[THE SPACEMAN WITH PLUTONIUM CYLINDERS part 7] by A.Appleyard

  <To those who have read parts 1 to 6 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).

  After this unsuccessful attempt to capture the free spacemen's remote bases in
the Anor star and planets system by sudden massive attack by its most advanced
craft, ISAB, International Space Administration Board, successor to NASA and
ESA, incorporating many space metals and supplies trading Companies, reassembled
and repaired its badly reduced attack and patrol fleet and wondered what to do.
It saw no reason to do anything but go public about all that had happened, since
the free spacemen told Earth their side of it, as they sent boxes containing the
solid part of the RD'ings of each of the ISAB casualties after their usual
spaceman's funeral (for they were unwilling to bury Earth bodies in Ardan soil
whose microorganism system cannot properly absorb Earth-type organic matter
naturally), all too many hundred such boxes, each the end of a promise of
pioneering excitement across the light-years that died at the hands of other men
who were desperately defending their new homes and freedom and likely their
lives against business-suited office-ruled ambitions and desires to control,
rather than by natural hazards of distance and exploring.
  The free spacemen were in shock at seeing death in such numbers where they had
hoped to get away from such things, and that they lost many fewer than the enemy
did not make it much easier to accept. All too many of their own men lost; at
their industrial base called Aulien on Anor's Earth-like planet Arda the mass
carnage of ISAB ground troops in the huge wreckage of the shot-down ISAB troop
transport T2 and of two other ISAB craft that it had fallen onto; dead of both
sides in shot-open wrecked spacesuits many of which had been made at Aulien or
in the Anor spacemen's main asteroid base Ilmenost and bought by Earth agencies
and now used against their makers; torn bodies of a squad of the special hard
ISAB security men who called themselves `Space Marines', who had died on Arda
not by the hand of man but by that Ardan natural dread the <Keraunorrhiza> bush
which has natural landmines on its roots as defence against browsing animals and
obeys no nation's war conventions on explosives. The spirits of Gagarin and his
successors seemed to cry out against the violent deaths and misuse of space kit
for war beyond the light years where they had hoped it would never happen. But
the Anor men had had to fight for their freedom and likely their lives against
armed Company controllism and monopolyism and narrowly managed to win, and the
end result happened and had to be tidied up. `Turning the other cheek' usually
achieves nothing useful: "It takes one side to make a war, not two, and those
without swords can still die on them.", as was written once by Tolkien whose
books (as CD-ROM's) were still much read and prompted the X-100 asteroid miner
group to their choice of names for what they discovered out in the wilds 400
light years from Earth pressures and power struggles which had now reached out
to them after all.
  The unexpected defeat had spoilt ISAB's plans to have already `suppressed all
rogue asteroid miner disobedience' when it become public as sole authority over
<all> areas outside the Earth which Man had yet reached. As Protak Pete, leader
of the X-100's, commented, "Us naming things from Tolkien: well, now we've had
our Seige of Gondor, and no Rohan to ride to our aid, except that one old man
who holed the T2 fatally kamikazeing into it on that little man-rider torpedo of
his, and we only just won. Lucky the T2 stayed still long enough for him to aim
at it from far enough away to build up enough speed. Like Theoden he perished at
the moment of his victory. Nothing like enough of him found afterwards to be
worth RD'ing separately with commemoration, as should have been done.".
  "Talking about losing a man, what about all of <our> men who'll only come back
in RD'ings boxes?!" a captured ISAB commander replied, "Some people don't like
it when men die without facing the enemy: the sunk or shot-down troop transport,
the bombed and strafed Army convoy, the wrecked troop train, the elite cavalry
shot by arrows from ambush, landmines on roads, delays from scruffy petty theft
of supplies and sabotage of transport, the dirty native diseases that troops die
of, all the unfair losses that have happened down history: and do-gooders whinge
when after all that troops hit back at some dirty native village that's been
supporting terrorists. And some people don't hold with their dead being RD'ed
like common rubbish, even though you wild spacemen seem to treat it as normal.".
  "Little, but enough. We were attacked suddenly and had to defend ourselves.".
  On Earth, some familiar with fictional space battles read about this real
battle excitedly; but those more following the real space tradition of Gagarin
first into space and Aldrin and Armstrong and Carpenter first to the moon and
the X-100's first to another star, were horrified that desire to keep control of
asteroid miners and maximize profitability of asteroid metals trading Companies,
versus the asteroid miners naturally wanting personal freedom, had escalated via
developing more and more advanced space-police craft and techniques to what the
space pioneers had hoped would never happen, a fullscale spacecraft battle in
reality and not in fiction. Men asked what had gone wrong. Asteroid metals
trading company share values crashed again, and, hit badly in their pockets,
financial men doubted previously trusted motives and thought again about policy.
As people demonstrated against what had happened, ISAB pulled back some steps
from a damaging expensive space arms race with the Anor system free spacemen and
wondered whether to admit what its spacecraft fleet had in effect become despite
a condition in their charter, by officially recognizing the naval rank names
given by the Anor men and some Earth public media to the various levels of its
spacefleet's command structure.
  But if armed spacecraft are used, who would their weapons be aimed at? They
had not met space-travelling aliens, but already in the Anor system they had met
men who had gone ahead of official control and settled and set up on their own,
and likely the same would happen again; and the question would arise each time
whether to restore central control over them or to leave them, in the endless
distances and empty vastnesses far greater than any distance imaginable to any
ruler of a far-scattered empire on Earth.
  The free asteroid miners and other free spacemen lamented NASA, who had been
like-minded to them. After the first bad financial crash of asteroid metals
Companies NASA pulled itself free from the Companies when drink and exasperated
feelings turned a joint formal dinner into a rowdy confrontation which escalated
to fists and chairs and handguns when men asked awkward questions such as why
the Companies had suppressed the hyperspace jumper development project for many
years while men could have been using them to explore and discover. After that
NASA and ESA were their own masters for a while; but now, after a general
international conference to reappraise and re-plan space matters, they were
gone, swallowed, their establishments and bases under ISAB control, NASA's
exploration plans heavily cut back, and ISAB retired many old-guard NASA top men
or gave them figurehead jobs.
  ISAB, now putting all Earth's main space interests under one control, looked
like having a unity of purpose and an avoiding of duplications; but also an
officialdom grown too big, and top-heaviness, and remoteness from practicalities
of the few top men who were their own masters, and reluctance to let anything
happen that they could not get money profit from or could not have a finger in,
and a tendency when away from planetary public opinion to resort to hard tight
controls. To such tendencies the Anor system spacemen and their traditions of
freedom were a valuable antidote, at least while it was untroubled by that
oldest and hardest of enemies of freedom, namely overpopulation and
overcrowding, and many of the adventurous from Earth got to the Anor system and
a new life far from secrecy and controls and lack of room.
  And ISAB's asteroid mining role could not control another competitor: a while
before, ever-improving RD technology led to the common RD-equipped dredger-sub,
bringing out of the sea huge amounts of metals natural in the sediment or lost
by Man, using as fuel any oxidizable matter in its dredgings, cleaning up seabed
fouled by pollution or wreckage, in many designs and sizes grab or suction or
with a front scoop - including small fast types of dark rumour when used as
patrollers - owned by many sea work groups from fishing villages to large
companies. From them is derived the fast submersible patrol and capture craft
called the FSPB, more like a surface boat that can duck-dive. Digging out and
RD'ing old rubbish tips on land also recovered huge amounts of valuable metals.
  And protests continued. "To this sort of stuff I had to turn ..." said
Mr.Melinitski, under-manager at the ESA and then ISAB Leeds (England) spaceport,
showing some books, at a later meeting with free spacemen who had come to trade.
  "Yes. Those `Blast Benton' space stories that you wrote and circulated in here
and at that science fiction club." said another ISAB manager, "There's infinity
spaceship fiction stories without you adding more instead of catching up with
our paperwork in your evenings. They caused our security department a lot of
extra work reading through them to check that no real space business or
information was in them under changed names. And your indiscipline about telling
us how to get hold of you when you are away, like that Easter you said you were
staying at that hotel but you wandered off and instead of a quick pickup in a
fast car and off to an urgent finance meeting that had arisen, after a six-hour
yomp across sodden bog and having to pay the hotel bar's publican-and-sinner a
fortune for alleged lost trade while he shut down and went off with his helirig
[= backpack motor and rotor set] on to help look for you; and when we found you
you were in God-awful holiday casuals and we had to hire a business suit for you
'cos it was too long to get your own from home and you hadn't brought it to the
hotel even. And at the meeting your @#% great hiking boots sticking out of
business suit trousers: we'd missed those in the hurry you'd caused us. Like
that two that had to be carpeted about keeping on being unavailable on long deep
scuba dives when things arose in their time off; they thought they'd obeyed the
rule by diving in those special diving suits that can act as pressure suits so
they can surface without decompressing; but they still had to sit through an
important meeting in them looking like spacemen like when we had those five men
from the asteroids in that time. What about your stories anyway?".
  "All those while you had hyperspace jumpers and never used them, all the
exploration that men could have gone on, and all that ever happened was routine
asteroid mining traffic and I was never allowed to talk to anybody involved or
suggest any places to go, or any way to find what was happening out there except
Company business reports and overhearing things and the grapevine. I hate
business report language. I've heard of Company scientists who had all sorts of
hassle getting hold of the full text of relevant scientific papers instead of
business report digests of them. Nearly every time NASA tried to get scientists
into space they got nothing but excuses and `sorry but our schedule's full' from
the Companies who controlled most of the spaceports, although it was NASA and
not the Companies who'd started space travel and got it routine and safe. OK,
OK, I know why: `We don't want to open up any more at any one time than we can
adequately control, and it <is> us and not you who keep space profitable.', and
the endless @#$% Company secrecy in case public or a competitor heard anything.
Oh, information leaked, people wrote memoirs and articles and risked being sued
for breaking undertakings of secrecy in their terms of employment; and all the
king's horses and all the king's men couldn't keep what was happening on Mars
secret, particularly when people involved started not liking what was going on.
Then tales of free spacemen landing started, either by appearing from nowhere or
by PL-props, that's spacesuit propulsors powerful enough to get on and off
planets; the Companies said they were the same thing as when people see UFO crew
aliens landing and denied that anything was happening, until that case in front
of a lot of people. <Then> they had to restart the hyper jumper project, and
there was that fist and gun fight in NASA's conference dinner room.
  In the meantime I'd got so sick of hearing next to nothing officially about
real space and real spacemen that I wrote stories about a fictional lot of them.
All the contact I had with space was seeing spacecraft coming and going but
never being allowed on board one in all the time of Fletcher's and Milford's and
the other space Companies, keeping the stores and accommodation, telling them
about weather hazards, endless sealed packages, and never a chance even to try a
spacesuit on; only tales and rumours and leaks, and what asteroid miners managed
to find out and bring back and tell of. No wonder some office-bound Company men
deserted and became asteroid miners under false names. No wonder my character
Captain `Blast' Benton explored space; there he and his men were, like any
fictional characters, just out of reach behind the surface of the page, and the
screen when I computer-generated video of it, ordinary sort of stuff, and my
idea of how his ship's hyperspace jumper and other kit worked was nothing like
the real thing; but they were the only spacemen who I routinely knew what they
were doing and what they discovered. It got less and less like reality as time
went on, as often is when a fictional scenario gets short of ideas; but his ship
that came from the shipyard of my mind and only flew in my stories, was the only
one whose crew I could meet; and I even flew to other stars in it sometimes - in
my dreams, and it dissolved like a ghost in the morning light. The stories
include me as one of his crew. Imaginary deeds with imaginary companions written
for escapism, and I knew all the time that real men were working in space and I
was allowed no access to their deeds or discoveries.
  Until real asteroid miners got hyperspace jumpers and PL-props and started
landing on Earth bypassing Company-controlled space routes, and I knew that all
the time I'd had to resort to fiction, the real X-100's had discovered and were
exploring a new planetary system 400 light years away, and at last I had real
space pioneers to write about, and their risks with untested flight kit across
the unknown.
  It could have been otherwise. They could have had help from Earth space
organizations, instead of them and their like having to make their own kit out
in the emptiness and being persecuted by Companies for infringing monopoly on
making replacement suit parts. Some royal family or government member could have
watched them take off and radioed greetings to them while they were in range.
They could have had public media and fame waiting for them when they returned,
and experts and supplies to help them set up a new base over there. They could
have gone in a good-sized spacecraft with room to unsuit whenever they wanted to
and to carry supplies and rock samples in. But instead they had to do everything
for themselves with no more help than what other asteroid miners could spare -
and <now> some of the companies and governments on Earth realize what fames and
names and honours they've missed because of past policies, and look for
scapegoats, and sometimes even expensively send years-late re-explorations of
what is already known, with full pioneering kit as if to a new place; or else
and more usefully they look for a space area where Ilmenostians haven't already
been in their explorings about. Anyway, now we know that Ilmenost's self-defence
precautions and unwillingness to carry idlers were very much justified.".
