More Wandering Stars: An Anthology of Outstanding Stories of Jewish Fantasy and Science Fiction

^{JOE W. HALDEMAN} The Mazel Tov Revolution

THIS IS THE STORY of the venerated / despised Chaim Itzkhok (check one). And me. And how we made 238 worlds safe for democracy / really screwed everything up (check another). With twenty reams of paper and an old rock. I know you probably think you’ve heard the story before. But you haven’t heard it all, not by a long way—things like blackmail and attempted murder, however polite, have a way of not getting in the history books. So read on, OK?

It all started out, for me at least, when I was stranded on Faraway a quarter of a century ago. You’re probably thinking you wouldn’t mind getting stranded on Faraway, right? Garden spot of the Confederation? Second capital of humanity? Monument to human engineering and all that, terraformed down to the last molecule. I tell kids what it was like back in ’09 and they just shake their heads.

Back then, Faraway was one of those places where you might see an occasional tourist, only because it was one of the places that tourists just didn’t go. It was one of the last outposts of George’s abortive Second Empire, and had barely supported itself by exporting things like lead and cadmium. Nice poisonous heavy metals whose oxides covered the planet instead of grass. You had to run around in an asbestos suit with an air conditioner on your back, it was so damned close to Rigel.

Still is too damned close, but the way they opaqued the upper atmosphere, they tell me that Rigel is just a baby-blue ball that makes spectacular sunrises and sunsets. I’ve never been too tempted to go see it, having worked under its blue glare in the old days; wondering how long it’d be before you went sterile, lead underwear notwithstanding, feeling skin cancers sprouting in the short-wave radiation.

I met old Chaim there at the University Club, a run-down bar left over from the Empire days. How I got to that godforsaken place is a story in itself—one I can’t tell because the husband is still alive—but I was down and out with no ticket back, dead-ended at thirty.

I was sitting alone in the University Club, ignoring the bartender, nursing my morning beer, and feeling desperate when old Chaim came in. He was around seventy but looked older, all grizzled and seamed, and I started getting ready an excuse in case he was armed with a hardluck story.

But he ordered a cup of real coffee and when he paid, I sneaked a look at his credit flash. The number was three digits longer than mine. Not prejudiced against millionaires, I struck up a conversation with him.

There was only one opening gambit for conversation on Faraway, since the weather never changed and there were no politics to speak of: What the hell are you doing here?

“It’s the closest place to where I want to go,” he said, which was ridiculous. Then he asked me the same, and I told him, and we commiserated for a few minutes on the unpredictability of the other sex. I finally got around to asking him exactly where it was he wanted to go.

“It’s interesting enough,” he said. Two other people had come into the bar. He looked at them blandly. “Why don’t we move to a table?”

He got the bartender’s attention and ordered another cup of coffee, and must have seen my expression—the tariff on two cups of coffee would keep me drunk for a week—and ordered me up a large jar of beer. We carried them to a table and he switched on the sound damper, which was the kind that works both ways.

“Can I trust you to keep a secret?” He took a cautious sip of his coffee.

“Sure. One more won’t hurt.”

He looked at me for a long time. “How would you like to get a share of a couple of million CU’s?”

A ticket back cost about a hundred thousand. “That depends on what I’d have to do.” I wouldn’t have, for instance, jumped off a high building into a vat of boiling lead. Boiling water, yes.

“I can’t say, exactly, because I really don’t know. There may be an element of danger, there may not be. Certainly a few weeks of discomfort.”

“I’ve had several of those, here.”

He nodded at the insignia on my fading fatigue jacket. “You’re still licensed to pilot?”

“Technically—”

“Bonded?”

“No, like I told you, I had to skip out. My bond’s on Perrin’s World. I don’t dare—”

“No problem, really. This is a system job.” You need to be bonded for interstellar flight, but planet-to-planet, within a stellar system, there’s not that much money involved.

“System job? Here? I didn’t know Rigel had any other—”

“Rigel has one other planet, catalogued as Biarritz. It never got chartered or officially named because there’s nothing there.”

