the whole lot and I broke the cargo up, seven tons to the big boys and the rest in small lots. I didn't forget to save out a couple hundred kilos for Jed, and I donated half a ton for the Jefferson city hall people to throw a feed with. The rest went for about thirty francs a kilo.
That would just about pay for the deuterium I burned up coming to Jefferson. There was some other stuff, lightweight items they don't make outside the big rocks like Pallas, and that was all pure profit, I felt pretty good when the auction ended. It was only the preliminaries, of course, and the main event was what would let me make a couple of payments to Barclay's on Slingers mortgage, but it's a good feeling to know you can't lose money no matter what happens.
There was another round of drinks. Rockrats came over to my table to ask about friends I might have run into. Some of the storekeepers were making new deals, trading around things they'd bought from me. Dalquist came over to sit with me.
"Johnny finding your client for you?" I asked.
He nodded. "Yes. As you suggested, I have invited her to dinner here with us."
"Good enough. Jan and the kids will be in when the business is over."
Johnny Peregrine came over to the table. "Boosting cargo this trip?"
"Sure." The babble in the room faded out. It was time to start the main event.
The launch window to Luna was open and would be for another couple hundred hours. After that, the fuel needed to give cargo pods enough velocity to put them in transfer orbit to the Earth-Moon system would go up to where nobody could afford to send down anything massy.
There's a lot of traffic to Luna. It's cheaper, at the right time, to send ice down from the Belt than it is to carry it up from Earth. Of course, the Lunatics have to wait a couple of years for their water to get there, but there's always plenty in the pipeline. Luna buys metals, too, although they don't pay as much as Earth does.
"I'm ready if there's anything to boost," I said.
"I think something can be arranged," al Shamlan said.
"Hah!" Hornbinder was listening to us from his place at the bar. He laughed again. "Iris doesn't have any dee for a big shipment. Neither does Westinghouse. You want to boost, you'll deal with us."
I looked to al Shamlan. It's hard to tell what he's thinking, and not a lot easier to read Johnny Peregrine, but they didn't look very happy. "That true?" I asked.
Hornbinder and Rhoda Hendrix came over to the table. "Remember, we sent for you," Rhoda said.
"Sure." I had their guarantee in my pouch. Five thousand francs up front, and another five thousand if I got here on time. I'd beaten their deadline by twenty hours, which isn't bad considering how many million kilometers I had to come. "Sounds like you've got a deal in mind."
She grinned. She's a big woman, and as hard as the inside of an asteroid. I knew she had to be sixty, but she had spent most of that time in low gee. There wasn't much cheer in her smile. It looked more like the tomcat does when he's trapped a rat. "Like Horny says, we have all the deuterium. If you want to boost for Iris and Westinghouse, you'll have to deal with us."
"Bloody hell." I wasn't going to do as well out of this trip as I'd thought.
Hornbinder grinned. "How you like it now, you goddam bloodsucker?"
"You mean me?" I asked.
"Fucking A. You come out here and use your goddam ship a hundred hours, and you take more than we get for busting our balls a whole year. Fucking A, I mean you."
I'd forgotten Dalquist was at the table. "If you think boostship captains charge too much, why don't you buy your own ship?" he asked.
"Who the hell are you?" Horny demanded.
Dalquist ignored him. "You don't buy your own ships because you can't afford them. Ship owners have to make enormous investments. If they don't make good profits, they won't buy ships, and you won't get your cargo boosted at any price."
He sounded like a professor. He was right, of course, but he talked in a way that I'd heard the older kids use on the little ones. It always starts fights in our family and it looked like it was having the same result here.
"Shut up and sit down, Horny." Rhoda Hendrix was used to being obeyed. Hornbinder glared at Dalquist, but he took a chair. "Now let's talk business," Rhoda said. "Captain, it's simple enough. We'll charter your ship for the next seven hundred hours."
"That can get expensive."
She looked to al Shamlan and Peregrine. They didn't look very happy. "I think I know how to get our money back."
"There are times when it is best to give in gracefully," al Shamlan said. He looked to Johnny Peregrine and got a nod. "We are prepared to make a fair agreement with you, Rhoda. After all, you've got to boost your ice. We must send our cargo. It will be much cheaper for all of us if the cargoes go out in one capsule. What are your terms?"
"No deal," Rhoda said. "We'll charter Cap'n Rollo's ship, and you deal with us."
"Don't I get a say in this?" I asked.
"You'll get yours," Hornbinder muttered.
"Fifty thousand," Rhoda said. "Fifty thousand to charter your ship. Plus the ten thousand we promised to get you here."
"That's no more than I'd make boosting your ice," I said. I usually get five percent of cargo value, and the customer furnishes the dee and reaction mass. That ice was worth a couple of million when it arrived at Luna. Jefferson would probably have to sell it before then, but even with discounts, futures in that much water would sell at over a million new francs.
"Seventy thousand, then," Rhoda said.