  "Yes, it could have been otherwise. Even the best and highest who go to Anor
have to go in native copies of our patrol craft and usually in a spacesuit for
weeks. Their first so-called spaceliner was a rough man's personnel carrier
complete with a big gun firing those little one-man torpedo craft called MST's.
Like when some important businessman in his best executive suit is promised a
lift to a meeting and it turns out to be a dirty bumpy open jeep in the weather
and he brought no waterproof except an umbrella. Like a marine biologist I heard
of who'd been promised every modern facility at a research site but he found
little there except an ex-naval frogman kit and he ended up in it wet and cold
smelling of shut-in rubber and sodalime dust having to get specimens up himself
(that was before sport scuba diving had been heard of much). When that lot at
Ilmenost in the Anor system that they discovered did make several of something
somewhat like a passenger craft it was nothing styled to look the part. The
first fleet of interstellar passenger craft: copies of Dakotas with a hyper
jumper stuck in each! Like that fiction story I [and I also: Author] read where
the first nation to get further out than the Moon was Denmark and Earth's first
proud interplanetary craft was a rusty old submarine with a spaceship propulsor
stuck in it that they'd just developed. Except that those space Dakotas are real
and I've ridden in one. I saw a picture recently of a sort of open rack-shaped
spacecraft that a visiting party in spacesuits can sit in, instead of in a PSC's
or loader's hold, at last.".
  "These are the space pioneers that people tend to think of first: Gagarin;
Armstrong and Aldrin - and Carpenter, the third, the other: people keep
forgetting him, he had to stay in the command module; and now, it seems, Protak
Pete and his men who are called the X-100's. We know the first three crews to
Mars, but then the Companies took over most space flight and their secrecy
started. But now at last news has come back, and I got a video of the film about
the X-100's: the proper Ilmenostian version, not the don't-offend-the-Companies
Earth version.".
  "I know, and the amount of international business policy secrets revealed, and
the things that it accused international business of. I saw the X-100's when
they came to Paris with it to that film festival that time: they kept their
spacesuits on all the time. They say it's because they have to be wary on the
ground in strange places: but I suspect that it's partly from some of them
starting to get spacesuit dependent: those modern long-trip spacesuits with
their fancy microchip-ized life-support and medical monitoring kit are too much
like personal mini intensive care wards.".
  "How come those modern long-trip spacesuits that all these matters depend on,
last so long away from a base or mothercraft, anyway?" said someone, "Surely any
sensible-sized spacesuit oxygen tanks can only last a day or so at the most? I'm
sorry to show my ignorance, but everyone in these controversies assumes that
people know all about them same as people are expected to know about cars.".
  "The spacesuit has in its kit a little RD, usually on its wearer's left hip.
RD means `recycler destructor', it's an advanced derivative of the fuel cell, it
sorts everything into separated chemical elements and simple oxides and gets any
energy of oxidation out as electricity. Like in corporation refuse destructor
depots but far smaller. The suit RD consumes all its wearer's body and personal
waste and oxidizes it completely and tracelessly. Then the spacesuit's powerpack
(usually run by a hot steady-heat radioisotope) splits out the oxygen, and a
chemicals synthesizer turns what's left into all the food biochemicals that the
wearer needs. The oxygen in the cylinders is only an emergency top-up and to get
enough into circuit when closing up the suit before going into space.".
  "Apart from details of how your dirty long-trip spacesuits work and the smell
when you finally unsuit: at one moment you Ilmenostians praised NASA, the next
moment you sabotaged them by poaching their men. For example, those 15 NASA
office men who deserted and went as an asteroid miner group under false names
and called themselves `the Actinides': their department couldn't afford to lose
so many men at once, and the one of them who they called `Einsteinium' was a
fairly important lab man there. It got to the stage when people daredn't put an
ex-spaceman anywhere important else he'd suddenly desert to get back into space,
leaving his department a man short in the middle of something important, and
likely entice others to go with him.".
  "It was their idea to go back into space, not ours. Have <you> ever had the
freedom of space or the air for one trip or for a while and then been suddenly
grounded and put in a dead-end desk job without asking you if you wanted the
change? There's far too many officials and clerks. In the RAF they called it
"flying a desk", and many men so treated resigned and became civilian pilots to
get back into the air.".
  "Yes, they do. One such man I knew of was discharged on medical grounds, but
once out his illness miraculously cleared up and next thing I knew he was a
pilot for an air freight firm. I remember that James Sopotsky who tested a
backpack jetpack-and-wings flying set for NASA, so they called him Jet Jack, and
then they let him have <a whole five years> in one of their first long-trip
spacesuits exploring asteroids prospecting for valuable metals, but at the end
of it he disobeyed a direct order to return to base, and he's still out there.".
  "Yes I did." said Jet Jack, "That's me here. I'd rather be thrown into the
base's security-destructor RD than be suddenly grounded and become a #@&
penpushing supplies clerk, and the only thing I'd done wrong was become a year
too old for some #%@ regulation.".
  "Supplies manager.".
  "Meaning an overgrown clerk. I'd rather command men in space than penpushers,
having to tell people sorry but this and that regulation, and knowing that all
sorts of new things were happening in space and I couldn't be part of it.".
  "You were allowed three men under you in case anything arose, not thirty like
you ended up with in that asteroid miner group called the Jetters that developed
by itself and never authorized to do so and [the authority on] the ground was
not even officially told about it, but NASA and the Companies had to work out a
bit at a time who was in what group and who was de facto leader of each, all
those wild-sounding codenames they chose for themselves and their groups making
it hard to sort out who was who. I suppose it had to happen, the eternal
complaint of men posted on away from places and people they knows.".
  "Never mind stray legalities about spacemen's work agreements." said someone,
"I'm a geologist, and the sooner the Anor system trust us again so geologists
and biologists and the like can get there the better. Earth's about `mined out'
for new big things for us to discover, and Arda's a whole new Earth for us to
explore. We can't work with ISAB controlling Anor and everything: too likely
things'd go back to like it was when the old Companies, Fletcher's and Milford's
and the rest, controlled asteroid metals trading and most spaceports and hardly
ever let non-Company scientists find and publish anything saying where there
were metals in case a competitor heard of it or some City speculation market got
scared there was too much or too little of something. I'm not having that again.
Good asteroid geology information in the scientific press was like hen's teeth.
For instance, the amount of europium in a space mineral's a good pointer to its
history, but that wasn't allowed out because `europium's a lanthanide and the
rules say that lanthanides are in the list of restricted information metals'.".
  I once did get Milford's to take me into space to look at a few asteroids.
They did it as a public relations job, I suppose: few outside scientists ever
were allowed even that much. The spacesuit they let me use was Company issue and
its radio could only receive and transmit their Company suit radio frequency and
two others, and couldn't receive anything else at all. Incredible list of things
that asteroid miners weren't allowed to talk to other miners about. That was
early in a hard area before Company rules slackened off so much. I once saw what
Company base-guards did to an miner when they found his nav scope had been
tweaked so it could pick up BBC World Service. A patrol squad watched me all the
time and I had to pay for their time out of my research grant; they didn't let
me go out with a group of miners. When I got back I had to do all my research
work in a Company lab instead of my own, not allowed to take anything out, and I
was searched whenever I went out. When I'd written up a Company censor slashed
my article to pieces with his `blue pencil' and what was left was only fit for
the popular press, and even that was only allowed into print if I put in a load
of fawning flattery about the Company's space work and facilities. The only way
an independent scientist could get samples or information of his own choosing
back was to go into space as an asteroid miner trainee, say falsely that he had
no academic or law qualifications else they'd never let him go out there, put up
with all the rough conditions and having to do miner's work most of the time,
smuggle any necessary instruments and reference material into space or have it
made out there `on the side', and as much aggro and risk getting his notes and
samples back to Earth and away from Company control.".
  "Yes, as we found out. Not only independents. Such as when Dr.Karl Enzheimer,
nuclear scientist who Milford's couldn't easily afford to lose that suddenly,
turned himself into Peter Hesketh, out-of-work unskilled labourer, went as an
asteroid miner, joined the X-100's, called himself first Long Pete and later
Control Rod, and now he's `in heaven' literally <and> metaphorically being an
Ilmenostian atomic scientist passing on his skills to all the wrong people.
Where's Ilmenost got all its people from? Where did they get the manpower to set
up like that over there so quickly? There's at least several ten thousand people
in the Anor system now, perhaps even over 100,000. It's like Mars again: every
time the Companies who ran Mars looked there were more unauthorized settlers
there until trying to enforce proper Company control blew up into a war of
independence.".
  "The Companies did a lot of it. In the later stages their old tight control
and security degenerated to throwing more and more men at the asteroids trying
to keep production up without bothering much where they were ending up, and a
lot of them cut loose from Company orders and became more and more free
spacemen. When we found out about hyperspace jumpers and how to make them we
could make our own contacts with Earth and its eager young wanting to go out
into the wilds to explore instead of hanging about the streets getting into
trouble. Plus that our people have been in space long enough for them to raise
children out there. At least having our own contact route to Earth means that a
lot of people down there know that their relatives who went into space are still
alive and not lost in space.".
  "Yes, I know, some nations using space as a dump for their restless types,
even to at least one case in Honduras of police waiting till two big teenage
street gangs were having a big set-piece battle, then rounding up the lot and
telling a bunch of you free spacemen with a hyper jumper to take the whole
crime-ridden caboodle of them off their hands and as far away as possible.".
  "I'll admit to that when I hear of it and know its source. There's all sorts
of wild rumours going about about what we do and what our kit can do. Talking
about metals again: all the Companies' records about what metals are where, all
that valuable asteroid geology knowledge: where is it? We found a lot of copies
of Fletchers records in that place Fletchmin-1 after wherever it was happened
there; but where's the rest? What NASA and the other outsiders got to know is
mostly what we asteroid miners put together and told them. They got far more
asteroid samples unauthorizedly from us directly than through the Companies.
After we got hyper jumpers to bypass Company spaceports and then NASA pulled
free from Companies at that meeting that turned violent, the scientists had to
start years late finding the sort of things that astronomers want to know, such
as how the asteroids evolved, which ones can be found out from trace element
amounts to be broken pieces of the same original body, which ones' crystalline
structure shows fission damage from old Pu-244 decays and so haven't been
remelted since the Solar System's original Pu-244 all decayed away, and so on.".
  "Yes, Pu-244. Like you on Arda've still got a lot of from the recent doses of
supernova fallout that Arda's had, such as that great bed of natural plutonite
rock that I saw a photo of once. Which reminds me: you lot'd be liked more if
you didn't go for your indiscriminate nuclear proliferation campaign and
disrupting trade patterns by encouraging all sorts of small Earth nations to set
up their own industry and nationalize foreign-owned mining concessions.".
  "Why not? They've a right to their minerals, same as you have yours. If they
find they've been bullied or tricked into selling them off cheap, they're
entitled to take them back when they can.".
  "It's bad enough seeing our industry go down and down from competition by the
whole cattery of `Asian economic tigers', Japan, Korea, China, etc, and now
Vietnam, without having to cope with `African economic lions' as well, watching
helplessly while yet another mining area or oilfield is nationalized and used to
develop a general-purpose industrial area. You lot can't deny that it was a
bunch of free spacemen who rediscovered that offshore oilfield at Ghana and told
them about it and then 'jumped a lot of the natives to Arda to train them in how
to run an oilfield. That plus some metal ore mines inland: I went there as a
tourist and saw some of it: factories everywhere and more being built, dirty
smell of building site diesel exhaust, and to me smellier because I knew that
the fuel used to make it wasn't planned to be used for 50 years and then on
<our> streets and work sites. Plus forever having to `avoid faeces' from work
elephants, and nearly trodden on by them twice: first time I'd seen African
elephants used for work. Plus where did that other West African nation get all
that uranium they had? We thought we'd mined out all there was.".
  "Yes. <That>'s why the USA won't reprocess its used reactor fuel but keeps on
importing new. They want to be sure of as much as possible for themselves and
rob everybody else out, scared in case someone sets up an army and air force big
enough to defy big-power bullying. Remember! Back in the 18th century you in the
USA were where we and Mars were recently!, ruled by officials from Britain, no
say in your own affairs, expected to pay for all surplus production from other
colonies that was dumped on you, till something snapped and there was a war of
independence, and even after that you had to attack British Canada in 1812 to
make the British navy leave your shipping alone. Ditto the South American reps
here: before their countries' war of independence from Spain in the 1820's their
colonists weren't allowed to make the least thing for themselves, not even wine
and tobacco, but they had to buy everything from Spain and from nowhere else.
  About the uranium mystery that you mentioned: we gave them some to replace
what you took. You and the big power business setup in general got it by keeping
them unable to do anything with it but sell it for a pittance, and threatening
to send in the Marines if they nationalized the mines etc; but after the space
trading Companies collapsed and set off more big business collapses and nations
started nationalizing foreign subsidiaries, the resulting disorders showed what
they showed. After Vietnam in the 1960's your reach has shortened: Khomeini's
successors in Iran are still there, for a start; and the WAIA [West African
Industrial Area]'s well started and away and we gave them training and technical
help to build its new west-to-east railway through the area. And you told one
nation there that you'd left some uranium ore for them to go at later, but
<after> they'd expensively set up processing equipment etc there they found that
the place'd been picked clean.".
