Pete’s eyes were shining like Halley’s Comet when I got through coaching him. It was his idea, but when I tossed it back at him wrapped up in dialogue the sparkle took his breath away!
We went down into the valley where the ships stood row on row, shouting and reeling as though we’d been celebrating for a week. The yardmaster heard us before he saw us. But he saw us quickly enough.
His lips tightened as he came striding toward us—a bushy-browed, hard-bitten old barnacle with a crusty stare. I could tell the exact instant when he recognized me. His jaw dropped about six inches; then closed with a click.
“Now!” I whispered to Pete.
Pete raised his voice. “You’re higher than a kite!” he shouted. “Why buy a flying coffin when you could own the sweetest little job in the System?”
“What I do with my dough is my own business!” I shouted back. “They knew how to build ships in the old days!”
“I tell you—you’re crazier than a diving loon!”
“Sure I’m crazy!” I agreed. “Only a baby with curvature of the brain could win back a cool eighty thousand on one spin of the wheel! But I’m sane enough not to want to thin out my take!”
“You’d flip a coin for one o’ those flyin’ coffins?”
“Why not?” I roared belligerently. “I’ve got five thousand that says I know what I’m doing! Five thousand against—the right to pick my own ship!”
I tripped myself then, deliberately by accident. I went sprawling over Pete’s out-thrust right leg. When I picked myself up I must have looked as helpless as a newborn babe, because the yardmaster was gripping my arm and refusing to let go.
“You were saying, mister?”
He was seeing the halo, of course, the rim of gold about my head. I was pretty sure he wouldn’t even ask me to cover my bet.
The copper piece on my palm seemed to fascinate him. He couldn’t take his eyes from it.
“What will it be?” I asked.
He swallowed hard. “Heads!” he said.
I flipped the coin.
“Tails it is!” I told him.
He stared at my palm suspiciously. I grinned and handed him the copper piece. There was nothing wrong with it.
“I never cheat!” I said.
I walked over to where she stood collecting rust in the red Jupiterlight—the ship I’d picked out. She wasn’t so ancient as old ships go. She must have been built around , just a hundred years before I’d won her. We were riding hard on your luck!
“Got a navigator’s license?” the yardmaster asked.
“Sure! Want to see it?”
He shook his head. “Never mind! Take her and get going before I start telling myself I’m the System’s prize sap!”
The control room was as musty as a tomb, and when I switched on the cold lights our shadows looked like black widow spiders dangling from the overhead.
“She’ll never hold together!” Pete groaned.
“Don’t be like that!” I chided. “All of these ships have to pass a rigid inspection.”
Pete blinked. “You sure of that?”
“Well … maybe the inspectors skip a ship here and there,” I conceded.
I went over her from stem to stern, to make sure she wouldn’t fly about when I gave her the gun. While I inspected the atomotors Pete kept giving me uneasy looks, like he was dying to ask me where I’d picked up my knowledge of ghost ships, but was scared I’d say something to shake his confidence in me.
I wasn’t worried. I can be awfully sure of myself when I’m around anything mechanical, from an inch-high rheostat to the guide lines on a sixty-foot control board.
The ship had the right feel about her. I’d have trusted my life to her, but Pete kept sniffing like he could smell the odor of charred flesh. To make him feel better I thumped him on the back and told him not to worry, that he’d appreciate what a fine ship she was when he saw the green Earth filling the viewpane, misty with spring rains. He’d lived alone so long he’d become suspicious of everything.
Eaten up by his own fears, tormented by shadows, an old man before his time. Some of my confidence seemed to seep into him as I talked. He didn’t look so old when he looked up.
He was sitting on a bulkhead chronometer, which meant that time was ticking away right under him. He was a dead ringer for old Father Time himself, but for an instant as he returned my stare there was a strange look in his eyes. As though he’d shrugged off his woes, and was gazing straight back across the years at his lost youth.
“Maybe you’re right, Jim,” he said. “When do we take off?”
“Before the yardmaster visiphones Callisto City to find out if I really did make a killing last night!” I told him.
I was standing close to the control board, my thumb on the oscillatory circuit. There are two ways of starting an atomotor. You can test out the strength of the circuit by letting the power drum through the board before you give the dial a full turn.
Or you can switch the power on full blast, reaching peak in ten seconds and letting the ship do its own testing. I liked the second way best. A ship that can’t absorb the shock of a takeoff at sixty gravities will almost certainly fly apart in space.
I switched the power on full strength. From the corner of one eye I had a brief, soul-satisfying glimpse of Pete stiffening in utter consternation. A mean trick to play on a pal? No. I don’t think so. I wasn’t asking him to take the plunge alone. I was sharing the risks, and I was doing him a favor.
When you’re taking a swim you just prolong the agony by sitting around on a diving raft wriggling your toes in the icy water. It’s best to jump right in, and get it over with.
We must have been twenty thousand feet up when Pete’s startled face slipped out of focus, and I found myself on my hands