There was something wrong here. I picked up my beer and took a long swallow. When I put it down, Rhoda was talking again. "Ninety thousand. Plus your ten. An even hundred thousand francs, and you get another one percent of whatever we get for the ice after we sell it."
"A counteroffer may be appropriate," al Shamlan said, He was talking to Johnny Peregrine, but he said it loud enough to be sure that everyone else heard him. "Will Westinghouse go halves with Iris on a charter?" Johnny nodded.
Al Shamlan's smile was deadly. "Charter your ship to us, Captain Kephart. One hundred and forty thousand francs, for exclusive use for the next six hundred hours. That price includes boosting a cargo capsule, provided that we furnish you the deuterium and reaction mass."
"One fifty. Same deal," Rhoda said.
"One seventy-five."
"Two hundred." Somebody grabbed her shoulder and tried to say something to her, but Rhoda pushed him away. "I know what I'm doing, Two hundred thousand." Al Shamlan shrugged. "You win. We can wait for the next launch window." He got up from the table. "Coming, Johnny?"
"In a minute." Peregrine had a worried look. "Ms. Hendrix, how do you expect to make a profit? I assure you that we won't pay what you seem to think we will."
"Leave that to me," she said. She still had that look: triumphant. The price didn't seem to bother her at all.
"Hum." Al Shamlan made a gesture of bafflement. "One thing, Captain. Before you sign with Rhoda, you might ask to see the money. I would be much surprised if Jefferson Corporation has two hundred thousand." He pushed himself away and sailed across the bar to the corridor door. "You know where to find me if things don't work out, Captain Kephart."
He went out, and his company cops came right after him. After a moment Peregrine and the other corporation people followed.
I wondered what the hell I'd got myself into this time.

Rhoda Hendrix was trying to be friendly. It didn't really suit her style.
I knew she'd come to Jefferson back when it was called Grubstake and Blackjack Dan was trying to set up an independent colony. Sometime in her first year she'd moved in with him, and pretty soon she was handling all his financial deals. There wasn't any nonsense about freedom and democracy back then. Grubstake was a big opportunity to get rich or get killed, and not much more.
When they found Blackjack Dan outside without a helmet, it turned out that Rhoda was his heir. She was the only one who knew what kind of deals he'd made anyway, so she took over his place. A year later she invented the Jefferson Corporation'. Everybody living on the rock had to buy stock, and she talked a lot about sovereign rights and government by the people. It takes a lot of something to govern a few thousand rockrats, and whatever it is, she had plenty. The idea caught on.
Now things didn't seem to be going too well, and her face showed it when she tried to smile. "Glad that's all settled," she said. "How's Janet?"
"The family is fine, the ship's fine, and I'm fine," I said.
She let the phony grin fade out. "OK, if that's the way you want it. Shall we move over to a booth?"
"Why bother? I've got nothing to hide," I told her.
"Watch it," Hornbinder growled.
"And I've had about enough of him," I told Rhoda. "If you've got cargo to boost, let's get it boosted."
"In time." She pulled some papers out of her pouch. "First, here's the charter contract."
It was all drawn up in advance. I didn't like it at all. The money was good, but none of this sounded right. "Maybe I should take al Shamlan's advice and — "
"You're not taking the Arab's advice or their money either," Hornbinder said.
" — and ask to see your money first," I finished.
"Our credit's good," Rhoda said.
"So is mine as long as I keep my payments up. I can't pay off Barclay's with promises." I lifted my beer and flipped the top just enough to suck down a big gulp. Beer's lousy if you have to sip it.
"What can you lose?" Rhoda asked. "OK, so we don't have much cash. We've got a contract for the ice. Ten percent as soon as the Lloyd's man certifies the stuffs in transfer orbit. We'll pay you out of that. We've got the dee, we've got reaction mass, what the hell else do you want?"
"Your radiogram said cash," I reminded her. "I don't even have the retainer you promised. Just paper."
"Things are hard out here." Rhoda nodded to herself. She was thinking just how hard things were. "It's not like the old days. Everything's organized. Big companies. As soon as we get a little ahead, the big outfits move in and cut prices on everything we sell. Outbid us on everything we have to buy. Like your beef."
"Sure," I said. "I'm facing tough competition from the big shipping fleets, too."
"So this time we've got a chance to hold up the big boys," Rhoda said. "Get a little profit. You aren't hurt. You get more than you expected." She looked around to the other miners. There were a lot of people listening to us. "Kephart, all we have to do is get a little ahead, and we can turn this rock into a decent place to live. A place for people, not corporation clients!" Her voice rose and her eyes flashed. She meant every word, and the others nodded approval.
"You lied to me," I said.
"So what? How are you hurt?" She pushed the contract papers toward me.
"Excuse me." Dalquist hadn't spoken very loudly, but everyone looked at him. "Why is there such a hurry about this?" he asked.
"What the hell's it to you?" Hornbinder demanded.