  (They had indeed given that nation plenty of replacement uranium, but it did
not come from the Anor system. Determined to make the thief pay, they some years
before had hyper jump entered a big USA nuclear materials store. The security
there was impressive but did not include a hyperspace jump field detector; it
was some years before existence of real hyper jumpers became public knowledge or
even not-security-cleared official knowledge. They took out the equivalent of
what had been taken from the African nation involved: used fuel rods, depleted
uranium, and plenty of old warhead plutonium to replace the U-235 that had been
used out of it. After reprocessing in Aulien to hide its identity and not make
it easy to make atom bombs from it too soon, they 'jumped it to its destination.
The USA storekeepers, unable to guess a possible way of entry and scared of sack
and prosecution for stealing it, covered up the shortage and said nothing.)
  "Yes, WAIA, the Zambian Copperbelt, the South African Rand after Mandela came
to power, etc, and Russia. Russia's another `dirty man' not caring who it gives
that sort of help to: a lot worse than just selling a few jet fighters for a few
native pilots to show off in. When I went to one of Russia's nuclear areas I
didn't need any fancy spy training to tell what had been going on there: on that
old radioactive materials accident site there it didn't take much to recognize
the space-alien weeds growing on site or to work out how their seeds had got
there: the `Nunarien's control rods' and the pluteweed and the rad-thorn like
I'd seen in National Geographic Magazine articles about natural radioactive
sites on Arda. No attempt to hide it, and likely no attempt by those spacemen to
clean alien seeds out of their kit before they 'jump; we don't want landmine
bush seeding itself about on Earth. Or the spacemen planted Ardan plants there
on purpose to remind them of home. I suppose the spacemen were after fission
waste to RD for hot radioisotopes to run spacesuit powerpacks.".
  "I remember one of Nigeria's best atom men:" said the Ilmenostian who had
spoken before, "he went to Europe for nuclear science. Up to PhD they thought
that the bush-native trying to learn nuclear physics was merely amusing, likely;
but when he stayed on for postgraduate it was a different matter. Finally he got
the course under a false name saying he was a black American, and a long job for
him learning Americanism of manner and speech which he hadn't cared for before,
and having to never speak his own language and having to disown all things West
African for the duration. Likely despite that someone suspected; first he lost
a lot of stuff in a funny burglary: they took all his notes and floppies, not
only valuables that could sell ...".
  "Are you accusing us of undercover funny-business -?" the previous speaker
interrupted threateningly.
  "But his government sent him more grant to buy replacement kit, and he remade
his notes and floppies from copies that he'd hidden in case anything like that
happened. A bit later an official dug up an excuse and he was grabbed in the
street and bounced onto a plane home without even being let back to his flat to
collect his luggage, and he never saw it again, for before the student's friends
could mail it back the official's men grabbed it all with a warrant including a
laptop computer that he'd paid a lot for. A bit over a year later when we are in
Nigeria with WAIA we heard of this, and we took him to Aulien and gave him stuff
to replace what he'd lost before, and he finished his course there under our men
Control Rod and Muon, along with a lot more like him who had to go beyond the
Pleiades to get fair treatment.".
  "Yes, he `died and went to heaven' as we call it: nothing smells quite so
dead-too-long as a man who's just taken off a long-trip asteroid miner spacesuit
for the first time in three months without an in-suit wash first. That or stale
sewer, and intergrades. That sort of interfering when we try to stop nuclear
proliferation does <not> endear you with some people down here, any more than
some of you being so brazen show-off that you've bypassed us that they planted
pluteweed and that Nunarien rad-thorn with those mauve and red flowers that look
like butterflies gone wrong all over that contaminated area near Chelyabinsk.".
  "Yes, there's been some undercover funny-business. At one WAIA site in Togo
where we'd hyper jumped a reactor in, some superstitious tribalism arose and
rioters invaded the site, and when the police had restored order the reactor was
out of action. Trouble was, how it had been put out of action: where would bush
subsistence farmers get a lot of boron beads from to fill it with, or even know
what boron was or what it had to do with nuclear reactors?, as well as some of
the other things done to it. Some of us were on site at the time, and (a) truth
drug had it from some of the rioters that a man with a half American half German
accent trying to hide a business office manner of speech had put them up to it
with a lot of talk about evil spirits, and (b) we promptly 'jumped the dead
reactor back to Aulien and a new one in instead, and the site was running again
in a week; over the weeks we repaired the old one.".
  "<Oh you did, did you!?>" the man who had spoken before exclaimed, in his
anger unable to obey secrecy any more, forgetting where he was, "And nobody on
the ground told, so I at headquarters thought that the old reactor was still
working or repaired so soon and that the two agents returning saying `mission
accomplished' had bungled or dodged the job and lied! We've ways with agents who
bungle jobs, and I'd accused them wrongly - God rest their souls and forgive me.
400 light years each way and you dirty space sewage just replace it and tell
nobody as casually as a shop replacing a faulty toaster bought by someone living
a few miles away! Well, thanks to that sort of thing and fast breeders all over
the place WAIA also has got too big to be stopped easily and we've got another
`African economic lion' competing with us and making weapons to arm a local
power bloc so we aren't free to act there or protect our investors there any
more. All those divisive groups to have to negotiate with made it far harder and
longer setting up ISAB and bringing it to one mind and full operational unity,
and by that time you also were too big to stop, and instead of a quick cleanup
ISAB had and lost a pitched battle.".
  "Yes, I admit it. Like deciding to start using hyperspace jumpers, that time:
any proper people would have consulted committees all over the place, and
written hundreds of huge reports, and worked out its effect on the pound, and
the dollar, and the mark, and the international financial situation, and
investment, and how these'd affect other things, such a complicated network of
all sorts of things tied in with each other that only a schizophrenic and not
all of those could properly keep track of all of it at once, taking twenty years
expense-account committeeing and conferencing before starting any work; but us
unprincipled space sewage and proud of it (as you can tell by the smell when we
take our spacesuits off for the first time in several weeks) just got on with
making and using them, and now we're well set up in the Anor star system that
some of us discovered. I notice that ISAB always talks of getting rid of us,
never of asking us to join them.".
  "So much for all these side issues that have got brought in." said the leader
of the ISAB team, "The sum and summary of it all is this: that we're stuck with
you lot as a wild factor upsetting plans and every month there's more of you.
You lot using PSC-4's (and likely it'll soon be PSC-5's) for most transport
needs, like a 1970's story about one man from each nation boasting about the
fancy luxurious vehicles they travelled abroad in, and the Russian said `I go by
tank'.". They turned to unorganized chatter about the outcome of the battle.
  They had to admit that the defeat came from ISAB risking a set-piece battle
with what they had then to get quick results to show to shareholders and other
backers. Other tactics that take longer would have been likelier to win. In the
Solar System the orbits of most asteroids are known, and in a new system such as
the Anor system a few space-telescopes with modern computerized astronomy
packages would in a year or two find them all, a job that in old times with no
computers effective for it and views only possible from Earth or nearby and thus
no triangulation possible took astronomers decades. While that is done, an
industrial economy the size of Earth's could easily make modern efficient space
patrol craft such as the PSC-5 by the hundred and train crews for them once
officialdom stops committeeing and at last orders action.
  In the endless millions of miles between planets it is easier to find roaming
spacemen than may seem at first, for they are far likelier to be at an asteroid
or comet where useful materials can be got than somewhere far from sizeable
matter. Such craft could hyper jump from asteroid to asteroid in radio and radar
silence, replacing from comets all the hydrogen used by the fusion reactors that
powered their weapons and ship-sized propulsors and hyperspace jumpers. Its
multiple lasers and missiles and missile-shaped capture craft would quickly
routinely destroy any unprotected propulsor-spacesuited groups that it found, or
else capture them. Onboard afterwards modern truth drugs and the like would
quickly find all the captives knew and make it unnecessary to develop a system
of informers; no spacesuit hyper jumper yet can jump out quick enough to escape
from multiple power-laser beams or a fast missile fired from close up. Unless
the free spacemen develop countermeasures; so the more need to have started this
method first and quietly, few ever of the free spacemen knowing of the ISAB
craft except as a rumour and a long list of groups not coming back from their
latest mining or exploring trip until few are left, and if those left have not
meanwhile unconditionally surrendered and put themselves under ISAB command the
final clearup of their main bases is easy. Perhaps some may have fled to a
remote refuge and started to set up there again, until they are found and the
process repeats.
  And unless, as the months needed pass, emptiness and alienness and awesome
distances prey on the minds of the search-and-destroy patrol spacecraft captains
and crews, and feelings come that they also are heirs of many real and fictional
space heroes and pioneers, gradually overcoming even the hardest space police
barracks training and indoctrination, and some start to feel sympathy for the
Anor men and want to go native, and some turn from their orders to exploring,
and some obey ISAB orders and training and conditioning until the last Anor
system free spacemen vanish impersonally into their powerful crafts' collapsible
prisoner-holds but then realize that with the job done their future is likely
dispersion and unemployment or dead-end static office or guard duty jobs and so
at last they do what the free spacemen did before, by ingenuity overcoming all
attempts to stop them setting up an independent self-increasing and reproducing
community somewhere far from Earth, even as had been done before them by runaway
asteroid miners who by chance got hold of a hyperspace jumper and had the means
and skill to copy it and set up on their own in the Anor star system.
  So they talked, and turned to current practicalities. Astronomers wanted lifts
to remote sites: if the Anor men carried the expense of the expeditions, then
ISAB wouldn't have to, after its losses in the battle. And rules about kit were
brought up.
  "You complained about Company rules about kit," said an Acle Investments
manager, "but when an agency that we'd hired sent a man out to Ceres in the
Sun's asteroids, a bunch of your men took his kit on an excuse and searched it,
and he had private stuff in it. Just like you used to accuse us of doing. All
right, so he was in a short-trip suit on a photon torpedo, old-style stuff and
not your standard issue. But you let some of <your> men keep on using them.".
  "I was there." said Jet Jack, "There's a limit to what we like seeing men in.
I've seen men in space in kit that'd make your hair stand on end. We've seen
plenty in space in Mars settler pressure suits as short-trip suits, spesh'ly
like when they hyper jump straight from Earth to somewhere and hope to trade and
jump back while their oxy tanks last, risky trick that we call `space-diving',
not the ideal but at least they're made so they'll stand up to scrapes and cuts
and rough work. But not what he had on.", and described the incident.
  A bit before, he and other asteroid miners gathered at an abandoned Company
base on the Sun's biggest asteroid Ceres. A distant undersized Sun shone on the
little spherical world, a thousand kilometers diameter. They stayed `balled' in
tight bunches, and their hyper men kept a hand on the controls of their hyper
jumpers in case; but all that came was, as promised, Mr.Kiernan, an Earth man
from a business contact agency hired by Acle Investments, to organize trading.
Between his flesh and the void was only a jet fighter pilot's pressure suit
naked to the distant stars. When he talked it was clear that his home-rigged
suit radio had no undistorter to remove gasmaskyness caused by talking into a
small breathing mask. Strapped to his back and connected to the suit's oxygen
mask was a scuba diver's long-dive rebreather roughly adapted for space in a
basement workshop. He was riding an LTRC one-man riding craft, commonly called a
photon torpedo, like were used before one man's long-trip survival and transport
gear got small enough to fit on a spacesuit. But he was not connected to its
onboard sewage-destructor RD or food synthesizer or air regenerator.
  He clearly had little experience of space, and presumed to finish his business
and be picked up by the spaceliner that had left him before his set ran out of
oxygen. The torpedo's sides near its rear end still bore Company logos and a
model code showing that it was a somewhat unreliable early Milfords make. It was
donkey's years overdue for servicing and its powerpack replacing, and was only
still working because it had been in store for many years instead of being used.
Red Scorpion in the Pallas-2's, who were also there, opened its servicing hatch
and poked about in its electronics, and swore in alarm in his strong Birmingham
accent, and was reminded how he got his blowtorch burn down his left side, in a
fight in Swansea in Wales before he went into space, when he had refused similar
bad work presented by an outside supplier who seemed very desperate for it to be
accepted and paid for at once. Now, far from Earth many years later, similar
design threatened more serious consequences than making a train late. Seeing the
Milfords logos made something move briefly in its sleep in a deep place in his
mind; but it caused no effect. The agent felt around to switch on his suit
radio, which seemed to have been home-adapted from a riotsquad sergeant's
in-helmet two-way radio; he had switched it off to save its battery.
  "Will this take long? I've got other calls when I get back to Earth after
this." the agent said.
  "As long as it takes. There's the usual at least five parts of this old thing
need replacing - like I did enough times in the old days and saved enough men
from being stranded in space by transport breakdown, like'll happen to you
likely if you keep on using this old thing as it is. Torn edge of newspaper here
to stop this from rattling, `Daily Mirror' Tuesday 23th of - @#$ hell the year
on it!, so that part can't've been #@$ opened or looked at since then. I thought
I'd done this sort of patching up for the last time long ago, before I had that
scrape with Fletchmin's trick loader. Where ever did you get it and that attempt
at a spacesuit from?! Can't Acle's for all its size and power and ISAB behind
it, even @#$ find you one modern long-trip propulsor spacesuit!? They had plenty
to supply that navy they sent against us, to get shot to scrap in the battle,
waste of good kit.".
