[THE SPACEMAN WITH PLUTONIUM CYLINDERS part 4] by A.Appleyard

  <To those who have read parts 1 to 3 I apologize for repetitions hereinafter;
but I felt that some explanation is due to those who have not read them.>
  `RD' = `recycler-destructor and materials separator': it sorts and separates
the component chemical elements of whatever is put in it.
  `actinides' = elements 89 to 103, including uranium (92) and plutonium (94).

  "Well, that was a lot of no good, except to give us a bad name and show all
and sundry that hyperspace jumpers exist." said a space trading Company official
after the abortive court case, "That fancy barrister with him who'd been in
space with them, supporting their side and `lock-picking' through everything we
do to keep them under control.".
  Another said: "Likely he's saying `A lot of no good' also out there somewhere,
coming here hoping to get everything settled right here and now and all our
space financial policy `kicked into touch' so all that we end up with from all
we've done in the asteroids is another empty dirty nest that young birds have
flown from, like when Mars turned bad on us and went independent on us, and we
had to leave them as soon as a few banana republics recognized them. Back to
looking over our shoulders for workers' and customers' rights protection laws
all the time. Back to having our agents who trade with free asteroid miners out
there handcuffed and leg-fettered and ball-and-chained and gagged by pricing and
trades descriptions laws etc etc till they can't move. Back to us being ditto
when we try to act against free astro miners coming in with patent infringement
kit on, so we can't recover costs by being the only supplier of necessary kit
items. By now they can make every @#&% thing for themselves out there somewhere
so they don't need to buy anything from us. And now they've got PL-props [=
planet-landing spacesuit propulsors] which we intended for special forces only.
And hyperspace jumpers that can fit on a man's spacesuit. So they'll be coming
and going as they wish and taking what they want to. That's why I put a lot of
my company's money into getting my home city a police VTOL jet fighter, at the
end of a direct phone line sitting with a pilot in it and not through a lot of
time-wasting air force official procedure: the only thing that's fast and well
armed enough and fast enough response to routinely reach in time and destroy
gangs of raiding PL-prop spacemen. I saw a video of one cleaning up a raiding
teenage helirig gang once.".
  "But it's hardly ever used, as taxpayers keep saying.".
  "That's the idea. They know we've got it, so they leave us alone, or go away
without landing when they see it on the ground, same as when scuba divers go to
poach shellfish and see the local inshore fishermen's RD-equipped FSPB [= fast
submersible armed patrol boat] in port. The lesson fades after a while, as
lessons do, and some lot raids till a cop jet gets them. Thus they learn again
that they aren't welcome there, and leave us alone for a good while after. If we
didn't have one, they'd be down on us all the time taking stuff and illegal
trading and evading customs like wasps in a jam factory. It's happened once
already. They shot straight up to space, but the cop jet got there just in time
and got them with a shrapnel missile fired straight upwards after them. Awful
job afterwards it was finding and picking up all the bits of their dirty
spacesuits' radioactive powerpacks. Some of the bits had maker's plates on them
saying they were made at a place called Ilmenost, wherever that is.".
  "I came across that name once. Two Company men on an inspection tour in issue
long-trip suits: one of them's suit radio went wrong, so they had to talk on the
distress frequency all the time. Then the other one's suit RD packed up, so they
had to siamese. They were three weeks from anywhere official to get spares, and
no idea what else might go wrong, so they had to use Company property valuable
metal to buy two suits off some free asteroid miners they met, full of patent
infringement items, and that name Ilmenost on many of them. They `got a rocket'
for it, <and> for speaking badly of Company kit in public afterwards. OK, so
some parts are designed only to last so long, so they must buy replacements:
it's no good if they never need spend on anything. Then those miners find how to
make suits that run for years without servicing, and make them for themselves
out there somewhere and never mind that the Companies have already patented
them. Wherever Ilmenost might be.".
  "That's `Space Fort' or `Space Town' in those languages that Tolkien invented
for his stories." said another, "Could be anywhere or nowhere. Somewhere in the
asteroid belt, likeliest. All it tells is there's a Tolkien fan out there
somewhere. I wonder how much else they've named in his languages or from his
books. I wanted to get to know some of them that time at that meeting, but that
silly attempt to seize their spacesuits while they were in the meeting,
stampeded them, and likely they won't trust us again, and I got hyper jumped
with them and stuffed into a pressure bag during the jump and left in orbit and
had to be fetched down by a space shuttle. At least I can say I've been in
space. There they are out there likely discovering things, while we're stuck
with procedural difficulties and far too many officials to consult: comes from
laws telling each firm to take on x percent more men merely to cut the
unemployed list down. I wish I could round up all the officials and businessmen
and put them into some sort of space-trooper kit and make them do the job
themselves, with all available weapons, including PL-props and hyper jumpers and
all despite the laws saying they're still top secret.".
  "Those `PL-proppers' land and trade all over the place. Some say there's been
high-level reactor waste going missing at atomic power stations, and talk of
spacemen landing there. Likelier staff selling it on the side to them, than
actual raiding. I don't like the idea of what they'd want <that> stuff for.".
  "<Not> to threaten the world with radioactive dirt bombs. Give them <some>
sense of decency. Never mind that thriller film `Terror of the Space Pirates'.
Far likelier to RD it for hot radioisotopes to put in spacesuit powerpacks. All
sorts of stuff turns up in them.".
  "At least the Moon won't go independent: no water and no hydrogen to make
water there. No big battle in Triesnecker crater securing their independence
like in a fiction story I read once: Argyre on Mars was bad enough for me. Every
drop of water's got to be carried in. No buried ice or gypsum strata like in
some stories, to get water from. Expensive place to do anything, with that and
its gravity well. The Moon can wait while we've got the asteroids. And another
thing: those two suits' powerpacks: one had curium-245 in, the other had
californium-249 in. At first I thought our radiochemist was joking. I couldn't
believe it. We on earth hadn't seen a thousandth as much californium together.
It's the sort of stuff we talk of by the milligram, and here was over a kilo of
it. It's six up from uranium, takes a $%@ of a lot of neutrons to make it from
uranium, and most of it fissions on the way up. It had some berkelium-249 in, so
likely they made it the way we make it, but starting at what? If we'd been here
when the Solar System was forming, we could have started half way at natural
plutonium-244, whose half life is 81 million years, but it all decayed away ages
ago. The longest half life beyond plutonium is curium-247 at 16 million years: I
suppose if we got to a supernova site quick we could find some still about and
make it into californium-249 so it'd decay quick enough to be a power source.
But where would they get either? Is Ilmenost a place, or just a word they put on
anything they make for themselves unauthorizedly anywhere out in the wilds?".
  But Ilmenost was a definite place, in the asteroid belt of a star beyond the
Pleiades, built by free asteroid miners as a safe base of their own away from
companies. While testing their new hyperspace jumper the X-100 asteroid miner
group discovered the star, and called it `Anor', which is a Tolkien word for the
Sun, and its planets likewise, since some of them were Tolkien fans and had a
set of CD-ROM's of his books. Ilmenost's inhabitants, travelling between places
in long-trip spacesuits with propulsors in groups tethered to each other, or
tethered to wherever they were working or resting (for things untethered in
space always drift away), listened over their suit radios to the news of these
and other events, next time a group hyper jumped in from the Solar System.
  After listening to this familiar tedious talk of chronic dispute and stalling,
as light relief they watched an Ilmenost-made cartoon called `Wild Goose Chase',
one of the absurd adventures of "Jettie", a blundering Earth police jet fighter
pilot who never quite succeeded when ordered to catch unauthorizedly landing
PL-prop spacemen. He chased one lot but they got away, `skying' faster than was
possible in reality. As the air got thinner as he rose after them, his jet
started panting like a man with its `chest' heaving and complained "Are you
trying to space me, or what? And I've missed the airshow for this: I was hoping
to meet friends there. I want double time [= double my usual pay rate] for
today, and a day off next week.". Later that day his jet's frustration boredom
and his own empty freezer pushed the two to chase flights of wild geese, towing
a fishing trawl in the air, which caused audience laughter. But he succeeded.
His jet found it such fun that after landing and unloading it took off again by
itself for another session, and he had to chase it with a backpack jetpack on.
It caught the geese, but spacemen came and chased him, finding him for once
outside his jet, which however arrived and for once caught them, in the net; but
as he was happily anticipating a medal for the capture and a full freezer, the
spacemen hyperspace jumped away taking the net and the geese, and that was the
end of that. All so silly and somewhat childish, and with gear that would not
have worked in reality; but behind it was the message not to expect indefinitely
to be able to ignore ground authorities when landing.
  Anor's system is roughly like the Sun's. Its planets, named by the X-100's
after Tolkien's names for the Sun's planets, are: Narien, Elemmire, Earendil,
Arda (which is Earthlike), Karnil, asteroids, Alkarinque, Lumbar, Luinil, Nenar.
Narien means `Fire-land' and is like the supposed `Vulcan' that many looked for
orbiting between Mercury and the Sun. Anor has no `Pluto'; the Tolkien
equivalent name `Mandos' is given to a satellite of Nenar. Having by now set up
their own complete industrial base there, the various asteroid miners and other
long-trip-suited spacemen who had followed the X-100's to the Anor system were
by now numerous enough to explore the area as well as making the means of
defence if unwelcome outside authority tried to intrude. So it happened that two
asteroid miner groups, the Jetters and the Quasars, loaded supplies into tow
crates and tethered to each other and aimed themselves. Their suit propulsors
gradually pushed them into an arc of a fast hyperbolic orbit towards one of the
inner planets. Their suits' onboard mini RD's reduced all waste matter into
separated chemical elements or simple inorganic compounds, which their onboard
food synthesizers used to make a monotonous but nutritious liquid. Energy for
all this came from their suits' nuclear powerpacks. Routine space travel had
brought back one common fact of pre-industrial life, namely journeys that
routinely lasted weeks. To pass the time on this journey they discussed the
native life that had been found in the Anor system.
  "Plenty on Arda." Jet Jack said, "Animals, some of them huge. Plants including
dense forests; some dangerous like the bush that has natural landmines on its
roots to keep browsing animals away. Some on Karnil in the tropical zone: it's
got more air than Mars, just enough not to need a pressure suit to stop the body
fluids from boiling at blood heat; but he still needs an oxygen breathing set,
plus a long acclimatization before he can live on one Karnil-atmosphere pressure
of oxygen. That's one of the `Karnil pleasures' of planet exploration, all that
breathing not enough oxygen and waiting while the bone marrow learns to make
enough extra red blood cells to cope. Too much biochemical difference from Earth
life for us to eat any living matter from either planet, or for anything from
either planet to eat the other's or Earth's. There must have been two separate
starts to life out here. This causes the biological species classifiers
problems: I don't know much about that sort of thing.".
  "The biggest biological classification was the kingdom, such as the animal
kingdom and the plant kingdom that you may have heard of." said Cobra, one of
the Jetters, "I know a fair amount of biology, so I was asked to help sort it
all out. I needed a word bigger than `kingdom' for all the life from one arising
of life: so I call all Earth life the `empire' Gaeabiota, that's Greek for
`Earth life'. So here we have the empires Ardabiota and Karnilbiota. I try to
avoid name duplications; but between Earth and Anor system biological names it
can't be helped, as there's so many Earth names; and all three empires have such
obvious names as kingdoms called Animalia and Plantae. So the all too common
landmine bush is empire Ardabiota, kingdom Plantae, phylum Florifera, order and
class and family not decided till we've done a lot more work to sort all the new
species out, genus and species Keraunorrhiza detonans, which means the exploding
thunderbolt-root: @#% dangerous things. One thing's a bit wrong: life can evolve
to live in all sorts of conditions, but it needs special conditions to start,
and I and the astronomers agree: how ever did life manage to start on Karnil?,
except perhaps in a few hot corners near volcanoes. Too cold and dry, and in the
old days even colder, since Anor's got a bit hotter since then, as stars often
do. But life's there, all over the tropical zone.".
  "At least when the bush dies, its mines deactivate, and later safely rot away.
Dangerous business trying to extract the explosive from them, it's been tried."
said another, "As a matter of interest, in the proper Roman meanings Latin
`detonare' doesn't mean `explode', but `for it to stop thundering', as in
weather, and `explodere' means `to hiss a bad actor off the stage'. A lot of
Latin and Greek words get used in unclassical meanings by scientists.".
  Thus they discussed as Anor's spectrum class A white glare (unlike the Sun's
G-class yellow) and their destination gradually got nearer. But anticipation of
another hunt for biology specimens was in vain, for the planet that got steadily
larger in front of them was not Earth-like Arda, or Karnil, but Earendil, hidden
like Venus by a cloud cover. On Venus a host of theorized and fictional worlds
and aliens from advanced technology to primaeval had been evaporated beyond
recall by two Russian landing probe craft. He thought of what would happen if if
something created such characters on the real Venus in its 90 Earth-atmospheres
of carbon dioxide at 480 degrees C under a sky whose famous eternal cloud cover
is made of sulphuric acid droplets. It was all too like descriptions of Hell and
inappropriate for high mental images like the classical love goddess Venus and
Tolkien's hardy sailor Earendil aroused by the white beauty of those clouds seen
by astronomers from afar sunlit from above and the way the planet moved in
Earth's sky. It was the same on Anor's planet Earendil. At the right time the
spacemen ran their suit propulsors long and steadily to decelerate. They looked
in passing at the airless cratered and ring-basin-marked surface of Earendil's
moon Elwing, which unlike Earth's Moon rotated much faster than it orbited. They
settled into a close orbit and decided who was to do what. Those chosen to land
put on special pressure and corrosion and heat resisting oversuits, and
descended. Some of them had been on Earendil before; but Plutey-pots had not,
and he was apprehensive.