“Except something you want.”

“Maybe something a lot of people want.”

But he wouldn’t tell me any more. We talked on until noon, Chaim feeling me out, seeing whether he could trust me, whether he wanted me as a partner. There were plenty of pilots stranded on Faraway; I later found out that he’d talked to a half-dozen or so before me.

We were talking about children or some damn thing when he suddenly sat up straight and said, “All right. I think you’ll be my pilot.”

“Good… now, just what—”

“Not yet, you don’t need to know yet. What’s your credit number?”

I gave it to him and he punched out a sequence on his credit flash. “This is your advance,” he said; I checked my flash and, glory, I was fifty thousand CU’s richer. “You get the same amount later, if Biarritz doesn’t pan out. If it works, you’ll also get a percentage. We’ll talk about that later.”

The other fifty thousand was all I wanted—get back to civilization and I could hire a proxy to go to Perrin and rescue my bond. Then I’d be in business again.

“Now. The first thing you have to do is get us a ship. I’ll arrange the financing.” We left the bar and went to Faraway’s only public (or private) stenographer, and he made out a letter of credit for me.

“Any kind of a ship will do,” he said as I walked him back to his hotel. “Anything from a yacht to a battlewagon. We just have to get there. And back.”

On any civilized world, I could have stepped into a booth and called Hartford; then strolled down to the nearest port and picked up a vessel: local, interplanetary or, if I was bonded and could wait a day or two, interstellar. But Faraway was Faraway, so it was a little more complicated.

Let me digress, in case you were born less than twenty years ago and fell asleep in history class.

Back then, we had two governments: the Confederation we all know and love, and New Hartford Transportation Rentals, Ltd. There was nothing on paper that connected the Confederation with Hartford, but in reality they were as intertwined as the skeins of a braid.

New Hartford Transportation Rentals, Ltd., owned virtually all of the basic patents necessary for interstellar travel as well as every starship, including the four clunkers left over from George VIII’s disastrous imperialistic experiment.

Tired of your planet? Seek religious freedom, adventure, fresh air? Want to run from creditors? Get enough people together and Hartford would lease you a ship—for an astronomical sum, but at very generous rates. In fact, the first couple of generations hardly paid anything at all (while the interest built up), but then—

Talk about the sins of the fathers coming home to roost! Once a colony began to be a going concern, Hartford was empowered to levy a tax of up to fifty percent on every commercial transaction. And Hartford would carefully keep the tax down to a level where only the interest on the loan was being paid—the principal resting untouched, to provide Hartford an income in perpetuity. It was a rigged game (enforced by the Confederation), and everybody knew it. But it was the only game in town.

Hartford had a representative on every planet, and they kept him fueled with enough money so that he was always the richest, and usually the most influential, citizen of the planet. If a planetary government tried to evolve away from the rapacious capitalism that guaranteed Hartford a good return on its investment, their representative usually had enough leverage to put it back on the right road.

There were loopholes and technicalities. Most planets didn’t pass the Hartford tax on directly, but used a sliding income tax, so the rich would get poorer and the poor, God bless them, would go home and make more taxpayers rather than riot in the streets.

If you ever patronized the kind of disreputable tavern that caters to pilots and other low types, you may have heard them singing that ancient ballad, “My Heart Belongs to Mother, But Hartford Owns My Ass.”

Hartford owned that fundamental part of everybody on Faraway, too. But that didn’t mean they’d supplied Faraway with a nice modern spaceport, bristling with ships of all sizes and ranges. No, just the biweekly vessel from Steiner that dropped off supplies and picked up some cadmium.

I had to admit there wasn’t much reason for Faraway to have a shortrun, plain old interplanetary ship—what good would it be? All you could do with it would be to orbit Faraway—and it looked bad enough from the ground—or take a joyride out to Biarritz. And there were more entertaining ways to throw away your money, even on Faraway.

It turned out that there actually was one interplanetary ship on Faraway, but it was a museum piece. It had been sitting for two hundred years, the Bonne Chance, the ship Biarritz herself had used to survey the clinker that retained her name by default. It was being held for back taxes, and we picked it up for six figures.

