Freedom's Ransom

Chapter Sixteen

The day before, Chuck had exchanged a lump of their copper for a carton of Toyota brake linings and two cartons of spark plugs for truck transmissions. "We did promise Vitali we'd get such things," he had informed Zainal.

"I know. And we must prove reliable to the coord."

Indeed they must. And thanks to Ditsy's enterprise, they also had both a supply of power packs and more of the coveted lifts to bring back. Erbri had been useful in this sideline, as well, bringing in dam aged equipment that he also helped repair. So Erbri could be useful on Botany as well as Natchi, and Zainal had half decided that he'd bring the two veterans back to Retreat rather than leave them to live out their hand-to-mouth lives. In fact, Zainal thought he had done better, in many ways, for the Terrans than for the folk on Botany. He had thought they would have had more buyers for the metals, which Zainal knew were in short supply on Barevi, but considering the green coord's trade with him, they could use the remaining metals to better advantage on Earth.

Zainal enjoyed a moment of peaceful reflection, wondering how much advantage he might wring from such insights. Barevi's main function had always been as a trading planet and only secondarily as a place for long-haul spacemen to vent excess energy and for sporting Catteni to hunt live creatures. However, one of Kris's cryptic phrases came to mind: something about a mountain coming to a man.

"What is that you say about the mountain and a man?"

She blinked for a moment, shook her head, and then her expres-sion brightened. "If Mohammed won't come to the mountain, let the mountain come to Mohammed. Is that the one you mean?"

"The very one," and he smiled at her, just as a man stepped up to the stall.

"Excuse me, Zainal," she said and offered a cup to the Catteni. The man had a noticeable squint and an unpleasant expression on his face but, watching him for a moment as Kris explained how to prepare the bean properly, she seemed to have soothed him. He sipped the coffee and turned to survey those passing by. Kris gave an exas-perated look at Zainal but smiled pleasantly at the Catteni. Then he said he wanted to purchase a bag of beans and evidently could not make up his mind between the arabica and the robusta. Kris offered to give him a quantity of both so he could savor them in his own house. They meant to stop selling the beans as a separate commodity since they were better used as barter but, as in the case of this pom-pous person, it was easier to comply than deny. And they acquired sufficient Catteni coins to defray other costs.

"But that is more than a bottle of the best wine would cost," the man complained when Kris quoted him the price.

"Ah, there are some who maintain that good coffee is better than wine," was Kris's smiling reply. "It is the beginning of the day you should ensure, rather than the end."

He grunted as he deposited the half-bags in the pockets of his loose jerkin before he stalked away, still annoyed at the cost.

"Be sure to grind them properly, as we showed you," Kris called cheerfully after him. Then to Zainal she said, "Serving coffee has be-come de rigueur. All the best homes serve it." Then she grinned.

"What's so amusing? He was not," Zainal said, for the squint-eyed man was an arrogant type of Catteni and possibly had not even liked being served by a Terran woman.

"No, and what do you want to bet he doesn't explain to his wife that she has to grind them, much less that the water must be boiled to make a proper brew"

"I wouldn't bet," Zainal said. He knew how careful the women were to explain the correct process. Maybe next time they could bring proper pots and more grinders.

He was astonished that he was thinking in terms of "next time." But he was beginning to think of a fairly complex business possibil-ity. He needed to turn it over in his mind before he voiced it to the members of his current crew, to say nothing of the Botany colonists, who were expecting so much from this venture.

Later that morning, Zainal saw Tavis accompanying a Catteni, stalwart even among their species, to Eric's office. The sort of man, Zainal thought, who was in the middle of brawls. Though it seemed true that the threat of transportation to a slave colony had remarkably reduced the number of brawls. Evidently Kapash had made good on that threat. The most recent fracas had involved two Catteni crews who had just landed on Barevi and had started by picking quarrels with each other even as they walked from the dock to the settlement. Ditsy had heard that half the crew had already been arrested and thrown into prison. Whether or not their captains would be able to bail them out of Kapash's reach remained to be seen. In the mean-time, if the slave ship arrived, they would be transported unless their captain ransomed them. Either way, Zainal thought, Kapash won. He wished fleetingly that, when he had been market manager, he had had that option. But in that year, there had been plenty of captive species to send to the work camps. Idly he wondered how long Catteni sur-vived in those conditions. Not all the quarrelsome crew members had been rounded up, so Zainal called a halt to their business early, in case the remaining men were still in the market before they went off to hunt or do whatever form of enterprise they considered suitable for relaxation.

They all got back to the BASS-1 with no problem and ate their evening meal-Gino enjoyed cooking and had put together some un-usually tasty meals. Eric was very pleased with his new patients and said he could easily support himself with dentistry on Barevi.

"What about that young fellow Tavis?" Zainal asked.

"The one who wants to apprentice himself to me as a dental as-sistant?" Eric asked with a smile. "Nice, earnest young man."

"I think he fancies that you can teach him how to be a dentist, too," Zainal said by way of cautioning.

"Hmmm. Fancies indeed. Not"-Eric paused to raise his hand-"that he isn't intelligent enough. I shall happily train him in the skills I need in an assistant, and Sally can go back to bookkeeping."

The next morning, Zainal was to meet with a merchant named Nilink, whom Ferris had brought to his notice as the owner of a large storage complex full of tires with the Goodyear and Michelin logos on their paper wrappings. Zainal was extremely eager to do business with the man but knew better by now than to appear keen. So he de-layed his departure, using the time to memorize the weights and sizes of the tires on the list he had compiled on Terra. It was always wise to know exactly what he was seeking.

As he moved through the morning crowds to their location, he was surprised to hear a commotion. Then Ferris came dodging through the crowds and all but ran into him.

"Zainal! Zainal!" The boy's face was terror-stricken. "Kapash's men have taken Kris and Kathy! Taken them," he gasped.

"Why?" Zainal grabbed the boy by the shoulders, holding him upright.

"'Misrepresenting goods' is all I heard. Chuck was arguing with them and so were Peran and Bazil. Brone tried to help, too. But they were taken away!" He had something more to say and not enough breath to spew it out.

"Steady, lad, steady! We can fix it."

"But they have Emassi Kris," the boy said. "And Natchi says there's a slave ship in. He says they load fast and leave."

"Go back, Ferris. Tell Chuck I have gone to attend to Kapash," he said before he started running through the crowd toward Kapash's of-fice, pushing people out of his way when they were not fast enough for the pace he set himself. Kris! Not Kris! Not on a slave ship again. And Kathy. She, too, would be frightened, but it was Kris he could not do without.