  The descent party's `Earendil suits' had foldable aeroplane wings about 6 feet
span. These saved much suit propulsor effort as the atmosphere got dense. Anor's
white glare vanished behind the acid-fog clouds as they descended towards the
lifeless hidden world of heat and pressure. In his hard oversuit, with the
wings, and with his legs held straight out behind him by the oversuit's hip
callipers to stop them from hanging down causing drag, Plutey-pots, who had once
been Blore the City businessman, felt even more like he had been turned into an
aeroplane rather than flying in one, as the formation of winged suited men came
out of the cloud base and switched their oversuits' cooling systems on and saw
at last below them the hidden surface of Earendil. Wing drag and outside
temperature increased fast as the pressure and temperature rose exponentially as
they descended and flew over desert plains and eroded hills and jagged fault
block mountains and a patch of new-looking volcanoes, in dim light like a very
overcast English winter day.
  No sign of water erosion, nor was it expected, not even the once-a-century
flash floods that wash away erosion debris in many Earth deserts. All this had
been surveyed before, by radar from orbit by the X-100's, so their leaders knew
the land layout. All was lifelessly hot, dull, and alien. It was easy to imagine
the souls of the sinful dead being condemned to wander there forever on the hot
sand and burning jagged rocks. Below them endless ranks of crescent-shaped
barchan dunes marched forever across a 100-mile-wide sand-filled circular
asteroid impact basin until they reached the jagged crest of the Ered Aragorn
(`ered' = "mountains": the X-100's had stayed with their Tolkien for many
Earendil land form names). As they swooped over bare highlands and high jagged
peaks which no snow would ever lie on and no torrent ever rush down from beneath
the endless dull cloud roof, Plutey-pots pointed at a high cliff with a winding
valley at its bottom.
  "That's a fresh landslide caused by undercutting by a river, or I've never
seen one!" Tiger Tim, one of the Quasars, exclaimed, for he was a geologist.
  As they flew lower, the excitement of undeniable paradox found turned flat as
they saw that the river was not one of water. Very fluid lava flowing fast from
a new vent on a mountainside had formed a bed and scoured away the fault scarp
cliff's foot as well as any Earth river in sudden flood could have. But anyway
they landed, running their suit propulsors higher as they turned feet down and
folded their wings and unclipped their oversuit hip callipers and landed on a
surface of sandblast-faceted stones on the surface of Earendil, even as space
probes had once at last revealed to men the hidden surface of Venus. Heat
constantly leaked in through their oversuits, whose bulky heat pump packs blew
it out again as a blast of the planet's air heated even hotter than usual. "Now
I've got a hot exhaust to wonder where it's going, blowing sand about or
scorching someone's suit." he thought tiredly, looking about, feeling even
further from home in that alien-looking kit in that alien hot place. He saw
little that he understood in the various rocks shown on the high cliff, but
others did.
  "Lava and ash strata." said Tiger Tim, looking there also, "A basalt dike, and
layers of sand that blew in. The only sedimentary stuff'll be aeolian [= made by
wind]. A fair lot of uranium about, but there's plenty to be going at in the
asteroids for now - what's that cross-bedded stuff? Looks like river delta silt
rather than desert stuff, but what made it here? If I climb up here I can reach
this layer of black stuff below it: someone come with me in case of anything.
This stuff must be quite ancient, by the uranium / lead and plute-244 / xenon
ratios that my [remote metal] analyzer shows.".
  "Where does plute [= plutonium] come into it?" said Plutey-pots, "I know that
Levitsky at that base thought it clever to give me a suit with oxy tanks made
out of it, whence my new name; but why here?".
  "There were a lot more supernovas a lot more recently around here than around
the Sun, including some quite recent that gave the planets a fresh fallout cover
with plenty of the middle actinides in, so there's still a lot of natural
plute-244 and even some curium-247 about. Plute-244 won't chain fission, but
some of it fissions slowly by itself, and makes xenon of such an isotope
distribution at such a rate. But when the rock's melted the xenon boils away. So
I can tell how long it was since this rock was melted last by how much xenon of
that sort's in it, and that was a very long time ago.".
  He and Plutey-pots climbed the fallen boulders, running their suit propulsors
a bit to make them lighter in their heavy kit in the Earth-like gravity. They
reached the black layer, which Tiger Tim then hammered at.
  "Foliation:" said Tiger Tim, "schist, I suppose, odd it's so soft and looks so
much like shale, but shale needs water to form - any other planet I'd've said it
was shale with a lot of eroded-out mica scales in as pseudo schistosity - lets
split some of its `pages' [= foliation layers] apart - Ye Gods! Look at this!".
  They looked at the split pieces of rock. On the split surfaces were what could
only be carbonized remains of seaweeds and odd-shaped sea animals, where it had
for ages been far too hot for life. They realized what had happened. Once on
that very spot, long ago, there were no death-clouds, but Anor's light reached
the surface routinely, and the land and the air were cool enough for life, and
water blown out by volcanoes condensed as rain, and ran down and formed seas.
Life had started there, but as Anor's hydrogen fusion reactor core accumulated
its helium ash and got hotter, so Earendil's tropical daytime temperature
reached boiling point, and its oceans evaporated, and its carbonate rocks
calcined and the released carbon dioxide made the greenhouse effect grow out of
control, and life ended there when it was still at the level of the Earth late
Precambrian Ediacara fauna. How long did life hang on in a few cold areas,
evolving to withstand ever hotter water and air, until the end came? How
narrowly did life stowing carbon and carbon dioxide away in the rocks win the
race against ever increasing sun heat to stop Arda's greenhouse effect from
running away likewise? And on Earth? But on Earendil, as on Venus, the race was
lost, and as the last heat-resistant spore and egg perished ages ago in the
ever-growing heat after long hopeless dormant waiting beneath the death-shroud
of perpetual acid cloud, native life died without progeny, and of the biological
`empire' Earendilbiota the end of the story had been written long ages ago.
  The place needed a name. They ignored the X-100s' pervasive Tolkien theme and
named it Burgess Cliff, after the similar Burgess Shale in Canada on Earth. They
collected as much weight of specimens as they could easily carry, recorded the
area with various instruments, and left. A wide empty desert plain which had
once been an ocean bed dropped below them and disappeared as they reached the
cloud layer, which they thankfully rose through, away from the hot dimness back
to space and the white light of Anor shining on the white sea of cloud top. As
the air got too thin to carry their oversuit wings, they turned heads up and
`skyed' back to orbit. They wore their oversuits for long enough for the acid
from the clouds to space-dry off, then took them off and put them away. After
the usual several weeks' journey back, they arrived in Ilmenost: most of those
that welcomed them were interested in their tales of such a risky place than of
a few ancient fossils. They took their finds to a palaeontology lab, where they
were examined. Ilmenostian biologists drew and named and listed the species
found, and defined empire Earendilbiota with its kingdoms Animalia and Plantae,
classes, orders, families, and arranged the species as they could, and regretted
the so early ending of a world of life.
  Or had it ended? Scientists found a few remaining biochemicals in the shale
samples. They did not fit Ardan or Earth biochemistry well, but those who
studied the chemistry of the life that clung to Karnil's cold tropical zone in
its thin air recorded with amazement a good fit. Did a long-ago asteroid impact
on Earendil throw hardy spores of its life into space, an evacuation from coming
disaster just in time? Long they likely circled Anor in the lifeless void, a
distance and time far longer than any ordinary crossing between continents on a
planet, until some managed a soft landing on Karnil, perhaps in a hot volcanic
area, and, already able to grow in adverse conditions, grew on and evolved again
and diversified there where some said life could not have likely arisen of
itself. Were the Earendilbiota still living, on Karnil? Did the Karnilbiota
arise not locally but from a few hardy organisms cast across space long before
from a doomed life-world? It was hard to imagine the ancestors of such plants as
the familiar prospector's guide plant, Karnil pluteweed, Plutophila diacrophylla
which hoards salts of the poisonous metal in its long fork-pointed leaves to
defend itself against grazing and insects in the hardships of cold and thin air,
growing in the hot dimly-lit hell of Earendil beyond 200 million miles of space,
but it seemed so.
  In the Sun's system less was being achieved. Asteroid mining work managed to
live with the usual wariness and suspicion between miners and the base staff.
Long range radio attempts to organise talks about talks went on intermittently,
and both sides brought up the usual accusations. On Earth, enthusiasts of real
and fictional space travel as well as some coal etc miners' organizations and
public media pressure groups protested and demonstrated loudly about what was
going on, and more than once burst into Company board meetings to make their
views known. Company men who `didn't like what was going on' turned public
evidence. Revelations about what had been going on at a base called Fletchmin-1
near Vesta wiped out the value of Fletcher Mining shares, and some other shares.
Some companies tried to salvage matters by issuing more shares, but few people
bought them. Investors got scared. More efficient ways of recovering metals from
old dumped rubbish back on Earth and from dispersion in the environment had been
steadily eating into the need to mine many metals off-world, except as needed
for use in space to avoid having to bring it out of Earth's gravity well.
Fletcher Mining and Milford Metals Brokers went into liquidation, and their fall
echoed about.
  The recent disappearance of Mr.Fletcher and Mr.Milford and others had already
disarranged matters and caused suspicions. An agent who was trying to tie too
much together at once to salvage asteroid metal trading matters went into
nervous breakdown in the middle of a speech by him in public at a trade fair and
loudly accused all present of being disguised space-alien spies sent by supposed
aliens who were supplying unauthorized types of kit to the asteroid miners to
sabotage Earth business and economy; this disrupted yet more business. Company
secret policy documents missing from Fletchmin-1 and elsewhere turned up, much
photocopied, on Mars, and were published on Earth before legal injunctions could
be served. In space and in business, life tried to carry on. To try to save at
least a bit of market, some Companies broke their long-standing policy rule and
turned, too late, to themselves selling to all and sundry long-lasting
spacesuits and parts; but it availed little.
  Some of the remoter Company asteroid bases were abandoned, including the base
where Levitsky the storeman had turned Blore the businessman into Plutey-pots
the asteroid miner; it was never repaired and re-manned after the attack by the
rogue Fletchmin guards, and Levitsky became and remained Leo of the Jetters,
free spaceman. Other bases fell empty except for a few emergency staff ordered
to evacuate or provide essential services for asteroid miners and other spacemen
who had been relying on those bases. At one base even those few staff left at
once and willingly when the Sardies arrived and manned the base, with a supply
of good Ilmenost-made spacesuits that worked for years without need to visit a
base; arriving miners eagerly put them on instead of the authorized types that
needed servicing or parts replacing too often; and that was not the only base
where the staff made such arrangements so they could get home sooner. Perhaps
the company would reclaim the base later; but in the meantime Company rules
about spacesuits and such were dead, and remained dead, for on Earth the new
general atmosphere of enquiry and calling to account showed that the relevant
patents had run out and the Company claims to have renewed them were not legally
enforceable, and the Company and government space interests' will to enforce
rule and be a power bloc finally wavered and collapsed.
  The matter ran to its end, and the remaining Companies ran out of excuses to
postpone or adjourn, and there met the often staved off but now inevitable final
meeting to decide all related disputes and try or drop all relevant law cases.
After all that had happened it was an anticlimax, as such things often are; much
of what happened was a massive job of writing-off debts and investments and
dropping accusations and claims and winding-up business and financial affairs,
like a multiple exchange of pieces that finally clears the board and the air in
a locked-up tense chess game. There was one request to hand over suits and hyper
jumpers, but it came not from any seizing authority's warrant but from some
astronomers who had got wind of the meeting and turned up, seeking the means of
seeing remote stars from close up. That intrusion of the irrelevant and merely
scientific was as good as anything else at creating a climate of realizing that
the old times were gone. The spacemen PL-propped or hyper jumped back to their
routines. The remaining Companies patched up their affairs as they could, or
sought business elsewhere, and some went into liquidation. Life went on.
  With PL-props in common possession the companies no longer had the monopoly on
transport to and from planets. Spacemen could take deceased effects to relatives
and send money sent by the living to people on planets, and bypass the company
controlled mail whose security equipment was all too good at detecting contained
valuables if the sender or addressee allegedly owed money. The old rule was that
asteroid miners were to do all trading in Company credits and an account in the
company bank and were not allowed to possess convertible currencies or valuable
metals in space (except for components of work kit, and what they mined and was
in immediate transit to the nearest Company collection base); but it had long
been a dead letter.
  Nor were the remaining Companies' attempts to patch up their affairs helped by
an Earth TV station that ran `Jettie' cartoons once a week, and made no secret
of that some men from space had sold them the tapes of it. Children loved it,
but business didn't care much for the undisguised display of the free spacemen's
idea of what the Companies were like, and again wondered where Ilmenost was,
seeing the name in end credits and elsewhere; much replaying of videorecorded
copies revealed nothing that might help anyone who may want to find or attack
the place.