Then the headaches began. Everything was in French—dial markings, instruction manual, log. I got a dictionary and walked around with an indelible pencil, relabeling; and Chaim and I spent a week of afternoons and evenings translating the manual.

The fusion engine was in good shape—no moving parts bigger than a molecule—but the rest of the ship was pretty ragged. Faraway didn’t have much of an atmosphere, but it was practically pure oxygen, and hot. The hull was all pitted and had to be reground. The electronic components of the ship had been exposed to two hundred years of enough ionizing radiation to mutate a couple of fruit flies into a herd of purple cattle. Most of the guidance and communications gimcrackery had to be repaired or replaced.

We kept half the drifter population of Faraway—some pretty highly trained drifters, of course—employed for over a week, hammering that antique wreck into some kind of shape. I took it up alone for a couple of orbits and decided I could get it twenty AU’s and back without any major disaster.

Chaim was still being the mystery man. He gave me a list of supplies, but it didn’t hold any clue as to what we were going to do once we were on Biarritz: just air, water, food, coffee, and booze enough for two men to live on for a few months. Plus a prefab geodesic hut for them to live in.

Finally, Chaim said he was ready to go and I set up the automatic sequencing, about two hours of systems checks that were supposed to assure me that the machine wouldn’t vaporize on the pad when I pushed the Commence button. I said a pagan prayer to Norbert Weiner and went down to the University Club for one last round or six. I could afford better bars, with fifty thousand CU’s on my flash, but didn’t feel like mingling with the upper classes.

I came back to the ship a half-hour before the sequencing was due to end, and Chaim was there watching the slavies load a big crate aboard the Bonne Chance. “What the hell is that?” I asked him.

“The Mazel Tov papers,” he said, not taking his eyes off the slavies.

“Mazel Tov?”

“It means good luck, maybe good-bye. Doesn’t translate all that well. If you say it like this”—and he pronounced the words with a sarcastic inflection—“it can mean ‘good riddance’ or ‘much good shall it do you.’ Clear?”

“No.”

“Good.” They finished loading the crate and sealed the hold door. “Give me a hand with this.” It was a gray metal box that Chaim said contained a brand-new phased-tachyon transceiver.

If you’re young enough to take the phased-tachyon process for granted, just step in a booth and call Sirius, I should point out that when Chaim and I met, they’d only had the machines for a little over a year. Before that, if you wanted to communicate with someone lightyears away, you had to write out your message and put it on a Hartford vessel, then wait around weeks, sometimes months, while it got shuffled from planet to planet (at Hartford’s convenience) until it finally wound up in the right person’s hands.

Inside, I secured the box and called the pad authorities, asking them for our final mass. They read it off and I punched the information into the flight computer. Then we both strapped in.

Finally the green light flashed. I pushed the Commence button down to the locked position, and in a few seconds the engine rumbled into life, The ship shook like the palsied old veteran that it was, and climbed skyward trailing a cloud of what must have been the most polluting exhaust in the history of transportation: hot ionized lead, slightly radioactive. Old Biarritz had known how to economize on reaction mass.

I’d programmed a quick-and-dirty route, one and a half G’s all the way, flip in the middle. Still it was going to take us two weeks. Chaim could have passed the time by telling me what it was all about, but instead he just sat around reading—War and Peace and a tape of Medieval Russian folk tales—every now and then staring at the wall and cackling.

Afterwards, I could appreciate his fetish for secrecy (though God knows enough people were in on part of the secret already). Not to say I might have been tempted to double-cross him. But his saying a couple of million were involved was like inviting someone to the Boston Tea Party, by asking him if he’d like to put on a loincloth and help you play a practical joke.

So I settled down for two weeks with my own reading, earning my pay by pushing a button every couple of hours to keep a continuous systems check going. I could have programmed the button to push itself, but hell…

At the end of two weeks, I did have to earn my keep. I watched the “velocity relative to destination” readout crawl down to zero and looked out the viewport. Nothing.

