Patron of the Arts

“That’s not the kind of ship Captain Laser uses.”

“Captain Laser,” snorted the pilot. “If my ship had visited as many alien planets as his and had been sabotaged, cut up, zapped, spacewarped, and eaten by intelligent dinosaurs as often as his, it would be in repair orbit ninety percent of the time.”

The two pilots began a good-natured argument about the adventures of the legendary space hero seen on television in eighteen languages, but I still watched the space ahead for our destination. Naturally, I had been to space stations before, and several times I had visited the Moon, on business usually, but twice for pleasure. The Moon was an exotic vacation, expensive but easily possible on any number of commercial flights.

Mars was a different matter.

For all practical purposes the Moon was dead, but there had been life on Mars, intelligent life, with an amazingly high civilization, even though we didn’t understand much of it yet. It seemed probable that it had developed early, for Mars was indeed younger than Earth, and its civilization developed with great speed, peaking and disappearing centuries before man was much more than a hunter and gatherer. Mars was as mysterious to us as Africa had been in the nineteenth century, when explorers were searching for the source of the Nile and discovering whole cultures, new species, and great wonders. With a trip to Mars, a lot of work, and a little luck, a man might get rich. He might be able to get himself up out of the mind-clogging morass of eight billion bodies and into sight of a slice of sky. Despite all the misfortunes, all the death and suffering, all the expense and disappointments, exploring Mars was romantic. And I hadn’t done anything romantic in a long time.

Wearing bulky all-purpose spacesuits we made the transfer from the shuttle to the receiving tube of the Balboa, gathering like sheep inside the big Richter lock, dutifully waiting until the experts told us what to do next.

We floated, weightless and awkward, bumping into each other as we waited, and some of us got upside-down to the others. Not that it mattered, for there would be no gravity until the big engines started pushing us out. But it was disorienting and confusing to most of us, and I saw some holding onto the guidelines and keeping out of the way of one clown who seemed to think kicking his legs and waving his arms would get him all right again, and that the faster he kicked, the quicker he would get back in sync with us.

Mercifully, a crewman snagged him and pulled him to a line, where he hung until the inner lock opened. I had been trying to see who my fellow passengers were, but the sexual and social anonymity of the suits prevented me.

A voice in our suit radios told us to start pulling ourselves along the safety lines that hung on all four walls of the square-cut passage beyond the lock, and we moved out in a ragged line. The more skilled and experienced soon shot through and went slithering off down the passage ahead, skimming the vacuum like seals. The rest struggled with our reflexes and eventually made it all the long way down through to the central core and another airlock.

The pressurized cylinder was the size of a small tower, with special cargo holds at the “front” end, passenger cabins next, then the service modules, the control room, and the fusion power plant at the

“back” or “bottom,” or what would be the bottom when the one-g thrust restored gravity.

I had no idea how they decided who bunked with whom, but I drew a cabin with the man named Franklin R. Pelf. He instantly offered his services as an experienced spacer, and I instantly disliked him, although he was polite and considerate.

“This old boat made the third trip to Mars, you know, I mean, of the asteroid ships. You know, the one with Bailey and Russell. Later on I’ll show you the laser scar on A Deck where Russell cut down Bailey, you know, on the way back, after he picked up that vitus worm.”

He was the original stick-with-me-kid type. “Maybe I should have gone out on the Spirit of the Revolution, or even the Leif Ericson III. They have great yums on those tubes, you know. But my business is just too urgent. I’m in pure ore, you know.”

No, I didn’t know. I was thinking about the historic old ship plugged into the inconceivably ancient chunk of space trash, equating it with the battered old tramp steamers of history, and romanticizing the hell out of it.

But Pelf wouldn’t leave me alone. Once he found out I was from Publitex he started feeding me endless canned pap about the eternal glories of Redplanet Minerals, the beauties of Grabrock, etcetera. I disliked him right from the start, and I never stopped. There was a sort of snake-eyed watchfulness about him that rang the alarm circuits honed by nearly two decades of wheeling and dealing in most of the countries of the world. If I were Brian Thorne instead of the easygoing Diego Braddock he would never have gotten within ten kilometers of me. That is one sort of protection that money can buy—sharp-witted sharpies who are your sharpies to watch out for other sharpies. But here I was, sealed in a small world of two hundred souls for a month, with a podmate whom I already disliked, and we hadn’t even left orbit.

We were still stowing luggage and he was well into the “Who are you, what do you do, how can you help me?” routine. Layered over it like chocolate frosting was the ever-present “Boy, can I help you!” pitch that I had heard from multimillionaire Arab rug merchants selling oil rights and billionaire service company czars and territorial senators and even a few out-back presidents, ministers, and regents of the throne. They do favors for you, and they expect them back. If you don’t take the favors you are not obligated, but getting out of taking them is often difficult; sovereign countries can make your refusal an international incident and beautiful women can attack your manhood. Pelf was somewhere in between.