  And again came the chronic legal aggro about the territorial status of space:
if the asteroid miners wanted to appeal to Earth law re price descriptions etc,
which nation's law?, thousands of Earth-diameters away. And if space was a
separate nation, with the directors of the Companies as its government, then the
asteroid miners and other space workmen hereby demanded democratic elections
like in most other modern nations: as a body of men gets bigger and more spread
out, it by degrees turns from a commanded force into a population. But distance
and emptiness made communication between far outposts and Earth far too slow for
a single central democracy to run efficiently, far more so even than in Russia
on Earth which many said would have to go federal like the USA in the end.
  So a new period started. The Jetters flew down out of space to an atomic test
site in Nevada: they were expected, and the visit was routine although not made
public. A minor-sounding remark during chatter while waiting for an automated
process to finish, showed something that would alarm the free spacemen somewhat.
  "Odd: the last year or two we've had this stuff spreading all over the test
area, with the big staring dayglo orange flowers." said one of the men in charge
of the test site, "Nothing'll eat it, not even the jackrabbits, and when it dies
it doesn't rot away properly. None of the botanists can find what it is. A
biologist says its biochemistry's weird, like nothing he's seen before, and it
accumulates plutonium, which gets into the soil on some atom bomb test sites. We
call it `atom weed', it only seems to want to grow on the test site.".
  Jet Jack recognized it right enough. "Holy &%$, it's pluteweed, `Seaborgia
plutoniophila', all the way from Arda, here on Earth." he thought with a shock
of unreality at seeing it there, "`The empire strikes back', it seems: at least
the [biological] `empire' Ardabiota. How long before they get ideas that free
spacemen have found a planet with alien life on, and send a force to try to take
over? All the fiction and schizophrenics' talk and so on of alien takeovers, the
overpowering presence of a technology beyond our grasp coming from the sky, and
what alien invasion what do we get in reality? Some garish-flowered weed from
seeds on or in someone's dirty spacesuit or work tools. Where there's pluteweed
on Arda, there'll be plutonium in the rocks there or upstream. Always isotope
244. Like the Earth plant called leadwort that grows on outcrops of lead ore,
and the way English wild orchids self-seed and grow on some chemical waste tips.
Like that time Protak Pete in the X-100's got interested in butterflies
splattered on one of his men's suits after they'd `skyed' quickly on Arda when
dangerous animals turned up: `Our mighty tough leader gone silly after
aw!-how-pretty little butterflies.' some teased him, until he had to remind them
that `Those two three-coloured ones are Spanish Flag Butterflies, and where they
are there's usually pluteweed for their caterpillars to eat, and where there's
pluteweed there's plute.'.".
  "I went to Novaya Zemlya island off the north coast of Siberia recently: the
Russians wanted to see if I could help tidy up there. Six tons of plutonium-239
dispersed in the soil there from all those dirty atom bomb tests in Soviet
times. I remember now, there was something like that growing there. Just like
these, but the leaves were smaller. One of the Russians with me called them
`noviye tsvety', that's `new flowers'. I don't know much about botany myself.
The biologists and biochemists are having a field day, all sorts of ideas about
how this `atom weed' could've arisen from ordinary plants.".
  "Oh no." Jet Jack thought, "There also. That'll likely be Seaborgia arctica.
I've told our people about keeping their kit free of seeds when they leave Arda
or Karnil or Earth. All we now need is Karnil pluteweed here also.".
  "And a funny new sort of three-coloured butterfly around them.".
  Jet Jack recognized the description, as Trichromis seaborgiae, the Ardan
Spanish Flag Butterfly. Its caterpillars are even more poisonous, from the
plutonium they eat with the plant's leaves. Its eggs blow about along with the
plant's seeds. Someone likely got both on his spacesuit while prospecting for
actinides on Arda, then hyper jumped to Earth. There some Russians paid them to
clean up a nuclear area because with their suits' life support systems they
didn't need as much supplies bringing in across all that cold distance, and with
their suits on they didn't need beds to sleep in, and they were better protected
against radiation, and they would likely go right away at once afterwards and
not chatter to Earth public media about things there.
  "I wonder what's so special about plutonium, that it's so poisonous anyway.
Apart from it being radioactive.".
  "If you know much about the chemical periodic table," said Jet Jack, "when the
actinides start, they act like eka transition metals, thorium like hafnium, etc,
as if the lanthanide deviation was a one-off. Then lanthanide-ishness starts to
show itself, and plute doesn't know whether it's eka-osmium or an eka lanthanide
or something between, so it's forever changing valency, and when it gets loose
among biological molecules it passes electrons about and makes molecules alter
at such a rate that it's a menace. Several ordinary heavy metals do the same
sort of thing. Perhaps this funny weed's mutated to tuck an atom of plute away
in a enzyme so only the right molecules can get reacted by it. That way, some
heavy metals are useful: f'r example people need a tiny bit of molybdenum to go
in some enzyme or another. And there's 6 ways plute as a metal can crystallize.
After plute the actinides get more like plain eka lanthanides.".
  "What's eka?".
  "Sanskrit for `one'. Chemists used to say `eka-X' for something like element X
but a row further down in the periodic table, back last century when they were
sorting the elements they'd found so far to find where they were missing some.
`Dva-' means `same but two down'. This dropped out when they'd found all the
missing elements up to uranium and given them proper names. But some people are
using the word again, with all this looking for superheavy elements and so on.".
  By now the automated process had finished; they got back to work, and finished
it, and went back to space. Jet Jack remembered one of the many strange ideas
said by a schizophrenic who had found his way to the Anor system, imagining that
his head voice was divine instructions to start an isolationist monastic order
called the `Faithful Brethren'. This flourished on a remote asteroid until the
X-100's in a police-type `PSC-4' spacecraft cleaned them out, for many of the
order's members were being held there against their will or by deception, and
they were not contributing to the defence effort in case Earth authority tried
to take over. That `prophesy' was "Fate will come, and its wings will be those
of a butterfly.". "So it seems, likely." Jet Jack thought irritatedly, "That
plant's funny biochemistry by itself might be an Earth plant with mutations
caused by radiation; but those butterflies also with the same biochemical
oddities would be far too much coincidence to be anything except alien life
forms, and they'll know we've found somewhere else with life on, and they may
decide to send a takeover force there. Most of them still think <so far> that
Ilmenost's on some one of the Sun's asteroids if it's anywhere definite at all.
All it'll need is for a set of photos of the Arda sky star patterns to find its
way back to them. They'll find from them roughly where we are compared to the
Pleiades and Aldebaran. Then they do what the X-100's did before: they jump
about the area taking star pattern photos, and use a computer to make them into
an accurate 3D star map of the area. Then they work out what the sky star
pattern'd be from all likely stars till they find one that fits the Arda sky.".
  News that Ilmenost and the Anor system existed, and roughly where it was,
inevitably filtered back to Earth, and caused reactions varying from sensational
headlines to feelings of inevitability, to messianic hopes or fears that much
foretold in science fiction would now come to pass, to official blaming and
search for who was responsible, as what was left of the business and government
space control system tried to re-form itself. Accusations flew about.
  Officials and MP's etc accused each other about someone's clever idea for a
`Project Sardaukar', codenamed after something in the science fiction `Dune'
series. It was a hard-squad of Company enforcers bred by cloning from a hard
thug who seemed good starting stock and XYY-ifying the cell clone line. They
were given them the best training and kit and the first hyperspace jumper let
away from the secret labs. But within a fortnight the `Sardies', as they changed
their name to, had cut loose and become free asteroid miners themselves and let
their hyper jumper be examined and copied in an unauthorized workshop on a
remote asteroid. Thus free asteroid miners found Anor first and named many
places there after "Tolkien and asteroid miner nicknames, not properly after
reputable Government and business people, and with the kit they've got if we do
try to restore proper order there we'll have an endless guerilla war on our
hands, much worse than Mars was.".
  They blamed and accused each other about endless bureaucratic and financing
delays so "they've got the PL-prop and the PSC-4 and much else finished and in
production and use some time ago, while here they'll be on the drawing board for
some time yet. Likely we'll end up buying such kit and craft in from them, when
we need them, same as nearly every motorcycle in England comes from Japan, and
that'll mean recognizing them as independent. Once we had a proper army to keep
roughs and natives under control. A shock in that Central American republic in
that film when the army got sick of officials doing nothing but argue over
things and wanting forms filling, so an Army squad took over the offices and
gave the officials and clerks an AK47 each and sent them to the front as they
were. What purpose is our endless meetings about who out of doctors and police
and such emergency personnel are to be able to apply for a licence for a
PL-prop, when and if we finally start making them, when soon every asteroid
miner'll likely have one? At least we can `spy out the land' over there a bit.
Instead of a working police craft to catch a bunch of them and force the
coordinates of that place of theirs from them, I'm reduced to scruffy little
sending spies and the risk of them going over to the enemy like the Sardies.".
  The first man they sent as an agent was a Company atomic scientist, as the
best to tell what in the nuclear line was going on there and what the risk of
atom bombs was in case of conflict with them. He went as an asteroid miner,
choosing a suitably rough-sounding codename for himself, `Nuke Nick', which he
painted on his helmet forehead. After a while at unremarkable manual labour with
a group that he joined, he had the luck to be hyper jumped to the Anor system
with his group, for most Ilmenostian groups showed themselves from time at time
at Solar System asteroid bases, to avoid Earth authorities either guessing or
getting alarmed by more and more groups apparently disappearing without trace.
As the hyper jump field cleared he saw with wonderment for the first time an
alien star system, and marvelled at the size of the installations build there so
far from the Sun by men with no Company or government backup. On Arda he saw
growing in nature the dayglo orange flowered alien weed which he had so far only
seen in television news. He recorded what he felt he needed to, went to
Ilmenostian scientific meetings when he could, and took a chance to return to
the Solar System, thinking that among so many one more coming and going would go
unnoticed. But his group kept a close watch on each other, and at his first
attempt to slip away he was chased and caught, and warned about the risks of
getting lost if he went off on his own. At the next base call he finally managed
to plead an invented sick relative and get to back to Earth. He got to his
office, toughened and weary after much miner's work, mind dizzy from so many new
things seen, and printed out the computer floppies that he had brought back.
  "`Some first-rate scientific talent over there, not just workmen making plain
uranium reactors from information in books.'" his boss, Mr.Jameson, read from
his report, "A bunch of scientific papers, all that's lost on me, I've told you
before, I'm an administrator, not a scientist, cut the jargon and the equations
out ... lets read this one a bit - `Techniques in designing and operating Cm247
reactors, by `Control Rod' (X-100's)' - even in scientific articles those
nicknames of theirs! - `neutron budget ... maximizing Cf249 production from the
proportion of Cm247 that reacts (n,gamma) instead of fissioning ... Cf249 makes
an average of 4 neutrons when it fissions ... minimizing the capture cross
section and integral-amount-d-time-exposed of Bk249 to avoid as far as possible
the neutron-wasting side reaction Bk249 (n,gamma) Bk250, unless transcalifornium
elements are needed for research ... a much more serious problem than avoiding
Np239 (n,gamma) Np240 when breeding U238 to Pu239, and Am245 (n,gamma) Am246
when breeding Pu244 to Cm245 ... best timing in taking the fuel elements out
...' - `they commonly refer to Bk and Cf as `berk' and `cally' ... with natural
Cm247 fairly abundant those high actinides are routine practical stuff to them'
... `Relevant half lives: Cm247 alpha 16e6 yr;' - that funny computerese way of
writing `times 10 to the power of', lucky I did a computer course once - `Cm248
alpha 350,000 yr; Cm249 beta 65 min; Bk249 beta 0.88 yr; Cf249 alpha 900 yr;' -
  And so on. <You're> the berk, where's the proper information? How many men've
they got, and how armed and equipped? What radar etc have they got? What is the
layout and whereabouts of this place Ilmenost and of their other bases over
there? What patrols do they mount? How for a snatch force to get hold of one of
their PSC-4's or the plans for them?, so we can make our own at last. Were any
of those scientists the three Company scientists that went over to the free
miners because they `didn't like what was going on'? As I should have expected:
you stopped being a Company undercover agent and let science take over, treated
that lot as scientific colleagues which you wouldn't dream of putting at risk.
What's this other paper about? Some place called Nunarien: ye gods the dirty
thing, lucky we haven't got them here now. This lot isn't much use either: a lot
of chitchat and gossip column stuff: when it is best to put young children into
their first spacesuit (oh crumbs are they trying to raise <children> in space!),
`odd legends about the group called the F-15's, says they're all Earth
businessmen who'd gone to space, but when I asked a few of them they all said
they'd all been workmen before they went to space...', and so on - I suppose
like the story going about space that somewhere there's an asteroid miner with
oxygen cylinders made of plutonium who will do all sorts of heroic things, yekh
the idea of it, all sorts of stories about him: etc etc, never mind.".
  "The leader of the F-15's has, or so they said: he's called `Hot-pots'. That
man of theirs that decides disputes in llmenost, that they call the Arbiter,
he's gone two better: his oxygen cylinders are made out of curium-247. Sometimes
I think they get a kick out of having kit items made out of actinides.".