"You want cash?" Rhoda asked. "All right, I'll give you cash." She took a document out of her pouch and slammed it onto the table. She hit hard enough to raise herself a couple of feet out of her chair. It would have been funny if she wasn't dead serious. Nobody laughed.
"There's a deposit certificate for every goddam cent we have!" she snouted. "You want it? Take it all. Take the savings of every family in Jefferson. Pump us dry. Grind the faces of the poor! But sign that charter!"
"Cause if you don't," Hornbinder said, "your ship won't ever leave this rock. And don't think we can't stop you."
"Easy." I tried to look relaxed, but the sea of faces around me wasn't friendly at all. I didn't want to look at them so I looked at the deposit paper. It was genuine enough: you can't fake the molecular documents Zurich banks use. With the Jefferson Corporation Seal and the right signatures and thumbprints that thing was worth exactly 78,500 francs.
It would be a lot of money if I owned it for myself. It wasn't so much compared to the mortgage on Slinger. It was nothing at all for the total assets of a whole community.
"This is our chance to get out from under," Rhoda was saying. She wasn't talking to me. "We can squeeze the goddam corporation people for a change. All we need is that charter and we've got Westinghouse and the Arabs where we want them!"
Everybody in the bar was shouting now. It looked ugly, and I didn't see any way out.
"OK," I told Rhoda. "Sign over that deposit certificate, and make me out a lien on future assets for the rest. I'll boost your cargo—"
"Boost hell, sign that charter contract," Rhoda said.
"Yeah, I'll do that too. Make out the documents."
"Captain Kephart, is this wise?" Dalquist asked.
"Keep out of this, you little son of a bitch." Horny moved toward Dalquist, "You got no stake in this. Now shut up before I take off the top—"
Dalquist hardly looked up. "Five hundred francs to the first man who coldcocks him," he said carefully. He took his hand out of his pouch, and there was a bill in it.
There was a moment's silence, then four big miners started for Horny.
When it was over, Dalquist was out a thousand, because nobody could decide who got to Hornbinder first.

Even Rhoda was laughing after that was over. The mood changed a little; Hornbinder had never been very popular, and Dalquist was buying for the house. It didn't make any difference about the rest of it, of course. They weren't going to let me off Jefferson without signing that charter contract.
Rhoda sent over to city hall to have the documents made out. When they came, I signed, and half the people in the place signed as witnesses. Dalquist didn't like it, but he ended up as a witness too. For better or worse, Slingshot was chartered to the Jefferson Corporation for seven hundred hours.
The surprise came after I'd signed. I asked Rhoda when she'd be ready to boost.
"Don't worry about it. You'll get the capsule when you need it."
"Bloody hell! You can't wait to get me to sign—"
"Aww, just relax, Kephart."
"I don't think you understand. You have half a million tons to boost up to what, five, six kilometers a second?" I took out my pocket calculator. "Sixteen tons of deuterium and eleven thousand reaction mass. That's a bloody big load. The fuel feed system's got to be built. It's not something I can just strap on and push off—"
"You'll get what you need," Rhoda said. "We'll let you know when it's time to start work."

Jed put us in a private dining room. Janet came in later and I told her about the afternoon. I didn't think she'd like it, but she wasn't as upset as I was.
"We have the money," she said. "And we got a good price on the cargo, and if they ever pay off we'll get more than we expected on the boost charges. If they don't pay up—well, so what?"
"Except that we've got a couple of major companies unhappy, and they'll be here long after Jefferson folds up. Sorry, Jed, but—"
He bristled his mustache. "Could be. I figure on gettin' along with the corporations too. Just in case."
"But what did all that lot mean?" Dalquist asked.
"Beats me." Jed shook his head. "Rhoda's been making noises about how rich we're going to be. New furnace, another power plant, maybe even a ship of our own. Nobody knows how she's planning on doing it."
"Could there have been a big strike?" Dalquist asked. "Iridiurn, one of the really valuable metals?"
"Don't see how," Jed told him. "Look, mister, if Rhoda's goin' to bail this place out of the hole the big boys have dug for us, that's great with me. I don't ask questions."
Jed's boy came in. "There's a lady to see you."
Barbara Morrison Colella was a small blonde girl, pug nose, blue eyes. She looks like somebody you'd see on Earthside TV playing a dumb blonde.
Her degrees said "family economics," which I guess on Earth doesn't amount to much. Out here it's a specialty. To keep a family going out here you better know a lot of environment and life-support engineering, something about prices that depend on orbits and launch windows, a lot about how to get something to eat out of rocks, and maybe something about power systems, too.
She was glad enough to see us, especially Janet, but we got another surprise. She looked at Dalquist and said, "Hello, Buck."
"Hello. Surprised, Bobby?"
"No. I knew you'd be along as soon as you heard."
"You know each other, then," I said.
"Yes." Dalquist hadn't moved, but he didn't look like a little man any longer. "How did it happen, Bobby?"