Radar found the little planet handily enough. We’d only missed it by nine thousand and some kilometers; you could see its blue-gray disc if you knew where to look.

There’s no trick to landing a ship like the Bonne Chance if you have a nice heavy planet. It’s all automated except for selecting the exact patch of earth you want to scorch (port authorities go hard on you if you miss the pad). But a feather-light ball of dirt like Biarritz is a different proposition—there just isn’t enough gravity, and the servomechanisms don’t respond fast enough. They’ll try to land you at the rock’s center of mass, which in this case was underneath forty-nine kilometers of solid basalt. So you have to do it yourself, a combination of radar and dead reckoning—more a docking maneuver than a landing.

So I crashed. It could happen to anybody.

I was real proud of that landing at first. Even old Chaim congratulated me. We backed into the surface at less than one centimeter per second, all three shoes touching down simultaneously. We didn’t even bounce.

Chaim and I were already suited up, and all the air had been evacuated from the ship; standard operating procedure to minimize damage in case something did go wrong. But the landing had looked perfect, so we went on down to start unloading.

What passes for gravity on Biarritz comes to barely one-eightieth of a G. Drop a shoe and it takes it five seconds to find the floor. So we halfclimbed, half-floated down to the hold, clumsy after two weeks of living in a logy G-and-a-half.

While I was getting the hold door open, we both heard a faint bass moan, conducted up from the ground through the landing shoes. Chaim asked whether it was the ground settling; I’d never heard it happen before, but said that was probably it. We were right.

I got the door open and looked out. Biarritz looked just like I’d expected it to: a rock, a pockmarked chunk of useless rock. The only relief from the grinding monotony of the landscape was the silver splash of congealed lead directly below us.

We seemed to be at a funny angle. I thought it was an optical illusion—if the ship hadn’t been upright on landing, it would have registered on the attitude readout. Then the bright lead splash started moving, crawling away under the ship. It took me a second to react.

I shouted something unoriginal and scrambled for the ladder to the control room. One short blip from the main engine and we’d be safely away. Didn’t make it.

The situation was easy enough to reconstruct, afterwards. We’d landed on a shelf of rock that couldn’t support the weight of the Bonne Chance. The sound we had heard was the shelf breaking off, settling down a few meters, canting the ship at about a ten-degree angle. The force of friction between our landing pads and the basalt underfoot was almost negligible, in so little gravity, and we slid downhill until we reached bottom, and then gracefully tipped over. When I got to the control room, after quite a bit of bouncing around in slow-motion, everything was sideways and the controls were dead, dead, dead.

Chaim was lively enough, shouting and sputtering. Back in the hold, he was buried under a pile of crates, having had just enough time to unstrap them before the ship went over. I explained the situation to him while helping him out.

“We’re stuck here, eh?”

“I don’t know yet. Have to fiddle around some.”

“No matter. Inconvenient, but no matter. We’re going to be so rich we could have a fleet of rescuers here tomorrow morning.”

“Maybe,” I said, knowing it wasn’t so—even if there were a ship at Faraway, it couldn’t possibly make the trip in less than ten days. “First thing we have to do, though, is put up that dome.” Our suits weren’t the recycling kind; we had about ten hours before we had to start learning how to breathe carbon dioxide.

We sorted through the jumble and found the various components of the pop-up geodesic. I laid it out on a piece of reasonably level ground and pulled the lanyard. It assembled itself very nicely. Chaim started unloading the ship while I hooked up the life-support system.

He was having a fine time, kicking crates out the door and watching them float to the ground a couple of meters below. The only one that broke was a case of whiskey—every single bottle exploded, damn it, making a cloud of brownish crystals that slowly dissipated. So Biarritz was the only planet in the universe with a bonded-bourbon atmosphere.

When Chaim got to his booze, a case of gin, he carried it down by hand.