  "OK, not only they do that sort of thing if allowed. On Earth in an atomic lab
somewhere a few years ago I saw a plutonium statuette of that G.T.Seaborg who
was one of the team that first made plutonium back in 1941. Lax supervision and
a bored radiochemist, I suppose. Some people's fancies. I know asteroid miners:
a thoroughly wild lot. I see you brought your spacesuit back with an Ilmenostian
PL-prop on instead of the old-style propulsor that we supplied it to you with.
Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Is it Superman? No, it's our man coming back with
an unauthorized suit kit part and a pair of those clip-on aeroplane wings on,
landing in our office car park without going through immigration as if he was a
special forces man. So much for that rule yet again. You may as well go back to
your ordinary work, and wait for the first banana republic to recognise them as
independent, like with Mars." his boss said, tiredly accepting the inevitable.
  "That big front gun on the PSC-4 that shoots out from a magazine a lot of
little missile-shaped craft each driven by one of its crew: you wouldn't believe
what they call it: 'sewage pump'!".
  "All right, I know of the free asteroid miners' habit of calling themselves
`space sewage and we intend to stay so, as you can tell by the smell when we
unsuit: shows we're not some base-bound bunch that can unsuit every night.',
when they pride themselves on being rough and unprincipled.".
  So the F-15's met Earth again, too late to return to their former lives as
Earth businessmen. They had been delegates at a crucial Company cartel meeting
in a time of virtual war between asteroid spacemen wanting freedom and asteroid
metals trading companies wanting control. Spacemen got wind of the meeting and
hyper jump snatched them out, disrupting dangerous concerted Company plans
against free spacemen which would have secured control of all supplies and got
various efficient space police craft into use much sooner than was actually
done. Life far from Earth and Sun, and other things (for among the free spacemen
moral scruples had come second to self-preservation), had consumed all the
F-15s' memories of their previous life.
  Wise after the event re scientists, Mr.Jameson sent a Company agent, with no
science qualifications above A-level and so less likely to be distracted by
scientificness. The agent had had a good pass in A-level biology, and so decided
to go under cover as a biologist, thinking that his school's A-level curriculum
plus much eager viewing of wildlife TV programmes and reading of wildlife books
was all there was to know about biology and certainly enough for what he was
likely to meet among a lot of space-workmen and atom men living in space. He
chose a name (`Eland', chosen at hurried random from African big game) and a
cover life story, joined a group of asteroid miners, and again was lucky and got
to Ilmenost soon. When meetings there turned to science, the atom and spacesuit
kit talk soon got `above his head', but he had not claimed to be an expert in
them; he stayed on the sidelines and listened, until once when discussion turned
to Arda wildlife. Memories of TV wildlife programs gave him the means to ask
what to him were learned-sounding questions, and skill at business speeches and
sales patter helped him to dodge awkward moments. His mission seemed to be
progressing well.
  "What is your opinion on the implications of differences in ontogeny of the
Earth and the Ardan vertebrate skull?" Cobra of the Jetters asked at one meeting
where the participants met in a bunch all linked by intercom wires and tethered
to the outside of a structure as the sky of alien constellations rotated slowly
around them. Cobra was a biologist, largely self-taught during weeks-long suit
propulsor flights across empty space between work sites with nothing to see but
each other and the unchanging stars. Supply of interesting CD-ROM's and suchlike
to avoid sensory deprivation psychosis during such journeys is important for
long-trip spacemen, and with the need for practical skills the CD-ROM makers had
a bias towards science and the like rather than literature and fiction.
  The result was disastrous. Among a welter of unknown words one word stood out,
or he thought it did: `oncology', the study of cancer, a word he had learned in
an anxious time in a hospital when an aunt of his had breast cancer. That and
`skull': he shuffled floppies in his spacesuit outside pack to gain time while
with the speed of much practise a speech quickly formed itself in his brain.
  "The fight against cancer." he started, "Particularly cruel when it starts in
the bone of the skull and endangers at once the brain and the facial appearance,
but harmful wherever it occurs, a killer of loved ones ... we need to combat
this enemy ... forward to the fight, forward to the future! ... ", and so on, he
went on until the chairman, Protak Pete in the X-100's, stopped him.
  "We've got enough treatment for cancer sufferers: we're not talking about it
now." said Cobra, "Anyway, in all that there was zero about the biology of
cancer. We didn't come here to have our time wasted by what is obviously a
businessman's or fund-raiser's promotion speech. Who and what are you?".
  "But you did say `cancer': OK, you actually said `oncology', I know the
word.".
  "I said `ontogeny'. OK, so you misheard. If you know nothing about cancer, you
should have said so directly. We accept that one man can't know all things.",
and then to Protak Pete: "I move that we remove that irrelevant stuff from the
record and him from this meeting, and find who he really is and what his real
qualifications are.".
  The agent fled abruptly, fearing a body search and discovery of his Company ID
in an undersuit pocket. He attached himself to a group which from their talk
seemed to be going onto Arda to explore something whose name meant nothing to
him except that it was "yet another Tolkien name that those X-100's used so many
of". Then the Jetters joined the party. He saw the name `Plutey-pots' on a
helmet forehead and realized that a particular space legend was likely true
after all. He stayed aside during the collecting and storing of kit, and set off
with the rest. On the way a companion described where they were going; he didn't
care much for the idea of it, but he dare not attract attention to himself.
  Everything went grey around him: he had not expected to be hyper jumped again
so soon. The grey cleared to show that they were now orbiting an Earth-like
planet with most of its land area in one big continent stretching from pole to
pole. They passed round pairs of aeroplane wings about 6 feet span, which they
clipped onto their suits' oxygen cylinder mountings. As they flew down, the
black sky of space turned into dark blue with a ring of pale blue round the edge
of the planet which rapidly turned from an object in space into a ground below
them. They flew east high above wild forested lands, then a huge inland desert
which ended in a high range of snow-capped mountains, after which the land was
forested again. In wonder at the alien world below him, Eland nearly forgot his
mission.
  They came to a plain between mountains, forested, and drained by a river. Its
name was ominous, ever since the X-100's found it from instrument readings when
first surveying Arda from orbit. `Thuringurth' the X-100's had called the river,
`Secret Death', but from not any hazard of wildlife or white water. They flew
steadily northeastwards over a sea of treetops, high enough to avoid the worst
of the insects that splattered on their suits and kit; below them they heard
animals chattering and squawking and roaring at each other, for their suit
propulsors ran silently. Sometimes they passed a place where several young trees
strove for light where a huge old tree had died or fallen. Isolated mountains
stood in the plain, and more ahead as they flew up a side valley whose name was
dread and whose water was dire. Thus Plutey-pots and Eland for the first time
saw the Nunorduin, which no fish swam in and no beast would drink.
  Black crags round its valley's mouth threw the wind into sudden eddies, which
caught Plutey-pots and Red Dog and threw them into a spinning fall. Red Dog got
out of it routinely, but Plutey-pots only after much frantic radioing of
instructions. "Why did I ever leave my business office? Why did I ever end up
`turned into an aeroplane' in a propulsor spacesuit with my hips and knees
callipered straight to be its tail, instead of a comfortable seat in an
airliner?" Plutey-pots thought in a brief reversal to the businessman Blore as
his suit's clip-on aeroplane wings threw him this way and that and the forested
rocks got ever nearer. In the end he pulled out of it and followed the rest, up
the tributary which local wildlife shunned, having thus escaped in his first
scrape with what many called ominously `The Thuringurth's Base-guards' - what
was being guarded?.
  The further up the side valley, the scantier the vegetation on its banks, far
more so than would be from mere altitude and steepness. The Jetters and the
others flew on up the river as its valley became ever steeper and narrower as
the valley-forests of Nan Thuringurth changed into a highland, covered in `cloud
forest' (that gets much of its water from mountain mist), except in one place.
  There underground near the cliff edge was something that elsewhere would have
been thought a dirty act by industrial Man against Nature, but here had been
done by Nature herself, something that She had not done on Earth for
2,000,000,000 years. Plutey-pots remembered the Republic of Gabon (in West
Africa) placename Oklo, and a drawing of Mother Nature as a radioactive area
worker. That was safely long before life came onto land; but on Arda fallout
from several recent nearby supernovas had brought that condition back, and more
so, and groundwater had concentrated original and fallout uranium into one area
near the cliff edge. "There's <the place>." Jet Jack said, not speaking its
name. `Nunarien' the X-100's had named it when their instruments found it from a
survey orbit, meaning "Place of Secret Fire" in Tolkien's languages, for they
were ever fond of his books, and their names were used by many after them who
found inventing enough place names to be difficult.
  One look at the scanty vegetation, the garish-flowered patches of pluteweed
(Seaborgia spp.), and the fluttering Spanish Flag Butterflies whose grubs ate
its leaves, and the scrub of only radioactivity-tolerant species of plants, and
the hot lifeless river headwater stream coming from the foot of the high cliff,
was enough to show what had happened. Natural nuclear reactor. At Oklo, long ago
when Earth natural uranium had enough U-235 in to fission with natural water as
moderator (to slow the neutrons so the uranium can catch them easily), there
were six of them; here was one, but a big one. In the plateau edge uranium
fissioned and some became plutonium-239, without containment of any sort, cooled
and moderated by ground water which flowed through the radioactive stuff and
then out of the cliff to form the poisoned river. The cliff was sheer, and the
only foot-way up it anywhere near was a fearsome climb up radioactive rock, in
some wind directions passing through the steam of the dreaded outflow. The
X-100's called that path Kirith Ungol, again from Tolkien: but it led past the
den of a fear which could not have been slain with sword or energy beam like the
huge ancient giant spider of Tolkien's Kirith Ungol was. Plutey-pots and many of
the others shuddered, not at the reactor but at the use made of it, not by
criminal or terrorist or mad scientist who could caught and shot but by blind
natural forces which never feared to attack again after defeats and could not be
brought to court. Strange to think that the menace came from familiar uranium
and not from the alien plutonium-244 and curium-247 well known on Arda and
elsewhere in its star Anor's system but dug in no mine on Earth.
  Cobra noticed that the pluteweed there was different enough in leaf and growth
to be a separate species much more radiation tolerant than other species, faced
with Pu-239, which is much more radioactive than the usual Ardan Pu-244, to make
itself poisonous with to defend itself from grazing: he named it `Seaborgia
nunariendea', and collected samples. Others who were not botanists told him
sharply to get back to the point of their visit and to put that `useless boxful
of medium level nuke waste' back where he found it, but after an argument botany
was respected. Trust Cobra's botany to get the better of him yet again even in a
place like that. Thus Eland saw that Cobra was with them; and Cobra noticed him.
  Eland realized that the enemy that he had brought on himself had come with
him. His panic exit at the biology meeting was final proof that he had something
to hide. Perhaps he could slip away flying among the rocks and trees and side
gorges downstream, and away, for while on the ground they were not tethered, for
the tethers would snag on things. But what to do then? No point wandering on
Arda until something in his suit went wrong, for except for buying a PL-prop in
Ilmenost his spacesuit was Company standard issue and certain parts would in due
time need replacing. He could not eat the planet's wild food. He had no
handyman's skill to make weapons or tools or suit parts. He was a business agent
and no workman. No point holing up in this accursed radioactive place so many
light years from base and backup. He still did not know what a spacesuit
hyperspace jumper looked like among the variety of mechanics on a long-trip
spacesuit, or how to get hold of one, or how to steer one to a desired place, or
which star would be the Sun if he did manage to get back on the home side of the
Pleiades. At least at night the Pleiades on Arda would give plenty light to see
by at night, for Anor is much nearer to them than the Sun is. No point flying up
and away to space: their suit radars would soon see him, and even if he had the
fastest propulsor there they could hyper jump after him. He could `take care of
himself physically' fairly well; but no point getting into a savage up-and-down
fight with them on the steep slopes, trampling the pluteweed and the rad-scrub
and likely finish falling with his suit open in the lethal pool of reactor water
at the cliff base which was the source of the poisoned Nunorduin river.
  Their visit was part of a long controversy in Ilmenost and elsewhere whether
to treat Nunarien as part of nature and the environment to be left alone as a
special hostile habitat like deserts etc, or as a polluter and a waste of useful
actinides to be put a stop to, and if the latter, how? Nunarien had run for
nearly fifteen thousand years as ground water brought in more uranium from the
plateau behind, and a recent geological survey of the area had shown the sites
of at least four other such reactors now thankfully burnt-out and dead. Sediment
in the Nan Thuringurth valley plain had layers laden with by now mostly harmless
decay products of uranium reactor outwash, and enough fossils to show that local
life had survived the crises. Oklo on Earth had produced about 10,000 watts
equivalent of heat for about a million years. How to stop such a thing, anyway?
  Dig all round it and put a containment round it?: that would be a massive job;
but if the containment was adequately heat insulating, the hot outflow water
could make power like in any other reactor, including power to pump the exit
water back up to the input, and the names of dread given to two of the valley's
rivers would thankfully lose their purpose. And catch the still-flowing natural
ground water to extract the uranium that it carried, or another natural reactor
might develop beside the old one. Such a massive job would need far more heavy
equipment than could be easily got there from the asteroids down Arda's gravity
well; the equipment would have to be made on planet. The beginnings of an
on-planet industrial area had been built on Arda, in an area of open low scrub
rather than damage high forest to make room for it, and following the X-100s'
persistent Tolkien theme it was named `Aulien', and a few railways were starting
to spread out from it; but Nunarien amid a tangle of forested mountains and
steep gorges was abominably hard to reach by land, or to build an overland route
to; and such an effort would need far more men than Ilmenost had at call then.
