Jackpot

That evening, we were all dog-tired, but we felt fine. We had made a good start with the loading and in a few more days would be heading home.

Hutch seemed to be preoccupied at supper. He fiddled witt his food. He didn't talk at all and he seemed like a man with something on his mind. As soon as I could, I cornered him.

'How's it going, Hutch?'

'Okay,' he said. 'Just a lot of gab. Explaining what it's all about. Gab.'

'Like what?'

'Some of it's hard to tell. Takes a lot of explaining I haven't got the words for. Maybe one of these days you'll find the time to run through it yourself.'

'You can bet your life I will,' I said, somewhat sore at him.

'There's nothing worth a dime in it so far,' said Hutch.

I believed him on that score. Hutch could spot a dollar twenty miles away.

I went down to the brig to see Doc. He was sober. Also unrepentant. 'You outreached yourself this time,' he said. 'That stuff isn't yours to sell. There's knowledge in that building that belongs to the Galaxy?for free.'

I explained to him what had happened, how we'd found the silo was a university and how we were taking the courses on board for the human race after signing up for them all regular and proper. I tried to make it sound as if we were being big, but Doc wouldn't buy a word of it.

'You wouldn't give your dying grandma a drink of water unless she paid you in advance,' he said. 'Don't give me any of that gruff about service to humanity.'

So I left him to stew in the brig a while and went up to my cabin. I was sore at Hutch and all burned up at Doc and my tail was dragging. I fell asleep in no time.

The work went on for several days and we were almost finished. I felt pretty good about it. After supper, I climbed down the ladder and sat on the ground beside the ship and looked across at the silo. It still looked big and awesome, but not as big as that first day?because now it had lost some of its strangeness and even the purpose of it had lost some of its strangeness, too.

Just as soon as we got back to civilization, I promised myself, we'd seal the deal as tight as possible. Probably we couldn't legally claim the planet because the professors were intelligent and you can't claim a planet that has intelligence, but there were plenty of other ways we could get our hooks into it for keeps.

I sat there and wondered why no one came down to sit with me, but no one did, so finally I clambered up the ladder.

I went down to the brig to have a word with Doc. He was still unrepentant, but he didn't seem too hostile. 'You know, Captain,' he said, 'there have been times when I've not seen eye to eye with you, but despite that I've respected you and sometimes even liked you.'

'What are you getting at?' I asked him. 'You can't soft-talk yourself out of the spot you're in.'

'There's something going on and maybe I should tell you. You are a forthright rascal. You don't even take the trouble to deny you are. You have no scruples and probably no morals, and that's all right, because you don't pretend to have. You are…'

'Spit it out! If you don't tell me what's going on, I'll come in there and wring it out of you.'

'Hutch has been down here several times,' said Doc, 'inviting me to come up and listen to one of those recordings he is fooling with. Said it was right down my alley. Said I'd not be sorry. But there was something wrong about it. Something sneaky.' He stared round-eyed through the bars at me. 'You know, Captain, Hutch was never sneaky.'

'Well, go on!'

'Hutch has found out something, Captain. If I were you, I'd be finding out myself.'

I didn't even wait to answer him. I remembered how Hutch had been acting, fiddling with his food and preoccupied, not talking very much. And come to think of it, some of the others had been acting strangely, too. I'd just been too busy to give it much attention.

Running up the catwalks, I cussed with every step I took. A captain of a ship should never get so busy that he loses touch?he has to stay in touch all the blessed time. It had all come down to being in a hurry, of wanting to get loaded up and out of there before something happened.

And now something had happened. No one had come down to sit with me. There'd not been a dozen words spoken at the supper table. Everything felt deadly wrong.

Pancake and Hutch had rigged up the chart room for the previewing chore and I busted into it and slammed the door and stood with my back against it. Not only Hutch was there, but Pancake and Frost as well and, in the machine's bucket seat, a man I recognized as one of the engine gang. I stood for a moment without saying anything, and the three of them stared back at me. The man with the helmet on his head didn't notice?he wasn't even there.

'All right, Hutch,' I said, 'come clean. What is this all about? Why is that man previewing? I thought just you and…'

'Captain,' said Frost, 'we were about to tell you.'

'You shut up! I am asking Hutch.'

'Frost is right,' said Hutch. 'We were all set to tell you. But you were so busy and it came a little hard…'

'What's hard about it?'

'Well, you had your heart all set to make yourself a fortune. We were trying to find a way to break it to you gentle.'

I left the door and walked over to him. 'I don't know what you're talking about,' I said, 'but we still make ourselves a killing. There never was a time of day or night, Hutch, that I couldn't beat your head in and if you don't want me to start, you better talk real fast.'

'We'll make no killing, Captain,' Frost said quietly. 'We're taking this stuff back and we'll turn it over to the authorities.'

'All of you are nuts!' I roared. 'For years, we've slaved and sweated, hunting for the jackpot. And now that we have it in our mitts, now that we can walk barefooted through a pile of thousand-dollar bills, you're going chicken on me. What's…'

'It's not right for us to do it, sir,' said Pancake.

And that 'sir' scared me more than anything that had happened so far. Pancake had never called me that before. I looked from one to the other of them and what I saw in their faces chilled me to the bone. Every single one of them thought just the same as Pancake. 'That orientation course!' I shouted.

Hutch nodded. 'It explained about honesty and honour.'

'What do you scamps know about honesty and honour?' I raged. 'There ain't a one of you that ever drew an honest breath.'

'We never knew about it before,' said Pancake, 'but we know about it now.'

'It's just propaganda! It's just a dirty trick the professors played on us!'

And it was a dirty trick. Although you have to admit the professors knew their onions. I don't know if they figured us humans for a race of heels or if the orientation course was just normal routine. But no wonder they hadn't questioned me. No wonder they'd made no investigation before handing us their knowledge. They had us stopped before we could even make a move.

'We felt that since we had learned about honesty,' said Frost, 'it was only right the rest of the crew should know. It's an awful kind of life we've been living, Captain.'

'So', said Hutch, 'we been bringing in the men, one by one, and orienting them. We figured it was the least that we could do. This man is about the last of them.'

'A missionary,' I said to Hutch. 'So that is what you are. Remember what you told me one night? You said you wouldn't be a missionary no matter what they paid you.'

'There's no need of that,' Frost replied coldly. 'You can't shame us and you can't bully us. We know we are right.'

'But the money! What about the corporation? We had it all planned out!'

Frost said: 'You might as well forget it, Captain. When you take the course.'

'I'm not taking any course.' My voice must have been as deadly as I felt, for not a one of them made a move toward me. 'If any of you mealy-mouthed missionaries feel an urge to make me, you can start trying right now.'