We set up housekeeping while the dome was warming. I was still opening boxes when the bell went off, meaning there was enough oxygen and heat for life. Chaim must have had more trust in automatic devices than I had; he popped off his helmet immediately and scrambled out of his suit. I took off my helmet to be sociable, but kept on working at the last crate, the one Chaim had said contained “the Mazel Tov papers.”

I got the top peeled away and looked inside. Sure enough, it was full of paper, in loose stacks.

I picked up a handful and looked at them. “Immigration forms?”

Chaim was sitting on a stack of food cartons, peeling off his suit liner. “That’s right. Our fortune.”

“‘Mazel Tov Immigration Bureau,’” I read off one of the sheets. “Who—”

“You’re half of it. I’m half of it. Mazel Tov is the planet under your feet.” He slipped off the box. “Where’d you put our clothes?”

“What?”

“This floor’s cold.”

“Uh, over by the kitchen.” I followed his naked wrinkled back as be clumped across the dome. “Look, you can’t just… name a planet…”

“I can’t, eh?” He rummaged through the footlocker and found some red tights, struggled into them. “Who says I can’t?”

“The Confederation! Hartford! You’ve got to get a charter.”

He found an orange tunic that clashed pretty well and slipped it over his head. Muffled: “So I’m going to get a charter.”

“Just like that.”

He started strapping on his boots and looked at me with amusement. “No, not ‘just like that.’ Let’s make some coffee.” He filled two cups with water and put them in the heater.

“You can’t just charter a rock with two people on it.”

“You’re right. You’re absolutely right.” The timer went off. “Cream and sugar?”

“Look—no, black—you mean to say you printed up some fake—”

“Hot.” He handed me the cup. “Sit down. Relax. I’ll explain.”

I was still in my suit, minus the helmet, so sitting was no more comfortable than standing. But I sat.

He looked at me over the edge of his cup, through a veil of steam rising unnaturally fast. I made my first million when I was your age.”

“You’ve got to start somewhere.”

“Right. I made a million and paid eighty-five percent of it to the government of Nueva Argentina, who skimmed a little off the top and passed it on to New Hartford Transportation Rentals, Ltd.”

“Must have hurt.”

“It made me angry. It made me think. And I did get the germ of an idea.” He sipped.

“Go on.”

“I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of the Itzkbok Shipping Agency.”

“No… it probably would have stuck in my mind.”

“Very few people have. On the surface, it’s a very small operation. Four interplanetary ships, every one of them smaller than the Bonne Chance. But they’re engaged in interstellar commerce.”

“Stars must be pretty close together.”

“No… they started about twenty years ago. The shortest voyage is about half over. One has over a century to go.”

“Doesn’t make any sense.”

“But it does. It makes sense on two levels.” He set down the cup and laced his fingers together.

“There are certain objects whose value almost has to go up with the passage of time. Jewelry, antiques, works of art. These are the only cargo I deal with. Officially.”

“I see. I think.”

“You see half of it. I buy these objects on relatively poor planets and ship them to relatively affluent ones. I didn’t have any trouble getting stockholders. Hartford wasn’t too happy about it, of course.”

“What did they do?”

He shrugged. “Took me to court. I’d studied the law, though, before I started Itzkhok. They didn’t press too hard—my company didn’t make one ten-thousandth of Hartford’s annual profit—and I won.”

“And made a credit or two.”

“Some three billion, legitimate profit. But the important thing is that I established a concrete legal precedent where none had existed before.”

“You’re losing me again. Does this have anything to do with…”

“Everything, patience. With this money, and money from other sources, I started building up a fleet. Through a number of dummy corporations… buying old ships, building new ones. I own or am leasing some two thousand ships. Most of them are loaded and on the pad right now.”

“Wait, now.” Economics was never my strong suit, but this was obvious. “You’re going to drive your own prices down. There can’t be that big a market for old paintings and—”

“Right, precisely. But most of these ships aren’t carrying such specialized cargo. The closest one, for instance, is on Tangiers, aimed for Faraway. It holds nearly a hundred thousand cubic meters of water.”