  Use the inevitable exploratory drill borings to blow it (probably with nukes
to get enough blast power) to pieces too small to go critical again?: The idea
of blowing up a working reactor made him shudder, for he didn't like seeing good
machinery destroyed, nor the likely resulting contamination; but Nunarien was a
different and alien thing whose like had not been seen on Earth since the middle
Precambrian when Earth's atmosphere still had next to no oxygen, and anyway it
was steadily outputting pollution of the must fearsome type already. Presumably
the debris could then be processed like in any ordinary actinide mine; but its
output, unless used on Arda, would have to be lifted out of Arda's gravity well,
and there were plenty actinides in Anor's asteroids.
  In earlier years the Companies' enforcers had been all too good at putting out
of action unauthorized settlements' reactors when trying to maintain Company
authority on Mars, until the Mars War of Independence stopped that and made the
Companies shudder at the name of the Argyre basin: Jet Jack wished he could get
hold of a squad of them and force them to try their harmful authoritarian skill
on Nunarien.
  Pour some dissolved boron compound into the drill holes or the incoming ground
water?: where to get all that boron from?; and over time it would leach out and
the reaction would restart, unless Nature stopped what she started, and changed
the groundwater drainage which collected the uranium.
  Thus they debated, and reported back to Ilmenost, for they had men and kit
only for exploring and surveying. Life went on, and the feared flowers and
insects of Reactor Gully and the deep river gorge downstream were not disturbed
immediately except by a few biologists. If men begin to remove or deactivate
Nunarien, say by gradually mining it away, that is in the future as yet.
  Eland had to stay with the Jetters and await a chance to get back to Earth,
for he was stranded far from home. Six weeks later at a badly-needed chance to
take his spacesuit off, while he was getting used for the first time to the foul
wave of undersuit smell which is the symbol of long-trip asteroid miners, his
Company ID slipped out of an undersuit pocket, and Red Dog (Jetters) grabbed it
first. The secret was out, and the Jetters were not gentle finding the rest of
the truth from him. They removed his suit's tether release lever to prevent him
from deserting; he hoped ever more remotely for a chance to get back to the
Solar System and home.
  Even so and similarly Earth and Ilmenost gradually each knew what the other
knew about them even as they learned about each other, and no chance for
surprise developed. And as expected an assortment of Earth's lesser nations
recognized Ilmenost as independent even before Ilmenost had expressed any wish
to be so recognized. And yet again various men dratted all banana republics and
said that the world would have been far better if (1) the national empires in
Africa and Asia had been held together, (2) Central America had broken away from
Spain as USA-like states of a single large orderly extended federal Mexico
instead of as a lot of separate bits and pieces, (3) similarly the smaller and
more purposeless South American odds and ends. But that had not happened, any
more than any other feared or longed-for alternative outcome of history, and
there was little left for Earth officialdom to do except argue about blame.
  Earth, officialdom and general population, had learned about the Anor system
not as a sudden sensation but gradually. The first hyperspace jump seen by Earth
public as the spacemen escaped from the arrest and seizure trap at the meeting
had set the headlines alight, but decades of routine fictional faster than light
travel had grossly lowered the possible shock value of it finally happening for
real. The Earth public had known for a long time about asteroid miners and many
of their doings, of course. Ardan pluteweed found self-seeding on Earth on atom
bomb test sites, with a biochemistry wildly different from that of Earth plants,
had started more speculation, as had the lack of success in looking for where so
much unauthorized long-lasting asteroid miner suit kit was coming from. Definite
news of Anor and Arda and Ilmenost getting into the Earth public media was an
event long heralded which caused scientific and public excitement but no massive
culture shock after so many fictional equivalents and various real astronomical
speculations that this or that star had planets.
  NASA and the other Earth space authorities saw no reason not to accept that
Anor was the only star in its space area to have planets. Some remembered
resignedly other events: often Australian officialdom, while the land was being
taken up there, had finally got around to giving an area of outback land to an
owner, only to find a faster unofficial settler already well at home there, so
often that in parts of Australia `squatter' had come to mean `landowner'. Men on
Earth debated whether to struggle any more with developing the PL-prop and
similar or whether to buy them from Ilmenost or to try to get a copy of their
plans from there.
  There was the first official Earth expedition to another star: an astronomer
who had used a long-trip spacesuit before, and five NASA men who had to be
trained hurriedly to use them, and were far from happy about having to travel
asteroid miner fashion instead of in a craft that they could unsuit in. Earth
pride of enterprise liked this very little, and cursed Company secrecy for
preventing development of Earth skill with hyperspace jumpers, for after the
Sardaukar mishap the whole idea of hyper jumpers had been tidied away out of
sight and its existence denied, to cover up'. Also they did not want men to
travel and settle further than the Companies could control. Now it had to be
restarted at last. Officials and scientists were rounded up from other projects
and places that they had dispersed to. Four of the scientists involved could not
be found (three of them were at Ilmenost, for they `didn't like what was going
on' and had gone over to the `enemy'); an important official involved had died
at home of a heart attack.
  The usual `St.Alzheimer's Day' as deep-buried personal and computer memories
of a project long suspended were painfully slowly dug up and got working again,
became several months; papers had been shredded; floppies were in encrypted
formats. Meetings lengthened as delays multiplied, until the astronomer waited
no longer, but put on a PL-prop spacesuit that he had bought `on the side' from
landing asteroid miners. He had used it twice, puzzling NASA when a failed
instrument in an astronomy satellite started working again before a shuttle
could get there, when he had got tired of delays and excuses. Now he used it
again, and not in secret; after ten days missing from his lab he suddenly
appeared in the meeting room in a paper-scattering wind and a cloud of grey
distortion, and with him an Ilmenostian hyperspace jumper operator. The men at
the meeting realized the inevitable as the outsider hyper man and the astronomer
went off to collect the five NASA men and supplies.
  The expedition craft had been ready for some time, except for an empty place
still waiting for its Earth-made hyperspace jumper. `Explorer-1' it was called,
and great things were expected of it beyond the light-years; but it lay unused
in long grass by the palmetto forest edge at Cape Canaveral, and its crew's
short-trip spacesuits in it. The hyper man, whose hyper jumper was asteroid
miner group type and not a ship-jumper, found the five NASA men and suited them
up in his own way, hurriedly trained them with a propulsor-simulator that he had
brought, got stores where they could, announced their intentions, and set off.
NASA put a brave face on it, but in private cursed all officialdom and lamented
what might have been. Seven small aeroplanelike figures towing their heavier kit
in a missile-shaped winged tow crate rose tethered to each other from a lab yard
in an unfilmable rainy night into a black turbulent sky, while the sleek
streamlined craft of intended fame lay on the ground and the majestic music
intended to accompany its public takeoff stayed unplayed in a cassette rack,
victim not of deep political or financial plot but of mere ordinary delay until
someone sought what other route he could.
  Even so and not as intended, they set off, with the comforts of Earth sinking
below them and nothing but a self-propelled spacesuit between each of them and
the empty light years. They rose three hundred feet and turned horizontal,
seeking an end to the storm cloud and its eddies. Lightning flashed about.
Finally the hyper man's suit radar found a fast smooth updraught, which they
flew into and rode. The stars appeared as they rose out of the storm cloud's
anvil-shaped top of ice fog into the stratosphere; soon they were in space, and
the ice coating they got from the cloud started to break and evaporate off. The
NASA men tried their suit propulsors for a while; then the hyper man told them
to pack into a ball round him and to pull in all trailing loops of tether.
  As NASA had planned, they went to Capella, a double star suffering from middle
age spread; it is at the deep yellow stage of expansion to red giants after its
cores ran out of hydrogen and started burning helium to carbon. There is little
to record of it. The hyper jumper man jumped with them twice to get parallax
fixes, then to the place. As in an old science fiction book title, `Capella's
golden eyes' looked at them, for the two stars pull each other into oval shape;
but as usual with doubles there are no planets; various fictional Capellan
planetary worlds evaporated into cold empty reality. The astronomer took many
photographs of the two stars of Capella with their blotchy surface pattern of
various temperature colours caused by convection in their huge rarefied shells.
As the two stars swell and become tenuous, their centres become dense: the
eventual white dwarfs are preforming inside the red giants. He also photographed
the sky star patterns. The NASA men looked in wonder through their breathing
mask eye-windows at distorted but sometimes recognizable Earth constellations,
and asked the hyper man which star was the Sun. After a few days the hyper man
jumped them back to Earth; they spoke their minds about the smell that emanated
when they unsuited. So ended Earth's first official space expedition out of the
Solar System, with Ilmenostian kit, to a place where Ilmenostians had been
before, and with an Ilmenostian effectively in command. And after it all they
still did not know which was the hyperspace jumper out of the clutter of
communication and navigation etc gear on its user's spacesuit.
  What to do now? So had happened Earth's first official interstellar flight,
with whichever of the NASA men might have got fame as captain of the craft, and
his subordinates duly chosen, mere accompaniers of an outsider treating it as a
routine delivery journey, propulsors strapped to their backs, cabins reduced to
the air room inside their suits. How now to boast of a proud first expedition?
  "In this seat one of us might have sat as captain," said one of the five NASA
men as they looked round the Explorer-1 afterwards, longing for what might have
been, "and found our own way to Capella, and got fame like Gagarin's, and the
ship's name likewise, if only those dirty trading finance-minded companies had
got on with using and improving the hyper jumper instead of hiding it like that.
OK, OK, there's no true vengeance against a stargazer who got tired of waiting
for his ride so he got transport where he could. And we get stuffed into
asteroid miner suits and jumped there as passengers by some runaway asteroid
miner who treats that sort of journey like we treat going to the next town. OK,
we've been to Capella as planned. At least those Sardines or whatever they're
called had better sense than the Companies: they gave copies of their hyperspace
jumper about for other people to use and improve. But that still means someone
else did all the exciting stuff for us. If we ever do get to fly it, the first
time I'll not take spoon feeding with some ready-made coordinate list: I'll jump
about and triangulate and find the place myself just like we were going to, and
claim discovery rights when we get back - fresh after an onboard shower, and not
smelling like stale sewage after the better part of a month shut up in a dirty
Ilmenostian spacesuit. But who'd stand at the top of the list now?: Protak Pete
who leads the X-100's, a rough dirty asteroid miner nicknamed after a dirty
radioactive waste element [= protactinium] that he uses to run his suit
powerpack. OK, it's not his fault, it's whoever ran that silly Project Saudaukar
unpleasant hard space police enforcement squad idea that caused all this.".
  Some tried to celebrate the five men's flight as it had happened, and they
were feted, and the astronomer with them; but they had no real achievements of
pilotage to boast of after their endless explorations of the imaginary in the
nearest that NASA could make to a hyper jumper simulator with such knowledge of
hyper jumpers as had been released to them yet. And the hyper jumper man had
tried the hyper jumper simulator and found that it acted nothing like the real
thing, and said so, writing-off weeks of intensive training with a few words.
  Some consoled themselves with fiction, and made a sequel of "Terror of the
Space Pirates" in which, after the space pirates' feared base and kit had been
completely destroyed and RD'ed, the `Explorer-1', completed faster than in
reality, flew as planned as the start of Earth's follow-up space exploration
effort, with many heroic deeds by its crew in the far distances between Earth
and Capella; but that was only fiction.
  Some on Earth found what they could about the X-100's and how they found Anor
and its planets, and computer simulation reconstructed it as they could, and
made a good story film of it, claiming it as Earth's first interstellar
expedition, even though neither NASA's Houston nor Russia's Kaliningrad (near
Moscow) nor any other Earth mission control had had command or knowledge of it.
Ilmenost had a good standard film version of it, but a copy of it that found its
way to Earth was unwelcome there as it was because of very strong opinions
voiced in it about the asteroid metals trading companies, and a very detailed
revealing of Project Sardaukar's methods and purpose. But the fact remained,
that while on Earth the hyper jumper lay hidden and other spacecraft projects
were delayed by official procedure, Ilmenost developed them and got ahead and
very far ahead, and will likely be so for a long time.
  The `Explorer-1' did finally fly, with an Ilmenostian ship-jumper and pilot,
as a routine supplies carrier, for tethered groups of men in long-trip suits
with suit-sized hyper jumpers proved ever to be the most cost-effective short
and medium range interstellar explorers unless needing to carry much heavy kit.
Matters slid into Ilmenost being a usual place to get space kit, as Japan for
electronics and motorcycles or India for tea or Izhevsk in Russia for rifles.
  Earth finally got to make hyper jumpers, man-sized and ship-sized. Some talked
hopefully of making in secret a big fleet of PSC-4's, and its hoped-for
successors the PSC-5 and so on, and support craft, and programming sentient
computer-brains, and training men, and when ready cleaning up all asteroid miner
disobedience once and for all, and consuming the free spacemen's supply base
Ilmenost and all other such places by massive assault as a crocodile crushes and
swallows a river turtle.
