Starman Jones

5 "...YOUR MONEY AND MY KNOW-HOW..."

"The patter?" Max looked puzzled. "I suppose I know what everybody knows."

"Where's the worry hole?"

"Huh? That's the control room."

"If the cheater wants a corpse, where does he find it?"

Max looked amused. "That's just stuff from SV serials, nobody talks like that aboard ship. The cook is the cook, and if he wanted a side of beef, he'd go to the reefer for it."

"How do you tell a 'beast' from an animal?"

"Why, a 'beast' is a passenger, but an animal is just an animal, I guess."

"Suppose you were on a ship for Mars and they announced that the power plant had gone blooie and the ship was going to spiral into the Sun? What would you think?"

"I'd think somebody was trying to scare me. In the first place, you wouldn't be 'on' a ship--'in' is the right word. Second, a spiral isn't one of the possible orbits. And third, if a ship was headed for Mars from Earth, it couldn't fall into the Sun; the orbit would be incompatible."

"Suppose you were part of a ship's crew in a strange port and you wanted to go out and look the place over. How would you go about asking the captain for permission?"

"Why, I wouldn't."

"You'd just jump ship?"

"Let me finish. If I wanted to hit dirt, I'd ask the first officer; the captain doesn't bother with such things. If the ship was big enough, I'd have to ask my department head first." Max sat up and held Sam's eye. "Sam--you've been spaceside. Haven't you?"

"What gave you that notion, kid?"

"What's your guild?"

"Stow it, Max. Ask me no questions and I'll sell you no pigs in a poke. Maybe I've studied up on the jive just as you have."

"I don't believe it," Max said bluntly.

Sam looked pained. Max went on, "What's this all about? You ask me a bunch of silly questions--sure, I know quite a bit about spaceside; I've been reading about it all my life and Uncle Chet would talk by the hour. But what of it?"

Sam looked at him and said softly, "Max--the _Asgard_ is raising next Thursday--for starside. Would you like to be in her?"

Max thought about it. To be in the fabulous _Asgard_, to be heading out to the stars, to be--he brushed the vision aside. "Don't talk that way, Sam! You know I'd give my right arm. Why needle me?"

"How much money have you?"

"Huh? Why?"

"How much?"

"I haven't even had time to count it." Max started to haul out the wad of bills he had been given; Sam hastily and unobtrusively stopped him.

"Psst!" he protested. "Don't flash a roll in here. Do you want to eat through a slit in your throat? Keep it down!"

Startled, Max took the advice. He was still more startled when he finished the tally; he had known that he had been given quite a lot of money but this was more than he had dreamed. "How much?" Sam persisted. Max told him, Sam swore softly. "Well, it will just have to do."

"Do for what?"

"You'll see. Put it away."

As Max did so he said wonderingly, "Sam, I had no idea those books were so valuable."

"They aren't."

"Huh?"

"It's malarkey. Lots of guilds do it. They want to make it appear that their professional secrets are precious, so they make the candidate put up a wad of dough for his reference books. If those things were published in the ordinary way, they'd sell at a reasonable price."

"But that's right, isn't it? As the Worthy High Secretary explained, it wouldn't do for just anybody to have that knowledge."

Sam made a rude noise and pretended to spit. "What difference would it make? Suppose you still had them--you don't have a ship to conn."

"But ..." Max stopped and grinned. "I can't see that it did any good to take them away from me anyhow. I've read them, so I know what's in them."

"Sure you know. Maybe you even remember some of the methods. But you don't have all those columns of figures so you can look up the one you need when you need it. That's what they care about."

"But I do! I read them, I tell you." Max wrinkled his forehead, then began to recite: "'Page 272, Calculated Solutions of the Differential Equation of Motion by the Ricardo Assumption--" He began to reel off a series of seven-place figures. Sam listened in growing surprise, then stopped him.

"Kid, you really remember that? You weren't making it up?"

"Of course not, I _read_ it."

"Well, I'll be a beat up ... Look, you're a page-at-a-glance reader? Is that it?"

"No, not exactly. I'm a pretty fast reader, but I do have to read it. But I don't forget. I never have been able to see how people forget. I can't forget anything."

Sam shook his head wonderingly. "I've been able to forget a lot of things, thank Heaven." He thought for a moment. "Maybe we should forget the other caper and exploit this talent of yours. I can think of angles."

"What do you mean? And what other caper?"

"Hmm ... no, I was right the first time. The idea is to get away from here. And with your funny memory the chances are a whole lot better. Even though you sling the slang pretty well I was worried. Now I'm not."

"Sam, stop talking riddles. What are you figuring on?'

"Okay, kid, I'll lay it on the table." He glanced around, leaned forward, and spoke even more quietly. "We take the money and I spread it around carefully. When the _Asgard_ raises, we're signed on as crewmen."

"As apprentices? We wouldn't even have time for ground school. And besides you're too old to 'prentice."

"Use your head! We don't have enough to pay one apprentice fee, let alone two, in any space guild--and the _Asgard_ isn't signing 'prentices anyhow. We'll be experienced journeymen in one of the guilds, with records to prove it."

When the idea soaked in, Max was shocked. "But they put you in jail for that!"

"Where do you think you are now?"

"Well, I'm not in jail. And I don't want to be."