Her face didn't change. She'd lost most of her smile when she saw Dalquist. She looked at the rest of us, and pointed at Jed. "Ask him. He knows more than I do."
"Mr. Anderson?" Dalquist prompted. His tone made it sound as if he'd done this before, and he expected to be answered.
If Jed resented that, he didn't show it. "Simple enough. Joe always seemed happy enough when he came in here after his shift—"
Dalquist looked from Jed to Barbara. She nodded.
"—until the last time.  That night he got stinking drunk. Kept mutterin' something about 'Not that way. There's got to be another way.'"
"Do you know what that meant?"
"No," Jed said. "But he kept saying it. Then he got really stinking and I sent him home with a couple of the guys he worked with."
"What happened when he got home?" Dalquist asked.
"He never came home, Buck," Barbara said. "I got worried about him, but I couldn't find him. The men he'd left here with said he'd got to feeling better and left them—"
"Damn fools," Jed muttered. "He was right out of it. Nobody should go outside with that much to drink."
"And they found him outside?"
"At the refinery. Helmet busted open. Been dead five, six hours. Held the inquest right in here, at that table al Shamlan was sitting at this afternoon."
"Who held the inquest?" Dalquist asked.
"Rhoda."
"Doesn't make sense," I said.
"No." Janet didn't like it much either. "Barbara, don't you have any idea of what Joe meant? Was he worried about something?"
"Nothing he told me about. He wasn't—we weren't fighting, or anything like that. I'm sure he didn't—"
"Humpf." Dalquist shook his head. "What damned fool suggested suicide?"
"Well," Jed said, "you know how it is. If a man takes on a big load and wanders around outside, it might as well be suicide. Hornbinder said we were doing Barbara a favor, voting it an accident."
Daiquist took papers out of his pouch. "He was right, of course. I wonder if Hornbinder knew that all Hanson employees receive a paid-up insurance policy as one of their retirement benefits?"
"I didn't know it," I said.
Janet was more practical. "How much is it worth?"
"I am not sure of the exact amounts," Dalquist said. "There are trust accounts involved also. Sufficient to get Barbara and the children back to Mars and pay for their living expenses there. Assuming you want to go?"
"I don't know," Barbara said. "Let me think about it. Joe and I came here to get away from the big companies. I don't have to like Rhoda and the city hall crowd to appreciate what we've got in Jefferson. Independence is worth something."
"Indeed," Dalquist said. He wasn't agreeing with her, and suddenly we all knew he and Barbara had been through this argument before. I wondered when.
"Janet, what would you do?" Barbara asked.
Jan shrugged. "Not a fair question. Roland and I made that decision a long time ago. But neither of us is alone." She reached for my hand across the table.
As she said, we had made our choice. We've had plenty of offers for Slingshot, from outfits that would be happy to hire us as crew for Slinger. It would mean no more hustle to meet the mortgage payments, and not a lot of change in the way we live—but we wouldn't be our own people anymore. We've never seriously considered taking any of the offers.
"You don't have to be alone," Dalquist said.
"I know, Buck." There was a wistful note in Barbara's voice. They looked at each other for a long time. Then we sat down to dinner.

I was in my office aboard Slingshot. Thirty hours had gone by since I'd signed the charter contract, and I still didn't know what I was boosting, or when. It didn't make sense.
Janet refused to worry about it.  We'd cabled the money on to Marsport, all of Jefferson's treasury and what we'd got for our cargo, so Barclay's was happy for a while. We had enough deuterium aboard Stinger to get where we could buy more. She kept asking what there was to worry about, and I didn't have any answer.
I was still brooding about it when Oswald Dalquist tapped on the door.
I hadn't seen him much since the dinner at the Doghouse, and he didn't look any different, but he wasn't the same man. I suppose the change was in me. You can't think of a man named "Buck" the same way you think of an Oswald.
"Sit down," I said. That was formality, of course. It's no harder to stand than sit in the tiny gravity we felt. "I've been meaning to say something about the way you handled Horny. I don't think I've ever seen anybody do that."
His smile was thin, and I guess it hadn't changed either, but it didn't seem like an accountant's smile any more. "It's an interesting story, actually," he said. "A long time ago I was in a big colony ship. Long passage, nothing to do. Discovered the other colonists didn't know much about playing poker."
We exchanged grins again.
"I won so much it made me worry that someone would take it away from me, so I hired the biggest man in the bay to watch my back. Sure enough, some chap accused me of cheating, so I called on my big friend—"
"Yeah?"
"And he shouted 'Fifty to the first guy that decks him.' Worked splendidly, although it wasn't precisely what I'd expected when I hired him—"
We had our laugh.
"When are we leaving, Captain Kephart?"
"Beats me. When they get the cargo ready to boost, I guess."
"That might be a long time," Dalquist said.
"What is that supposed to mean?"
"I've been asking around. To the best of my knowledge, there are no preparations for boosting a big cargo pod."