“Water…”

“Old passenger liner, flooded the damn thing. Just left a little room for ice expansion, in case the heating—”

“Because on Faraway—”

“—on Faraway there isn’t one molecule of water that men didn’t carry there. They recycle every drop but have to lose one percent or so annually.

“Tonight or tomorrow I’m going to call up Faraway and offer to sell them 897,000 kilograms of water. At cost. Delivery in six years. It’s a long time to wait, but they’ll be getting it for a hundredth of the usual cost, what Hartford charges.”

“And you’ll lose a bundle.”

“Depends on how you look at it. Most of my capital is tied up in small, slow spaceships; I own some interest in three-quarters of the interplanetary vessels that exist. If my scheme works, all of them will double in value overnight.

“Hartford, though, is going to lose more than a bundle. There are 237 other planets, out of 298, in a position similar to Faraway’s. They depend on Hartford for water, or seed, or medical supplies, or something else necessary for life.”

“And you have deals set up—”

“For all of them, right. Underbidding Hartford by at least a factor of ten.” He drank off the rest of his coffee in a gulp.

“What’s to stop Hartford from underbidding you?”

“Absolutely nothing.” He got up and started preparing another cup. “They’ll probably try to, here and there. I don’t think many governments will take them up on it.

“Take Faraway as an example. They’re in a better position than most planets, as far as their debt to Hartford, because the Second Empire financed the start of their colonization. Still, they owe Hartford better than ten billion CU’s—their annual interest payment comes to several hundred million.

“They keep paying it, not because of some abstract obligation to Hartford. Governments don’t have consciences. If they stopped paying, of course, they’d dry up and die in a generation. Until today, they didn’t have any choice in the matter.”

“So what you’re doing is giving all of those planets a chance to welsh on their debts.”

“That bothers you?” He sat back down, balanced the cup on his knee.

“A little. I don’t love Hartford any more than—”

“Look at it this way. My way. Consider Hartford as an arm of the government, the Confederation.”

“I’ve always thought it was the other way around.”

“In a practical sense, yes. But either way. A government sends its people out to colonize virgin lands. It subsidizes them at first; once the ball is rolling, it collects allegiance and taxes.

“The ‘debt’ to Hartford is just a convenient fiction to justify taking these taxes.”

“There are services rendered, though. Necessary to life.”

“Rendered and paid for, separately. I’m going to prove to the ‘colonies’ that they can provide these services to each other. It will be even easier once Hartford goes bankrupt. There’ll be no monopoly on starships. No Confederation to protect patents.”

“Anarchy, then.”

“Interesting word. I prefer to call it revolution… but yes, things will be pretty hectic for a while.”

“All right. But if you wanted to choreograph a revolution, why didn’t you pick a more comfortable planet to do it from? Are you just hiding?”

“Partly that. Mostly, though, I wanted to do everything legally. For that, I needed a very small planet without a charter.”

“I’m lost again.” I made myself another cup of coffee and grieved for the lack of bourbon. Maybe if I went outside and took a deep breath…

“You know what it takes to charter a planet?” Chaim asked me.

“Don’t know the numbers. Certain population density and high enough gross planetary product.”

“The figures aren’t important. They look modest enough on paper. The way it works out, though, is that by the time a planet is populated enough and prosperous enough to get its independence, it’s almost guaranteed to be irretrievably in debt to Hartford.”

“That’s what all those immigration forms are for. Half of those stacks are immigration forms and the other half, limited powers of attorney. I’m going to claim this planet, name it Mazel Tov, and accept my own petition for citizenship on behalf of 4,783 immigrants. Then I make one call, to my lawyer.” He named an Earth-based interplanetary law firm so well-known that even I had heard of it.

“They will call about a hundred of these immigrants, each of whom will call ten more, then ten more, and so on. All prearranged. Each of them then pays me his immigration fee.”

“How much is that?”

“Minimum, ten million CU’s.”

“God!”

“It’s a bargain. A new citizen gets one share in the Mazel Tov Corporation for each million he puts in. In thirty minutes MTC should have almost as much capital behind it as Hartford has.”

