“What were Captain Hiskey’s qualifications for that kind of work—for outsystem commerce generally?” Derek asked.
Elisabeth’s eyes flickered. “Harold said Hiskey had been first officer on a big transsolar transport. Then he got money enough to buy his own ship.” She hesitated. “I guess they’ve tried about anything they could. But they never had a good enough streak of luck to do much better than break even . . . or else they’d get good luck mixed up with bad. Perhaps Harold will stay in Earthsystem now. But I have a feeling he won’t. He was always very stubborn when he set himself a goal.”
“You heard from him regularly?”
“No, not regularly. Not very often either. I’ve had seven message-packs from him in eight years. Somebody would get back to Earthsystem and drop the pack off at Mars Underground or Solar U, and I’d receive it that way. The last one was just six months ago. It didn’t say a word about the ship coming back. That’s why I can still hardly believe Harold’s here.”
The eyes had begun to brim again. Sally said quickly, “Perhaps he wasn’t sure he’d be coming back and didn’t want to build up your hopes.”
Elisabeth nodded. “I suppose that was it. And . . .”
Derek drew back mentally from what she was saying. An independent outsystem trader—not a very large ship, from what Elisabeth had told them. A crew working mainly on a gamble, willing to try anything, each man out to make his fortune, hit the big money by some means. At least some of the men on Captain Hiskey’s ship had pursued that objective for eight years without getting there.
Man played it dirty and rough on Earth, held back only by a few general rules which none dared break. In the outsystems the same games were played, as extensions of those on Earth, perhaps somewhat dirtier and rougher, with no enforceable rules of any kind. Drop an adventurous, eager twenty-year-old into that kind of thing after the quiet order of Mars Underground, the disciplines of the SP Academy . . . well, it might shape the twenty-year-old in one way or another, but shape him it would, thoroughly and fast, if he was to survive. Eight years should have worked quite a few changes in Harold Gage. The changes needn’t have been evident in the message-packs Elisabeth had received. But she was intelligent, and she knew in general what the outsystems were like. And so, unwillingly, she was apprehensive of what she would find in her brother.
It bothered Derek because he liked Elisabeth and thought that whatever her expectations were, she might still be in for a shock. He checked his watch, got to his feet, smiled at his wife and guest, and excused himself. A few minutes later, seated at a transmitter, he dialed a number.
“Lieutenant Pierce,” a voice said. “Who is calling?”
“This is Derek Alston, Mike.”
“And what can the System Police do for Professor Alston today?” asked Michael Pierce.
“Do you have anything on an outsystem tramp trader called Prideful Sue? Captain-owner’s name is Hiskey. He might have checked in a day or two ago.”
“Hold on,” Pierce told him.
Perhaps a minute passed before his voice resumed. “There’s a ship by that name and of that description in the territory, Derek. She’s Earthplanet registry. Last SP check was ten years ago. No record of present owners. First reported as having arrived from transsolar three days ago. We have a mild interest in the ship because the captain evidently has no intention of checking in or going through Customs. Of course, an SP check isn’t compulsory if his business is only and directly with Earthplanet and if we have no reason to suspect Class A contraband. However, he keeps shifting about the system as if he preferred to keep out of our way. Do you feel we should give him more attention?”
“I have no definite reason to think so,” Derek said. “But possibly you should.”
* * *
A number of things were disturbing Harold Gage. One of them was that Jake Hiskey had invited himself down on the asteroid with him. Jake had made no mention of such plans until the Prideful Sue eased in to a stop on the coordinates given them in the Alston asteroid’s gravity field and went on space anchor. Then Harold came forward to the comm room; and there was Jake, freshly shaved and in dress uniform, talking to the Alstons on viz screen. The matter was already settled. How Jake wrangled the invitation Harold didn’t know, but he was downright charming when he wanted to be; and undoubtedly he’d made the Alstons feel it would be impossibly rude not to include him in the party. Jake switched off the screen, looked at Harold’s face, and grinned.
“Hell, Harold,” he said. “You’re not begrudging an old friend a few hours’ look at sheer luxury, are you?”
“No,” Harold said. “But in this case I felt I was already imposing on Elisabeth’s friends.”
“Ah—don’t be so sensitive. They invited you, didn’t they? And Professor Alston and that sweet-looking wife of his will get a boot out of me. These millionaire hermits must get mighty bored on their pretty-pretty asteroids where nothing ever happens. We’re transsolar spacers, man! We’ve been places and done things it would curl their hair to think about. We’re romantic!” He clapped Harold on the shoulder. “Come on! They told me your sister’s waiting at the lock. Hey, this is one place we don’t have to wear guns when we stick our noses outside—seems odd, doesn’t it?”
And then they were down; and there, first of all, was Elisabeth—not a girl any more but, startlingly, a beautiful woman. Harold wasn’t even sure he would have recognized her if she hadn’t run towards him, laughing and crying a little, as he stepped out of the skiff, and clung to him for long seconds. And there were the Alstons, pleasant people who immediately took Jake in hand and smoothly dissociated him and themselves from the Gages, so that in only minutes Harold and Elisabeth were wandering about alone in this sunlit, rather dreamlike garden of an asteroid.
He’d been afraid there’d be an awkwardness between them, but none developed. Elisabeth was a completely honest person, of the kind whose expression hides nothing because there is rarely anything in their minds they want to hide. She studied him frankly and gravely, his eyes, his mouth, his motions, listened to his voice and its inflections, her face telling him meanwhile that she realized he’d changed and something of the manner in which he’d changed, and that she was accepting it, perhaps with regret but without judgment and with no loss of affection. He knew, too, that this was a matter it wouldn’t be necessary to talk about, now or later . . . later meaning after the business on Earthplanet was concluded. What was left then was that he always would have to be a little careful of what he said to her, careful not to reveal too much. Because what Elisabeth didn’t know, couldn’t possibly know, was just how extensive the change had been.
He told himself it couldn’t have been helped. In the outsystems it could hardly have worked out otherwise. For a while they’d remained fairly selective about what they did with the Prideful Sue. If a job looked too raw, they didn’t touch it. But they weren’t making money, or not enough, and the raw jobs began to look less unacceptable. Then some of the crew dropped out, and some got killed, and the replacements were outsystem boys with outsystem ideas. On occasion they’d come close to straight raiding then; and if it had been up to Jake Hiskey alone, what difference was left finally mightn’t have mattered enough to count.
But a first-class navigator was the most valuable man on the ship in the outsystems; and Harold was a first-class navigator by then. If he hadn’t been one, he still would have been the most valuable man on the Prideful Sue; Hiskey had come to depend on him more and more. So he could put a stop to an operation if it looked too bad, and from time to time he did. It didn’t get him liked on board; but, as it happened, he’d also developed a first-class gun hand. If necessary the hand might get a little more blood on it, and Navigator Gage would get his way.
This last move now, the big one, the one which was to make the whole past eight years pay off extremely well, importing McNulty’s mercenaries and their devastating weapon, the Rilf toziens, to Earthplanet—he’d thought about it long and hard and had been at the point of backing out more than once. Hiskey, whose idea it had been, argued that it was a perfectly legitimate enterprise. It was, without question. Earthplanet’s criterion of permissible weaponry was the guaranteed limitation of effect. A tozien strike had an active period of less than two days, a target radius of less than twenty miles. It fell well within the allowable range.