"That's stupid," I said. "Well, it's their business. When we go, how many passengers am I going to have?"
His little smile faded entirely. "I wish I knew. You've guessed that Joe Colella and I were old friends. And rivals for the same girl."
"Yeah. I'm wondering why you—hell, we talked about them on the way in. You never let on you'd ever heard of them."
He nodded carefully. "I wanted to be certain. I only know that Joe was supposed to have died in an accident. He was not the kind of man accidents happen to. Not even out here."
"What is that supposed to mean?"
"Only that Joe Colella was one of the most careful men you will ever meet, and I didn't care to discuss my business with Barbara until I knew more about the situation in Jefferson. Now I'm beginning to wonder—"
"Dad!" Pam was on watch, and she sounded excited. The intercom box said again, "Dad!"
"Right, sweetheart."
"You better come up quick. There's a message coming through. You better hurry."

"MAYDAY MAYDAY MAYDAY." The voice was cold and unemotional, the way they are when they really mean it. It rolled off the tape Pam had made.

mayday mayday mayday. this is pegasus lines boostship agamemnon outbound earth to pallas.
our main engines are disabled. i say again, main engines disabled. our velocity relative to sol is one four zero kilometers per second, i say again, one hundred forty kilometers per second
 auxiliary power is failing. main engines cannot be repaired. present ship mass is 54,000 tons.seventeen hundred passengers aboard. mayday mayday mayday.

"Lord God." I wasn't really aware that I was talking. The kids had crowded into the control cabin, and we listened as the tape went on to give a string of numbers, the vectors to locate Agamemnon precisely. I started to punch them into the plotting tanks, but Pam stopped me.
"I already did that, Dad." She hit the activation switch to bring the screen to life.
It showed a picture of our side of the solar system, the inner planets and inhabited rocks, along with a block of numbers and a long thin line with a dot at the end to represent Agamemnon. Other dots winked on and off: boostships.
We were the only one that stood a prayer of a chance of catching up with Agamemnon.
The other screen lit, giving us what the Register knew about Agamemnon. It didn't look good. She was an enormous old cargo-passenger ship, over thirty years old—and out here that's old indeed. She'd been built for a useful life of half that, and sold off to Pegasus Lines when P&L decided she wasn't safe.
Her auxiliary power was furnished by a plutonium pile. If something went wrong with it, there was no way to repair it in space. Without auxiliary power, the life-support systems couldn't function. I was still looking at her specs when the comm panel lit. Local call, Port Captain's frequency.
"Yeah, Jed?" I said.
"You've got the Mayday?"
"Sure. I figure we've got about sixty hours max to fuel up and still let me catch her. I've got to try it, of course."
"Certainly, Captain." The voice was Rhoda's. "I've already sent a crew to start work on the fuel pod. I suggest you work with them to be sure it's right."
"Yeah. They'll have to work damned fast." Slingshot doesn't carry anything like the tankage a run like this would need.
"One more thing, Captain," Rhoda said. "Remember that your ship is under exclusive charter to the Jefferson Corporation. We'll make the legal arrangements with Pegasus. You concentrate on getting your ship ready."
"Yeah, OK. Out." I switched the comm system to Record. "Agamemnon, this is cargo tug Slingshot. I have your Mayday. Intercept is possible, but I cannot carry sufficient fuel and mass to decelerate your ship, I must vampire your dee and mass, I say again, we must transfer your fuel and reaction mass to my ship.
"We have no facilities for taking your passengers aboard. We will attempt to take your ship in tow and decelerate using your deuterium and reaction mass. Our engines are modified General Electric Model five-niner ion-fusion. Preparations for coming to your assistance are under way. Suggest your crew begin preparations for fuel transfer. Over."
Then I looked around the cabin. Janet and our oldest were ashore. "Pam, you're in charge. Send that, and record the reply. You can start the checklist for boost. I make it about two-hundred centimeters acceleration, but you'd better check that. Whatever it is, we'll need to secure for it. Also, get in a call to find your mother. God knows where she is."
"Sure, Dad." She looked very serious, and I wasn't worried. Hal's the oldest, but Pam's a lot more thorough.
The Register didn't give anywhere near enough data about Agamemnon. I could see from the recognition pix that she carried her reaction mass in strap-ons alongside the main hull, rather than in detachable pods right forward the way Slinger does. That meant we might have to transfer the whole lot before we could start deceleration.
She had been built as a general-purpose ship, so her hull structure forward was beefy enough to take the thrust of a cargo pod—but how much thrust? If we were going to get her down, we'd have to push like hell on her bows, and there was no way to tell if they were strong enough to take it.
I looked over to where Pam was aiming our high-gain antenna for the message to Agamemnon. She looked like she'd been doing this all her life, which I guess she had been, but mostly for drills. It gave me a funny feeling to know she'd grown up sometime in the last couple of years and Janet and I hadn't really noticed.
