Infinite Dreams (5 page)

It all started out, for me at least, when I was stranded on Faraway a quarter of a century ago. You’re probably thinking
you
wouldn’t mind getting stranded on Faraway, right? Garden spot of the Confederation? Second capital of humanity? Monument to human engineering and all that, terraformed down to the last molecule. I tell kids what it was like back in ’09 and they just shake their heads.

Back then, Faraway was one of those places where you might see an occasional tourist, only because it was one of the places that tourists just didn’t go. It was one of the last outposts of George’s abortive Second Empire, and had barely supported itself by exporting things like lead and
cadmium. Nice poisonous heavy metals whose oxides covered the planet instead of grass. You had to run around in an asbestos suit with an air conditioner on your back, it was so damned close to Rigel.

Still is too damned close, but the way they opaqued the upper atmosphere, they tell me that Rigel is just a baby-blue ball that makes spectacular sunrises and sunsets. I’ve never been too tempted to go see it, having worked under its blue glare in the old days; wondering how long it’d be before you went sterile, lead underwear not-withstanding, feeling skin cancers sprouting in the short-wave radiation.

I met old Chaim there at the University Club, a run-down bar left over from the Empire days. How I got to that godforsaken place is a story in itself—one I can’t tell because the husband is still alive—but I was down and out with no ticket back, dead-ended at thirty.

I was sitting alone in the University Club, ignoring the bartender, nursing my morning beer and feeling desperate when old Chaim came in. He was around seventy but looked older, all grizzled and seamed, and I started getting ready an excuse in case he was armed with a hard-luck story.

But he ordered a cup of real coffee and when he paid, I sneaked a look at his credit flash. The number was three digits longer than mine. Not prejudiced against millionaires, I struck up a conversation with him.

There was only one opening gambit for conversation on Faraway, since the weather never changed and there were no politics to speak of: What the hell are you doing here?

“It’s the closest place to where I want to go,” he said, which was ridiculous. Then he asked me the same, and I told him, and we commiserated for a few minutes on the unpredictability of the other sex. I finally got around to asking him exactly where it was he wanted to go.

“Its interesting enough,” he said. Two other people had come into the bar. He looked at them blandly. “Why don’t we move to a table?”

He got the bartender’s attention and ordered another cup of coffee, and must have seen my expression—the tariff on two cups of coffee would keep me drunk for a week—and ordered me up a large jar of beer. We carried them to a table and he switched on the sound damper, which was the kind that works both ways.

“Can I trust you to keep a secret?” He took a cautious sip of his coffee.

“Sure. One more won’t hurt.”

He looked at me for a long time. “How would you like to get a share of a couple of million CU’s?”

A ticket back cost about a hundred thousand. “That depends on what I’d have to do.” I wouldn’t have, for instance, jumped off a high building into a vat of boiling lead. Boiling water, yes.

“I can’t say, exactly, because I really don’t know. There may be an element of danger, there may not be. Certainly a few weeks of discomfort.”

“I’ve had several of those, here.”

He nodded at the insignia on my fading fatigue jacket. “You’re still licensed to pilot?”

“Technically.”

“Bonded?”

“No, like I told you, I had to skip out. My bond’s on Perrin’s World. I don’t dare—”

“No problem, really. This is a system job.” You need to be bonded for interstellar flight, but planet-to-planet, within a stellar system, there’s not that much money involved.

“System job? Here? I didn’t know Rigel had any other—”

“Rigel has one other planet, catalogued as Biarritz. It
never got chartered or officially named because there’s nothing there.”

“Except something you want.”

“Maybe something a lot of people want.”

But he wouldn’t tell me any more. We talked on until noon, Chaim feeling me out, seeing whether he could trust me, whether he wanted me as a partner. There were plenty of pilots stranded on Faraway; I later found out that he’d talked to a half-dozen or so before me.

We were talking about children or some damn thing when he suddenly sat up straight and said, “All right. I think you’ll be my pilot.”

“Good … now, just what—”

“Not yet, you don’t need to know yet. What’s your credit number?”