  "I'm not in Acle's, I'm in an agency that they called in. They were left with
this old torp after something with Milford's was dropped suddenly when someone
thought again about security letting outsiders into space with them. My boss's
car mechanic rigged up the spacesuit in his workshop in spare moments, in case
they had to send a man into space, since they already had this torp.".
  "It looks like it. And likely they believed all Company blah about their kit
including their torps being the best and superefficient etc.".
  "Will it take long!?" the agent repeated insistently.
  "It'll take all the rest of your life, if you go into shadow without a suit
heater and radiate body heat away till your fingers get frostbite and you can't
operate controls. Or if you tear that thin suit on something, not wearing even
an overall over it. Or if something that you came to talk about takes longer and
you forget the time and miss the return flight, like the way Plutey-pots here
stopped being a businessman and started being an asteroid miner. Or if your
return flight's late. Not as easy as on Earth to get home another way and sue
the railway/etc company for loss caused by the delay. <Have> you been in space
before?".
  "I've been in a big vacuum chamber and on simulators.".
  "Not the same. Same as you can keep on crashing flight simulators and no harm
done.".
  "I've been on two space trips like this before. My suit had a pinhole in it
after the second time, a blood blister where it was, but no harm from it. My
trading offer. Do you want it or not?, very favourable, and all I get from you
is a load of reprimand about my kit for me to have to play back from my recorder
and reword into a proper recommendation in the right tone for me to address to a
superior, before you decide to send it to him unaltered rough.".
  "And we want you back home alive with our reply to your offer, and with the
replies to any other offers that you may go into space with in the future. You
said you've already had a decompression injury!".
  "This bit in his torp's propulsor won't last more than one more trip, if that,
and I'll have to make a replacement made specially." Red Scorpion interrupted as
he rummaged about in the torpedo's innards, "And his suit hasn't even got a
sewage tank for me to connect the torp's RD to, only a `watchman's urinal' [a
type of adult-size napkin]. I <might> be able to patch the torp up to last a bit
longer.".
  This sort of argument had happened, with variations, several times down the
years, but this time things were different.
  "While you lot are arguing, I better radio Earth, if one of you could aim the
signal." the agent said, "Just before the spacecraft took off, I got the latest
`Business World' from the passenger magazine rack, and it talked of new things
happening on the market, someone big went bankrupt and it's set everything by
the ears and they still didn't know how it'd settle. There's about time for a
signal to get to Earth and back before the spaceliner comes to pick me up.".
  "You're cutting it #@$ fine with the signal travel times and the liner coming
and your oxy tanks holding out. Ten minutes delay being switchboarded about or
getting him to a phone from somewhere, and the whole thing goes into the RD.".
  "No it won't. Anyone that causes that sort of avoidable delay to Company
matters gets sued or sacked or disciplined. Time is money. Only way to do it.
Same as when I went on a space basics course before I came out here the first
time, one thing we were taught is to think of everything the first time like
with writing a letter so no query'll arise that he'll have to ask back and your
firm's kept waiting while the signal travels there and back a second time.".
  "Yes, we know all that, we're out here all the time. Not like one man from New
York who went on a Space Explorer holiday and thought his tour leader's radio
was subspace like in stories, so cocksure he never bothered to check although
the brochure said very clearly there's no such thing, till near the asteroid
Pallas he suddenly decided to ring his broker and <then> he found about radio
signal travel times and `time taken = distance divided by the speed of light'.".
  That sort of thing had happened before, and will keep on happening, when money
business and space travel meet, but this time matters were complicated again.
  "Not with that great sun-flare blasting particles at us. There's a radio
blackout coming." said Rattler, "'E'll 'ave to wait 'ere till it's blown past,
or trade 'ere now 'thout radioing, or one of us'll 'ave to rig up a buddy 'ose
to 'im from [the air recycling system of] one of our suits in an 'urry, and
being siamese gets in the way of work. It may make the liner late: a flare that
size @#$'s up long-range radio good and proper. Surely you saw that whacking
great sunspot cluster coming to centre of disk like some #@$ great particle beam
gun muzzle? The sun's onboard fusion reactor can be %$# dirty at times.".
  "A what? - but my boss told me to - if I buy now without consulting, and the
market turns out that he could have got it in Detroit for less and without
spaceshipping costs in this sudden market uncertainty ..." the agent pleaded,
"Isn't there any way you could get a signal through? Why didn't you warn me, you
lot knowing everything about space?".
  "You didn't tell me you'd need to radio back. I thought you'd've sorted all
the prices out and checked what the `weather' is out here before you came.".
  So they argued, businessmen meeting workmen, not completely understanding each
other, each thinking that the other was in some amount unreasonable, as has been
down the ages.
  "I was too busy reading reports and writing speeches on the way up, to listen
to a load of astronomy on the passenger earphones. I'm in other things also, and
my time's valuable. Enough without that cargo-man getting stroppy about fitting
my torpedo into the hold, so it had to be fastened on outside, and I had to act
Gagarin in magnetic boots on the craft's outside to reach my torpedo. Boss
promised me a rocket pack for that sort of thing, but the man who was going to
make it went down with flu, or at least that's what he said. The only time I do
want to `get a rocket' from my boss, I don't. Things have gone down: in the old
days every base was manned and pressurized and I could have done all this in
atmosphere. Will this take much longer? My suit radio battery won't last much
longer. OK, someone of us has to go to these places to trade with them: the more
we stay down there so they must come to Earth themselves, the more they learn
about market prices and the like and trade directly with people and bypass us:
tell me the old old story." he said, wearily and not caring who he was talking
to or in radio-earshot of, "We've had this ever since you wild space-miners got
your own hyperspace jumpers and PL-props. That's why ISAB tried to clean up that
place Ilmenost that you set up out there, and all they did was lose a lot of men
and ships and make you wary and annoy the Earth space-fan public.".
  This small-scale replay of Man's struggles to design and improve space kit,
ever since real men ventured into thin upper air and fictional men into space in
the 1920's and 1930's, caught the free spacemen's sympathy, for many of their
space techniques and devices were independent rediscoveries of what Companies
already knew and kept secret, and the more people attack a problem independently
the more chance of one finding something that others missed. At another time and
place the mechanic might have followed his crude attempt by better designed and
made kit leading to a long line of modern efficient space kit, even as the big
British excavator makers JCB started with James Cyril Bamford making a farm cart
from war-surplus oddments in 1945. But space is dangerous for the inexperienced
without better backup than a car mechanic's basement workshop, in those days
when some sorts of space kit are easily available. The first query is `why was
he allowed to airlock out using that kit?', but refusing passengers for nature
of kit (often allegedly unserviceable but actually having parts made by asteroid
miners in space in breach of (legal enforceability disputed) Company patents)
had caused many successful lawsuits for breach of promise to carry, and yet more
customers drifting away to rough-and-ready free-spaceman-type transport in a
tethered group in a long-trip propulsor spacesuit each; and needs too much
searching and examining of luggage. And Mr.Kiernan in his odd-looking kit had
returned safely twice already, so the spaceport staff let him board.
  But facts told, and Mr.Kiernan as he was was all too likely on his last and
unreturning mission, or would be next time. Two of the Pallas-2's untethered him
from his photon torpedo (which Red Scorpion was still poking about inside),
towed him to a large ominously industrial-looking device with Ilmenost logos and
several inspection and feed hatches which was anchored to the bare rock of Ceres
near the base, and shoved him protesting into a hatch, and it swallowed him. A
little later it ejected his pressure suit and clothes, all too reminiscent of an
owl ejecting the baled undigested fur and bones of a mouse. Time passed. The
suit radio noise from the sun flare grew as an immense scattered mass of various
charged and neutral atomic particles sped through the huge interplanetary
emptinesses away from the Sun. Earth was not in the line of fire, so its polar
regions saw no unusual auroras.
  A little later it opened its end hatch and ejected into a collecting cage a
man in a standard Ilmenostian long-trip propulsor spacesuit. It was Kiernan, and
the device was not a destructor as he had been told in workman's rough humour
but an auto resuiter. "I designed it." said Red Scorpion, "It can work through
50 men one after another like that.". (And it had, quite recently, when the
Honduras police paid some landing Ilmenostians to take two arrested street gangs
away with them and the further the better. In went teenage street warriors from
a big pressure bag, out came spacemen; the mental rather than physical part of
the reprocessing came later and was another matter.) He chalked `Kiernan' on the
helmet forehead.
  "Now that's over and you're in proper safe kit, nuclear powerpack and no silly
little torch batteries to run out, the business that you came for." said Jet
Jack, "500 tons of ingots of various lanthanide metals (and yttrium). Price had
been agreed but you say something's `dropped boron beads into' the market and
you can't radio Earth about it for that @#$ sun flare. What's your local time? -
oh, it's evening there. In that case, nothing we can do till your office opens,
9am or so. I've put you on half a mile of tether fastened to the base: get some
practice in propulsor flying and get some sleep in the meantime. Read your suit
manual: it's in your left outside pocket.". The spaceliner passed and went away
towards Earth; Kiernan, who had booked a return seat on it, wondered how the
commodities price of boron or someone wearing a necklace of it came into it (for
he knew little about how nuclear reactors work), and cursed all things that take
longer than planned and mess up complicated tight schedules, for he was
scheduled to return not to Cape Canaveral but to a spaceport in Germany and
straight on to several important clients around there.
  Jet Jack paid (platinum and USA dollars) for the suit that he had got from the
resuiter. Kiernan looked round at the encrusting untwinkling stars (including
many far southern constellations that he had never seen before except from
space), and the free asteroid miners who he suddenly looked like one of, and
their codename plates and variously fanciful ornaments. He saw one with a large
praseodymium rampant lion bas-relief on his chest and `Plutey-pots' on his
helmet forehead; he knew enough about space not to be surprised at a wild
asteroid miner sporting oxygen cylinders made of atom bomb fuel and boasting
about it. Plutey-pots's eyes through his breathing mask's small eye windows
looked at Kiernan and seemed to recognize him. Kiernan wondered where in all the
wilderness of space was the financier Blore whose businesses had crashed
suddenly some years before and fouled the market and investment structure badly.
  Kiernan practised propulsor flying for a while, then floated inert while he
thought in that alien place in that alien kit how to reschedule his appointments
and explain what had happened. The Jetters and the others turned to the various
recourses of spacemen with nothing to do. Some switched their portable lasers on
at low power and practised target shooting and space fighting in case ISAB or
anyone tried trouble again. Cobra passed Plutey-pots an intercom wire and
started telling him a new not-for-polite-company story using star constellation
patterns as ready-made illustrations; Laser Larry, coming that way in the
simulated battle, let his suit aerial touch the intercom wire, tapping it, and
told them sharply to "lets 'ave that again, on radio so we all can 'ear it".
Kiernan looked warily at the distant sun reflected off Plutey-pots's bulky shiny
backpack cylinders. Rattler checked the contents of the group's tow crates.
  Kiernan, and a new member of the Pallas-2's with callsign Banksia who had not
been to Ceres before, explored about inside the base, in total vacuum lit by a
naked tungsten filament without glass bulb on her helmet forehead. It was a big
base, with a suite of offices and guardrooms and storerooms allocated to each of
the main space Companies of the old days. But the Companies were gone, and
offices open to space vacuum contained desks which the officials named on their
doors had not sat behind in authority for many years. Ceres base was cavernous
and dark and empty, and the Pallas-2's used one corner of it. Even so after the
fall of the Roman empire native farmers and invading barbarians camped and built
huts in the shells of Roman cities and wondered how Men could ever have built
such vast structures in what had become the middle of nowhere. They crossed the
base's biggest conference room, 40 by 100 feet and 10 feet high, 40000 ornate
cubic feet once all pressurized that far from Earth, supplied from a kitchen
like a hotel's, all for what men now did in spacesuits by tethering together to
anything handy and passing intercom wires. A few cobwebs showed that cleaning,
and disinfesting whatever came from Earth, had got slack letting insects arrive
and breed feeding spiders before the base's air had been salvaged or let escape.
  Two other spacemen followed them. Banksia (whose safety helmet had her
callsign on its forehead and her name flowers painted on its top and sides on a
dark blue background) floated into one office and sat behind its desk and
started to mimic her idea of officialese style with much "I'm sorry but ..." and
referring to regulations. The others within radio earshot laughed, but Kiernan
wished that he was in that office, lit and in gravity and full of air, in office
clothes negotiating the deal not with rough wandering spacemen but with the
`Mr.Clifham, assistant sales manager, Milford's (Ceres)' who was still named on
its door. He thought of a highly-trained well-armed ISAB space police
order-reestablishing squad in armoured constant-volume spacesuits arriving and
entering in radio silence until they could suddenly overpower all persons found
and take the base back and teach that cheeky asteroid miner girl and her fellows
the proper respect for an official, and an official's office and desk, and an
official's speech manners.
