a constant acceleration. They cost an arm and two legs, but Sam was in his spare no expenses mode, and I agreed with him. We could zip out to the belt in four days, deliver the message, and be home again in time for the wedding. We’d even have a day or so to spare, I thought.

One thing about Judge Myers: she couldn’t stay angry for more than a few minutes at a time. But from the expression on her face, she remained highly suspicious.

“I want a call from you every day, Gar,” she said. “I know you can’t keep Sam on a leash; nobody can. But I want to know where you are and what you’re doing.”

“Yes, ma’am. Of course.”

“Every day.”

“Right.”

Easier said than done.

Sam rented a torch ship, the smallest he could find, just a set of fusion engines and propellant tanks with a crew pod attached. It was called Achernar, and its accommodations were really Spartan. Sam piloted it himself.

“That’s why I keep my astronaut’s qualifications up to date with the chickenshit IAA,” he told me, with a mischievous wink. “No sense spending money on a pilot when I can fly these birds myself.”

For four days we raced out to Ceres, accelerating at a half gee most of the time, then decelerating at a gee-and-a-half. Sam wanted to go even faster, but the IAA wouldn’t approve his original plan, and he had no choice. If he didn’t follow their flight plan, the IAA controllers at Ceres would impound Achernar and send us back to Earth for a disciplinary hearing.

So Sam stuck to their rules, fussing and fidgeting every centimeter of the way. He hated bureaucracies and bureaucrats. He especially loathed being forced to do things their way instead of his own.

The trip out was less than luxurious, let me tell you. But the deceleration was absolute agony for me; I felt as if I weighed about a ton and I was scared even to try to stand up.

Sam took the strain cheerfully. “Double strength jockstrap, Gar,” he told me, grinning. “That’s the secret of my success.”

I stayed seated as much as possible. I even slept in the copilot’s reclinable chair, wishing that the ship had been primitive enough to include a relief tube among its equipment fixtures.

People who don’t know any better think that the Rock Rats out in the belt are a bunch of rough-and-tumble, crusty, hard-fisted prospectors and miners. Well, sure, there are some like that, but most of the Rock Rats are university educated engineers and technicians. After all, they work with spacecraft and teleoperated machinery out at the frontier of human civilization. They’re out there in the dark, cold, mostly empty asteroid belt, on their own, the nearest help usually so far away that it’s useless to them. They don’t use mules and shovels, and they don’t have barroom brawls or shootouts.

Most nights, that is.

Sam’s first stop after we docked at the habitat Chrysalis was the bar.

The Chrysalis habitat, by the way, was something like a circular, rotating junkyard. The Rock Rats had built it over the years by putting used or abandoned spacecraft together, hooking them up like a tinkertoy merry-go-round and spinning the whole contraption to produce an artificial gravity inside. It was better than living in Ceres itself, with its minuscule gravity and the constant haze of dust that you stirred up with every move you made. The earliest Rock Rats actually did live inside Ceres. That’s why they built the ramshackle Chrysalis as quickly as they could.

I worried about hard radiation, but Sam told me the habitat had superconducting shielding, the same as spacecraft use.

“You’re as safe as you’d be on Earth,” Sam assured me. “Just about.”

It was the just about that scared me.

“Why are we going to the bar?” I asked, striding along beside him down the habitat’s central corridor. Well, maybe central corridor is an overstatement. We were walking down the main passageway of one of the spacecrafts that made up Chrysalis. Up ahead was a hatch that connected to the next spacecraft component. And so on. We could walk a complete circle and come back to the airlock where Achernar was docked, if we’d wanted to.

“Gonna meet the mayor,” said Sam.

The mayor?

Well, anyway, we go straight to the bar. I had expected a kind of rough place, maybe like a biker joint. Instead the place looked like a sophisticated cocktail lounge.

It was called the Crystal Palace, and it was as quiet and subdued as one of those high-class watering holes in Old Manhattan. Soft lighting, plush, faux-leather wall coverings, muted Mozart coming through the speakers set in the overhead. It was midafternoon, and there were only about a dozen people in the place, a few at the bar, the rest in high-backed booths that gave them plenty of privacy.

Sam sauntered up to the bar and perched on one of the swiveling stools. He spun around a few times, taking in the local scenery. The only woman in the place was the human bartender, and she wasn’t much better looking than the robots that trundled drinks out to the guys in the booths.

“What’s fer yew?” she asked. She looked like she was into weight lifting. The gray sweatshirt she was wearing had the sleeves cut off; plenty of muscle in her arms. The expression on her squarish face was no-nonsense, unsmiling.

“West Tennessee,” said Sam. “Right?”

The bartender looked surprised. “Huntsville, ’Bama.”

“Heart of the Tennessee Valley,” Sam said. “I come from the bluegrass country, myself.”

Which was a complete lie. Sam was born in either Nevada or Pennsylvania, according to which of his dossiers you read. Or maybe Luzon, in the Philippines.

Well, in less than six minutes, Sam had the bartender laughing and trading redneck jokes with him. Her name was Belinda. I just sat beside him and watched the master at work. He could charm the devil out of hell, Sam could.

Sam ordered Tennessee corn mash for both of us. While he chatted up the bartender, though, I noticed that

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