He ducked through the hatch and into the cramped, overheated bridge. Fogerty overflowed the pilot’s seat, one hand clenching half a meat pie; most of the rest of it was spattered over his chins and his coveralls front. He was globulously lumpy, stretching the faded orange fabric of his coveralls so much that McPherson was reminded of an overripe pumpkin. He smelled overripe, too, and the additional spicy aroma from the meat pie made McPherson’s stomach churn. Reckon I don’t smell much better, McPherson told himself, trying to keep an even temper.
Fogerty half-turned in the creaking chair and jabbed a thick finger excitedly toward the main display screen. McPherson saw the two-kilometer-long chunk of rock they had just claimed, dark and lumpy, and a silvery spacecraft that looked too sleek and new to be a prospector’s ship.
“A mining team?” Fogerty half-suggested.
“Out here already?” McPherson snapped. “We just sent in our claim. We haven’t contacted any miners.”
“Well, there they are,” said Fogerty.
“That’s not a miner’s ship.”
Fogerty shrugged. “Shall I give ’em permission to come aboard?”
McPherson had to squeeze past his partner’s bulk to get into the right-hand seat. “Who in blazes are they? And what are they doing here? With the whole Belt to poke into, why are they sticking their noses into our claim?”
Fogerty grinned at his partner. “We could ask ’em.”
Grumbling, McPherson flicked on the communications channel. “This is The Lady of the Lake. Identify yourselves, please.”
The screen swirled with color momentarily, then a darkly bearded man’s face took form. He looked vaguely oriental to McPherson: high cheekbones, hooded eyes.
“This is Shanidar. We have a boxful of videodisks that we’ve viewed so often we can lip-synch the dialogue. Do you have any to trade?”
“What’ve you got?” Fogerty asked eagerly. “How recent are they?”
“Private stuff, mostly. Muy piquante, if you know what I mean. You can’t get them through the normal channels. They were brand-new when we left Selene, six months ago.”
Before McPherson could reply, Fogerty broke into a dimpled, many-chinned smile. “We can swap you one-for-one, but our stuff is older.”
“That’s okay,” said the bearded man. “It’ll be new to us.”
“What’re you doing out here?” McPherson demanded. “We claimed this rock, you know.”
“We’re not prospecting any more,” came the reply. “We’ve hit our jackpot and made a deal with Humphries Space Systems to process the ores. Got our money in the bank. We just thought we’d unload these videodisks before we head back home.”
“Sure,” said Fatso. “Why not?”
McPherson felt uneasy. But he saw the eager look on his partner’s fleshy face. After fourteen months in the Belt they had barely cleared the payments on their ship. They needed another week, at least, to negotiate a mining contract with one of the corporations. McPherson had no intention of accepting the first offer they received. And the prices for ores just kept going down; they’d be lucky if they netted enough to live on for six months before they had to go out again.
“Okay,” he said reluctantly. “Come on over and dock at our main airlock.”
Fogerty nodded happily, like a little kid anticipating Christmas.
CHAPTER 7
Amanda thought again about how housekeeping on Ceres—inside Ceres, actually—was different from living on a ship. Not that their living quarters were that much more spacious: the single room that she and Lars shared was a slightly enlarged natural cave in the asteroid, its walls, floor, and ceiling smoothed and squared off. It wasn’t much bigger than the cubic volume they had aboard Starpower. And there was the dust, always the dust. In Ceres’s minuscule gravity, every time you moved, every time you took a step, you stirred up the everlasting dust. It was invisibly fine inside the living quarters, thanks to the air blowers. Once they moved up to the orbiting habitat, the dust would be a thing of the past, thank god.
In the meantime, though, it was a constant aggravation. You couldn’t keep anything really clean: even dishes stored in closed cupboards had to be scoured under air jets before you could eat off them. The dust made you sneeze; half the time Amanda and most of the other residents wore filter masks. She worried that her face would bear permanent crease marks from the masks.