"Don't take it so hard," he said unhappily. "It's not such a bad place. I'll have them take your personal stuff to the Hamilton House and the bureau stuff here. It's the only decent hotel in town except the Phoenix and that's kind of high—" He saw that I didn't like him jumping to such accurate conclusions about my pay check and beat it with an apologetic grimace of a smile.
The ethertype went brrp again and said "GB FRB CU LTR" "Good-by, Frostbite. See you later." There must have been many days when old Kennedy was too sick or too sick at heart to rewrite pieces from the lone client. Then the machine began beating out news items which I'd tear off eventually and run over to the Phoenix.
"Okay, sweetheart," I told the clattering printer. "You'll get copy from Frostbite. You'll get copy that'll make the whole damned ISN sit up and take notice—" and I went on kidding myself in that vein for a couple of minutes but it went dry very soon.
Good God, but they've got me! I thought. If I'm no good on the job they'll keep me here because there's nothing lower. And if I'm good on the job they'll keep me here because I'm good at it Not a chance in a trillion to do anything that'll get noticed—just plain stuck on a crummy planet with a crummy political machine that'll never make news in a million years!
I yanked down Kennedy's library—"YOUR FUTURE ON FROSTBITE,"
which was a C. of C. recruiting pamphlet, "MANUAL OF ETHERTYPE
MAINTENANCE AND REPAIR," an ISN house handbook and "THE
UNITED PLANETS ORGANIZATION SECRETARIAT COMMITTEE
INTERIM REPORT ON HABIT-FORMING DRUGS IN INTERPLANETARY
COMMERCE," a grey-backed UP monograph that got to Frostbite God knew how. Maybe Kennedy had planned to switch from home brew to something that would kill him quicker.
The Chamber of Commerce job gave a thumbnail sketch of my new home. Frostbite had been colonized about five generations ago for the usual reason. Somebody had smelled money. A trading company planted a power reactor—still going strong—at the South Pole in exchange for choice tracts of land which they!d sold off to homesteaders, all from Earth and Earth-colonized planets. In fine print the pamphlet gave lip service to the UP ideal of interspecific brotherhood, but— So Frostbite, in typical hick fashion, thought only genus homo was good enough for its sacred soil and that all non-human species were more or less alarming monsters.
I looked at that editorial-page cartoon in the Phoenix again and really noticed this time that there were Sirians, Venus-ians, Martians, Lyrans, and other non-human beings jammed into the jetbus, and that they were made to look sinister. On my first glance, I'd taken them in casually, the way you would on Earth or Mars or Vega's Quembrill, but here they were, supposed to scare me stiff and I was supposed to go around saying, "Now, don't get me wrong, some of my best friends are Martians, but—"
Back to the pamphlet The trading company suddenly dropped out of the chronology. By reading between the lines I could figure out that it was one of the outfits which had overextended itself planting colonies so it could have a monopoly hauling to and from the new centers. A lot of them had gone smash when the Greenhough Effect took interstellar flight out of the exclusive hands of the supergiant corporations and put it in the reach of medium-sized operators like the rusty-bucket line that had hauled in me, the yaks, and the ten-penny nails.
In a constitutional convention two generations back the colonists had set up a world government of the standard type, with a president, a, unicameral house, and a three-step hierarchy of courts. They'd adopted the United Planets model code of laws except for the bill of rights—to keep the slimy extra-terrestrials out—with no thanks to the UP.
And that was it, except for the paean of praise to the independent farmer, the backbone of his planet, beholden to no man, etc.
I pawed through the ethertype handbook. The introduction told me that the perfection of instantaneous transmission had opened the farthest planets to the Interstellar News Service, which I knew; that it was knitting the colonized universe together with bonds of understanding, which I doubted; and that it was a boon to all human and non-human intelligences, which I thought was a bare-faced lie. The rest of it was
"see Fig. 76 3b," "Wire 944 will slip easily through orifice 459," "if Knob 545 still refuses to turn, take Wrench 31 and gently, without forcing—"
Nothing I couldn't handle.
The ethertype was beating out:
FARM—NOTE FROSTBITE
NOME, ALASKA, EARTH—ISN—HOUSEWIVES OF THE COLDER FARM
PLANETS WOULD DO WELL TO TAKE A LEAF FROM THE BOOK OF
THE PRIMITIVE AMERINDIAN SEAMSTRESS. SO SAYS PROFESSOR OF
DOMESTIC SCIENCE MADGE MCGUINESS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF
NOME'S SCHOOL OF LOW-TEMPERATURE AGRONOMY. THE INDIAN
MAID BY SEWING LONG, NARROW STRIPS OF FUR AND BASKET-WEAVING THEM INTO A BLANKET TURNED OUT COVERINGS WITH
TWICE THE WARMTH AND HALF THE WEIGHT OF FUR ROBES SIMPLY
SEWED EDGE TO EDGE—
That was my darling, with her incurable weakness for quote leads and the unspeakable "so says." Ellie Masters, I thought, you're a lousy writer but I love you and I'd like to wring your neck for helping McGillicuddy con me into this. "Dig up all sorts of cute feature stories," you told me and you made it sound sensible. Better I should be under the table at Blogri's with a hangover and sawdust in my hair than writing little by-liners about seventeen tasty recipes for yak manure, which is all that's ever going to come out of this Godforsaken planet
Rat-Face barged in without knocking; a moronic-looking boy was with him toting the box of ethertype spare parts.
"Just set-it anywhere," I said. "Thanks for getting it right over here. Uh, Joe, isn't it?—Joe, where could I get me a parka like that? I like those lines. Real mink?"
It was the one way to his heart. "You betcha. Only plaid mink lining on Frostbite. Ya notice the lapels? Look!" He turned them forward and showed me useless little hidden pockets with zippers that looked like gold.
"I can see you're a man with taste."
"Yeah. Not like some of these bums. If a man's Collector of the Port he's got a position to live up to. Look, I hope ya didn't get me wrong there, at the field. Nobody told me you were coming. If you're right with the Phoenix you're right with the Organization. If you're right with the Organization, you're right with Joe Downing. I'm regular."
He said that last word the way a new bishop might say: "I am consecrated."
"Glad to hear that. Joe, when could I get a chance to meet some of the other regular Boys?"
"Ya wanna get In, huh?" he asked shrewdly. "There's been guys here a lot longer than you, Spencer."
"In, Out," I shrugged. "I want to play it smart. It won't do me any harm."
He barked with laughter. "Not a bit," he said. "Old man Kennedy didn't see it that way. You'll get along here. Keep ya nose clean and we'll see about The Boys." He beckoned the loutish porter and left me to my musings.
That little rat had killed his man, I thought—but where, why, and for whom?
I went out into the little corridor and walked into the "ride-up-and-save" parka emporium that shared the second floor with me. Leon Portwanger, said the sign on the door. He was a fat old man sitting cross-legged, peering through bulging shell-rimmed glasses at his needle as it flashed through fur.
"Mr. Portwanger? I'm the new ISN man, Sam Spencer."
"So?" he grunted, not looking up.
"I guess you knew Kennedy pretty well."
"Never. Never."
"But he was right in front there—"
"Never," grunted the old man. He stuck himself with the needle, swore, and put his finger in his mouth. "Now see what you made me do?" he said angrily and indistinctly around the finger. "You shouldn't bother me when I'm working. Can't you see when a man's working?"
"I'm sorry," I said, and went back into the newsroom. A man as old as Leon, tailoring as long as Lepn, didn't stick himself. He didn't even wear a thimble—the forefinger was calloused enough to be a thimble itself.