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  Ricki broke in. “That’s dangerous—the Free Trade, I mean—”

  But Artur frowned. To a dangerous trade some glamour might still cling, and he refused to allow that. “Oh, not all the Free Traders are explorers or fringe system men, Ricki. Some have regular runs among the poorer planets where it doesn’t pay the Companies to operate. Dane’ll probably find himself on a back and forth job between a couple of dome-citied worlds where he can’t even take a breath outside his helmet—”

  Which is just what you would like, isn’t it? Dane concluded inside. The picture isn’t black enough to suit you yet, is it, Sands. And for a second or two he wondered why Sands got pleasure out of riding him.

  “Yes—” Ricki subsided fast. But Dane was aware that his eyes continued to watch the new Free Trader wistfully.

  “Here’s to Trade anyway you have it!” Artur raised his mug with a theatrical gesture. “Best of luck to the Solar Queen. You’ll probably need it, Viking.”

  Dane was stung anew. “I don’t know about that, Sands. Free Traders have made big strikes. And the gamble—”

  “That’s just it, old man, the gamble! And the chips can fall down as well as up. For one Free Trader who has made a stroke, there’re a hundred or so who can’t pay their Field fees. Too bad you didn’t have some pull with the powers-that-be.”

  Dane had had enough. He pushed back from the table and looked at Artur straightly. “I’m going where the Psycho assigned me,” he said steadily. “All this talk about Free Trading being so tough may be just meteor light. Give us both a year in space, Sands, and then you can talk—”

  Artur laughed. “Sure—give me a year with Inter-Solar and you a year in that broken down bucket. I’ll buy the dinner next time, Viking, you won’t have credits enough to settle the bill— I’ll wager an extra ten on that. Now,” he glanced at his watch, “I’m going to have a look at the Star Runner. Any of you care to join me?”

  It seemed that Ricki and Hanlaf would, at least they arose with dispatch to join him. But Dane remained where he was, finishing the last of a very good dinner, certain that it would be a long time before he tasted its like again. He had, he hoped, put up a good front and he was heartily tired of Sands.

  But he was not left to his own company long. Someone slipped into Ricki’s chair across the table and spoke: “You for the Solar Queen, man?”

  Dane’s head snapped up. Was this to be more of Artur’s pleasantries? But now he was looking at the open face of the astrogator-apprentice from the neighbouring table. He lost part of his bristling antagonism.

  ”Just been assigned to her.” He passed his ID across to the other.

  “Dane Thorson,” the other read aloud. “I am Rip Shannon —Ripley Shannon if you wish to be formal. And,” he beckoned to the Video hero, “this is Ali Kamil. We are both of the Queen. You are a cargo-apprentice,” he ended with a statement rather than a question.

  Dane nodded and then greeted Kamil, hoping that the stiffness he felt was not apparent in his voice or manner. He thought that the other looked him over too appraisingly, and that in some mysterious way he had been found wanting after the instant of swift measurement.

  “We are going to the Queen now, come with us?” Rip’s simple friendliness was warming and Dane agreed.

  As they boarded the scooter which trundled down the length of the Field towards the distant cradles of the star ships, Rip kept up a flow of conversation and Dane warmed more and more to the big young man. Shannon was older, he must be in his last year of apprenticeship, and the newcomer was grateful for the scraps of information about the Queen and her present crew which were being passed along to him.

  Compared to the big super ships of the Companies the Solar Queen was a negligible midget. She carried a crew of twelve, and each man was necessarily responsible for more than one set of duties—there were no air tight compartments of specialization aboard a Free Trader spacer.

  “Got us a routine cargo haul to Naxos,” Rip’s soft voice continued. “From there,” he shrugged, “it may be anywhere—”

  “Except back to Terra,” Kamil’s crisper tone cut in. “Better say goodbye to home for a long while, Thorson. We won’t be hitting this lane for some time. Only came in on this voyage because we had a special run and that doesn’t happen once in ten years or more.” Dane thought that the other was getting some obscure pleasure in voicing that piece of daunting information.

