Native workers hovered about, idle… alien life, persistent reminder of
possibilities. Man had found nothing else, but the quiet, avowedly gentle
Downers of Pell,
It was perhaps out there, a star or two away. It might happen in his lifetime,
some merchanter, disgruntled with things as they were, diverting his ship off to
probe the deep… but the finding of nullpoints took probes, and probes took
finance, and Lucy could never do it. Every route, everything that was settled in
the Beyond rode that kind of maybe, that maybe this year… maybe someone… Sandor
took some perverse comfort in that, that no one’s prerogatives were that secure.
This running gnawed at him. And it was rout, this time. He was a contamination,
a hazard. He thought about Allison Reilly and knew it for the truth, the things
she had said.
Maybe he should have taken the money. Or anything else he could get.
He walked along the line of canisters, saw nothing out of the way—Downers peered
down at him from a perch atop the cans, suddenly scampered out of sight. He
looked about him, walked the shadows closer and closer to the access. Lucy was
not a large problem for customs, nothing that deserved as much fuss as his
anxiety painted. Likely—he earnestly hoped—they had gotten some junior agent to
suit up and walk through the holds to check out his claim that they were empty.
The plates under which the gold was hidden were inconspicuous in hundreds of
other like places, in the empty cavern of the badly lighted hold. They had
looked, that was all, gone offshift—it was alterday.
He walked around the bending of the huge can-stacks, came face to face with blue
uniformed militia, two grim-faced men. Blinked, caught off balance for the
moment, then shrugged and strolled the other way, suddenly out of the notion to
prowl about the customs barrier.
So. Too many troops, everywhere. Viking, and here. He shifted his shoulders,
persuaded his frayed nerves to calm. Better to go to the offices, get it settled
up there and not go try security out here. He walked lightly still, the more so
when he had gotten the shock out of his system, tucked his hands into his
pockets and looked about him as he walked, anonymous again, among the passing
mobile sleds, the passersby that were mostly spacers or dock-workers—flinched
once when a knot of stationers pointed at him and talked among themselves. But
the mainday crowds were gone: the stationers who had seen his face on vid and
gathered on the dock were decently in their beds, with the alterday shift awake.
No one troubled him. He sealed off the experience back there, sealed off the
nightmare of the docking, sealed off too the sleepover with Allison Reilly,
getting himself focused again, sorting his wits into order. He might be on any
station, at any year of his adult life. He had done the like over and over. His
knees still felt like rubber, but that was hunger: he fished up the crushed
sandwich out of his pocket—a prudent idea, that, after all; and that was his
breakfast, dry, pocket-squelched mouthfuls while he walked the edge of the
loading zones and headed for blue dock and the offices.
The combine had me carry the gold in case, sir—personal funds, no, sir, not
transporting for general trade. He started composing his arguments in advance,
against every eventuality they might haul up. The unsettled state of affairs,
sir, the military—
No. Maybe not such a good idea to invoke that particular reason unless he had
to. Unsettled state of affairs was close enough.
And with luck, they had not found the cache in the hold at all; with luck, he
could pay his dock charges and get out of here with some show of trying to
arrange cargo. Best not to contact the black market here: they were likely to
check him closer going out than coming in. But he could change Lucy’s name
again, out at Tripoint—could risk a blown ship or a cut throat and do some
nullpoint trading, sans customs, sans police, lying off at some place like
Wesson’s and waiting for some ship that might be willing to trade with a