"Pamela, I'm going to need more information on Agamemnon," I told her. "The lads had a TV cast out of Marsport, so you ought to be able to get through. Ask for anything they have on that ship. Structural strength, fuel-handling equipment, everything they've got."
"Yes, sir.
"OK. I'm going ashore to see about the fuel pods. Call me when we get some answers, but if there's nothing important from Agamemnon just hang onto it."
"What happens if we can't catch them?" Philip asked.
Pam and Jennifer were trying to explain it to him as I went down to the lock.

*        *        *

Jed had lunch waiting in the Doghouse. "How's it going?" he asked when I came in.
"Pretty good. Damned good, all things considered." The refinery crew had built up fuel pods for Slinger before, so they knew what I needed, but they'd never made one that had to stand up to a full fifth of a gee. A couple of centimeters is hefty acceleration when you boost big cargo, but we'd have to go out at a hundred times that.
"Get the stuff from Marsport?"
"Some of it." I shook my head. The whole operation would be tricky. There wasn't a lot of risk for me, but Agamemnon was in big trouble.
"Rhoda's waiting for you. Back room."
"You don't look happy."
Jed shrugged. "Guess she's right, but it's kind of ghoulish."
"What—?"
"Go see."
Rhoda was sitting with a trim chap who wore a clipped mustache. I'd met him before, of course: B. Elton, Esq., the Lloyd's rep in Jefferson. He hated the place and couldn't wait for a transfer.
"I consider this reprehensible," Elton was saying when I came in. "I hate to think you are a party to this, Captain Kephart."
"Party to what?"
"Ms. Hendrix has asked for thirty million francs as salvage fee. Ten million in advance."
I whistled. "That's heavy."
"The ship is worth far more than that," Rhoda said.
"If I can get her down. There are plenty of problems— hell, she may not be fit for more than salvage," I said.
"Then there are the passengers. How much is Lloyd's out if you have to pay off their policies? And lawsuits?" Rhoda had the tomcat's grin again. "We're saving you money, Mr. Elton."
I realized what she was doing. "I don't know how to say this, but it's my ship you're risking."
"You'll be paid well," Rhoda said. "Ten percent of what we get."
That would just about pay off the whole mortgage. It was also a hell of a lot more than the commissioners in Marsport would award for a salvage job.
"We've got heavy expenses up front," Rhoda was saying. "That fuel pod costs like crazy. We're going to miss the launch window to Luna."
"Certainly you deserve reasonable compensation, but—"
"But nothing!" Rhoda's grin was triumphant. "Captain Kephart can't boost without fuel, and we have it all. That fuel goes aboard his ship when you've signed my contract, Elton, and not before."
Elton looked sad and disgusted. "It seems a cheap—"
"Cheap!" Rhoda got up and went to the door. "What the hell do you know about cheap? How goddamn many times have we heard you people say there's no such thing as an excess profit? Well, this time we got the breaks, Elton, and well take the excess profits. Think about that."
Out in the bar somebody cheered. Another began singing a tune I'd heard in Jefferson before. Pam says the music is very old, she's heard it on TV casts, but the words fit Jefferson. The chorus goes "There's gonna be a great day!" and everybody out there shouted it.
"Marsport will never give you that much money," Elton said.
"Sure they will." Rhoda's grin got even wider, if that was possible.  "We'll hold onto the cargo until they do—"
"Be damned if I will!" I said.
"Not you at all. I'm sending Mr. Hornbinder to take charge of that. Don't worry, Captain Kephart, I've got you covered. The big boys won't bite you."
"Hornbinder?"
"Sure. You'll have some extra passengers this run—"
"Not him. Not in my ship," I said.
"Sure he's going. You can use some help—"
Like hell. "I don't need any."
She shrugged. "Sorry you feel that way. Just remember, you're under charter." She gave the tomcat grin again and left.
When she was gone, Jed came in with beer for me and something else for Elton. They were still singing and cheering in the other room,
"Do you think this is fair?" Elton demanded.
Jed shrugged. "Doesn't matter what I think. Or what Rollo thinks. Determined woman, Rhoda Hendrix."
"You'd have no trouble over ignoring that charter contract," Elton told me. "In fact, we could find a reasonable bonus for you—"
"Forget it." I took the beer from Jed and drank it all. Welding up that fuel pod had been hot work, and I was ready for three more. "Listen to them out there," I said. "Think I want them mad at me? They see this as the end of their troubles."
"Which it could be," Jed said. "With a few million to invest we can make Jefferson into a pretty good place." Elton wasn't having any. "Lloyd's is not in the business of subsidizing colonies that cannot make a living—"
"So what?" I said. "Rhoda's got the dee and nobody else has enough. She means it, you know."
"There's less than forty hours," Jed reminded him. "I think I'd get on the line to my bosses, was I you."
"Yes." Elton had recovered his polish, but his eyes were narrow. "I'll just do that."