  There had been other cleanups. In some places diving was now for work only and
scuba divers not known to a closely controlling central authority longer had
their own uncontrolled way to poach shellfish or raid wrecks or nose about
underwater for fun. A variety of naval and para-naval and inshore fishermen's
work and dredging and patrol craft, many submersible, routinely shot them with
high-powered underwater ultrasound guns or caught them and their boats in grabs
or sucked them up "along with all the other rubbish that gets in the water
around here". There were dark allegations about what happened to them onboard to
avoid wasting men's time as witnesses afterwards at official or unofficial
courts. Such happens when ever-multiplying people invade ever more working men's
work room and base areas for leisure room when those working men need to be left
alone even more to provide ever more supplies for ever-multiplying people.
  But such a space cleanup is in the future if it ever happens; currently it is
stalled by ever more small and medium Earth nations recognizing Ilmenost as
independent. On Earth some celebrated the Capella Five despite the unintended
way their mission turned, and some celebrated what they knew of the X-100's.
  Astronomers loudly clamoured for hyperspace jumpers and training in using
them, or for hyper jump men to fly with them. Some astronomers directly
contacted PL-prop spacemen landing at an observatory; officials heard of it and
threatened to wield powers, causing a public shouting row about new and old
Earth military / commercial attempts to monopolize or control all space travel;
during this the expedition was organized.
  Hoteliers in the New South Wales outback town of Coonabarabran in Australia
had a run on accommodation as astronomers gathered there. They met and drove
through semi-arid eucalyptus woodland and areas of cattle grazing to the nearby
Siding Spring Mountain Observatory. Next day, the few early morning visitors to
the surrounding Warrumbungle National Park saw with astonishment a wingless
craft flying in over the dry forested tops of the Warrumbungle Mountains. It was
an Ilmenost-made PSC-4. One man there recognized it with angry envy, for he was
a space metals trading Company man who had long in vain fought against delay
after delay in getting Earth-made PSC-4's to a prototype, and here was one
working and in use - made by `the enemy' and manned not by a hard-minded space
police squad but by a group of wild free asteroid miners called the Quasars.
Alongside it flew a flock of what looked at first like small aeroplanes but
proved to be men in spacesuits with clip-on wings; they were the Jetters. It
passed low over the upstanding rock peaks known as the Bread Knife and the
Belougery Spire which attract many tourists to the area. Scared grey kangaroos
fled as it landed. Fourteen astronomers gathered round it.
  The spacemen flying with it landed beside it. Some of them unsuited, without
smell; they had used an in-suit washer before landing. It was Plutey-pots's
first time on the ground in the Australian outback, although he had flown over
it several times when he was Mr.Blore the businessman before he went into space.
They unloaded twenty long-trip spacesuits from its drum-shaped collapsible hold,
and sorted out one for each of the astronomers, who looked at them with various
feelings, for a few of them had thought they would be in pressurized cabins most
of the time, and many had not bothered to read properly the information that
they had been sent about their spacesuits. In the PSC-4's cabin, its ominous
`empty hold into RD' lever was clamped <very> solidly `off'. They suited-up,
with the expected delay while the principles of such suits were explained, which
they should have read from the info pack before. Then came `sorting the loot',
as Space Explorer tour operators sometimes irritatedly call reducing optimistic
bagfuls and suitcasefuls to what fits into a spacesuit's inside and outside
packs. Out came the changes of clothes, formal for supposed dinners and informal
for supposed leisure interludes. Out came the toiletries and washing stuff, for
their spacesuits would be providing for that. Out came assorted items that would
not have withstood space vacuum. Out came a great variety of food and alcoholic
drink. From the two women's luggage, out came an incredible amount of cosmetics.
Out came portable typewriters, a portable photocopier, and office gear of every
description. The Quasars' two electronics men were soon busy rigging up adaptors
and tethers for the astronomers' assorted laptop computers to run off their
spacesuit powerpacks.
  The astronomers reacted various ways to their unfamiliar kit. "RD's give me
the shudders," said one, "the way everything vanishes into them, like that big
one in the Council refuse destruction depot, and is ground up and dissolved, and
now I find I'm carrying a little one about with me on my spacesuit as part of
its sewage destruction system.".
  The PSC-4's collapsible hold, vacated of the spacesuits, was assigned first to
observing equipment, which was duly packed in with inflatable padding. This took
most of the space; the more useful of the office gear took what of the rest was
not needed for frozen O,Rh- blood and other emergency medical supplies. The rest
had to be `left luggage' to be repacked and stored in the observatory until the
party returned. The astronomers finished sorting their kit, and tethered to the
Jetters. The Jetters switched their suit propulsors on and rose slowly and
heavily, towing the astronomers, whose experience with propulsor spacesuits was
zero; takeoff from an Earth-sized planet is not a good choice of first flying
lesson with one, if it can be avoided, and it would take less time to train them
in propulsor use in space during the journey. When in orbit, they started to get
used to propulsor flying in an easier way, until the PSC-4 met them. For many of
the astronomers, even that was quite an experience; but they were not in space
merely to see things that had been well photographed from close-up already. They
flew about awkwardly and bunched closely against the PSC-4. Several of them made
startled radio noises as everything went grey round them as its big onboard
hyperspace jumper took them to near Ilmenost in the Anor system, where they were
lent more observing kit and given a large package of CD-ROM's containing what
had been discovered so far about the Anor system and the space area about.
  Two of the astronomers left the group to look at a house-sized meteoroid that
one of them's suit radar had seen; they had got halfway there when the PSC-4's
threatening front gun muzzle fired a small missile-like one-man craft which
outran them and untelescoped as it scooped them into itself at speed and took
them back to the PSC-4. If it had been in action against unauthorized space
activity, as was planned by some Earth authorities when trying to make them, it
would have quickly pumped them into an armoured hold in the PSC-4, which might
later have transferred them to a bulk prisoner transport; but it was not; it let
them go with a sharp reminder about tethered group discipline and inexperience
in propulsor flying. If they want long tethers, then well, but don't untether
unless the group leader says they can. It was a slight reminder that the PSC-4
was designed not as an expedition luggage carrier (as it was being used then)
nor its magazineful of one-man pursuit craft as mini tugs (as sometimes used on
Ilmenostian space building sites) but as a terrifyingly efficient base-buster
and antipersonnel craft designed by the space metals trading Companies in their
time of power, equipped with powerful lasers, missiles, and sensors to detect
nearby developing hyperspace jump fields.; The free spacemen had got hold of the
plans and completed them and made several of them as a defence in case. Manned
by the X-100's, even hampered by needing to capture all alive and unhurt, it had
cleaned out the `Faithful Brethren' in one quick action as easily and completely
as a street-cleaners' van's RD-trailer digests a wasps' nest. About using them
as work craft, Plutey-pots remembered some pre-industrial nations' laws about
armed readiness that said that civilian-owned horses (except necessary heavy
breeds) must be fit for the cavalry and not ponies or donkeys or low-grade nags.
  They clustered round the craft while it jumped to a star system that the
X-100's had found while looking for Anor: it was a binary, and one of the pair
was a pulsar. It was no place to hang about, in the powerful spinning magnetic
field, and the occasional blasts of atomic particles and radioactive dirt as a
meteoroid or the like fell into the pulsar. The ceaseless flashing started to
make them feel brainwashed. It seemed unreal that something six miles diameter
could be as heavy as the Sun and spin that fast: it was no sort of normal matter
but a single giant atom nucleus. The astronomers recorded what they could before
Jet Jack called them off and they thankfully hyper jumped away. Pulsars, like
some big Ardan animals, are best admired from a distance.
  They jumped into the Pleiades cluster. It was an astonishing place. Some of
the stars were nearly as bright as a half moon, and many were as bright as
Venus, so that they could see each other clearly without artificial light; much
of the sky was milky from the cluster's interstellar gas. Many of the stars were
still blowing away the rest of the gas and dust that they had formed from. A
radar echo proved to be a young planet flying loose, that had managed to form in
a binary system before being inevitably thrown out; eventually it would freeze
white and dead. Binaries of every description. Equal pairs, unequal pairs, pairs
of pairs. Some time ago a few correctly placed supernovas in a dense part of a
spiral arm of our galaxy had swept a space area's incredibly scarce gas and dust
together until gravity pulled it together and made stars. Over the millions of
years the present tight cluster would scatter across space like a family's
children scatter when they become adult; but each binary would stay together.
The Jetters remembered the long `double, double, toil and trouble' that the
X-100's had been through among endless `childless couple' binaries before
finding at last a single star with planets and naming it Anor.
  The astronomers opened their tow crate to get data storage and recorded
observations endlessly. The Jetters were more interested in the proportion of
useful metals in the gas and dust, and how they could collect it, and whether it
was worth the effort trying that far from base. "Now <that>'s more relevant!"
said Rattler when an astronomer said something about faint but clear uranium and
plutonium and curium absorption lines in a star spectrum: actinides as a power
source are ever useful to free spacemen. They looked at a single star: round it
orbited a thick disk of dust and objects up to asteroid size which after many
million years would settle into an orderly system of planets. In the mean time
far too much was colliding with other things for anyone to want to set up an
asteroid base there. They moved on again. Each man's spacesuit's unattractively
functional mini RD and recycling system, powered by a nuclear powerpack,
destroyed his waste output and gave him a steady supply of oxygen and water and
liquid food; that and his suit propulsor gave him personal speed and range
better than many of the large complicated early spacecraft.
  They saw observations of Aldebaran that an Ilmenostian expedition had made
some time before, the huge insubstantial ball of gas wider than Earth's orbit,
merely red hot on its surface, blotchy from somewhat hotter patches brought up
in convection cells, so diffuse in its outer layers that the spacemen had flown
some way inside the star without harm, a doubtful achievement sometimes called
`star-diving'. Far inside a dense core was forming as gravity collapse scratched
together the ever mightier heat needed to set alight ever poorer nuclear fusion
fuel until all its inner parts had been turned to a star's ultimate ash, iron
and nickel, and the big collapse would send the star into meltdown with an
explosion as bright as a whole galaxy. That is a supernova, and in a hail of
flying neutrons every higher element up to the limit of stability would be made
in a few seconds. Plus perhaps that scientist's dream, isotope 298 of element
114, ununquadium, eka-lead, whatever you call it, among the fabulous superheavy
elements far beyond the actinides, with just enough protons and neutrons to make
a special complete pattern of each to keep the nucleus together against heavy
element instability. And if found after all their searching it would be much
like lead but heavier, the theoretical chemists said. They left such fancies and
photographed the star patterns and ran the auto spectrum recorder, and such
routine astronomical work, floating in emptiness tethered to each other many
dozen light years from Earth among the dazzle of close-packed bright young stars
and the ethereal trails and streaks of gas and dust being blown about by light
radiation pressure. They packed their observing gear away and huddled round the
PSC-4 for its hyper jumper to take them to their next stop.
  "We don't need the aliens coming from the beyond, with this lot around." said
one of the astronomers, "They go routinely to the surface of their equivalent of
Venus, and we [= Earth] haven't even sent an unmanned lander to ours since those
two in the 1980's. We've got a lot of catching up to do. And I want an enclosed
craft to work in, somewhere to spread papers and floppies out, not to have to
work in open space with everything tethered with string or it'd end up drifting
everywhere between here and Aldebaran. At least that collapsible net cage to
work in's better than nothing, but I've still got to tether all thin things or
they'd go through the mesh. All right for the young ones to yahoo about with
propulsors bolted to their backs, like motorcyclists on land, but I'm the car
type. I'd like to get out of this @#% spacesuit sometimes. Not many round here
can live in atmosphere, only a few scientists and storemen that need the
pressure volume for their work. In the old days all spacemen could go into
pressure and take their spacesuits off overnight.".
  "And be base-bound and have to obey everything the Companies said." one of the
Quasars replied, "Even after that when we could go further on a trip, rules,
rules, weren't allowed to see Earth newspapers till they'd cut all the space and
finance news and finance metals prices out of them, all radios designed so we
couldn't pick up Earth broadcasting stations. First thing `illegal' that Spanner
Sam (Jetters) did was altering his mates' suit radios so they could pick up BBC
World Service when they pointed their nav scope [= navigational radio telescope]
at Earth. Back to the old evil, a punishable offence to believe the BBC over
lying official handouts. They allowed us any sort of long-trip suit only 'cos it
was costing them too much keeping collection and suit refilling points within a
few hours suit flight of everywhere. Prospectors first were allowed long-trip
suits, then more of us. They thought we couldn't do anything that mattered if
they controlled all the ways to and from Earth. But we found ways round it: we
set up our own workshops here and there. And we got that hyper jumper and copied
it: holy $%@# that was a stroke of luck. We used it to `liberate' the plans for
the PSC-4 and got it working, which they haven't yet. We designed our PL-props
ourselves. More and more unauthorizedness till they had to slacken off. Then for
all their united front and business suited `sorrybut and all that' managerial
manner things were going bad till recently crash bang wallop the whole space
metals trading Companies business structure went into meltdown like a bad
reactor, good riddance to it, and we were left alone. And on Earth it was left
to NASA to pick up as many of the pieces as it could, and they found we'd done a
lot of their work for them some time ago, like on their Capella expedition.".