"This whole planet is one big jail, and a crowded one at that. What chance have you got? If you aren't born rich, or born into one of the hereditary guilds, what can you do? Sign up with one of the labor companies."

"But there are non-hereditary guilds."

"Can you pay the fee? You've got a year, maybe two until you're too old to 'prentice. If you were sharp with cards you might manage it--but can you earn it? You should live so long! Your old man should have saved it; he left you a farm instead." Sam stopped suddenly, bit his thumb. "Max, I'll play fair. Your old man did leave you a fair start in life. With the money you've got you can go home, hire a shyster, and maybe squeeze that Montgomery item out of the money he swindled for your farm. Then you can buy your apprenticeship in some guild. Do it, kid. I won't stand in your way." He watched Max narrowly.

Max reflected that he had just refused a chance to pick a trade and be given a free start. Maybe he should reconsider. Maybe ... "No! That's not what I want. This ... this, uh, scheme of yours; how do we do it?"

Sam relaxed and grinned. "My boy!"

Sam got them a room over Percy's restaurant. There he coached him. Sam went out several times and Max's money went with him. When Max protested Sam said wearily, "What do you want? To hold my heart as security? Do you want to come along and scare 'em out of the dicker? The people I have to reason with will be taking chances. Or do you think you can arrange matters yourself? It's your money and my know-how ... that's the partnership."

Max watched him leave the first time with gnawing doubts, but Sam came back. Once he brought with him an elderly, gross woman who looked Max over as if he were an animal up for auction. Sam did not introduce her but said, "How about it? I thought a mustache would help."

She looked at Max from one side, then the other. "No," she decided, "that would just make him look made up for amateur theatricals." She touched Max's head with moist, cold fingers; when he drew back, she admonished, "Don't flinch, honey duck. Aunt Becky has to work on you. No, we'll move back his hair line above his temples, thin it out on top, and kill its gloss. Some faint wrinkles tattooed around his eyes. Mmm ... that's all. Mustn't overdo it."

When this fat artist was through Max looked ten years older. Becky asked if he wanted his hair roots killed, or would he prefer to have his scalp return to normal in time? Sam started to insist on permanence, but she brushed him aside. "I'll give him a bottle of 'Miracle Gro'--no extra charge, it's just rubbing alcohol--and he can make a big thing of using it. How about it, lover? You're too pretty to age you permanently."

Max accepted the "Miracle Gro"--hair restored or your money back.

Sam took away his citizen's identification card, returned with another one. It had his right name, a wrong age, his right serial number, a wrong occupation, his own thumb print, and a wrong address. Max looked at it curiously. "It looks real."

"It should. The man who made it makes thousands of real ones--but he charges extra for this." That night Sam brought him a book titled _Ship Economy_ and embossed with the seal of the Guild of Space Stewards, Cooks, and Purser's Clerks. "Better stay up all night and see how much you can soak up. The man it belongs to won't sleep more than ten hours even with the jolt Percy slipped into his nightcap. Want a pill to keep you awake?"

"I don't think so." Max examined it. It was in fine print and quite thick. But by five in the morning he had finished it. He woke Sam and gave it back, then went to sleep, his head buzzing with stowage and dunnage, moment arms and mass calculations, hydroponics techniques, cargo records, tax forms, diets, food preservation and preparation, daily, weekly, and quarterly accounts, and how to get rats out of a compartment which must not be evacuated. Simple stuff, he decided--he wondered why such things were considered too esoteric for laymen.

On the fourth day of his incarceration Sam fitted him out with spaceside clothes, none of them new, and gave him a worn plastileather personal record book. The first page stated that he was an accepted brother of the Stewards, Cooks, and Purser's Clerks, having honorably completed his apprenticeship. It listed his skills and it appeared that his dues had been paid each quarter for seven years. What appeared to be his own signature appeared above that of the High Steward, with the seal of the guild embossed through both. The other pages recorded his trips, his efficiency ratings, and other permanent data, each properly signed by the first officers and pursers concerned. He noted with interest that he had been fined three days pay in the _Cygnus_ for smoking in an unauthorized place and that he had once for six weeks been allowed to strike for chartsman, having paid the penalty to the Chartsmen & Computers Guild for the chance.

"See anything odd?" asked Sam.

"It all looks funny to me."

"It says you've been to Luna. Everybody's been to Luna. But the ships you served in are mostly out of commission and none of the pursers happens to be in Earthport now. The only starship you ever jumped in was lost on the trip immediately after the one you took. Get me?"

"I think so."

"When you talk to another spaceman, no matter what ship he served in, it's not one you served in--you won't be showing this record to anybody but the purser and your boss anyhow."

"But suppose _they_ served in one of these?"

"Not in the _Asgard_. We made darn sure. Now I'm going to take you out on an evening of gaiety. You'll drink warm milk on account of your ulcer and you'll complain when you can't get it. And that's just about all you'll talk about--your symptoms. You'll start a reputation right now for being untalkative; you can't make many mistakes with your mouth shut. Watch yourself, kid, there will be spacemen around you all evening. If you mess it up, I'll leave you dirtside and raise without you. Let me see you walk again."

Max walked for him. Sam cursed gently. "Cripes, you still walk like a farmer. Get your feet out of those furrows, boy."

"No good?"

"It'll have to do. Grab your bonnet. We'll strike while the iron's in the fire and let the bridges fall where they may."