They launched the big fuel pod with strap-on solids, just enough thrust to get it away from the rock so I could catch it and lock on. We had hours to spare, and I took my time matching velocities. Then Hal and I went outside to make sure everything was connected right.
Hornbinder and two friends were aboard against all my protests. They wanted to come out with us, but I wasn't having any. We don't need help from ground-pounders. Janet and Pam took them to the gallery for coffee while I made my inspection.
Slingshot is basically a strongly built hollow tube with engines at one end and clamps at the other. The cabins are rings around the outside of the tube. We also carry some deuterium and reaction mass strapped on to the main hull, but for big jobs there's not nearly enough room there. Instead, we build a special fuel pod that straps onto the bow. The reaction mass can be lowered through the central tube when we're boosting.
Boost cargo goes on forward of the fuel pod. This time we didn't have any going out, but when we caught up to Agamemnon she'd ride there, no different from any other cargo capsule. That was the plan, anyway. Taking another ship in tow isn't precisely common out here.
Everything matched up. Deuterium lines, and the elevator system for handling the mass and getting it into the boiling pots aft; it all fit. Hal and I took our time, even after we were sure it was working, while the Jefferson miners who'd come up with the pod fussed and worried. Eventually I was satisfied, and they got onto their bikes to head for home. I was still waiting for a call from Janet, Just before they were ready to start up she halted us. She used an open frequency so the miners could hear. "Rollo, I'm afraid those crewmen Rhoda loaned us will have to go home with the others."
"Eh?" One of the miners turned around in the saddle.
"What's the problem, Jan?" I asked.
"It seems Mr. Hornbinder and his friends have very bad stomach problems. It could be quite serious. I think they'd better see Dr. Stewart as soon as possible."
"Goddam. Rhoda's not going to like this," the foreman said. He maneuvered his little open-frame scooter over to the airlock. Pam brought his friends out and saw they were strapped in.
"Hurry up!" Hornbinder said. "Get moving!"
"Sure, Horny." There was a puzzled note in the foreman's voice. He started up the bike. At maximum thrust it might make a twentieth of a gee. There was no enclosed space, it was just a small chemical rocket with saddles, and you rode it in your suit.
"Goddamit, get moving," Hornbinder was shouting. If there'd been air you might have heard him a klick away. "You can make better time than this!"
I got inside and went up to the control cabin. Jan was grinning.
"Amazing what calomel can do," she said.
"Amazing." We took time off for a quick kiss before I strapped in. I didn't feel much sympathy for Horny, but the other two hadn't been so bad. The one to feel sorry for was whoever had to clean up their suits.
Ship's engines are complicated things. First you take deuterium pellets and zap them with a big laser. The dee fuses to helium. Now you've got far too much hot gas at far too high a temperature, so it goes into an MHD system that cools it and turns the energy into electricity.
Some of that powers the lasers to zap more dee. The rest powers the ion drive system. Take a metal, preferably something with a low boiling point like cesium, but since that's rare out here cadmium generally has to do. Boil it to a vapor. Put the vapor through ionizing screens that you keep charged with power from the fusion system.
Squirt the charged vapor through more charged plates to accelerate it, and you've got a drive. You've also got a charge on your ship, so you need an electron gun to get rid of that.
There are only about nine hundred things to go wrong with the system. Superconductors for the magnetic fields and charge plates: those take cryogenic systems, and those have auxiliary systems to keep them going. Nothing's simple, and nothing's small, so out of Slingshot's sixteen hundred metric tons, well over a thousand tons is engine.
Now you know why there aren't any space yachts flitting around out here. Slinger's one of the smallest ships in commission, and she's bloody big. If Jan and I hadn't happened to hit lucky by being the only possible buyers for a couple of wrecks, and hadn't had friends at Barclay's who thought we might make a go of it, we'd never have owned our own ship.
When I tell people about the engines, they don't ask what we do aboard Slinger when we're on long passages, but they're only partly right. You cant do anything to an engine while it's on. It either works or it doesn't, and all you have to do with it is see it gets fed.
It's when the damned things are shut down that the work starts, and that takes so much time that you make sure you've done everything else in the ship when you can't work on the engines. There's a lot of maintenance, as you might guess when you think that we've got to make everything we need, from air to zweiback. Living in a ship makes you appreciate planets.
Space operations go smooth, or generally they don't go at all. I looked at Jan and we gave each other a quick wink. It's a good luck charm we've developed. Then I hit the keys, and we were off.

It wasn't a long boost to catch up with Agamemnon. I spent most of it in the contoured chair in front of the control screens. A fifth of a gee isn't much for dirtsiders, but out here it's ten times what we're used to. Even the cats hate it.
The high gees saved us on high calcium foods and the drugs we need to keep going in low gravs, and of course we didn't have to put in so much time in the exercise harnesses, but the only one happy about it was Dalquist. He came up to the control cap about an hour out from Jefferson.
"I thought there would be other passengers," he said.                                                               
"Really? Barbara made it pretty clear that she wasn't interested in Pallas. Might go to Mars, but — "
"No, I meant Mr. Hornbinder."
