The Rock Rats

DOSSIER: JOYCE TAKAMINE

“It’s not what you know,” he told her, time and again. “It’s who you know.”

Joyce “graduated” from picking to helping run one of the big farm management companies. Armed with her degree in computer analysis, she had worked up the courage to ask the young man running the company’s local office for a job. He offered to discuss the possibilities over dinner, in his mobile home. They ended the evening in his bed. She got the job and lived for the next two years with the young man, who constantly reminded her about “the great American know-who.”

When Joyce took his advice and left him for an older man who happened to be an executive with Humphries Space Systems, the young man was shocked and disillusioned.

“But it’s what you’ve been telling me to do all along,” Joyce reminded him.

“Yeah,” he admitted, crestfallen. “I just didn’t think you’d take my advice so literally.”

Joyce stayed with the executive only long enough to win a position at HSS’s corporate offices in Selene. She left the tired old Earth at last, and moved to the Moon.