“Where could you find four thousand—”

“Twenty years of persuasion. Of coordination. I’ve tried to approach every living man of wealth whose fortune is not tied up with Hartford or the Confederation. I’ve showed them my plan—especially the safeguards on it that make it a low-risk, high-return investment—and every single one of them has signed up.”

“Not one betrayal?”

“No—what could the Confederation or Hartford offer in return? Wealth? Power? These men already have that in abundance.

“On the other hand, I offer them a gift beyond price: independence. And incidentally, no taxes, ever. That’s the first article of the charter.”

He let me absorb that for a minute. “It’s too facile,” I said. “If your plan works, everything will fall apart for the Confederation and Hartford—but look what we get instead. Four thousand—some independent robber barons, running the whole show. That’s an improvement?”

“Who can say? But that’s revolution: throw the old set of bastards out and install your own set. At least it’ll be different. Time for a change.”

I got up. “Look, this is too much, too fast. I’ve got to think about it. Digest it. Got to check out the ship, too.”

Chaim went along with me halfway to the air lock. “Good, good. I’ll start making calls.” He patted the transceiver with real affection. “Good thing this baby came along when it did. It would have been difficult coordinating this thing, passing notes around. Maybe impossible.”

It didn’t seem that bloody easy, even with all those speedy little tachyons helping us. I didn’t say anything.

It was a relief to get back into my own element, out of the dizzying fumes of high finance and revolution. But it was short-lived.

Things started out just dandy. The reason the control board was dead was that its cable to the fuel cells had jarred loose. I plugged it back in and set up a systems check. The systems check ran for two seconds and quit. What was wrong with the ship was number IV-A-I-a. It took me a half-hour to find the manual, which had slid into the head and nestled up behind the commode.

“IV” was fusion power source. “IV-A” was generation of magnetic field for containment thereof. “IV-A-I” was disabilities of magnetic field generator. And “IV-A-I-a,” of course, was permanent disability. It had a list of recommended types of replacement generators.

Well, I couldn’t run down to the store and pick up a generator. And you can’t produce an umpty-million-gauss fusion mirror by rubbing two sticks together. So I kicked Mlle. Biarritz’s book across the room and went back to the dome.

Chaim was hunched over the transceiver, talking to somebody while he studied his own scribblings in a notebook.

“We’re stuck here,” I said.

He nodded at me and kept up the conversation. “—that’s right. Forty thousand bushels, irradiated, for five hundred thousand CU’s… so what? So it’s a gift. It’s guaranteed. Delivery in about seven years, you’ll get details… all right, fine. A pleasure to do business. Thank you, sir.”

He switched off and leaned back and laughed. “They all think I’m crazy!”

“We’re stuck here,” I said again.

“Don’t worry about it, don’t worry,” he said, pointing to an oversized credit flash attached to the transceiver. It had a big number on it that was constantly changing, going up. “That is the total assets of Mazel Tov Corporation.” He started laughing again.

“Minims?”

“No, round credits.”

I counted places. “A hundred and twenty-eight billion… credits?”

“That’s right, right. You want to go to Faraway? We’ll have it towed here.”

“A hundred and twenty-nine billion?” It was really kind of hard to grasp.

“Have a drink—celebrate!” There was a bowl of ice and a bottle of gin on the floor beside him. God, I hate gin.

“Think I’ll fix a cup of tea.” By the time I’d had my cup, cleaned up, and changed out of my suit, Chaim was through with his calls. The number on the credit flash was up to 239,605,967,000 and going up slowly.

He took his bottle, glass, and ice to his bunk and asked me to start setting up the rescue mission.

I called Hartford headquarters on Earth. Six people referred me to their superiors and I wound up talking to the Coordinator of Interstellar Transit himself. I found out that bad news travels fast.

“Mazel Tov?” his tinny voice said. “I’ve heard of you, new planet out by Rigel? Next to Faraway?”

“That’s right. We need a pickup and we can pay.”

“Oh, that’s not the problem. Right now there just aren’t any ships available. Won’t be for several months. Maybe a year.”