  But such a squad did not come, and he and the rest came out and retethered; he
reflected that one of the various things that helped to bring the old Companies
down was the cost in money and materials of maintaining so much Earth-style
comfort and convenience at every remote space base and on all passenger craft
going between them, and wondered whether ISAB in its new spirit of unitedness
and cleaning-up and getting things done would succeed any better.
  He for the first time slept in his spacesuit, dreamed of being a wartime
frogman, woke, felt an urgency, and knew the convenience of having his suit's
sewage pipes permanently plugged in to his body's natural waste outlets. He
sucked from the pipe that led from his suit's food synthesizer, and wondered
just what metal the two bas-relief space shuttles on Long Tom's suit chest were
made of. Jet Jack called them to ball closely together with the metal and
Kiernan's torpedo and old suit among them. He told Kiernan's office's address to
Rattler, who got a large street atlas of New York out of his suit outside pack
and looked in it. The stars distorted and faded into greyness.
  Kiernan had read and heard enough about space to know what that meant. "No,
stop, stop!" he exclaimed in alarm and inexperience on several frequencies at
once, making men's ears ring with feedback howl and heterodyne wailing. The
nearly-complete hyper jump field collapsed back into flat normal space as Jet
Jack switched his on-suit hyper jumper off and asked what the panic was.
  "No, all that metal doesn't go in our office foyer! It'd get in the way, and
the floorboards won't take the load, we've got no heavy loading and unloading
facilities, and we're not planning zoned to store that sort of stuff.".
  "I was going to put in your basement.".
  "Our building's basement's someone else's night club, except a bit at the
back that's our car garage.".
  "Well, where's your warehouse, then?".
  "No, erh, perhaps I didn't make my firm's position clear." said Keirnan,
returning to something like a formal business manner, "We're metals brokers, we
arrange metals deals for other people. We've got no warehousing facilities of
our own. We're not stockists. You'll have to keep the metal until you get our
instructions where to dispatch it.".
  Again City and space had met and misunderstood each other.
  "We'll have to leave it here and tell the Pallas-2's what to do with it.
They're running this place right now, and we've got to move on. And the metal's
still got to be paid for.".
  "`Pallas-2's': is that an asteroid miner group? What is the legal status of
their occupation of this base?".
  "All we know is a lot of the Companies went down at once that time and the men
who ran this base and a lot of others pulled out. Someone's got to run a base
here for the men around here to call at and get kit serviced and mended.".
  Knowing via business connections the end result of many previous attempts to
enforce unpopular rules on asteroid miners, Kiernan realized that this was no
place and time to raise points of law about abandoned building shop-squatting.
He offered a cheque book, and a promissory note from his firm, and a card.
  "Where's the bank to cash any of those out 'ere, and what's that?" said Long
Tom in the Pallas-2's, looking at the American Express card through his
breathing mask eye-windows in a well-rehearsed air of dense incomprehension.
  "OK! OK! You asteroid miners, like a lot of other workmen types, can't
understand anything except cash paid at once, valuable metals or hard currency
only. There were 3 branches of big banks here in Ceres base, in Company times,
but they became financially unviable, so the banks ceased operations here. It's
most inconvenient being in foreign places where my cheque book doesn't work.".
  "Meaning they shut sudden, and a #%$ of a job it was for several lots of us to
get their money back, that 'ad started banking their money 'ere. #&$ banks.".
  Being out of reach of his relied-on bank account in that weightless place
finally brought on him the often-resisted lonely feeling of awesome depth and
remoteness and huge distances. Between and around them the ancient void
stretched forever; Man's attempt during the Company years to shut it out of a
volume around Ceres's north pole had not lasted long, and sporadic craft and
hyper-jumping men carrying mail across the vastness didn't change matters much.
He knew to hold onto his card firmly when showing it, for he knew of cases in
rough places of offered credit cards disappearing into a drawer or pocket held
as security instead of being processed in the usual way, and he was millions of
miles from police for him to threaten to call for.
  "How long's that lot going to be stuck 'ere?" Long Tom queried, "Yet another
thing for us to 'ave to 'jump out sudden with us if some Company comes to take
this base back. A while back some broker tried what you're trying, and left 1000
ton o' neodymium 'ere cluttering the place awaiting instructions and no answer
ever when we wrote to them asking about it. After a year the people who were
running this base 'ad to sell it to get shut of it. We still 'aven't 'ad no
shipping instructions for it.".
  Kiernan sighed. That sort of thing had been happening ever since the big
collapse left many of the metals dealers having to trade with random groups of
space nomads instead of the old big Companies. Pieces of paper representing
metals are traded about or held as security, etc, by businessmen too busy to
send someone to check the goods. No point starting a fraud case: the base's
current occupants <had> made a sort of attempt at checking if the stuff was
wanted, and as for sending investigators and enforcers into all the quadrillions
of cubic miles of emptiness - the well-known big heavily-armed attempt by ISAB
had failed spectacularly recently. "Which brokers?" he asked, so that he knew
who to tell to write the missing metal off.
  "I don't know, we only know what the Sardies told us, they were running this
base then. They told us when they wanted to move on and we came in instead.".
  "Where are the Sardies? I know who they are: it was in the papers that time,
Project Sardaukar, cloned XYY enforcers named after something in the `Dune'
space stories and all that and yet they ran away to space as asteroid miners.".
  "Ilmenost or Aulien working likely. There's a lot to mend there after the
battle.".
  "Or wandering in space round Anor somewhere. Forget it. By the time someone
sends a man to chase it up via that man of theirs called the Arbiter with his
showoff shiny curium-247 spacesuit oxygen cylinders that I've heard of, who
settles disputes among them and sometimes is a sort of general leader of theirs
- never mind, after the amount firms invested on the battle and lost the lot.
But how can I relate the vastness of space to your talk of being so short of
storage room out here that you've got to sell other people's property to make
room for things?".
  "The secure storage here isn't so vast. The Sardies wrote to him sev'ral times
asking what he wanted doing with it. It's easy enough now getting letters from
Earth to the main space bases. It's not just officious bits of charges and
percent like the Companies kept doing to us. We've known piles of city firms'
stuff to be left cluttering up base storerooms for 5 years and no answer however
many times the base wrote to ask what wanted doing with it, and at Herculina it
got so bad once they had to build another storeroom to keep it all in.".
  Kiernen sighed again. The consumer and workman mentality, imagining that
failure to answer a letter was voluntary wickedness unless caused by a physical
barrier. Not his fault if company secrecy rules mean that the only few people
allowed to communicate with outsiders about where metals are, are too busy to do
so or too busy to be contacted, and workman types get impatient at unanswered
letters and at being cluttered with absentee strangers' stuff, and that what was
planned as another quick in-and-out trip had become a time-wasting sidetracky
discussion in strange kit with strange people floating about in emptiness among
the asteroids. "OK, I know the various ways stuff and money gets lost track of."
he said, "Like, three years ago we changed offices and the new people in our old
offices binned our mail instead of forwarding it. We prosecuted them for it, but
that didn't bring the letters back. And firms are renamed or taken over and the
post office loses track of who became who. Now, the lanthanides you've got for
us now. OK, you want us you take it away and pay for it now and never mind that
we're agents and not stockists, we arrange deals, not handle stuff ourselves. I
know a warehousing firm in Brooklyn that'll probably have space, I mean room,
for it. They won't like it, us just hyperspace jumping in with it without
warning. Oo-er, I've never been hyperspace jumped before. OK, here we go.".
  Kiernan told the address, trying to feel confident in his shivery feeling of
the unknown knowing that he was going to be pulled out of his familiar three
orderly dimensions and hurled God-knows-where in an alien void. He had trouble
out there thinking in three dimensions instead of two; how ever could that man
Rattler of theirs with the shiny ytterbium bas-relief rattlesnakes on his oxygen
cylinders so casually find his way about in four or five? Rattler looked at his
New York street atlas again. They jumped to a fast close-in oblique prograde
Earth orbit. As they orbited, Kiernan thankfully saw his home world again and
looked in wonder at ocean and mountain and desert and wide lands passing below
him, and in the night hemisphere saw the glitter of town and city lights.
  After a few orbits they got over New York and Rattler found the warehouse with
a telescope. They jumped into the warehouse. The warehousemen gaped at the
unearthly way of arrival, which they had read about, usually in fiction, but
never seen before, then started to pick up and sort the vortex of papers that
had blown off shelves and desks in the air displaced by the incoming hyper jump
field and then filling the volume of space vacuum that had been jumped in.
Kiernan took his suit's hood and unpressurized safety helmet off and thankfully
breathed USA air after a longer and more exciting space exploration than he had
expected. He had his firm's documents in a suit outside pocket, but the
warehousemen did not seem to know what to do. Jet Jack, who was no office man
and more forthright than Kiernan and wanted to get away, looked in rooms until
he found the manager, who growled, listened to the alien-looking spaceman
telling him what had happened, and filled in the required papers.
  The manager came out of his office and saw what had happened, not much liking
spacemen manifesting from nowhere like demons in his warehouse any more than any
other sort of delivery men expecting him suddenly to find storage for all that
stuff without warning, or being reminded how hyper jumpers even more than
helirigs had ruined the implicit assured reliableness of security perimeters and
enclosures, or the gross moral turpitude of invading the coffee room and
interrupting him from his coffee.
  Needing to get themselves and Kiernan's bulky heavy torpedo to Kiernan's
office, they accepted the manager's scared offer of transport in a large
warehouse van. The undercover way of getting them away reminded them of old
rumours and stories of official cover-ups of findings of UFO wreckage. It cost
much less energy than a short hyper jump, and them leaving visibly by propulsor
flying would risk unwanted attention for the warehouse. They arrived by the
backyard door, and went in. Jet Jack told Kiernan's manager Mr.Sullivan what had
happened, and asked why Kiernan hadn't been found a better spacesuit.
  "No, I <didn't> buy him a spacesuit like yours." said Mr.Sullivan, "They cost,
and too many people run away to space in them and don't come back. I send a man
into space and its risks to avoid spacemen coming here, and it ends up anyway
with me having to negotiate with spacemen come here, and my man in a spacesuit
like yours.", and looked irritatedly at them in there without having to get
through or over anything, and their unattractively functional far-travelling kit
with such things as undisguised sewage pipes running from their body outlets to
a little RD on the left of the suit's waist. "`Plutey-pots' on that one's
helmet:" he said, "oh help, it's him with the cylinders, bringing that stuff in
here, I've read about him, crazy showoff trick. OK, we better negotiate a price.
The market still hasn't properly settled down, but we'll have to deal now. I
suppose you want dollar bills or valuable metals now, can't wait for payment, I
know rough-country foreigners and spacemen. Once a firm I know sent a man to
Afghanistan to try to buy stuff, and where he went the local currency was cattle
or gold for big money and sheep or Kalashnikov ammunition as small change: the
natives didn't trust the local paper money further than they could throw it. So
we'll be left owning all that metal tying up capital and having to pay storage
charges on it until we find a customer for it.".
  The metal was paid for. Kiernan unsuited, unwillingly, for he had tasted the
freedom of the long-trip spacesuit with a modern propulsor that can get on and
off planets and a powerpack and life support system that can last twenty years
or more. The mechanic lowered the torpedo into the basement with a hoist through
a floor hatch in a back room. Jet Jack copied into one of the office computers a
file containing a strong recommendation about safety of space kit and Red
Scorpion's list of what needed doing very urgently to the torpedo. They went
into the backyard as the agency's men removed or battened down everything that
hyper jump wind could blow about. Grey distortion filled the yard, and the
spacemen were gone, back to Ceres. Disturbed dust and litter settled; it was if
the visitation had never happened. But their Mr.Kiernan was back, and they had a
text computer file that had been composed among the asteroids.
  Mr.Kiernan was back - there and not in Germany, not having contacted two men
who were to board the same spaceliner on its way home, culture-shocked and
weary, and, if told to fly to Germany at once and get back on his schedule, all
too likely to desperately plead for a day's or a weekend's rest to recover; all
concerned had been too startled to think in time to ask the spacemen to take him
there. Mr.Sullivan tiredly listed the damage which outsider suppliers had done
to his firm's plans not by ill will but merely by choosing without consulting
what to do when things changed. As the old space trading Companies had often
experienced, affairs had fouled on sun flare radio blackouts and malfunctioning
spacecraft and space kit and the unavoidable mathematics of interplanetary
distances. The office stank of asteroid miner, for some of them had opened their
spacesuits while they were on the ground. A man was in the wrong place, a common
nuisance more usually caused by airliners diverted for fog. They urgently had to
revise the firm's arrangements for contacting space metals producers.
  Mr.Sullivan rang a hotel in Schaffhausen in Switzerland to order another agent
off a holiday to attend to the German jobs, but the agent had moved on: he was
helirig flying about among the Alps, battery removed from his bleeper and mobile
phone switched off, sleeping in a different climbers' hostel each night, himself
also desperate for uninterrupted time off to relax and unwind, knowing nothing
of the events until a fortnight later he came back to Mr.Sullivan who by now
knew wearily too much of human nature to get far with the standard reprimand for
being incommunicado and his firm's oft-repeated rule that `staying' at a hotel
means `remaining' there available whenever needed and not wandering away from it
for hours. The German clients went to an Ilmenostian ground contact office in
Munich and got their supplies straight off a loader spacecraft when it landed.
