4
Fsha-fsha and I reached the port less than ten minutes behind the boat we had trailed in from where our ship and the Riv vessel were parked, a hundred thousand miles out. We found the captain already at the mutual-congratulation stage with the portmaster. His already prominent eyes nearly rolled down his scaled cheeks when he saw us.
“Perhaps the captain forgot to mention that he owes Captain Danger and myself a tenth-share in the prize,” Fsha-fsha said, after the introductions were over.
“That’s a prepothterouth falthhood!” the officer started, but Fsha-fsha cut him off by producing a pocket recorder of a type allowable in every law court in the Bar. The scene that followed lacked that sense of close comradeship so desirable in captain-crew relationships, but there was nothing our former commander could do but go along.
Afterward, in the four-room suite we treated ourselves to to rest up in, Fsha-fsha said, “Ah, by the way, Danger, I happened to pick up a little souvenir aboard that Riv tub—” He did something complicated with the groont-hide valise he carried his personal gear in and took out a small packet which opened out into a crisscross of flat, black straps with a round pillbox in the center.
“I checked it out,” he said, sounding like a kid with a new bike. “This baby is something. A personal body shield. Wear it under your tunic. Sets up a field nothing gets through!”
“Nifty,” I agreed, and worked the slides on the bottom of my kit bag. “I took a fancy to this little jewel.” I held up my memento. It was a very handsome jeweled wristlet, which just fit around my neck.
“Uh-huh, pretty,” Fsha-fsha said. “This harness of mine is so light you don’t know you’re wearing it—”
“It’s not only pretty, it’s a sense-booster,” I interrupted his paean. “It lowers the stimulus-response threshold for sight, hearing and touch.”
“I guess we out-traded old Slinth-face after all,” Fsha-fsha said, after we’d each checked out the other’s keepsake. “This squares the little finesse he tried with the sleepy-pills.”
The salvage authorities made us wait around for almost a month, but since they were keeping forty Thlinthorian crew members waiting, too, in the end they had to publish the valuation and pay off all hands. Between us, Fsha-fsha and I netted more cash than the lifetime earnings of a spacer.
We shipped out the same day, a short hop to Hrix, a human-occupied world in a big twenty-seven-planet system only half a light from Thlinthor. It seemed like a good idea not to linger around town after the payoff. On Hrix, we shopped for a vessel of our own; something small, and superfast. We still had over two thousand lights to cover.
Hrix was a good place to ship-hunt. It had been a major shipbuilding world for a hundred thousand years, since before the era known as the Collapse when the original Central Empire folded—and incidentally gave the upstart tribe called Man its chance to spread out over the Galaxy.
For two weeks we looked at brand-new ships, good-as-new second- and third- and tenth-hand jobs, crawled over hulls, poked into power sections, kicked figurative tires in every shipyard in town, and were no further along than the day we started. The last evening, Fsha-fsha and I were at a table under the lanterns swinging from the low branches of the Heo trees in the drinking garden attached to our inn, taking over the day’s frustrations.
“These new hulls we’ve been looking at,” Fsha-fsha said; “mass-produced junk; not like the good old days—”
“The old stuff isn’t much, either,” I countered. “They were built to last, and at those crawl-speeds, they had to.”
“Anything we can afford, we don’t want,” Fsha-fsha summed it up. “And anything we want, costs too much.”
The landlord who was refilling our wine jug spoke up. “If you gentlebeings are looking for something a little out of the usual line, I have an old grand-uncle—fine old chap, full of lore about the old times—he’s over three hundred you know—who still dabbles in buying and selling. There’s a hull in his yard that might be just what the sirs are looking for, with a little fixing up—”
We managed to break into the pitch long enough to find out where the ship was, and after emptying our jug, took a walk down there. It looked like every junkyard I’ve ever seen. The place was grown with weeds taller than I was, and the sales office was a salvaged escape blister, with flowers growing in little clay pots in the old jet orifices. There was a light on, though, and we pounded until an old crookbacked fellow with a few wisps of pink hair and a jaw like a snapping turtle poked his head out. We explained what we wanted, and who had sent us. He cackled and rubbed his hands and allowed as how we’d come to the right place. By this time we were both thinking we’d made a mistake. There was nothing here but junk so old that even the permalloy was beginning to corrode. But we followed him back between towering stacks of obsolete parts and assemblies, over heaps of warped hull-plates, through a maze of stacked atmosphere fittings to what looked like a thicket dense enough for Bre’r Rabbit to hide in.
“If you sirs’ll just pull aside a few tendrils of that danged wire vine,” the old boy suggested. Fsha-fsha had his mouth open to decline, but out of curiosity, I started stripping away a finger-thick creeper, and back in the green-black gloom I saw a curve of dull-polished metal. Fsha-fsha joined in, and in five minutes we had uncovered the stern of what had once been elegance personified.
“She was built by Sanjio,” the oldster told us. “See there?” he pointed at an ornate emblem, still jewel-bright against the tarnished metal. Fsha-fsha ran his hand over curve of the boat’s flank, peered along the slim-lined hull. Our eyes met.
“How much?” he asked.
“You’ll put her in shape, restore her,” the old man said. “You wouldn’t cut her up for the heavy metal in her jump fields, or convert her for rock-prospecting.” It was a question. We both yelled no loud enough to satisfy him.
The old man nodded. “I like you boys’ looks,” he said. “I wouldn’t sell her to just anybody. She’s yours.”
5
It took us a day to cut the boat free of the growth that had been crawling over her for eighty years. The old man, whose name was Knoute, managed, with curses and pleas and some help from a half-witted lad named Dune, to start up a long-defunct yard-tug and move the boat into a cleared space big enough to give us access to her. Fsha-fsha and I went through her from stem to stern. She was complete, original right down to the old logbook still lying in the chart table. It gave us some data to do further research on. I spent an afternoon in the shipping archives in the city, and that evening at dinner read the boat’s history to Fsha-fsha:
“Gleerim, fifty-five feet, one hundred and nine tons. Built by Sanjio, master builder to Prince Ahax, as color-bearer to the Great House, in the year Qon. . . .”
“That would be just over four thousand years ago,” Knoute put in.
“In her maiden year, the Prince Ahax raced her at Poylon, and at Gael, and led a field of thirty-two to win at Fonteraine. In her fortieth year, with a long record of brilliant victories affixed to her crestplate, the boat was sold at auction by the hard-pressed and aged prince. Purchased by a Vidian dealer, she was passed on to the Solarch of Trie, whose chief of staff, recognizing the patrician lines of the vessel, refitted her as his personal scout. Captured nineteen years later in a surprise raid by the Alzethi, the boat was mounted on a wooden-wheeled platform and hauled by chained dire-beasts in a triumphal procession through the streets of Alz. Thereafter, for more than a century, the boat lay abandoned on her rotting cart at the edge of the noisome town.
“Greu of Balgreu found the forgotten boat, and set a crew to cutting her out of her bed of tangled wildwood. Fancying the vessel’s classic lines, the invading chieftain removed her to a field depot, where his shipfitters hammered in vain at her locked port. Greu himself hacked in at her crestplate, desiring it as an ornament, but succeeded only in shattering his favorite dress short-sword. In his rage, he ordered flammable rubble to be heaped on the boat, soaked with volatiles, and fired. After he razed the city and departed with his troops, the boat again lay in neglect for two centuries. Found by the Imperial Survey Team of His Effulgent Majesty, Lleon the fortieth, she was returned to Ahax, where she was refitted and returned to service as color-bearer to the Imperial House.”