"He, uh, seems to have become ill. So did his friends. Happened quite suddenly."
Dalquist frowned. "I wish you hadn't done that."
"Really? Why?"
"It might not have been wise, Captain." I turned away from the screens to face him. "Look, Mr. Dalquist, I'm not sure what you're doing on this trip. I sure didn't need Rhoda's goons along."
"Yes. Well, there's nothing to be done now in any event. "
"Just why are you aboard? I thought you were in a hurry to get back to Marsport — "
"Butterworth interests may be affected, Captain. And I'm in no hurry."

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 Stinger'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 stretch 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 S/tnger'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. Slingers 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?"
"All 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."
He wasn't being generous. With a forty percent bloc it was a cinch they could find enough more among the rockrats for a majority. Some of them hated everything Rhoda stood for.
"You've got to be crazy," Rhoda said. "Sell out to a goddam syndicate of corporations? We don't want any of you here!"
Dalquist's face was grim. "I am trying to remain polite, and it is not easy, Ms. Hendrix. You don't seem to appreciate your position. The corporation representatives have made their decision, and the Commission has ratified it. You will either sell or face something worse."
"I don't recognize any commissions," Rhoda said. "We've always been independent, we're not part of your goddam fascist commission. Christ almighty, you've found us guilty before we even knew there'd be a trial! We weren't even heard!"
"Why should you be? As you say, you're independent. Or have been up to now."
"We'll fight, Dalquist. Those company cops will never get here alive. Even if they do—"
"Oh, come now." Dalquist made an impatient gesture. "Do you really believe we'd take the trouble of sending Intertel police, now that you're warned? Hardly. We'll merely seize all your cargo in the pipeline and see that no ship comes here for any reason. How long will it be before your own people throw you out and come to terms with us?"
That hit her hard. Her eyes narrowed as she thought about it. "I can see you don't live to enjoy what you've done—"
"Nonsense."
I figured it was my turn. "Rhoda, you may not believe this, hut I heard him argue them out of sending the cops without any warning at all. They were ready to do it."
The shouts came From the bar as Jed opened the door to see if we wanted anything. "There's gonna be a great day!"
"Everything all right here?" Jed asked.
"No!" Rhoda shoved herself away from the table and glared at Dalquist. "Not all right at all! Jed, he's—"
"I know what he's saying, Rhoda," Jed told her. "Cap'n Rollo and I had a long talk with him last night."
"With the result that I'm speaking to you at all," Dalquist said. "Frankly, I'd rather see you dead." His face was a bitter mask of hatred, and the emotionless expression fell away. He hated Rhoda. "You've killed the best friend I ever had, and I find that I need you anyway. Captain Anderson has convinced me that it will be difficult to govern here without you, which is why you'll remain nominally in control after this sale is made,"
"No. No sale."
"There will be. Who'll buy from you? Who'll sell to you? This was a unanimous decision. You're not independent, no matter how often you say you are. There's no place for your kind of nationalism out here."
"You bastards. The big boys. You think you can do anything you like to us."
Dalquist recovered his calm as quickly as he'd lost it. I think it was the tone Rhoda used; he didn't want to sound like her. I couldn't tell if I hated him or not.
"We can do whatever we can agree to do," Dalquist said. "You seem to think the Corporations Commission is some kind of government. It isn't. It's just a means for settling disputes. We've found it more profitable to have rules than to have fights. But we're not without power, and everyone's agreed that you can't be let off after trying what you did."
"So we pay for it," Jed said.
Dalquist shrugged. "There's no government out here. Are you ready to bring Rhoda to trial? Along with all the others involved?"
Jed shook his head. "Doubt it—"
"And there's the matter of restitution, which you can't make anyway. And you're bankrupt, since you sent no cargo to Luna and the launch window's closed."
"Just who the hell is this syndicate?" Rhoda demanded.
Dalquist's expression didn't change, but there was a note of triumph in his voice. He'd won, and he knew it. "The major sums are put up by Hansen Enterprises."
"And you'll be here as their rep."
He nodded. "Certainly. I've been with Hansen most of my life, Ms. Hendrix. The company trusts me to look out for its best interests. As I trusted Joe Colella. Until he retired he was my best field agent."
She didn't say anything, but her face was sour.
"You might have got away with this if you hadn't killed Joe," Dalquist said. "But retired or not, he was a Hansen man. As I'm sure you found when he discovered your plan. We take care of our people, Ms. Hendrix. Hansen is a good company."
"For company men." Jed's voice was flat. He looked around the small back room with its bare rock walls, but I think he was seeing through those walls, out through the corridors, beyond to the caves where the rockrats tried to make homes, "A good outfit for company men. But it won't be the same, for us."
Outside they were still singing about the great days coming.

"Tinker," copyright, ©. 1975, by UPD Publishing Company. First published in Galaxy.