  "I know." said an astronomer, "Now the big crash has let NASA pull clear of
Companies and Arrangements and all that (with a shouting match with guns drawn
in their boardroom), there's a hellish row going on between them and what's left
of the Companies. A dinner to try to patch things up between them turned into a
running fist and chair fight between them, and a Company agent who'd been in
Fletcher Metals Brokers was electric shock interrogated for an hour to try to
make him tell what'd happened to hyperspace jumpers down the years when NASA
could've been developing them and exploring with them. Not like NASA men to do
that sort of thing: some of their scientists just `went over the top' with what
they could rig up on the spot. That slick business suit and his sorry-but-ing
and smooth excuses simply made them `see red', when drink at the dinner loosened
tongues and things came out. No wonder. Exploration by NASA rather than by the
Companies was almost at a standstill. Commercial security didn't want outsiders
to know where metals were, and suchlike, and didn't want more to be explored
than the Companies could control, endless obstruction and veiled threats, for
the Companies had arrangements with NASA's suppliers, and NASA's top levels were
packed with Company men. Finally at the dinner NASA's director tore up all
trading agreements despite the law and threatened buy supplies `even from that
place Ilmenost that they've set up out there' if he had to. The reply was more
threats of legal action and `difficulties' in business-ese, and after that the
shouting and then the fighting started.
  If NASA'd had the hyper jumper as soon as it was invented, they might've got
Explorer-1 into space and to a star system years ago, instead of delays till
that stargazer couldn't wait any longer and its crew were taken there as
passengers by that runaway asteroid miner like some common taxi ride. And the
endless excuses and sorrybut sorrybut not in Company interests etc that we got
when we tried to get scientists out there or the like and never mind it was NASA
not them started space travel. We had more samples and information from the
asteroids unauthorizedly from asteroid miners than we ever had officially from
the Companies, and now they've got PL-props the dike is down. As it is, of the
Capella five, we don't even know which'd've been captain and so on. There's
little point in Earth people trying to console themselves by writing fiction
stories about the Explorer-1 flying as planned crewed and navigated by the five,
like I've seen.".
  "Yes, I saw a comic-strip version that my son brought home." said another,
"Quite well told. I hadn't been so saddened by anything read for a long time,
realizing that all that could have been real. This one of the five could have
been captain of the Explorer-1, like in the story; that one could have been
navigator, and so on, learning as they went more about how to hyperspace jump
navigate and travel to the stars, if those Companies had told us about hyper
jumpers in time. As it is they told us lies that hyper jumping was impossible
and we didn't know otherwise till those asteroid miners hyper jumped out of a
trap at that meeting. Then we realized that various space `ghost stories' were
likely actually hyper jumping by asteroid miners, and more when we got a proper
look at matter used by that creepy TV series `The Unexplained' or that had been
used to write Ghostbusters episodes around. Then the Companies coughed up at
last that hyper jumpers exist. I don't blame the astronomer, or that Ilmenostian
that he called in. NASA had to take men off proper work to crack encrypted
floppies and even do safebreakers' work when Companies' safe and strongroom keys
and lock combinations couldn't be got hold of: it'll be over a year before we
can even think of making a first-model spacesuit hyper jumper like that one the
`Sardaukar' ran off with, let alone a ship-jumper or the refinements that'll be
needed. Or we'll have to buy them from that lot at Ilmenost like so many
inventions that slipped away from the nations that started them.".
  Several more jumps and observing sessions followed as the men's long-trip
suits let them lengthen the expedition as long as they wished, for their suits'
nuclear powerpacks lasted for between ten years and a lifetime. The Jetters left
and went about their own work. The astronomers and the Quasars landed on Arda
twice, and were glad to breathe natural air after weeks on end of looking out
through breathing mask eye-windows at space vacuum. With the expected shudder
they looked from the air at Nunarien among a tangle of forested mountains and
gorges. They were given a set of reports on Anor and its planets and satellites,
and got more data storage in Ilmenost.
  Finally they loaded their observing and recording kit into the PSC-4's
collapsible hold for the last time, and crowded round it. The now familiar Anor
constellations disappeared into flat grey and the Sun's constellations appeared
instead; they were closely orbiting their friendly familiar Earth at last. Near
Orion were the Pleiades, back to their familiar size, so remote-looking; had
they really been among and beyond them? No hope of seeing Anor through them. The
Pleiades and the other stars disappeared behind blue sky as the spacemen flew in
down southwestwards over the Pacific. They reached Australia and flew over the
Blue Mountains with their blue haze of eucalyptus oil from the forests that
covered them, then over the grass and wheat lands beyond. No recent supernova
fallouts had dosed the land with fresh actinides; no uncontained natural nuclear
reactor lurked among the well-known Australian mountains or drained into one of
its rivers; no Ardan landmine bushes grew among the bush and scrub further
inland. They were home. They caused UFO reports in the New South Wales outback
under their flight path. At last they found the Castlereagh River, shaded with
willow trees and never drying up, and saw the Siding Spring Mountain observatory
dome on one of a line of low mountains nearby.
  "Well," one of the astronomers thought, "I've seen some things that I never
imagined that I would, in this alien-looking kit like a cross between a jet
fighter pilot and an aeroplane and a flying sewage works, and no prizes guessing
which I'll smell like when I unsuit unless this PSC-4's got an onboard in-suit
washer after all; but I'm glad to be home.". So they thought, with variations,
and landed much more expertly than when they had flown independently the first
time. The observatory staff had brought their left luggage down from the
observatory store, and a mobile shower; they thankfully unsuited and showered
very thoroughly and dressed, and unloaded their kit from the PSC -4's hold. The
Quasars checked the suits and stored them away and flew away.
  "They are gradually getting to treat the Anor system as home." one of the
astronomers said, "For example they still for now keep a memory of Earth
flowers, as names sometimes given to their girl children; but all the pot plants
I've seen in pressure areas in that place Ilmenost have been nothing I've seen
before. I just can't identify with all that alien Ardan and Karnilian stuff they
decorate places with, either as plants or as pictures of them. Give me the Earth
daffodil any day, to brighten a room properly. One man I saw even had a big pot
of pluteweed in his lab trailing everywhere, I know it from those great dayglo
orange flowers it's got: hanged if I'd want all that plutoniumy garden waste to
have to keep getting rid of. Yekkh.".
  "Not always." said another, "I know it needs plute normally, in two enzymes in
its roots, as well as to make its leaves poisonous to prevent grazing; but
they've found that if they give the plant two biochemicals that those enzymes
usually make it doesn't need plute after all. I've seen the stuff grown on Earth
in pots like that, after it came up on that test site in Nevada that time. If
you can't get used to appreciating the native plants of where you are, try
reading Rudyard Kipling's poem `The Flowers' (`Buy my English posies!', etc).".
  "Never mind pretty flowers." said a visiting businessman irritatedly, "How
much did you see of their business and financial customs?".
  "Quite a bit different from ours, from what I saw and heard." said one, "To
them:-
  - There is no `company limited liability'. Directors are personally liable for
their companies' liabilities, and vice versa, even after the company has been
wound up: i.e. companies are the same as partnerships. Companies with directors
in common are responsible for each other's debts.
  - Shareholders can't tell the company what to do. This and the previous `throw
into the RD' the whole joint-stock system, and there is no such thing as limited
companies, only partnerships. Adjourning negotiations to consult shareholders is
classed as an `inexcusable delay' or `an excuse rather than a reason' that can
justify breaking-off an agreement.
  - There is no debt interest. Agreements to pay any sort of interest are null
and void, even if you try to evade their law by calling the interest something
else. But if X has lent money to Y, and Y hasn't paid it back as agreed, a
<court> (not X himself) can order Y to pay compensation as well as the original
sum, if X has lost out from not having the money when needed. Or if Y is forever
on the borrow from different people and not paying them back.".
  - `Unnecessary' rehandling of goods by way of trade can be stopped by court
order, and its participants send back to productive manual work. A complicated
finance and business structure must not be allowed to develop.
  - A price stated at first is the price. Anything describable as an `extra' or
a `charge' or the like on top of it, need not be paid....".
  "And I suppose every %$@ handcuff-and-leg-iron consumer protection law that
was ever passed anywhere between here and Capella, I suppose, so we can't do a
thing." the businessman interrupted angrily, "I <thought> those @%# asteroid
miners'd go like that if they were left to themselves. Again financially
ignorant idealists go like that. Like Moses's `Thou shalt not lend thy money on
usury.' in the Bible somewhere, and we know how long <that> rule lasted when
business practicality intruded. And likely if we buy anything from them they'll
want US dollars cash or valuable metals to the value at once, and won't take
cheques or promises. I know what they thought of Company credits, back here.".
  "That sort of attitude can be understood." said another, "They're building up
and everyone's labour's needed and they can't carry businessmen or officials or
statistics-collectors or any other sort of idle hand.".
  "A whole society living in spacesuits nearly all the time." said another, "I
couldn't take that. Spacesuits are something that I wear only when I have to.
The whole thing smells of workerism run rampant. We'll get no financial good
from <them>. It smells of something else as well, when they unsuit.".
  "And another thing. They are <not> forever threatening and shooting each other
with work lasers and other sorts of ray guns over metals and supplies like in
some `pot-boiler' space thrillers. The last time I heard of one asteroid miner
shooting another was when the Quasars were on Earth and a stray dog ran up to
one of them and bit him on the hand and he ignored it, but over the weeks he
started to act odd and got afraid of his feeding tube and they had to restrain
him, and at their next chance to unsuit he clearly had rabies, in the furious
stage. Out in space far from anywhere there was nothing to do but shoot him to
shorten his suffering. Sad business. #@$% filthy animals dogs are. Another thing
about anything real or fictional that consists largely of fighting is that stuff
used up in fights has to be made somewhere. They are <not> like in that film
`Terror of the Space Pirates', and even if they were <someone> would have had to
make all the fancy kit and craft and weapons that both sides used in the raiding
and battles.".
  They continued to find things to talk about. Finally the astronomers collected
their left luggage and went back to Earth life; the information that they
brought back kept their theoretical colleagues busy for a long time afterwards.
  Other times, other pickups. By now some Earth towns let PL-prop spacemen run
contact points on the ground for people who wanted to trade with them and also
for people who wanted to join them. The latter were well vetted and checked, and
they had a steady supply of young entry that way - young, as men in their
fifties or older with no useful skills usually found when they enquired. In the
past new entry had to be got where it could to add to the Company-authorized
asteroid miners: down the years the free spacemen's training system had digested
Company runaways, a commune of hippies who had gone to space, assorted fugitives
from debt or justice, and various unfortunate officials and businessmen singly
and once a large batch of them who were now the F-15's. Hard was the fate of a
54-year-old man, out of physical condition and with no skill but administrating
and finance, who suddenly found himself at steady manual work in a long-trip
work spacesuit so far away that the stars were completely different, but it had
happened. But now new entry could volunteer and be chosen.
  For all of most people's living memory most parts of Earth have been within
about a week's travel at most of most other parts, and even quicker to send
messages. But space travel has brought back the times when journeys routinely
took weeks, and emigration partings often as final as the parting of death,
when the young and eager go to space, and parents cry on their sons' and
daughters' spacesuited shoulders before the final departure into the sky or
through the clouds or by hyperspace jump, and the well-meaning loading down with
spare clothes and best clothes and all sorts of junk for the group leader to
have to dump as he sorts out what is needed and will fit into the suits' packs
and the group's tow crates. Some departers may weary of space and alienness and
return to life on earth, and eventually perhaps die peacefully in bed. Some may
visit home briefly. Others' relatives as years pass will realize with a slight
shudder that when the end comes their sons or nephews will never come to
cemetery or crematorium and a place where they can be said to `lie asleep', but
to a spaceman's funeral and to vanish tracelessly into their group's towed RD in
space far from anywhere; and until then the light years stretch wide and empty
between a man helping to settle the Anor system and an old woman on Earth who
looks at the Pleiades whenever she can at night.
  Old memories died hard, and sometimes old practices re-surfaced, for personal
reasons. Rattler PL-propped from orbit to London on Earth to see his old parents
for the first time for many years, and Plutey-pots and Cobra came with him. An
ordinary social visit; there was much family news to hear, as the Companies had
never worked out an effective public mail route from Earth addresses to asteroid
miners, and valuable items mailed to or by asteroid miners via Company mail were
usually seized in transit for money allegedly owed, until the senders learned
not to use the mail. But the area had gone down, and as often, as evening came,
teenagers from nearby estates gathered to vandalize and make trouble; the police
were called and made brief ineffective visits. Such an odd occurrence as three
spacemen landing to visit excited the gang into even more nastiness and mockery
and harassment, as is described in too many places elsewhere for me to waste
words here; Rattler's parents pleaded with their son not to come again, although
they wanted to see him, as it excited the hooligans. The spacemen went back to
orbit. It was February, and it was dark early. Rattler, like the NASA men at the
dinner had, saw red at what his parents were going through, and decided.
  Next night the spacemen came again, and Jet Jack with them. They visited, and
went out onto waste ground. Rattler's parents pleaded; Rattler promised
unspecified consequences. The gang gathered. The spacemen pretended to be
grounded by propulsor trouble, and appealed for help, and were mocked. More and
more gang gathered, pushing closer, and trying to pull their kit off; the
spacemen's lasers were in their suit outside packs out of reach. The gang saw
grey around them and became weightless. Some of them went `high' at the
unexpected drug-like experience; but others lost all cheekiness and from what
they knew via the public media recognized with utter despair that they were
being hyperspace jumped. In either case they offered little resistance to being
stuffed into pressure bags, just in time before the hyper field left them in
vacuum in the Anor star system which few of them had heard of. Such random
abduction recruitment of public was against the usage of free spacemen, who knew
what it was like having their own freedom not respected; but many sorts of
work-hardened organized men would have taken some sort of hard action despite
the law on finding relatives harassed by that sort of character.