I gave it to him and he punched out a sequence on his credit flash. “This is your advance,” he said; I checked my flash and, glory, I was fifty thousand CU’s richer. “You get the same amount later, if Biarritz doesn’t pan out. If it works, you’ll also get a percentage. We’ll talk about that later.”

The other fifty thousand was all I wanted—get back to civilization and I could hire a proxy to go to Perrin and rescue my bond. Then I’d be in business again.

“Now. The first thing you have to do is get us a ship. I’ll arrange the financing.” We left the bar and went to Faraway’s only public (or private) stenographer, and he made out a letter of credit for me.

“Any kind of a ship will do,” he said as I walked him back to his hotel. “Anything from a yacht to a battlewagon. We just have to get there. And back.”

On any civilized world, I could have stepped into a booth and called Hartford; then strolled down to the nearest port and picked up a vessel: local, interplanetary or,
if I was bonded and could wait a day or two, interstellar. But Faraway was Faraway, so it was a little more complicated.

Let me digress, in case you were born less than twenty years ago and fell asleep in history class.

Back then, we had two governments: the Confederation we all know and love, and New Hartford Transportation Rentals, Ltd. There was nothing on paper that connected the Confederation with Hartford, but in reality they were as intertwined as the skeins of a braid.

New Hartford Transportation Rentals, Ltd., owned virtually all of the basic patents necessary for interstellar travel as well as every starship, including the four clunkers left over from George VIII’s disastrous imperialistic experiment.

Tired of your planet? Seek religious freedom, adventure, fresh air? Want to run from creditors? Get enough people together and Hartford would lease you a ship—for an astronomical sum, but at very generous rates. In fact, the first couple of generations hardly paid anything at all (while the interest built up), but then—

Talk about the sins of the fathers coming home to roost! Once a colony began to be a going concern, Hartford was empowered to levy a tax of up to fifty percent on every commercial transaction. And Hartford would carefully keep the tax down to a level where only the interest on the loan was being paid—the principal resting untouched, to provide Hartford an income in perpetuity. It was a rigged game (enforced by the Confederation), and everybody knew it. But it was the only game in town.

Hartford had a representative on every planet, and they kept him fueled with enough money so that he was always the richest, and usually the most influential, citizen of the planet. If a planetary government tried to evolve
away from the rapacious capitalism that guaranteed Hartford a good return on its investment, their representative usually had enough leverage to put it back on the right road.

There were loopholes and technicalities. Most planets didn’t pass the Hartford tax on directly, but used a sliding income tax, so the rich would get poorer and the poor, God bless them, would go home and make more taxpayers rather than riot in the streets.

If you ever patronized the kind of disreputable tavern that caters to pilots and other low types, you may have heard them singing that ancient ballad, “My Heart Belongs to Mother, But Hartford Owns My Ass.”

Hartford owned that fundamental part of everybody on Faraway, too. But that didn’t mean they’d supplied Faraway with a nice modern spaceport, bristling with ships of all sizes and ranges. No, just the bi-weekly vessel from Steiner that dropped off supplies and picked up some cadmium.

I had to admit there wasn’t much reason for Faraway to have a short-run, plain old interplanetary ship—what good would it be? All you could do with it would be to orbit Faraway—and it looked bad enough from the
ground
—or take a joyride out to Biarritz. And there were more entertaining ways to throw away your money, even on Faraway.

It turned out that there actually was one interplanetary ship on Faraway, but it was a museum piece. It had been sitting for two hundred years, the
Bonne Chance
, the ship, Biarritz herself had used to survey the clinker that retained her name by default. It was being held for back taxes, and we picked it up for six figures.

Then the headaches began. Everything was in
French-dial markings, instruction manual, log. I got a dictionary and walked around with an indelible pencil, relabeling; and Chaim and I spent a week of afternoons and evenings translating the manual.

The fusion engine was in good shape—no moving parts bigger than a molecule—but the rest of the ship was pretty ragged. Faraway didn’t have much of an atmosphere, but it was practically pure oxygen, and
hot
. The hull was all pitted and had to be reground. The electronic components of the ship had been exposed to two hundred years of enough ionizing radiation to mutate a couple of fruit flies into a herd of purple cattle. Most of the guidance and communications gimcrackery had to be repaired or replaced.