  The scooter rounded the first of the towering cradles. Here were the Company ships in their private docks, their needle points lifted to the sky, cargoes being loaded, activity webbing them. Dane stared in spite of himself, but he did not turn his head to keep them in sight as the scooter steered to the left and made for the other line of berths, not so well filled, where the half dozen smaller Free Trade ships stood awaiting blast off. And somehow he was not surprised when they drew up at the foot of the ramp leading to the most battered one.

  But there was affection and honest pride in Rip’s voice as he announced, “There she is, man, the best trading spacer along the lanes. She’s a real lady, is the Queen!”

  CHAPTER TWO:

  WORLDS FOR SALE

  Dane stepped inside the Cargo-Master’s office cabin. The man who sat there, surrounded by files of microtape and all the other apparatus of an experienced trader, was not at all what he expected. Those Masters who had given lectures at the Pool had been sleek, well groomed men, their outward shells differing little from the successful earth-bound executive. It had been difficult to associate some of them with space at all.

  But more than J. Van Rycke’s uniform proclaimed him of the service. His thinning hair was white-blond, his broad face reddened rather than tanned. And he was a big man—though not in fatty tissue, but solid bulk. He occupied every inch of his cushioned seat, eyeing Dane with a sleepy indifference, an attitude shared by a large tiger-striped tom cat who sprawled across a third of the limited desk space.

  Dane saluted. “Apprentice-Cargo-Master Thorson come aboard, sir,” he rapped out with the snap approved by Pool officers, laying his ID on the desk when his new commander made no attempt to reach for it.

  “Thorson—” the bass voice seemingly rumbled not from the broad chest but from deep in the barrel body facing him. “First voyage?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The cat blinked and yawned, but Van Rycke’s measuring stare did not change. Then—

  “Better report to the Captain and sign on.” There was no other greeting.

  A little at a loss Dane climbed on to the control section. He flattened against the wall of the narrow corridor as another officer swung along behind him at a hurried pace. It was the Com-tech who had been eating with Rip and Kamil.

  “New?” the single word came from him with some of the same snap as the impulses in his communicators.

  “Yes, sir. I’m to sign on—”

  “Captain’s office—next level,” and he was gone.

  Dane followed him at a more modest pace. It was true that the Queen was no giant of the spaceways, and she doubtless lacked a great many refinements and luxurious fittings which the Company ships boasted. But Dane, green as he was, appreciated the smartly kept interior of the ship. Her sides might be battered and she had a rakish, too worn appearance without—inside she was a smooth running, tight-held vessel. He reached the next level and knocked at a half open panel. At an impatient order he entered.

  For one dazed moment he felt as if he had stepped into the Terraport X-Tee Zoo. The walls of the confined space were a montage of pictures—but such pictures. Off-world animals he had seen, had heard described, 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.

  “Wel
l—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 a
bsent 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.

  “Survey auction!” the words burst out of Jellico as if he simply could not restrain them any longer.

  Somebody whistled and someone else gasped. Dane blinked, he was too new to the game to understand at once. But when the full purport of the announcement burst upon him he knew a surge of red hot excitement. A survey auction—a Free Trader got a chance at one of those maybe once in a life-time. And that was how fortunes were made.

  “Who’s in town?” Engineer Stotz’s eyes were narrowed, he was looking at the Captain almost accusingly.

  Jellico shrugged. “All the usual. But it’s been a long trip, and there are four Class D-s listed as up for bids—”

  Dane calculated rapidly. The Companies would automatically scoop up the A and B listings—there would be tussles over the C-s. And four D-s—four newly discovered planets whose trading rights auctioned off under Federation law would come within range of the price Free Traders could raise. Would the Queen be able to enter the contest for one of them? A complete five- or ten-year monopoly on the rights of Trade with a just charted world could make them all wealthy—if luck rode their jets.

  “How much in the strong box?” Tau asked Van Rycke.

  “When we pick up the voucher for this last load and pay our Field fees there’ll be—but what about supplies, Frank?”

  The thin little steward was visibly doing sums in his head. “Say a thousand for restocking—that gives us a good margin—unless we’re in for a rim haul—”

  “All right, Van, cutting out that thousand—what can we raise?” It was Jellico’s turn to ask.

  There was no need for the Cargo-Master to consult his books, the figures were part of the amazing catalogue within his mind, “Twenty-five thousand—maybe six hundred more—”