  The rest of the matter is like events described before. Something sent them to
sleep. They woke in Ilmenostian spacesuits in totally alien circumstances
weightless with a complete sphere of stars round them. After they were trained,
they were finally dispersed one here one there among different groups after it
was decided not to treat the captured gang as a ready-made new group. Each had a
hard time having the punk cheekiness and idleness knocked out of him, plus for
several of them `cold turkey' from various drugs. None of them had a useful
skill; `experience with computers' always turned out to mean videogames only.
Even so they came to actual rather than imagined manhood and a lifetime of
productive work and having to obey their elders; the novelty of `being an
astronaut' soon wore off. Each finally realized when at his first chance to take
his spacesuit off he found under it only an undersuit and the usual smell and
not his jeans and impressively studded leather jacket and proudly-displayed gang
insignia and weapons; he guessed all too well what had happened to them, as by
then he had found what spaceman groups' large towed RD's were for.
  Back on the estate in London, the event had been seen. It caused newspaper
headlines locally for two days. The abductees' parents in their estates accused
Rattler's parents and others of encouraging the spacemen to take their sons, and
pleaded ignorance of what their sons had been doing. The police tried to
interrogate some of the other spacemen's ground representatives, but achieved
little. People who had suffered from hooliganism demonstrated in the area
supporting the spacemen's action and wanting the gang to be tried in absentia
for their demands for money and other harmful deeds. Talk of ransoming or
otherwise getting the abductees back caused a chorus of sharp `No!''s, for the
residents were weary of the culprits being called naughty boys and let go to
steal again or to demand extra money to pay their fines: some said angrily that
they'd've paid to have them taken away, not to get them back.
  News came back across the light years to the abductees' parents where their
sons were, and letters could pass between as fast as anyone going between could
be found, and some of the parents felt a little relieved. Some alleged that
`Terror of the Space Pirates' was coming true after all, and others pointed out
who the terror had been coming from in reality this time. The police didn't like
the implication that they couldn't do their job properly, and the event stung
them into more effective action against teenage gangs for a while.
  Another pickup went unnoticed, or at least not complained about. About now the
well-known electronics expert Red Scorpion rejoined his group the Pallas-2's. He
had been missing since a Company loader craft with a modified hold had caught
them and two other groups by deception. They had been kept as captive workers in
Company suits which needed refilling each day, at a remote mobile base near
Vesta, until the Jetters rescued them. Now he was unexpectedly with them again.
He seemed undefinably different and complained of weird and often bad dreams,
which he had not had before, but he looked and sounded the same, with the same
marks and scars including a large oxyacetylene torch burn down his right side.
With electronics he seemed somehow awkward, but he gradually returned to his
former easy skill which he had started at nine years old in his father's
workshop in Birmingham in England and continued with until he moved to Swansea;
his original name was unremarkable: John Wilson. He explained that he had been
busy elsewhere and then for two months ill. The full story of what had happened
to him in the meantime was described before. Anyway, he was mostly the same as
he always had been. Like Rattler, he wanted to visit his parents. With Long Tom
and a few others from his group, he flew down from orbit to the area, remembered
the town pattern, found south Birmingham, remembered the street pattern, found
the place, and descended. The map-like air view became a terrace street scene as
he sank below the roofs and landed. His space gear startled his parents, but
they recognized his face and voice and let him in.
  Like Rattler, he found that the area had gone down. Like Companies, so town
authorities: when overloaded their power shrinks and their rule fades unless
something big prods them into fresh action. A factory where many local men had
worked was now disused and dossed in by an endemic tramp population which stole
where they would, and men had to spend much on security equipment. A formerly
well-kept local sports field was now waste ground which a large camp of tinkers
had settled on a month before, bullying the area. They were all too efficient
with their favourite tool and weapon, heavy oxyacetylene cutter torches (which
can make a flame up to a foot long) run off backpack scuba-sized cylinders, in
many places where blowtorches are not usually expected. Chain and lock and steel
door yielded before them. They backed up their owners' orders, including to the
tramps (the painful way, when they gave lip) not to leave their doss without
permission and to do whatever work the tinkers told them to. Some residents were
briefly thankful for this before finding that they had swopped a fox for a wolf.
Everything including garden tools and drying washing had to be kept indoors. The
night after the tinkers came, his father Stephen Wilson had had to hurriedly
brick up his workshop door and windows for the duration and say that the council
had done it; others buried their valuables.
  The habits and thievings of such wanderers are well known, and I will not
repeat them here. They may not be able to help their present condition; but that
is irrelevant. Red Scorpion called down plague and thunderbolt on whoever
misguidedly pitying politicians had repealed the good old law against `wandering
without visible means of subsistence'; but such cursing never does any good; nor
ever did the police, except for chivvying the culprits about a bit sometimes.
Well-meaning charities feeding the tramps had not helped matters. He had a red
wave of anger, nearly called himself and those with him to set their lasers to
high power and settle the matter the quick way, but had other ideas. He radioed
for the rest of his group, who by now all had PL-props.
  The tramps, after their lessons from the tinkers in obeying orders, were an
easy catch. As the Pallas-2's invaded the tramps' doss, laser fire reminded the
tramps not to be cheeky or put on airs. The Pallas-2's quickly herded the tramps
together and threw over them weighted nets, some intended for making net cages
for working in in space so loose work objects won't drift away, some garden
bird-excluder nets borrowed from the area. The local householders joined in, and
the tramps were soon all tied up and in a large pressure bag.
  The tinkers were tougher to crack, and the spacemen were unused to Earth
gravity; but some of the spacemen remembered judo that they had learned before
going into space, and they and the residents had a few CS-gas grenades between
them, and they had other substances that could be used as weapons; the spacemen
put their breathing masks on. The tinkers came out of their vehicles and formed
up, as often before when opposed by groups of residents. Some of them wore slung
diagonally across their chests or backs by rope slings the feared rumoured shiny
cylindrical metal bulks of flamethrowers made from big pressurized-liquid fire
extinguishers with their hose nozzles fitted with igniters and pistol-grip
on/off valves, all too dirtily efficient a weapon and fire-starter; and they had
their backpack blowtorches. One resident had such a flamethrower which he had
made. Battle was joined, and if the residents had fought unaided the result
would not have been in doubt, unless armed police intervened quickly before the
blasting volley of twenty-foot-long flame that had settled many confrontations.
  A few demonstratory shots from the spacemen's lasers showed what would happen
if a pressure-tank full of gas or petrol was hit by one. The tinkers jettisoned
their fire-weapons in alarm, cursing about unfair alien weapons, and sticks and
clubs and other weapons appeared; more than one said roughly and undefeatedly
"Those things can't `brew up' my good old pump-action [shotgun]." or the like.
Some of the spacemen propulsor hovered to swoop on and pick up any tinker who
tried to run away or get behind the residents. After a running fight all the
tinkers including two women and five children were captured and disarmed and
tied up and in two pressure bags. The Pallas-2's accepted a few thank gifts that
the residents pressed on them, unfolded their suit wings, took off, and rose
heavily towing the pressure bags, up through a black fog into stratosphere and
the sight of the stars, then into space. In orbit they switched their big towed
RD into `regenerate breathing air' mode and connected the pressure bags to it.
After a few radio enquiries and a short hyper jump they found enough spare
spacesuits in the Solar System, in a deserted Company base now manned by the
Sardies who were asteroid mining in the area.
  The Sardies' leader spoke his mind strongly and abusively to the Pallas-2's
about the sort of stuff they were being expected to waste good spacesuits on and
try to turn into work spacemen; Red Scorpion replied as strongly about what his
parents and their neighbours had been going through.
  "There's been cases o' cop jet fighters comin' after [free asteroid] miners
when they land from space 'thout askin'. Another @#% thing to @#$ look out fer.
@#% dangerous things that can think far faster'n a man, wi' the right weapons
could wipe out an 'undred of us in a minute if we tried landin' there. Lucky not
many places keep one yet. We got evens wi' the one that got the Quadrantids with
a shrapnel missile that time." said Sardie 2 threateningly, "'E 'ad the right
way with a gang o' tramps once though: 'e used a @#% great wide flexible pipe to
blast 'is jet's back end on afterburn into their doss 'ole, we 'eard. That
stopped the thievin' and turnin' bins out and pesterin'.", and pointed meaningly
at two of the Pallas-2's lasers, "OK, yer ran out o' bottle to do the job that
way. You and yer parents: we never 'ad parents, we didn't need 'em, we're clones
from a Company lab to do their dirty work, till they wouldn't play fair over
money and things, and we didn't need the Company any more, so we cut loose. And
we're XYY, that's we got two Y chromosomes each 'stead o' one, and that's why we
all grew this tall.
  They say we're not the only XYY's 'ere: that Control Rod in the X-100's, that
atomic scientist, 'e's XYY also. 'E said once there was a story that 'is father
'ad the egg taken out and XYY-ified on purpose, like us, to get a real big 'eavy
round the 'ouse when 'e grew up; got 'im a really rough job on the docks to get
the best out of the XYY; but 'e wouldn't 'ave it. 'E tried the docks job one day
only and went back to school and stayed for 6th form. 'Is father tried calling
'im a @#% useless brainbox and the like a few times, and then gave up on 'im. 'E
went on to university, in atomic science, joined one of those space trading
Companies till 'e didn't like it in there and got 'old of a [space]suit an' went
off with some [asteroid] miners and ended up 'ere. So 'e grew tall but never
filled out proper[ly] and ended up like a beanpole. Not much thug in <'im>,
whatever they say about XYY men. That may be why 'e's called Control Rod: 'e's
about as long and thin as one, I've seen reactors' innards a few times.
  OK, you want to try to turn those bagfuls of @#$ into spacemen. I reckon we'll
make a better job of it than you, if anyone can. Yer leave 'em with us.".
  The Sardies may well show a hard contempt of needs for parental affection, for
who could <they> call parents? Their clone-parent?, who at their `conception'
was in his 80's, with a long record for violence until only old age stopped it.
Or their clone-parent's parents?, who died long before the Sardies were born and
were a low type who soon separated and offered little resistance when he was put
in a council children's home. Or several unfortunate cows?, whose wombs the
Sardies were implanted in artificially as embryos, and who after nine months and
a Caesarian section went the way of most beef, out of public sight and objection
in a secret lab. Such were the Sardies, and all too many of the standard insults
directed at a man's parents are for them literally true.
  The catch had to be cleaned. One of the tinkers recognized the towed RD from a
newspaper report, and expected his last seconds of life as he was pushed from
the pressure bag into its hatch; but it had been fitted with an auto resuiter
that Red Scorpion had helped to design. In a space much smaller than a man could
work in and so using less air it anaesthetized him, cut his clothes off, shaved
off all head and body hair, suited him up, and ejected him; the RD consumed the
clothes and caught all escaping air. They put another spacesuit and undersuit in
the resuiter and repeated, until all the catch were in spacesuits. Once it
flashed a red light for human help when it couldn't cope with an abnormality of
its current `patient''s body's natural waste outlets when connecting them to his
spacesuit's sewage destructor system. Finally they removed the resuiter. The RD
swallowed a pile of unclean leftover rags and bags and bundles; the catching had
been hurried and untidy. Remaining lice and the like died in vacuum as it stored
all the air from the pressure bags. The Sardies, who hadn't seen such a resuiter
before, watched curiously, and thankfully that the Pallas-2's hadn't had to use
much air pressurizing a room to do the job.
  The Pallas-2's left; the Sardies started to try to turn the catch into
spacemen, and were as hard as usual when offered cheek or refusal to learn. The
Sardies were well over six feet tall, heavily built, unpleasant looking if their
breathing masks were off or had fullface windows, as identical as photocopies,
and had serial numbers rather than codenames; their leader was `1'. "Thank @#%
those real right efficient thugs and proud of it are on our side." Long Tom said
to himself, and so have many before and after. The Jetters' catch were teenagers
and quick to learn, and after a few `reminders' adapted well and fast; but most
of the Sardies' new trainees were older, fixed in their ways, aggressive and
surly or else lazy and shifty, and very poor material.
  Of the tramps three proved to be schizophrenics, for many such take to
vagrancy; their suit medipacks were set to synthesize and auto dose the correct
controlling agent; and two had badly cirrhosed livers and three had meths
damage. Then they had to be got used to working steadily without evading or
stealing, and to learning; the process was often not gentle; but sheer shock at
the alienness of where they were helped to scare them out of making trouble, and
many of them had little idea of space or what it is like. The Sardies treated as
a challenge finding once in a while whether they could reprocess (at least for
supervised unskilled work) such bad raw material, like when a crocodile's
stomach has to dissolve a large thick-shelled turtle. Trying to find their names
caused cheek and refusals and obvious lies, so they were given numbers.
  They were taken to the Arda system, where they stayed, with no way to do such
things as selling their kit to buy drink and smoke and then going back to
wandering, having to work steadily under supervision until use accepted it and
life before they we