He raked his crew with his eyes, one by one, craning and twisting to make each eye contact. Satisfied, or as satisfied as Hans Horeger ever got, he finished, “And if any of you forget what I’m saying, I promise you I’ll make you regret it.”
But MacDonald noticed that he didn’t say how.
Nordvik was a hundred times the size of the shuttle, but they could feel the whole vast starship shuddering as the Slowyear shuttle nuzzled in. Then there were long seconds of squeaking and rasping while the shuttle’s portal seals felt the outlines of Nordvik’s, and slowly adjusted themselves to fit.
Then the lock opened.
Nordvik’s whole crew moved forward as one as the shuttle people pulled themselves in, hand over hand. Through the tangled crowd MacDonald could see clearly enough that they were carrying no weapons. There were only three of them. One was a slim young girl who held a briefcase, the second a tall, lean man who had nothing at all in his hands, the third a squat, good-looking one who held only a flower. The man with the flower peered in, at and around the various faces, in all their angles of presentation, taking his time. Then he settled on Mercy MacDonald. He grinned at her and handed her the flower. “My name’s Blundy. Welcome to Slowyear,” he said.
The young girl gave him a quick, angry look, then turned it on MacDonald. “Are you the governor?” she demanded.
Her accent was odd, but MacDonald understood her easily enough. “We don’t have a governor. I guess you mean the captain. That’s him over there on the wall,” she said, pointing-to the real captain, of course.
“But I’m his executive, so I’m the one you have to talk to,” Horeger said quickly. And belatedly added, “Uh, welcome to Interstellar Ship Nordvik.”
The girl bent to her briefcase and pulled out a thick sheaf of papers. The man named Blundy still had his eyes appreciatively on Mercy MacDonald. She stared right back. He was, she thought, the smallest person present-well, the shortest, anyway (though even that was hard to be sure of, with everyone floating in odd directions). There was nothing small about his body, especially the thick muscles in his bare forearms. And his eyes did not leave Mercy MacDonald.
He was interested, she thought, liking the fact that he was showing interest, even liking the feelings inside her that came from enjoying it. She was sorry when he turned his gaze to Hans Horeger. “The kind of thing we want-” he began.
“Visas first, Blundy,” the girl interrupted. “I’ve got my orders.”
“Sure, Petoyne,” the man said indulgently, “but they don’t have to have visas until they come down, do they?”
“They’re all probably going to want to, won’t they? So they have to fill out the forms.” She cleared her throat and addressed the group: “On behalf of the governor general, I welcome you all to Slowyear-”
“I already said that, Petoyne,” said Blundy.
“I’m saying it officially. -And ask that you fill out these forms and sign them. Then we can get on with the business we’re all really interested in. Each of you take one, please-have you all got pencils? Well, get some, will you?”
While someone was hurrying away to find things to write with, MacDonald took her eyes off the squat man long enough to read one of the forms. The people of this backwater planet didn’t seem to have much regular use for such things, she saw, because these were just photocopied printouts, headed “Planet of Slowyear, Department of Trade and Immigration,” with the impromptu look of something somebody had remembered to whomp up at the last minute before Nordvik arrived. There was an awful lot of tiny type. When she signed that form she would be relinquishing any claim for liability for almost any kind of ill that might befall her on the surface of the planet or on the way to it-from mechanical failure of the planet’s ancient shuttles or their own; from navigation errors; from disease or attack by animals . . . but there weren’t any dangerous animals on Slowyear, Mercy MacDonald knew very well; they must have copied the thing out of an old lawbook. Really, it amused her. She looked up at the girl named Petoyne. “I didn’t know you had lawyers on Slowyear,” she said.
The Slowyear girl gave her an impatient look. “Did you sign it? All right, you’ve got your visa. Next!”
And the man named Blundy was saying, “Who’s in charge of selling stuff?”
MacDonald raised her hand. “I am. Mercy MacDonald. Purser.”
He looked at her again. “That’s nice,” he said, approving. “Then let’s find some place where we can go, Mercy MacDonald, so we can talk business.”
Business was business, and this Blundy man didn’t waste much time getting down to it. He perched companionably next to her at her display screen, one hand lightly holding her shoulder, and frowned at the readout. No seeds, ova or sperm right now, he said; not on this first trip. “We came up light so we could carry a max load back, so there’s no refrigeration on board this time.” No living plants right now, either, not until that other man, whose name was Gowen, finished checking them. “He’s our health officer,” Blundy explained. “He’ll stay on board until he quick-cultures everything-so you won’t bring anything nasty down with you, you know.”
“He’s going to check everything? Even us?”
Blundy looked surprised. “Hasn’t he done you yet? No, of course not; well, give him a drop of blood as soon as you can. You’re coming on the first trip, of course.”
“I am?”
Blundy grinned at her. “Of course you are-I’m glad to say. We’ll only take two of you this time-to have as much cargo mass as possible, you see-and that deputy captain of yours insists on being one of them. So you’re the other.”
MacDonald just smiled at that, not having made her own mind up yet-though actually there wasn’t any real doubt about it-and he got back to business. Scrimshaw? Sure. A lot of people would like that sort of stuff, he conceded, though only heaven knew why. Books? Certainly; and music and dramas and dance recitals, too, why not.
But the big thing, he told her, was datastores. “Science, history, medicine-especially medicine; we’ll buy copies of everything you’ve got about medicine or biochemistry. Diagnosis, therapies, pharmaceuticals, surgical procedures-you name it, we’ll buy it. Can you get all that in the first load? I assume all this stuff is electronic, so it won’t mass much- Fine! Now, what are these Hades artifacts I see on the list?”
He kept her jumping, but it wasn’t all business. She could see that. She didn’t miss the way he was looking at her, even when what he was talking about was merchandise. It was exciting.
It gave her pleasure. The excitement was good for her. She could feel it in her groin, an almost sexual tingling-no, she corrected herself fairly, not “almost” at all. It was defnitely sexual, all right. And Blundy’s interest in her was not just for generic sex, as it always was with dirty Hans Horeger, because when she took the stranger to see Betsy arap Dee she observed carefully that, although he gave Betsy a thoroughly assessing look, his eyes returned to MacDonald herself.
Betsy, of course, assessed him right back. It didn’t seem to be serious, though, because the other stranger, Gowen, had obviously already taken a lien on Betsy’s interest when he took her blood sample. The four of them went over Betsy’s datastores rapidly, and before they were halfway through MacDonald made a surprising discovery.
The surprise was that Betsy wasn’t moping. More than that, for the first time since the death of her baby, Betsy looked not only alert but actually happy. There was no other word for it. Her face was flushed and her eyes sparkled; she smiled; she even laughed out loud.
Then MacDonald made the even more surprising discovery that she was quite happy too. She was eager to board the shuttle and find out what this forbidding, but also intriguing, new planet had to offer her.
Of course, that was the point at which Hans Horeger came bustling into the datastore room, radiating officious authority and orders. MacDonald didn’t let even that puncture her mood. She let him strut for a few minutes. Then, “Come on, Hans,” she said, pulling him by the sleeve as she invented an errand to get him away from Betsy and the new man-realizing with astonishment that it was the first time in a good long while that she had deliberately invited Horeger to do anything with her-“come on, help me pick out the first load of scrimshaw and start loading the shuttle.”
That kept them both busy for half an hour. Then, with the selections made, she left Horeger to round up a loading crew, shouting more orders that no one either heeded or needed, and she went looking for the “health officer”.