  And what about Mr.Kiernan for his next space trip? Limited-range propulsor
spacesuits could be got, allowing a few days in space if something took longer
than expected but not equipping him to go off with long-trip asteroid miners and
never see his firm again. Mr.Sullivan sold the torpedo, and the fighter pilot
pressure suit with the modified scuba on it, to a science museum as examples of
early space travel kit. He printed the floppy disk out and tried to understand
the space kit technical jargon on it, and got back to ordinary business life.
  And the young still went into space. The Hondurans described above soon looked
on what was happening to them as a new adventure, except for the inevitable few
who for a while suffered agonies of sudden abuse drug withdrawal. Others sought
space willingly via Ilmenostian contact offices. After the weary shortages and
restrictions of many modern cities, many compare going to the Anor system with
the afterlife. The spacemen needed the manpower but were in an excited alert
security-minded state after the big ISAB attack, and the entrants had to put up
with a moderate truth drug interrogation as a `Purgatory before Heaven': it was
much easier to endure than rumoured, and weeded out many psychiatric conditions
and hard criminal types and the like; it was no more than what came to entrants
to some security-dependent jobs on Earth. Some raised issue against this, saying
moral reasons but actually because it made it harder to get spies into the Anor
system; but it enforced honesty, even as the common asteroid miner's remote
metal analysers forced honesty in metals dealing, as had been found the hard way
once by a Company storeman, desperate to get square from a tangle of losing
dishonest trading on the side, who tried to pass off a fake alloy as gold to the
X-100's. If there is one thing that can be learned from crime stories, it is
that one dishonest man can spoil matters for many honest men.
  By now, official attempts to tightly control who went into space were much
opposed by knowing that space was a useful outlet for the restless who need room
as in an ever more crowded world each inevitably had less work and leisure room
and freedom. People use legal or illegal severe measures to keep work areas safe
from intrusions; leisure groups' solicitors resist such restrictions. People and
dogs from edge of town treat nearby farmland as a public park until aggressive
horned cattle are the only crop that can resist the pressure. Sea sport anglers
increase and increase until they must be controlled like freshwater anglers. The
sport scuba diver spills from crowded diving sites seeking new water, trained
and equipped safe from all sea hazards, aided by his club solicitor against all
attempts to restrict him, treating nosing in security areas like a commando as
fair adventure, until a patrolling RD-equipped naval or Company dredger-sub or
FSPB, unseen underwater ordered to keep the area secret, swallows him equipment
and all at a grabful. More and more hikers invade a moorland area until the
authorities have to restrict numbers or lay the paved paths that the hikers went
there to get away from. A modern variant of motorcycle gangs is helirig gangs
who casually fly over boundaries which had once securely ensured privacy or that
all who enter pay. In public opinion, between `Safety for all.' and `Let the
wild types kill themselves in spacesuits or scuba gear if they want to, playing
at space explorers or frogmen, rather than hanging about the streets until
boredom turns them into criminals.', there are many intergrades.
  Some ancient peoples knew of Space, although they had no way to go there or
send instruments there: the Greeks called the primal void `Chaos', from `kha-'
or `kh-n-' meaning "gape, be wide open" (the modern meaning "disorder" came from
wrong guesses by mediaeval theologians); the Vikings called it `Ginnunga Gap',
"the Yawning Gap". But at last men could now routinely go into it and cross it
and bring tales of what lay beyond it.
  And beyond the `Yawning Gap' an organization that had done much to get Man
into space reformed itself. Between the old exploring space tradition and later
asteroid metals control enforcenent and trading system there was conflict: NASA
had wanted to explore and publish and research, but the Companies had not wanted
more to be spent than need be on exploring for its own sake making more
accessible than could be controlled, or so much metal discovery published that
finance prices suffered. Some in authority were simply scared of the unknown:
while Man was earth-bound, the stars were merely pretty patterns in telescopes;
but now Man can go to them, the abysses of distance and fear of unknown things
afar that men could awake, oppressed their minds. For this and other reasons the
Companies for many years had suppressed the hyperspace jumper and said it was
impossible, except one undercover use - and those on the mission deserted with
it and let asteroid miners copy it, and from that much came. Many said that
NASA-type pioneering times and need for NASA were over; but still some wanted to
explore, as often is. So exploration was taken over by wild asteroid miners, and
Earth only gradually found what was happening; and, after the lost gamble of the
big attack and competing for money with the ordinary needs of maintaining an
ever more crowded Earth, ISAB was for now unwilling to venture much.
  So it happened that some ex-NASA men, relegated by ISAB to the job of going to
the Anor system to coordinate tracing ISAB men still missing after the battle,
made their own plan of undercover contacting and gathered others of their kind
and their families and by various ways got to Anor, in spacesuits packed round a
hyper jumper operator, or in assorted spacecraft, usually of the rough and ready
type such as in a loader's hold, which was pressurized for them; some travelled
in that Ilmenostian unstylistic approximation to a spaceliner, a copy of a
1940's Dakota with a hyper jumper in it and an airlock in the rear tip of its
cabin. They gathered at Ilmenost, and after the inevitable security check the
unsuited were found spacesuits and trained to use them. For some of them it was
the first time in space, and for others it was a thankful return after years
stuck at a desk. Mr.Melinitski was there, at last in a real spacesuit in space
instead of having to console himself with fiction: and, needing a space callsign
name, he took his fictional spaceship captain's name `Blast Benton' as his own;
he did not extend his fiction stories further, for he at last had enough real in
space and on alien worlds to chronicle. In the sky the alien constellations, and
the hugely enlarged reversed Pleiades like a picture in an astronomy book, gave
him a fearsome shock of exile and remoteness, but he recovered from it.
  For them it was much as for others before: as there is a limit to accuracy of
long-range hyper jumps, the first jump was not straight to the destination on
Anor but to orbit round it, and they marvelled at the alien world below them and
its single oval supercontinent stretching from pole to pole. Then again grey hid
everything, and when it cleared they were in gravity in atmosphere under a blue
sky on an airfield near Aulien. The Arbiter met them; his spacesuit was largely
unadorned, and Anor's white light shone off his oxygen cylinders. They announced
themselves and thanked him, and declared NASA with its old exploratory spirit to
be cut loose from ISAB and reestablished there and willing to help and join the
Anor system men.
  Arduous was the refounding of NASA in exile there beyond the Pleiades. Instead
of fertile Florida countryside and every modern town pleasure, alien dry scrub
risky with landmine bushes stretched into the distance. Much of the wildlife was
like nothing they had seen before, and all of it was utterly poisonous to Earth
life: no more could any of them live off wild fruit and what he shot and fished.
Housing was crude, and most food came from synthesizers. As they knew would be
from reports and tales that came to Earth, the industrial support was much
smaller than Earth's, and they had to do much for themselves that on Earth they
paid others to do: like all able-bodied people there they had to obey work and
rescue callouts and defence training when needed, and sometimes when asking for
a metal they were told where the ore quarry was and lent mining and portable
smelting kit: they remembered that in old times farmers needing clothes often
had to do every stage of making them from the sheep's backs to their own backs.
In pioneering conditions people have to do many sorts of work for themselves.
  They named a nearby area of contorted rocky hills `Orlando' in memory of a
town of fanciful buildings in Florida housing Walt Disney's characters that they
had often visited. Thankfully there were several large lakes in the area to
scuba dive in as a change from work, and by now a railway had been hacked from
Aulien through jagged spine-backed volcano-ridden mountains and across a wide
jungle-choked coastal plain to a coral reef area of the western sea. Others came
later and joined them; they put up NASA's emblem large and bold on their first
building at Aulien and on their first space base structure at Ilmenost.
  Both learned new things. Too many of the NASA men who came were older planner
and manager types and had to get used again to work and action and not letting
paperwork multiply. The Anor men had gradually got out of practise in exploring
outside Anor's asteroids and inner planets, for they, busy with exploring and
defending their their base area, had got unwilling to scatter their strength by
going elsewhere as much as might have been expected, except nearby stars and
taking visiting Earth astronomers to such often-wanted places as the Pleiades
and Aldebaran and Capella; they realized that some Anor men, like ISAB, were
getting local-minded and control-minded, and wondered whether the needs of armed
readiness to fight off repeated ISAB attacks would in the end turn the Anor men
into a duplicate of ISAB. Thus the NASA men coming started a new period of space
exploration there.
  Anor asked the NASA men for any new information about what was happening or
planned on Earth, but got little, for ISAB did not fully trust ex-NASA upper
staff. But there was suspicion that ISAB and its predecessors had planned and
perhaps still hoped to wind up as much remote human space activity as possible
and to end that involvement in remote places, ever since at the big Company
collapse some years ago an order had gone round to recall all asteroid miners
and wait for all financial dust to settle allowing a general replanning of space
matters. That order had been widely ignored, for asteroid miners had got able to
maintain themselves away from planets; the recent ISAB attack may have a part of
that plan, or of a plan to spread Earth's direct rule across the near stars.
  In the Anor system men were far fewer than on Earth and their time mattered
and kit had to last; for example, in future years titanium alloy experimental
hard articulated constant-volume spacesuits that some NASA men wore on a long
surveying star-hop in and around the Orion Nebula meant more when the men using
them for their far-travelling exploring and eagerly-awaited discoveries had dug
the titanium as ore, sweating with heavy rock-drills below the looming peaks of
the Otsonelki (Seven Teeth) on the north edge of the Aulien plain, for there was
no massive taxpayer population there to live off. But they had escaped from the
darkness of takeover by ISAB and forced retirement or relegation to dead-end
paperwork or figurehead or patrol jobs to a new day of space exploration.
  Bases and equipment were smaller than in old Earth days: in these days of
modern spacesuit and spacecraft propulsors there were no more tall hard-blasting
space shuttle launchers, and men travelled to places far further than Anor's two
moons with space kit far smaller than the leftover Saturn moon-rocket that still
lay on its side at Cape Canaveral in Florida on Earth ready for an Apollo 18
Moon mission that never flew except in fiction. These things were not now needed
as tools; but they were missed as symbols of past efforts and achievements; one
NASA man who had been a shuttle pilot soon imitated Long Tom in the Pallas-2
asteroid miner group and adorned his spacesuit chest with two bas-relief model
space shuttles, but in his case made of chromium, shining in Anor's light as his
spacesuit propulsor took him from Arda into orbit with a 30-kilogram
geostationary communication satellite strapped to his chest.
  Less expected and less welcome was an odd mixture of botany and entomology and
flamethrower drill that they had had to go through, but it was necessary, as
Melinitski (who now had his codename `Blast Benton' on his safety helmet) drove
south with others from Aulien towards the Orlando Hills. Nearly all the way a
level hard road now ran, but on the edge of the hills they had to dismount and
unload their tools and walk. Some said that their choice of names for each of
the hills looked too odd on maps; but some of the NASA men who had known the
characters commemorated at the Florida Orlando all their lives said that the
X-100's were not the only group who could raid a favourite fictional scenario
for placenames. But they had not gone for pleasure; they were making a recording
satellite to put in orbit round Karnil, and they needed cadmium for rechargeable
batteries to store solar electric power while that satellite, and others later,
were in shadow; so they, and an experienced miner to advise them, hacked and
scrambled through rocky scrub, one burdened with a flamethrower, another with a
rockdrill and a heavy backpack generator, and wondered how later to make a light
mine-truck railway from the road to the site. A name that they had allotted
light-heartedly as a relief from work had become a name of a place of work, and
in the base of a three-lobed rock pinnacle that they had named `Goofy' was a
seam of cadmium ore. And something else: they knew the leaf shape and the white
butterfly-like flowers, and as they followed their asteroid miner type remote
metal analyser/detector's signal in that narrow place there was no way round it.
  It showed no sign of the characteristic sickness showing attack on its roots
by the insect <Tetrathyrsoceros keraunorrhizae>, so there was no point leaving
it and coming back later. It was 20 feet high and 12 feet in branch spread.
Thankfully it has a very characteristic leaf and is evergreen. They measured and
took cover behind boulders. One of them shot his laser low power at a nearby
bird's nest, trying to make the sitting bird fly safely away in time, but it sat
tight. `Blast Benton' wished briefly that he had not rashly put 400 light years
between himself and people to do maths and work for him, calculated, primed his
flamethrower, set its power, aimed, and fired. The jet of burning petrol-jelly
arched over the boulder and stuck in the branches of the landmine bush, killing
all woody parts that might have grown on from scattered bits later; it was not
in seed then. Then the heat set off the natural landmines in its roots. There
was a blasting roar and a hail of stones and bits of branches and burning stuff
and the unpleasant hardwood flechettes and blades that that sort of bush grows
in its roots, and they again realized that there is no use waving treaties and
war conventions at the blind natural happenchances of evolution and geology.