We kept half the drifter population of Faraway—some pretty highly trained drifters, of course—employed for over a week, hammering that antique wreck into some kind of shape. I took it up alone for a couple of orbits and decided I could get it twenty AU’s and back without any major disaster.

Chaim was still being the mystery man. He gave me a list of supplies, but it didn’t hold any clue as to what we were going to do once we were on Biarritz: just air, water, food, coffee and booze enough for two men to live on for a few months. Plus a prefab geodesic hut for them to live in.

Finally, Chaim said he was ready to go and I set up the automatic sequencing, about two hours of systems checks that were supposed to assure me that the machine wouldn’t vaporize on the pad when I pushed the
Commence
button. I said a pagan prayer to Norbert Weiner and went down to the University Club for one last round or six. I could afford better bars, with fifty thousand CU’s on my flash, but didn’t feel like mingling with the upper classes.

I came back to the ship a half-hour before the sequencing
was due to end, and Chaim was there, watching the slavies load a big crate aboard the
Bonne Chance
. “What the hell is that?” I asked him.

“The Mazel Tov papers,” he said, not taking his eyes off the slavies.

“Mazel Tov?”

“It means good luck, maybe good-bye. Doesn’t translate all that well. If you say it like this”—and he pronounced the words with a sarcastic inflection—“it can mean ‘good riddance’ or ‘much good shall it do you.’ Clear?”

“No.”

“Good.” They finished loading the crate and sealed the hold door. “Give me a hand with this.” It was a gray metal box that Chaim said contained a brand-new phased-tachyon transceiver.

If you’re young enough to take the phased-tachyon process for granted, just step in a booth and call Sirius, I should point out that when Chaim and I met, they’d only had the machines for a little over a year. Before that, if you wanted to communicate with someone light-years away, you had to write out your message and put it on a Hartford vessel, then wait around weeks, sometimes months, while it got shuffled from planet to planet (at Hartford’s convenience) until it finally wound up in the right person’s hands.

Inside, I secured the box and called the pad authorities, asking them for our final mass. They read it off and I punched the information into the flight computer. Then we both strapped in.

Finally the green light flashed. I pushed the
Commence
button down to the locked position, and in a few seconds the engine rumbled into life. The ship shook like the palsied old veteran that it was, and climbed skyward trailing a cloud of what must have been the most polluting exhaust in the history of transportation: hot ionized lead,
slightly radioactive. Old Biarritz had known how to economize on reaction mass.

I’d programmed a quick-and-dirty route, one and a half G’s all the way, flip in the middle. Still it was going to take us two weeks. Chaim could have passed the time by telling me what it was all about, but instead he just sat around reading—
War and Peace
and a tape of Medieval Russian folk tales—every now and then staring at the wall and cackling.

Afterwards, I could appreciate his fetish for secrecy (though God knows enough people were in on part of the secret already). Not to say I might have been tempted to double-cross him. But his saying a couple of million were involved was like inviting someone to the Boston Tea Party, by asking him if he’d like to put on a loincloth and help you play a practical joke.

So I settled down for two weeks with my own reading, earning my pay by pushing a button every couple of hours to keep a continuous systems check going. I could have programmed the button to push itself, but hell …

At the end of two weeks, I did have to earn my keep. I watched the “velocity relative to destination” readout crawl down to zero and looked out the viewport. Nothing.

Radar found the little planet handily enough. We’d only missed it by nine thousand and some kilometers; you could see its blue-gray disc if you knew where to look.

There’s no trick to landing a ship like the
Bonne Chance
if you have a nice heavy planet. It’s all automated except for selecting the exact patch of earth you want to scorch (port authorities go hard on you if you miss the pad). But a feather-light ball of dirt like Biarritz is a different proposition—there just isn’t enough gravity, and the servomechanisms don’t respond fast enough. They’ll try to land you at the rock’s center of mass, which in this case was
underneath forty-nine kilometers of solid basalt. So you have to do it yourself, a combination of radar and dead reckoning—more a docking maneuver than a landing.