Starman Jones by Robert A. Heinlein Read Free Book Online Page B

a restaurant. Sam led him on through the restaurant, through the kitchen, down a passage off which there were card rooms, and ended in a smaller, less pretentious dining room; Sam picked a table in a corner. An enormous Samoan shuffled up, dragging one leg. Sam nodded, “Howdy, Percy.” He turned to Max. “A drink first?”
    “Uh, I guess not.”
    “Smart lad. Lay off the stuff. Irish for me, Percy, and we’ll both have whatever you had for lunch.” The Samoan waited silently. Sam shrugged and laid money on the table, Percy scooped it up.
    Max objected, “But I was going to pay.”
    “You can pay for the lunch. Percy owns the place,” he added. “He’s offensively rich, but he didn’t get that way by trusting the likes of me. Now tell me about yourself, old son. How you got here? How you made out with the astrogators…everything. Did they kill the fatted calf?”
    “Well, no.” There seemed to be no reason not to tell Sam and he found that he wanted to talk. Sam nodded at the end.
    “About what I had guessed. Any plans now?”
    “No. I don’t know what to do now, Sam.”
    “Hmm…it’s an ill wind that has no turning. Eat your lunch and let me think.”
    Later he added, “Max, what do you want to do?”
    “Well… I wanted to be an astrogator…”
    “That’s out.”
    “I know.”
    “Tell me, did you want to be an astrogator and nothing else, or did you simply want to go into space?”
    “Why, I guess I never thought about it any other way.”
    “Well, think about it.”
    Max did so. “I want to go to space. If I can’t go as an astrogator, I want to go anyhow. But I don’t see how. The Astrogators’ Guild is the only one I stood a chance for.”
    “There are ways.”
    “Huh? Do you mean put in for emigration?”
    Sam shook his head. “It costs more than you could save to go to one of the desirable colonies—and the ones they give you free rides to I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemies.”
    “Then what do you mean?”
    Sam hesitated. “There are ways to wangle it, old son—if you do what I say. This uncle of yours—you were around him a lot?”
    “Why, sure.”
    “Talked about space with you?”
    “Certainly. That’s all we talked about.”
    “Hmm…how well do you know the patter?”

5
“…YOUR MONEY AND MY KNOW-HOW…”
    The patter?” Max looked puzzled. “I suppose I know what everybody knows.”
    “Where’s the worry hole?”
    “Huh? That’s the control room.”
    “If the cheater wants a corpse, where does he find it?”
    Max looked amused. “That’s just stuff from SV serials, nobody talks like that aboard ship. The cook is the cook, and if he wanted a side of beef, he’d go to the reefer for it.”
    “How do you tell a ‘beast’ from an animal?”
    “Why, a ‘beast’ is a passenger, but an animal is just an animal, I guess.”
    “Suppose you were on a ship for Mars and they announced that the power plant had gone blooie and the ship was going to spiral into the Sun? What would you think?”
    “I’d think somebody was trying to scare me. In the first place, you wouldn’t be ‘on’ a ship—‘in’ is the right word. Second, a spiral isn’t one of the possible orbits. And third, if a ship was headed for Mars from Earth, it couldn’t fall into the Sun; the orbit would be incompatible.”
    “Suppose you were part of a ship’s crew in a strange port and you wanted to go out and look the place over. How would you go about asking the captain for permission?”
    “Why, I wouldn’t.”
    “You’d just jump ship?”
    “Let me finish. If I wanted to hit dirt, I’d ask the first officer; the captain doesn’t bother with such things. If the ship was big enough, I’d have to ask my department head first.” Max sat up and held Sam’s eye. “Sam—you’ve been spaceside. Haven’t you?”
    “What gave you that notion, kid?”
    “What’s your guild?”
    “Stow it, Max. Ask me no questions and I’ll sell you no pigs in a poke. Maybe I’ve studied