  They waited for all debris to settle, then a while longer, knowing tales of
big landslides caused by landmine bush explosions; but `Goofy''s quartz-veined
sandstone bulk withstood the shock. They came out of shelter. He switched his
flamethrower off and put its nozzle in its holder across his chest. It was as it
often was in the war between Man and that natural Ardan hazard. The crater stank
of explosion and burnt vegetation. The area smelt of napalm, a substance that
before coming to Arda he had not met and certainly not expected to have to make
and then strap a pressure-tank of it on his own back; those on the good side in
his fiction scenario had not used it. This unexpected use of it reminded one of
the men who had been in an army, of a time lost in a desert when they had long
ago used all firewood and, desperate for a meal, had killed a camel and cooked
it over a mixture of napalm and dry desert sand, which burnt steadily enough for
the job; the meat tasted of petrol, but that had to be ignored. But the lethal
bush and all its roots were gone and no flying living bit of it rooted and
became another bush, and no torn body of a native browsing animal lay there for
scavengers to quarrel over. Small Ardan birds, attracted by the noise, started
pecking and scratching about for insects and worms in the disturbed soil.
  The place was now safe, so they walked on, and soon came to the ore exposure.
They unslung their tools and set to work, following the ore seam and hand
sorting the cadmium mineral from the waste until the men who were unloaded
before had a heavy packful each when Anor got near the western horizon. So far
the work had been easy; but as they or others got further in in the future they
would need more work and safety kit than merely a few wood pitprops cut from the
bushes about. They loaded their kit and ore and set off back towards the road.
  "You are under arrest in the name of ISAB!!".
  The loudhailered order and shots over their heads from bushes to their left
startled them into inaction while 23 men in armoured spacesuits propulsor
hovered out of hiding and surrounded them. The thing that they dreaded. The ISAB
emblems, serial numbers and no code or personal names, and heavy high-powered
weapons made it clear that they were seeing something that many would likely see
but few ever get away to tell of, if it turned out that not as many as hoped of
such squads would merely surrender and ask to be shipped home; they realized too
well that the flame splatter had told anything flying over that the bang had not
been caused by an animal. The scenery started to distort and go grey. That sort
of commando squad does not take prisoners unless it has to, and then only for as
long as needed.
  `Blast Benton' stumbled in surprise as a stone rolled under his foot. As he
fell, he turned round and caught his flamethrower's trigger and safety catch on
thorny twigs. His shock inactivity thus broken, he fired, and the jet of burning
liquid hit some of the attackers. Their suit armouring withstood it, and soon
space vacuum would put the flames out as they stuffed the prisoners into towed
pressure bags during hyperspace jump to a remote interrogation site. It was a
thankfully easy pickup, caught unsuited and unprepared in the open; too many
similar attempts had ended in a shootout or a dangerous in-hyperspace tug-of-war
between opposing hyper men trying to steer the same hyper-jumping bubble of
normal space; and after a raid on one apparently unwary target a similar squad
found after much wasted interrogation effort that their prisoners were all
useless due to advanced Alzheimer's Disease or other mental afflictions and that
their risky raid and dangerous escape under fire with several fatal casualties
had served only to clean out a native in-space mental incurables home.
  The napalm did little against ISAB space-commando armour; but it caught both
the squad's hyper jumper men and its heat made them take their hands off their
on-suit hyper jumpers. As the grey and distortion faded, the Ardans took cover
among rocks with such weapons as they had at the ready, and radioed for help,
saved only by the commando sergeant's order to take all alive if possible; else
the squad would have turned the flamethrower against its users by shooting its
pressure-tank open and efficiently cleaned up the rest in a minute or so in a
few accurate shots each.
  "To whoever's coming against us: we shoot this lot if you don't do what we
say!" an ISAB man radioed as nearly 100 miles away a hole in the rock opened and
fired five native jet fighters at them from a huge buried magazine. But the
planes came anyway, plus 43 propulsor-spacesuited armed Anor men who had landed
nearby for a rest and a spell in gravity and luckily had not unsuited yet. The
ISAB men knew how effective specially equipped and programmed police jet
fighters were in atmosphere against unauthorized propulsor spacemen incursions
and helirig gangs and the like, and were shocked to be unexpectedly on the
receiving end of it.
  "If you want us as `your ticket home', all you had to do was turn up at our
spaceport and we'd've shipped you home! Some time ago your Admiral Lintzford
ordered the rest of his men to surrender to us or get back to Earth.".
  "We'll take no facilities `please kindly' from you #@% deserters and space
rats! If you're NASA men like those badges say, NASA's part of ISAB now and that
makes you deserters; else you're displaying a symbol falsely. We go under our
own command, and you carry us under our orders and under our guns.".
  "Never mind!" `Blast Benton' exclaimed on his radio, "Shoot even if you must
shoot us along with them!, that's better than what they'll likely do with us.".
  "Oh, very gallant.".
  By now the ISAB hyper jumper men could use their jumpers again, but the jet
fighters were near enough to be heard and radared, and both sides now had the
missile that homed on developing hyper jump fields. They knew from overheard
native radio that some official Earth bodies were contacting Anor again, and
some had doubts about the legal consequences if they attacked groups that Earth
men were negotiating with. But those ISAB men had been trained hard to fight for
Earth ISAB authority in remote places, and for once refused to be ordered off an
unfinished job by politicians and traders who had not served one day in an armed
force. They spread out, and a wild swirling fight with dead and wounded on both
sides developed between them and the incoming Anor men in the air among the rock
peaks named after cartoon characters and on the ground below. Men with their
spacesuit propulsors shot out fell to earth, and sometimes were caught and put
on the ground safely, but sometimes not.
  The jet roar with its whining overtone approached fast: 100 miles are soon
gone at Mach 2. The flying Anor men landed to let the fighters clean up; the
fighters' onboard sentient computers, thinking far faster than a man, could
usually tell which target was on which side, but it was safer to keep out of
their way. The ISAB men were so well armoured that it took a hard shot or heavy
blast to stop each one, but the job was being got through. Another Anor man's
propulsor was shot out, and he fell far. A fighter fired an antipersonnel
missile backwards at him as it went after other targets, and he knew the fate of
accidental own-side victims of war; but the missile matched speed with him as he
fell, and did not attack him, but let him hold onto it as he could, with his
head against its lethal warhead full of blast-propelled antipersonnel bolts. His
one-sided unaerodynamic bulk strained its guidance system, but it flew level
carrying him and with nearly the last of its fuel landed him safely; and he knew
that even in confused fast action AJ-12 had recognized one of its own people.
  7 of the ISAB men packed into bullet shape and tried to `sky' quickly to
space, but a jet fighter soared after them and disposed of them. An ISAB hyper
jumper man gathered 4 others that he could quickly and jumped away to pass on
the bad news when he met more of his kind. The fighter free-fell back from its
pursuit, levelled off, and to save fuel settled on a rock peak on lookout with
its name code AJ-17 on its sides and its fleet's emblem of one of Arda's bright
northern star constellations along its wings. VTOL ability and rear-pointing
guns change much. The rest of the ISAB men landed and surrendered. The jet roar
faded as the other fighters settled nearby to add more gunpoint on the ground to
what the defenders had.
  Melinitski and many others felt the unreal feeling of sudden ending of danger.
Luckily such attacks were rare and getting rarer. This time they could look at
the lethal powerful hard-blasting streamlined bulks of the jet fighters and not
fear them, for they had his own side's emblems on. At the big ISAB attack that
he had heard of, the feared thing did come, anti-spaceman jet fighters with ISAB
emblems on, pumped out over Aulien by two big ISAB space-transports. The ISAB
men unsuited, sullen and not speaking unless they had to. AJ-13 sat silently
alert on its undercarriage, nose and guns towards them. They shivered at the
inappropriate Earth-city images raised by a hypodermic syringe pattern of stars
along each wing, although they knew where that pattern came from: they were too
wearily familiar with the Anor sky's constellations including the one that it
was a copy of in months of orbiting Anor and intermittent jumping about to try
to find what was happening and how to get to a friendly base. The Disney names
that the natives had given to the hills now jarred badly with what had happened
there, as they saw AJ-17 perched like an ominous and ill-boding crow on the hill
that they now knew was called Donald Duck. They were down and stranded, fated to
be shipped back to probable unemployment or dead-end ground job on Earth, unless
they deserted and stayed on Arda and went native as others had before.
  This was not the first time and unlikely the last that giving a place a light
pleasant name ended inappropriately. Red Bill in the Jetters, who met the NASA
men afterwards as he got out of AJ-13's cockpit, remembered reading about a part
of the Wienerwald (Vienna Woods) in Austria where there are places called the
German for Nut Village, Nut Mountain, Birdsong Mountain, pretty little names
more like a small child's reading book than the real world, as far as possible
from anything with rough associations as if a local lord's lady had disliked the
old names; but in 1683 the Turks under Kara Mustafa [and in reality: Author]
attacked Austria and beseiged Vienna hard and long, and Nussdorf (Nut Village)
among other places got fame as a place of battle despite its name when cavalry
led by Jan Sobieski king of Poland arrived and relieved the desperate seige just
in time.
  After all that Melinitski and the rest collected their cadmium ore and took it
to NASA's building in Aulien, where next day they processed it for its contained
metals and used it to make rechargeable batteries as planned. Things used up in
war or anything else unproductive have to be made by someone. Anor was near the
jagged ridges and volcano-peaks of the western mountains, and looking for
wreckage had to wait until morning, with the usual natural risks in the scrub of
the Aulien plain. Four months before, biologists there discovered a biochemical
that if sprayed on a landmine bush goes to its roots and reliably deactivates
for a while the plant's thousands of natural detonators, each with its own
trigger hair; but the chemical was scarce and takes time to work and was only
used when one of the bushes grew up where an explosion could not be allowed.
  Two days later as they were shovelling the processing waste into a workshop RD
to detoxify it - some Ardan life needs trace amounts of cadmium, but still does
not care for too much of it - another visitation came, but this time welcome.
Going out of the building they saw a two-man bubble spacecraft about twelve feet
long, powered by a spacesuit hyper jumper and a larger version of a spacesuit
propulsor. A big crowd, some in spacesuits, some in spacesuit undersuits, some
in overalls or other ground clothes, had gathered to see it come, and for a
chance to exchange news and scientific discoveries. The Jetters spaceman group
were there, including Plutey-pots; Melinitski, who had heard of him, looked
nervously at his shiny spacesuit oxygen cylinders. The two men in the spacecraft
were less concerned, as they came out, and the factory manager welcomed them.
The craft's registration and the two men's Mars pressure suits showed where it
had come from; the pilot had been to Arda before, but the passenger, who was
from the WAIA industrial area on Earth and was seeing with an unreal feeling of
alienness for the first time the planet where those who had helped his people
came from, was surprised at the manager's workshop-smelling overalls and factory
safety helmet and nothing like business office clothes, and the impression that
most people who were anything describable as managerial carried their offices
around in backpacks and were as accustomed to manual work as those under them.
  "Well, here I am." said the craft's passenger, a Mr.Ulongu, "We've all got a
lot to tell each other, I reckon. I heard of your scrap with ISAB that time, and
again just now. I've been in space before, and I've learned a fair lot of atomic
and subatomic stuff; I didn't care for the idea of having to live in a spacesuit
for weeks coming here, but I never thought I'd ride in `Spaceship Neutrino'!".
  Some of the crowd laughed, for astronomers sometimes call the neutrino
particle `Spaceship Neutrino' because unlike light and other particles it comes
undelayed out of the middles of stars and thus scientists with neutrino
detectors can tell what is happening in there just then. And the little craft's
nameplate bore the name of a Mars spaceport and its own name `Neutrino'. Things
are named after atomic particles sometimes, as is to be expected.
  "They say I may be out of this pressure suit when I'm old." its pilot said,
"The air on Mars is getting nearer and nearer to 100 millibars of oxygen, thin
like the oxygen part of up on the Andes in Peru, but we'll live on it. A lot
sooner than we used to think it'd be. There's a deep copper and nickel mine in
the Hellas hollow [on Mars] where miners have already been known to unsuit at
the bottom in the open and get away with it.".
  There had been no particular trouble on Mars, but its people were wary after
the recent events: Mars had won a violent war of independence from space trading
Company control years before there was much spaceman disobedience further away
in the asteroids, like Ireland in the 1920's when the rest of the British Empire
had held together nearly half a century longer. There were births and deaths and
marriages to report. Ilmenostians had found in captured ISAB craft something
unexpected although in books familiar, reminding them uncomfortably that Earth
could still catch up with them. A biologist handed over a boxful of CD-ROM's and
papers of new discoveries about Ardan and Karnilian wildlife and geology.
  "If you lot out here are so advanced and clever, first to make PL-props and
PSC-4's, and suchlike, when are you going to invent the total conversion
reactor?" said the Earth biologist.
  "The what?".
  "It turns matter into energy completely, energy = mass times speed of light
squared.".
  "Oh, annihilating matter with antimatter. That needs antimatter. Even if any
remote galaxies are made of antimatter, like I've seen speculations of, they're
far too far away for us to reach with any hyperspace jumper that's ever likely
to be invented. Pity: it'd be a thousand times as powerful per weight as fissile
actinide.".
  "I know about antimatter. I mean turning ordinary matter into all energy.".
