overlapped others which were strictly culled from more gruesome nightmares. In a small swinging cage sat a blue creature which could only be an utterly impossible combination of toad—if toads had six legs, two of them ending in claws—and parrot. It leaned forward, gripped the cage bars with its claws, and calmly spat at him.
Fascinated, Dane stood rooted until a rasping bark aroused him.
“Well—what is it?”
Dane hastily averted his eyes from the blue horror and looked at the man who sat beneath its cage. Grizzled hair showed an inch or so beneath the Captain’s winged cap. His harsh features had not been improved by a scar across one cheek, a seam which could only have been a blaster-blister. And his eyes were as cold and imperious as the pop ones of his blue captive.
Dane found his tongue. “Apprentice-Cargo-Master Thorson come aboard, sir,” again he tendered the ID.
Captain Jellico caught it up impatiently. “First voyage?”
Once more Dane was forced to answer in the affirmative. It would have been, he thought bleakly, so much better had he been able to say “tenth”.
At that moment the blue thing sirened an ear piercing shriek and the Captain swung back in his chair to strike the floor of the cage a resounding slap which bounced its occupant into silence, if not better manners. Then he dropped the ID into the ship’s recorder and punched the button. Dane dared to relax, it was official now, he was signed on as a crew member, he would not be booted off the Queen.
“Blast off at eighteen hours,” the Captain told him. “Find your quarters.”
“Yes, sir.” He rightly took that for dismissal and saluted, glad to be out of Captain Jellico’s zoo—even if only one inhabitant was living.
As he dropped down again to the cargo section, Dane wondered from what strange world the blue thing had come and why the Captain was so enamoured of it that he carried it about in the Queen. As far as Dane could see it had no endearing qualities at all.
Whatever cargo the Queen had shipped for Naxos was already aboard. He saw the hatch seals in place as he passed the hold. So his department’s duties were done for this port. He was free to explore the small cabin Rip Shannon had indicated was his and pack away in its lockers his few personal belongings.
At the Pool he had lived in a hammock and locker; to him the new quarters were a comfortable expansion. When the signal came to strap down for blast off, he was fast gaining the contentment Artur Sands had threatened to destroy.
They were space borne before Dane met the other members of the crew. In addition to Captain Jellico, the control station was manned by Steen Wilcox, a lean Scot in his early thirties who had served a hitch in the Galactic Survey before going into Trade, and now held a full rating as Astrogator. Then there was the Martian Com-Tech— Tang Ya—and Rip, the apprentice.
The engine-room section was an equal number, consisting of the Chief, Johan Stotz, a silent young man who appeared to have little interest save his engines (Dane gathered from Rip’s scraps of information that Stotz was in his way a mechanical genius who could have had much better berths than the ageing Queen, but chose to stay with the challenge she offered), and his apprentice—the immaculate, almost foppish Kamil. But, Dane soon knew, the Queen carried no dead weight and Kamil must— in spite of his airs and graces—be able to meet the exacting standards such a Chief as Stotz could set. The engine room staff was rounded out by a giant-dwarf combination startling to see.
Karl Kosti was a lumbering bear of a man, almost bovine, but as alert to his duties with the jets as a piece of perfectly working machinery. While around him buzzed his opposite number, a fly about a bull, the small Jasper Weeks, his thin face pallid with that bleach produced on Venus, a pallor not even the rays of space could colour to a natural brown.
Dane’s own fellows housed on the cargo level were a varied lot. There was Van Rycke himself, a superior so competent when it came to the matters of his own section that he might have been a computer. He kept Dane in a permanent state of awe. There appeared to be nothing concerning the fine points of Free Trade Van Rycke had ever missed hearing or learning, and, having once added any fact to his prodigious store of memories, it was embedded forever, but he had his soft spot, his enduring pride that as a Van Rycke he was one of a line stretching far back into the dim past when ships only plied the waters of a single planet, coming of a family which had been in Trade from the days of sails to the days of stars.
