what you need. Are you following me?”
He blinked and tried. Stopped believing it and looked for the strings: it was
the only thing to do when things looked too good. “What’s it cost?” he asked.
‘Where’s the rest of it? There is a rest of it.”
She nodded toward the bar next door. “Come on. Sit down and look through it.”
He went, dragged by the hand, into the noise and closeness of the smallish bar,
sat down with her at a table by the door where there was enough light to read,
and spread out the papers. “Beer,” she ordered when the waiter showed, and in
the meantime he picked up the loan papers and tried to make sense of them.
Clause after clause of fine print Five hundred thousand credit cargo allowance.
A hundred thousand margin account. He looked at numbers stacked up like stellar
distances and shook his head.
“You’re not going to get a better offer,” she said. “I’ll tell you how you got
it. I’m going with you. The whole Third Helm alterday watch of Dublin is signing
with you for this tour. Crew that knows what they’re doing. I’ll vouch for that.
My watch. And it’s a fair agreement. You say that your Lucy can make profit on
marginer cargoes. What do you think she could do given real backing?”
That touched on his pride, deeply. He lifted his head, not stupid in it, either.
“I don’t know. My kind of operation I know— how to get what’s going rate on
small deals. Lucy’s near two hundred years old. She’s not fast. I strung those
jumps getting here. Hauling, she’s slow, and you come out of those jumps feeling
it.”
“I’ve seen her exterior on vid. What’s the inside rig?”
He shrugged. “Not what you’re used to. Number one hold’s temperature constant to
12 degrees, the rest deep cold; fifteen K net—It’s not going to work. I can’t
handle that kind of operation you’re talking about”
“It’ll work.”
“I don’t know why you’re doing this.”
“Business. Dublin’s starting up operations here, wants a foot on either side of
the Line; putting you on margin account is convenient And if it helps you out at
the same time—”
The beers came. Sandor picked his up and drank to ease his dry mouth, gave the
papers another desperate going over, trying to find the clause that talked about
confiscations, about liability that might set him up for actions, about his
standing good for previous debts.
“A few profitable runs,” she said, “and you build up an account here and you
clear the debt. You want to know what Dublin clears on a good run?”
“I’m not sure I do.”
“It’s a minor loan. Put it that way. That’s the scale we’re talking about It’s
nothing. And there’s a ten-year time limit on that loan. Ten years. Station
banks—would they give you that? Or any combine? You work that debt down and
there’s a good chance you could deal with Dublin for a stake to a refitting. I
mean a real refitting. No piggyback job. Kick that ancient unit off her tail and
put a whole new generation rig on. She’s a good design, stable moving in jump;
some of the newest intermediate ships on the boards borrow a bit from her type.”
“No,” he said in a small voice. “No, you don’t get me into that. You don’t get
your hands on her.”
“You think you can’t do it You think you’ll fail.”
He thought about it a moment
“What better offer,” she asked him, “have you ever hoped to have? And if charges
come in, who’s going to stand with you? Hmn? You sign the appropriate papers,
you take the offer.—I’ve gone out on a line for you; and for me, I admit that. I
get a post I can’t get on my ship. So we both take a risk. I don’t know but what
there’s worse to you than you’ve told. I don’t know who your enemies might be;
and I wouldn’t be surprised if you had some.”
He shook his head slowly. “No, I don’t. Hard as it may be to believe, I’ve never