  "Quite easy. Heat it. Then inside the protons and neutrons in it, the thermal
movements knock two quarks right into each other so they make an X particle or a
Z particle. Trouble is, it needs 10 to the 27th degrees to do it, 'cos an X
particle weighs 10 to the 15th times as much as a proton and making all that
mass needs a lot of energy, even though you'd get it all back and more when the
X or Z splits into an antimatter quark and a positron which then annihilate with
the proton or neutron's other quark and an electron. Not even the insides of the
biggest hottest star ever's managed that. If you wait for a proton to decay like
that by itself, the half life's about 10 to the 30th years.".
  "If it's so hard to react via the X-particle," someone said naively, "why
can't you just take a bit of space out with one of your hyper jumpers and sort
of put it back the other way up? If so, would that invert the matter in it to
antimatter and vice versa? If so, you could make antimatter reactor fuel any
time you like.".
  "Or something equally unlikely like designing a neutrino catcher. Neutrinos
are a @#$ waste of energy in reactors and it'd take ten light years thick of
solid matter to stop most of them. The only Neutrino that's any use round here's
this one these two came in. Really, the ideas some people come out with.".
  "Never mind puns and fantasy. Lets net up and pass on what we've found." said
a scientist. Some took laptop computers out of their packs. The factory manager
took two out, one with a bigger casing than most, and also a long cat o' nine
tails of computer link wire. He plugged its root into his larger computer's
COM-2 port, and passed the free ends around the others. Ulongu looked surprised:
he had seen and used computer Local Area Networks (LAN's) plenty of times, but
never one formed on the spot out in the wilds or floating in remote space with
its net server carried about among a packful of kit and tools. Neutrino's pilot
plugged one end into his little craft's onboard computer. The manager recorded
everybody's login names and plugged one link into a socket in the ground to
connect to other computers in the area; by then they were used to having to go
through net setup procedure whenever they met, something which most computer
users only have to do once in years. Ulongu decided to stay there for two or
three weeks longer.
  They met, and went their ways, another routine chance meeting; and elsewhere
others met. The ISAB squads before the big battle had arranged a time and place
of meeting, if as happened they could not be picked up by their fleet; and thus
now such of them as had survived the natural and human hazards of the area and
were still too minded enough on authority and control to go native, met in the
middle of the largest crater on the biggest moon of Anor's gas giant planet
Alkarinque, a bright object and easy to find. They met, and wondered what to do,
whether to return to Earth, or to still try to harass the Anor men, or what.
They chose a command structure among themselves, and planned.
  "Squad 4B leader reporting." said one, "We tried an action against a bunch of
them called the Typhoons, and lost 14 men. We'd hoped to capture a few men to
interrogate, but they fought back better than we thought they would. And kit
damage; we need somewhere to mend it.".
  "If we go back to Earth now, they may put us in another action fleet; or
likelier pay us off and we'll be grounded on Earth out of work, and many of you
know what it's like leaving an armed force and looking for work, unless you've
got a useful skill like electronics or aeroplane flying. I say we find a place
to set up a self-supporting remote ISAB base, really far away where this lot of
deserters won't find us. Then ISAB will thank us and may let us stay here to man
it. Then we can gradually get many and cost Earth little, until we are so strong
that Anor won't know what hit them and they're under proper control again. I
think there are enough good trained and equipped mechanics and so on here.".
  "And we become deserters. We should report back to Earth." said another.
  "To Earth, or our own remote base? We must decide. Those wild miners cost us
Mars, then the asteroids, and now likely all of space if they spread everywhere
before we can. Law, order, control! Remember! We obey orders, we talk in name
and rank and serial number, not back-street rough type nicknames. We keep to
uniform regulations, and no spacesuit ornaments except what command authorizes
for each rank and unit. We find a place and set up there so we're self
supporting. When we've made our first space-navy craft, we send one of those
craft to Earth carrying a detachment to contact ISAB command and report for duty
there. If those runaway miners can do it, we can, ISAB can boast of an
exploration deed as good as what those too much heard-of X-100's did. No more
raiding the Anor system till command says it's time to. Then while we build up
and train and arm they'll get slack in peace, and then we'll see. And that PSC-4
we've got'll be needed for transport, it's too valuable to risk in action now.".
  This was decided, in radio silence by link wires, like many remote groups do.
Scout groups jumped about, and after less time than feared they found a single
star about halfway between Aldebaran and the Hyades, and computer-generating a
random name codenamed it Itan. Its Earth-warmth planet was in a pre-Cambrian
stage with next to no free oxygen and no life on land; its continents were sand
or rock desert except where ice lay. It was very cold at nights, and fierce
sandstorms blew. Nothing living had a fossilizable shell yet. But they found
metal ores, and oil, and uranium ore. They mined, and built a crude small
nuclear power station, and later a bigger better one, and called the place Base
Langton after a squad-leader of theirs who had died in the recent minor action
near Aulien. Men explored in a cave, looking for minerals, and found in a pool
far from light a numerous community of small freshwater animals that seemed to
have no outside energy source, for on Itan there were no cave bats or the like
to fly out and eat insects and fly in and leave droppings. It seemed irrelevant,
so they were ordered away from it. They puzzled about it silently as they
laboured setting up an industrial support structure, and their command debated
how to stop the men from sliding into a workman and colonist mentality. Time
passed until those men were heard of again.
  Meanwhile Ulongu and the Pallas-2's in their locally-made long-trip spacesuits
orbiting Arda tethered to each other knew nothing of this, but wondered where
the next sudden ISAB hyper jump raid would come to try to weaken them and keep
them off balance. The emptiness around seemed no longer isolating and protecting
but a high-road for enemies, like the North Sea for Anglo-Saxon England's east
coast when Vikings learned to make ships good enough to raid across it. But Anor
men had the kit and will to raid also if they had to, and Earth and ISAB knew
that. So they were left alone, and both sides and Earth's public preferred their
rulers to leave alone, after the shock of a real space battle when they had been
thankful that such things were safely remote in the pages of exciting fiction.
  Among them, Red Scorpion woke from yet another tangled jangled dream of being
many different people all of who met unpleasant ends in close succession, and
was glad to suck from his spacesuit's food synthesizer and stretch and get to
work. What had happened to him? He hardly ever had that sort of dream before his
scrape with Fletcher Mining's trick loader near the Sun's asteroid Vesta that
time. He did not care much either for where his group was due to explore next: a
large rectangular depression in the south edge of the dreaded Kumnearen, the dry
bed of a small ocean which had been cut off from the sea long ago. Their work
site was two and a half miles below sea level but dry to the sunlight except for
rare flash floods when summer rain in the Sornoronti (Eagle Mountains) to the
southwest was unusually heavy. This rain drained in through massive volcanic ash
outpourings and washed out of it natural soda and potash and accumulated it deep
and ancient in the hot hollow. But no Ardan analogue of heat-loving algae and
brine shrimps came there, and nothing flew in to feed there. Long Tom remembered
long ago seeing millions of flamingos feeding in the African Rift Valley soda
lakes, and the green around, and longed for Earth briefly as he thought of the
hot dead hollow where they would be surveying for minerals. The exploring
X-100's had used Tolkien's languages to name many Anor system places and space
objects, but not that place: men called it the Devil's Canister, after the
canisters filled with sodalime or the like which are in many breathing sets to
absorb exhaled carbon dioxide. At the right time they activated their spacesuit
propulsors to take them out of orbit and down to the place.
  As he went into atmosphere flying configuration horizontal with spacesuit
wings fitted and knees and hips calipered straight for streamlining, he wondered
what ever had led him from his father's workshop in Birmingham in England to
many sorts of jobs here and there including a spell as a docker in Swansea in
Wales and ending up looking like a cross between an aeroplane and a fighter
pilot and a flying sewage works orbiting an alien planet among men equipped the
same. Once they had swooped down like this to his old home in Birmingham, and,
finding the area bullied by tinkers and tramps who nobody in authority seemed to
want to control, had been only just persuaded not to shoot the lot; but instead
they had taken all the vagrants of both sorts into space, and reprocessing them
into useful space or Arda workmen had been long and hard.
  One of them was there, and bore the result of his attitude when the spacemen
asked him for his name: `Noddy' he had said, in low street-rough cheek, and as
Noddy he had been listed and it was still on his helmet forehead, although he
regretted it and the day he had moved to that doss near Red Scorpion's father's.
But he would not have fitted back in his old life easily and he knew it: his low
mentality had quickly turned to complete spacesuit dependence even when in
atmosphere, although he knew little of space travel except to set his propulsor
controls as his group's navigator Blue Shark said. He had drifted away from
school and delayed and delayed looking for a job until it was too late, until at
last 400 light years from home he was forced painfully and very late to get used
to steady fulltime work. The childish name jarred among the exotic rough names
on many of the other men's helmets, and some of the men wondered why they had to
have such a type with them; but Red Scorpion all too well remembered the thefts
and ordeal his parents and their neighbours had gone through, and the threats
what would happen if anyone called the police, and having to hide or bury
valuables, and was still determined to make the culprits pay and not merely
chase them away and let them make trouble somewhere else.
  The group descended through the atmosphere, past a flock of birds migrating in
high cool air irrelevantly high above the hot wilderness, over the advancing
front of a sandstorm, down and down into the dry hot depths where long ago the
waves had rolled two miles overhead and hunting sea-creatures never saw light
except from luminous organisms, un-calipered their legs and turned upright, and
landed.
  They folded their wings, and kept their suits sealed sheltering among rocks
until the storm blew over and the stinging driven soda dust settled. Noddy was
on a planet for the first time in a very long time, and he did not like it. All
the places of human comfort he had flown over, and his group had to land here.
Ulongu crouching next to him was thankful that he could seal his suit outside
pack securely from inside his suit, and still in some culture shock at the alien
world. Noddy, after a long spell crossing emptiness in a spacesuit that he had
never asked to be stuffed into and nothing to see but stars and the same group
of spacemen, merely hated hot heavy places where there was nothing to pick over
and sell and nowhere to buy or cadge drink but plenty of manual work waiting and
still no chance of getting away and nowhere to go if he did. At least by now he
could understand most asteroid miner jargon. The standard Anor system long-trip
spacesuit with its food and water and oxygen regenerating and recycling systems
is very foolproof when in its maximum safety mode. They kept their suits sealed
and did not breathe the desert air, as that would have cost them far too much
body fluid, as even Noddy had had drilled into him by then. At least it was not
Urnunie, the salt-glaring main floor plain of Kumnearen, half a mile deeper.
  "My suit cooler's working as hard as if I was at Elemmire [Anor's equivalent
of Mercury]. Where the #%$ are we gonna find to sleep?" Blue Shark complained.
  The wind remained hard northwest. Above them pelting rain from a rare shower
all evaporated long before it reached the ground. They dug sleeping hollows in a
sheltered patch of sand, and slept in their spacesuits as they waited for the
morning.
  When they awoke the stars shone and the air was clear. The Pleiades cluster,
reversed and as big as Earth's sky's Orion, lit the ground; many of its stars
were as bright as Ulongu remembered Venus as being. Aldebaran was above the
eastern hills. Beside it the huge comet Altaloke was returning, still distant
and looking small, but later in months to come it would at times cover much of
the sky. Ulongu took a booklet out of his spacesuit outside pack and tried to
identify the Anor sky constellations. The X-100's, first men to Anor, had named
them in their usual choice of language, but others had insisted on English, and
so many Ardan and Ilmenostian sky maps followed.
  At least Anor system settlers had one established constellation and star name
set, and were spared what happened later on a planet a long way from Anor that
men later settled and named simply `New Earth'. There the settlers' official
astronomy committee refused constellations but divided the sky along coordinate
lines into areas lettered along and numbered down; but popular astronomy and
people navigating or finding time or date by the stars wanted constellations,
and used them despite official astronomical rules that observations however good
that used constellations were to be rejected. Various religious and other bodies
invented sets, which finally had to be listed and cross-correlated. Men adapted
as they sought fit: for example, one coastal sailing and fishing community,
lacking anything better to name navigational stars by, for a long time used the
`Childish-A' constellation set crudely adultified with unprintable alterations.
A set invented hurriedly at a sea-navigation school finally won, and New Earth's
fleet of passenger spacecraft were named after them - and when its flagship on
their first scheduled flight came to Cape Canaveral spaceport on Earth and a
crowd waiting, it bore the name `Alcapone'. The one-word spelling, and the
accompanying picture of a quarryman with a large rockdrill overlain by the named
constellation's star pattern, merely emphasized the wrongness.
  It was too late to rename the constellation or the ship. If whoever at the Nav
School with an over-fascination with old gangster stories, taking the first name
that came into his head for that star pattern (which undeniably did look like a
man with a big gun), had chosen another such man's name, people would have asked
who the man commemmorated was, and the matter would been put right; but starting
with `Al-' it went unnoticed among many Arabic star names starting with `Al-'
meaning "The", some transplanted from old Earth's sky, some given new by men
treating Arabic as the right language for star names like Latin and Greek for
constellation names, for most men there were far too busy with settling a new
world to keep much track of bad men of ol