“What? We only have three months’ worth of air!” By this time Chaim was standing right behind me, breathing gin into my ear.

“I’m really very sorry. But I thought that by the time a planet gets its charter, it should be reasonably self-sufficient.”

“That’s murder!” Chaim shouted.

“No, sir,” the voice said. “Just unfortunate planning on your part. You shouldn’t have filed for—” Chaim reached over my shoulder and slapped the switch off, hard. He stomped back to his bunk—difficult to do with next to no gravity—sat down and shook some gin into his glass. He looked at it and set it on the floor.

“Who can we bribe?” I asked.

He kept staring at the glass. “No one. We can try, but I doubt that it’s worth the effort. Not with Hartford fighting for its life. Its corporate life.”

“I know lots of pilots we could get, cheap.”

“Pilots,” Chaim said without too much respect.

I ignored the slur. “Yeah. Hartford programs the main jump. Nobody’d get a jump to Rigel.”

We sat in silence for a while, the too-sober pilot and the Martian-Russian Jew who was the richest person in the history of mankind. Less than too sober.

“Sure there’s no other ship on Faraway?”

“I’m sure,” I said. “Took me a half day to find someone who remembered about the Bonne Chance.”

He considered that for a minute. “What does it take to build an interplanetary ship? Besides money.”

“What, you mean could they build one on Faraway?”

“Right.”

“Let me see.” Maybe. “You need an engine. A cabin and life-support stuff. Steering jets or gyros. Guidance and commo equipment.”

“Well?”

“I don’t know. The engine would be the hard part. They don’t have all that much heavy industry on Faraway.”

“No harm in finding out.”

I called Faraway. Talked to the mayor. He was an old pilot (having been elected by popular vote) and I finally reached him at the University Club, where he was surrounded by other old pilots. I talked to him about engineering. Chaim talked to him about money. Chaim shouted and wept at him about money. We made a deal.

Faraway having such an abundance of heavy metals, the main power generator for the town, the only settlement on the planet, was an old-fashioned fission generator. We figured out a way they could use it.

After a good deal of haggling and swearing, the citizens of Faraway agreed to cobble together a rescue vehicle. In return, they would get control of forty-nine percent of the stock of Mazel Tov Corporation.

Chaim was mad for a while, but eventually got his sense of humor back. We had to kill two months with six already-read books and a fifty-bottle case of gin. I read War and Peace twice. The second time I made a list of the characters. I made crossword puzzles out of the characters’ names. I learned how to drink gin, if not how to like it. I felt like I was going slowly crazy—and when the good ship Hello There hove into view, I knew I’d gone ’round the bend.

The Hello There was a string of fourteen buildings strung along a lattice of salvaged beams; a huge atomic reactor pushing it from the rear. The buildings had been uprooted whole, life-support equipment and all, from the spaceport area of Faraway. The first building, the control room, was the transplanted University Club, Olde English decorations still intact. There were thirty pairs of wheels along one side of the “vessel,” the perambulating shantytown.

We found out later that they had brought along a third of the planet’s population, since most of the buildings on Faraway were without power and therefore uninhabitable. The thing (I still can’t call it a ship) had to be put on wheels because they had no way to crank it upright for launching. They drove it off the edge of a cliff and pulled for altitude with the pitch jets. The pilot said it had been pretty harrowing and after barely surviving the landing I could marvel at his power of understatement.

The ship hovered over Mazel Tov with its yaw jets and they lowered a ladder for us. Quite a feat of navigation. I’ve often wondered whether the pilot could have done it sober.

The rest, they say, is history. And current events. As Chaim had predicted Hartford went into receivership, MTC being the receiver. We did throw out all of the old random bastards and install our own handpicked ones.

I shouldn’t bitch. I’m still doing the only thing I ever wanted to do. Pilot a starship; go places, do things. And I’m moderately wealthy, with a tenth-share of MTC stock.

It’d just be a lot easier to take, if every ex-bum on Faraway didn’t have a hundred times as much. I haven’t gone back there since they bronzed the University Club and put it on a pedestal.