Coogan winked at him. “You’re not just kiddin’, friend. We’re on our way out to a system that looks pretty promising. Old Sainte Marie’s in a position to declare another dividend if it pays off.” He rubbed his thumb and forefinger together. “And how I do enjoy those dividends! Do a good job, lad. Do a bang-up job. Baby needs new shoes.”
“I don’t follow you.”
“Buddy, I got half of my pay sunk into company stock. So do the rest of these guys. Couple years more, and I can get off this barge, settle down, and just cash checks every quarter for the rest of my life. And laugh like a fool every time I hear about you birds goin’ out to earn me some more.”
Imbry hadn’t known what to make of it, at first. He’d mumbled an answer of some kind. But, listening to the other men talking—Petrick, with the alcohol puffing out on his breath; Kenton, making grandiose plans; Maguire, sneering coldly; Jusek, singlemindedly sharpening his bush knife—he’d gradually realized Coogan wasn’t an exception in this crew of depraved, vicious fakes. Listening to them talk about the Corporation itself, he’d realized, too, that the “pioneers of civilization” line was something reserved for the bought-and-paid-for write-ups only. He wasn’t dewy-eyed. He didn’t expect the Corporation to be in business for its health. But neither had he expected it to be totally cynical and grasping, completely indifferent to whether anyone ever settled the areas it skimmed of their first fruits.
He learned, in a shatteringly short time, just what the contact crew men thought of each other, of the Corporation, and of humanity. They carped at, gossiped about, and despised each other. They took the Corporation’s stock as part of their pay, and exploited all the more ruthlessly for it. They jockeyed for favored assignments, brought back as “souvenirs” anything valuable and sufficiently portable on the worlds they visited, and cordially hated the crews of all the rival mother ships. They weren’t pioneers—they were looters, squabbling among themselves for the biggest share, and they made Imbry’s stomach turn.
They were even worse than most of the TSN officers and men he’d known.
“Imbry.”
He looked up. Lindenhoff was standing, arms akimbo, under the schematic at the head of the briefing room.
“Yes?” Imbry answered tightly.
“You take II. It’s a rain-forest world. Humanoid inhabited.”
“I’ve studied the surveys.”
Lindenhoff’s heavy mouth twitched. “I hope so. You’re going alone. There’s nothing the natives can do to you that you won’t be able to handle. Conversely, there’s nothing much of any value on the planet. You’ll contact the natives and try to get them started on some kind of civilization. You’ll explain what the Terran Union is, and the advantages of trade. They ought to be able to grow some luxury agricultural products. See how they’d respond toward developing a technology. If Coogan turns up some industrial ores on IV, they’d make a good market, in time. That’s about the general idea. Nobody expects you to accomplish much—just push ’em in the right direction. Take two weeks. All straight?”
“Yes.” Imbry felt his jaws tightening. Something for nothing, again. First the Corporation developed a market, then it sold it the ores it found on a neighboring world.
No, he wasn’t angry about having been given an assignment that couldn’t go wrong and that wouldn’t matter much if it did. He was quite happy about it, because he intended to do as little for the Corporation as he could.
“All right, that’s about it, boys,” Lindenhoff finished up. He stepped off the platform and the lights above the schematic went out. “You might as well draw your equipment and get started. The quicker it all gets done, the quicker we’ll get paid.”
Coogan slapped him on the back as they walked out on the flight deck. “Remember what I said,” he chuckled. “If there’s any ambition in the gooks at all, shove it hard. Me, I’m going to be looking mighty hard for something to sell ’em.”
“Yeah, sure!” Imbry snapped.
Coogan looked at him wide-eyed. “What’s eating you, boy?”
Imbry took a deep breath. “You’re eating me, Coogan. You and the rest of the setup.” He stopped and glared tensely at Coogan. “I signed a contract. I’ll do what I’m obligated to. But I’m getting off this ship when I come back, and if I ever hear about you birds again, I’ll spit on the sidewalk when I do.”
Coogan reddened. He took a step forward, then caught himself and dropped his hands. He shook his head. “Imbry, I’ve been watching you go sour for the last week. All right, that’s the breaks. Old Smiley made a mistake. It’s not the first time—and you could have fooled me, too, at first. What’s your gripe?”
“What d’you think it is? How about Lindenhoff’s giving you Petrick for a partner?”
Coogan shook his head again, perplexed. “I don’t follow you. He’s a geologist, isn’t he?”
Imbry stared at him in astonishment. “You don’t follow me?” Coogan was the one who’d told him about Petrick’s drinking. He remembered the patronizing lift to Coogan’s lip as he looked across the lounge at the white-faced, muddy-eyed man walking unsteadily through the room.
“Let’s move along,” Lindenhoff said from behind them.
Imbry half turned. He looked down at the Assignment Officer in surprise. He hadn’t heard the man coming. Neither had Coogan. Coogan nodded quickly.
“Just going, Lindy.” Throwing another baffled glance at Imbry, he trotted across the deck toward his sub-ship, where Petrick was standing and waiting.
“Go on, son,” Lindenhoff said. “You’re holding up the show.”
Imbry felt the knotted tension straining at his throat. He snatched up his pack.
“All right,” he said harshly. He strode over to his ship, skirting out of the way of the little trucks that were humming back and forth around the ships, carrying supplies and maintenance crewmen. The flight deck echoed back to the clangs of slammed access hatches, the crash of a dropped wrench, and the soft whir of truck motors. Maintenance men were running back and forth, completing final checks, and armorers struggled with the heavy belts of ammunition being loaded into the guns on Jusek’s ship. In the harsh glare of work lights, Imbry climbed up through his hatch, slammed it shut, and got up into his control compartment.
The ship was a slightly converted model of the standard TSN carrier scout.
He fingered the controls distastefully. Grimacing, he jacked in his communication leads and contacted the tower for a check. Then he set up his flight plan in the ballistic computer, interlocked his AutoNav, and sat back, waiting.
Lindenhoff and his fearsome scar. Souvenir of danger on a frontier world? Badge of courage? Symbol of intrepidness?
Actually, he’d gotten it when a piece of scaffolding fell on him during a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, well before he ever came aboard the Saint Marie.
The flight deck cleared. Imbry set his ship’s circulators. The flight-deck alarm blasted into life.
The deck canopy slid aside, and the flight deck’s air billowed out into space. Imbry energized his main drive.
“Imbry clear for launch.”
“Check, Imbry. Launch in ten.”
He counted down, braced back against his couch. The catapult rammed him up off the deck, and he fired his engines. He rose high above the Sainte Marie, hovering, and then the ship nosed down and he trailed a wake of fire across the spangled night, in toward the foreign sun.
Almost from pole to pole, World II was the deep, lush color of rain-forest vegetation. Only at the higher latitudes was it interspersed with the surging brown-green of prairie grass and bush country, tapering into something like a temperate ecology at the very “top” and “bottom” of the planet. Where there was no land, there was the deeper, bluer, green of the sea. And on the sea, again, the green of islands.