Two others who were partly of the cargo world shared this section. The Medic, Craig Tau, and the Cook- Steward Frank Mura. Tau Dane met in the course of working hours now and then, but Mura kept so closely to his own quarters and labours that they seldom saw much of him.
In the meantime the new apprentice was kept busy, labouring in an infinitesimal space afforded him in the cargo office to check the rolls, being informally but mercilessly quizzed by Van Rycke and learning to his dismay what large gaps unfortunately existed in his training. Dane was speedily reduced to a humble wonder that Captain Jellico had ever shipped him at all—in spite of the assignment of the Psycho. It was too evident that in his present state of overwhelming ignorance he was more of a liability than an asset.
But Van Rycke was not just a machine of facts and figures, he was also a superb raconteur, a collector of legends who could keep the whole mess spellbound as he spun one of his tales. No one but he could pay such perfect tribute to the small details of the eerie story of the New Hope, the ship which had blasted off with refugees from the Martian rebellion, never to be sighted until a century later—the New Hope wandering forever in free fall, its dead lights glowing evilly red at its nose, its escape ports ominously sealed—the New Hope never boarded, never salvaged because it was only sighted by ships which were themselves in dire trouble, so that “to sight the New Hope” had become a synonym for the worst of luck.
Then there were the “Whisperers”, whose siren voices were heard by those men who had been too long in space, and about whom a whole mythology had developed. Van Rycke could list the human demi-gods of the star lanes, too. Sanford Jones, the first man who had dared Galactic flight, whose lost ship had suddenly flashed out of Hyperspace, over a Sirius world three centuries after it had lifted from Terra, the mummified body of the pilot still at the frozen controls, Sanford Jones who now welcomed on board that misty “Comet” all spacemen who died with their magnetic boots on. Yes, in his way, Van Rycke made his new assistant free of more than one kind of space knowledge.
The voyage to Naxos was routine. And the frontier world where they set down at its end was enough like Terra to be unexciting too. Not that Dane got any planet-side leave. Van Rycke put him in charge of the hustlers at the unloading. And the days he had spent poring over the hold charts suddenly paid off as he discovered that he could locate everything with surprising ease.
Van Rycke went off with the Captain. Upon their bargaining ability, their collective nose for trade, depended the next flight of the Queen. And no ship lingered in port longer than it took her to discharge one cargo and locate another.
Mid-afternoon of the second day found Dane unemployed. He was lounging a little dispiritedly by the crew hatch with Kosti. None of the Queen’s men had gone into the sprawling frontier town half encircled by the bulbous trees with the red-yellow foliage, there was too much chance that they might be needed for cargo hustling, since the Field men were celebrating a local holiday and were not at their posts. Thus both Dane and the jetman witnessed the return of the hired scooter which tore down the field towards them at top speed.
It slewed around, raising more dust, and came to a skidding stop at the foot of the ramp. Captain Jellico leaped for that, almost reaching the hatch before Van Rycke had pried himself from behind the controls. And the Captain threw a single order at Kosti:
“Order assembly in the mess cabin!”
Dane stared back over the field, half expecting to see at least a squad of police in pursuit. The officer’s return had smacked of the need for a quick getaway. But all he saw was his own superior ascending the ramp at his usual dignified pace. Only Van Rycke was whistling, a sign Dane had come to know meant that all was very well with the Dutchman’s world. Whatever the Captain’s news, the Cargo-master considered it good.
As the latest and most junior member of the crew, Dane squeezed into the last small portion of room just inside the mess cabin door a few minutes later. From Tau to the usually absent Mura, the entire complement of the ship was present, their attention for Captain Jellico who sat at the head of the small table, moving his finger tips back and forth across the old blaster scar on his cheek.
“And what pot of gold has fallen into our hands this time, Captain?” That was Steen Wilcox asking the question which was in all their minds.
