“It’s useless, Second,” Fsha-fsha answered for me. “Danger is searching for a magic flower that only grows in one special garden, at the hub of the Galaxy.”
After a couple of weeks of job-hunting, we signed on as scrapers on a Center-bound tub crewed by small, damp dandies from the edge of Center. That was the only berth a highbrow Center skipper would consider handing a barbarian from what they called the Outworlds. It was a long cruise, and as far as I could tell, the jobs that fell to a scraper on a Center ship were just as dirty as on any Outworld tub.
On our next cruise, we found ourselves stranded on a backwater world by a broken-down guidance system on the rotting hulk we had shipped in on. We waited for a berth outbound for a month, then took service under a local constabulary boss as mercenaries. We did a lot of jumping around the planet, marching in ragged jungle and eating inedible rations, and in the end barely got clear with our hides intact when the constabulary turned out to be a dacoit force. I made one interesting discovery; my sorting skill came in handy in using the bill-hook machetes issued to the troops. After one or two small run-ins, I had keyed-in a whole set of reflex responses that made me as good as the battalion champion.
Usually, though, we didn’t see much of the planets we visited. It was normal practice, all across the Galaxy, for a world to channel all its space-faring commerce and traffic through a single port, for economy of facilities and ease of control. The ports I saw were like ports in all times and climes: cities without personality, reduced to the lowest common denominator of the thousand breeds of being they served.
After that, we found another slot, and another after that, on a small, fast lugger from Thlinthor; and on that jump we had a change in luck.
3
I was sound asleep in the off-watch cubbyhole I rated as a scraper when the alarm sirens went off. It took me thirty seconds to roll out and get across the deck to the screens where Fsha-fsha and half a dozen other on-watch crewmen were gaping at a sight that you only see once in a lifetime in Deep Space: a derelict hulk, adrift among the stars. This one was vast—and you could tell at one glance that she was old. . . .
We were five hundred miles apart, closing on courses that were only slightly skew; that made two miracles. We hove-to ten miles from her and took a good look, while the power officer conferred with Command Deck. Then the word came through to resume course.
“Huh?” Both Fsha-fsha and I swiveled on him. From the instant I’d seen the hulk, visions of prize-money had been dancing in my head like sugarplums. “He’s not going to salvage her?” Fsha-fsha came as close to yelling as his mild nature would let him.
The power officer gave him a fishy look from fishy eyes in a fishy face. Like the rest of the crew, he was an amphibian who slept in a tank of salty water for three hours at a stretch—and like all his tribe, he was an agoraphobe to the last feathery scale on his rudimentary rudder fin. “It ith not practical,” he said coldly.
“That tub’s fifty thousand years old if she’s a day,” Fsha-fsha protested. “And I’m a mud-puppy if she’s not a Riv Surveyor! She’ll be loaded with Pre-collapse star maps! There’ll be data aboard her that’s been lost since before Thlinthor lofted her first satellite!”
“How would you propoth that we acthelerate thuch a math as that to interthtellar velothity?” he put the question to us. “The hulk outweigth uth a million to one. Our engines were not dethigned for thuch threthes.”
“She looks intact,” I said. “Maybe her engines are still in working order.”
“Tho?”
“We can put a prize crew aboard her and bring her in under her own power.”
The Thlinthorian tucked his head down between his shoulder plates, his version of a shudder.
“We Thlinthorians have no tathte for thuch exthploiths,” he said. “Our mithion is the thafe delivery of conthigned cargo—”
“You don’t have to go out on the hull,” Fsha-fsha said. “Danger and I will volunteer.”
The power officer goggled his eyes at us and conferred with Command Deck. After a few minutes of talk word came through that his Excellency the Captain was agreeable.
“One stipulation,” I said. “We’ll do the dirty work; but we take a quarter-share between us.”
The captain made a counter-offer of a twentieth share each. We compromised on a tenth.
“I don’t like it,” Fsha-fsha told me. “He gave in too easily.”
We suited up and took a small boat across to the old ship. She was a glossy brown ovoid about half a mile in diameter. Matching up with her was like landing on a planetoid. We found a hatch and a set of outside controls that let us into a dusty, cavernous hold. From there we went on through passenger quarters, recreation areas, technical labs and program rooms. In what looked like an armory, Fsha-fsha and I looked over a treasure-house of sophisticated personal offense and defense devices. Everything was in perfect order; and nowhere, then or later, did we ever find a bone of her crew, or any hint of what had happened to her.
A call from the captain on the portable communicator reminded us sharply that we had a job to do.
We followed a passage big enough to drive a moving van through, found the engine room, about the size of Grand Central Station. The generators ranged down the center of it were as massive as four-story apartment buildings. I whistled when I saw them, but Fsha-fsha took it in stride.
“I’ve seen bigger,” he said. “Let’s check out the system.”
It took us four hours to work out the meaning of the oversized controls ranged in a circular console around a swiveled chair the size of a bank vault. But the old power plant started up with as sweet a rumble as if it had been in use every day.
After a little experimental jockeying, I got the big hull aligned on course coordinates and fed the power to the generators. As soon as we were up to cruise velocity, His Excellency the Captain ordered us back aboard. “Who are you sending over to relieve us?” I asked him.
“You may leave that detail to my discrethion,” he told me in a no-argument tone.
“I can’t leave this power section unmanned,” I said.
He bugged his eyes at me on the four-inch screen of the pocket communicator and repeated his order, louder, with quotations from the Universal Code.
“I don’t like it,” Fsha-fsha said. “But I’m afraid we haven’t got much choice.”
Back aboard the mother-ship, our reception was definitely cool. Word had gotten around that we’d pigged an extra share of the goodies. That suited me all right. The Thlinthorians weren’t the kind who inspired much in the way of affection.
When we were well inside the Thlinthorian system the power officer called Fsha-fsha and me in and showed us what was probably a smile.
“I confeth I entertained a thertain thuthpithion of you both,” he confided. “But now that we have arrived in the Home Thystem with our thuperb prize thafely in the thlave orbit, I thee that my cauthion was exthethive. Gentlemen, join me in a drink!”
We accepted the invitation, and he poured out nice-sized tumblers of wine. I was just reaching for mine when Fsha-fsha jostled the table and sloshed wine from the glasses. The power officer waved aside his apologies and turned to ring for a mess-boy to mop up the puddle. In the instant his back was turned, Fsha-fsha dropped a small pellet in our host’s drink, where it dissolved instantly. We all sat smiling benignly at each other while the small Thlinthorian servant mopped up, then lifted our glasses and swallowed. Fsha-fsha gulped his down whole. I took a nice swallow of mine, nodded my appreciation and took another. Our host chugalugged and poured another round. We sipped this one; he watched us and we watched him. I saw his eyes wander to the time-scale on the wall. Fsha-fsha looked at it, too.
“How long does it take your stuff to work?” he inquired pleasantly of the Thlinthorian. The latter goggled his eyes, made small choking noises, then, in a strangled voice said: “A quarter of an hour.”
Fsha-fsha nodded. “I can feel it, a little,” he said. “We both belted a couple of null-pills before we came up, just in case you had any funny stuff you wanted to try. How do you feel?”
“Not well,” the fish-mouth swallowed air. “I cannot control my . . . thpeech!”
“Right. Now, tell us all about everything. Take your time. It’ll be an hour or two before we hit Planetary Control. . . .”