John Fitzgerald Brennan was very much the average Belter. Forty-five years of age. Two daughters — Estelle and Jennifer — by the same woman, Charlotte Leigh Wiggs, a professional farming machine repairwoman in Confinement. Brennan had the beginnings of a nice retirement fund, though he’d drained it twice for trust funds for his children. He had twice lost loads of radioactive ore to the goldskins. Once would have been typical. Belters laugh at inept smugglers, but a man who has never been caught may be suspected of never having tried. No guts.
Suit design: The Madonna of Port Lligat. Dali. Nick frowned. Miners sometimes lost their grip on reality, out there. But Brennan was alive and fairly well-off on his own earnings, and he’d never had an accident.
Twenty years ago he’d worked with a crew mining molten tin on Mercury. Mercury was rich with valuable nonferrous elements, though the sun’s magnetic field made special ships necessary; a solar storm could pick up a metal ship and drop it miles away. Brennan had been competent, and he’d made good money, but he’d quit after ten months and never worked with a crew again. Apparently he didn’t like working with others.
Why had he let the Outsider catch him?
Hell, Nick would have done the same. The Outsider was here in the system; somebody had to meet him. Runrung would have been an admission that Brennan couldn’t handle such a meeting.
His family wouldn’t have stopped him. They were Belters; they could take care of themselves.
But I wish he’d run, Nick thought. His fingers beat a nervous tattoo on his desk.
Brennan was all alone in a small space.
It had been a hairy, scary ride. The Outsider had jumped into space with a balloonful of Brennan, balanced itself against his mass and used its reaction pistol. They had coasted for twenty minutes. Brennan had been near suffocation before they reached the trailing pod.
He remembered the alien touching a flat-nosed tool to the hull, then pulling them both through a viscous surface that looked like metal from both sides. The alien had unzipped the balloon, turned and jumped and vanished through the wall while Brennan was still tumbling helplessly in air.
The air tasted like the cabin air, though the peculiar scent was much stronger. Brennan drew it in in great rarefied gasps. The Outsider had left the balloon behind. It floated toward him like a translucent ghost, menacing and inviting, and Brennan began to laugh, a painful sound, almost like sobbing.
He began to look around him.
The light was greener than the sunlight tubes he was used to. The only clear space was the space he floated in, as roomy as the lifesystem of his singleship. On his right were a number of squarish crates whose material was almost wood, certainly a plant of some kind. To his left, a massive rectangular solid with a lid, almost like a big deep freeze. Above and around him, the curved wall.
So he’d been right. This was a cargo hold. But half of the space in this teardrop-shaped hold was still locked off from him.
And all through the air, a peculiar scent, like an unfamiliar perfume. The smell in the lifesystem had been an animal smell, the smell of the Outsider. This was different.
Below him, behind a net of coarse weave, were things that looked like yellow roots. They occupied most of what Brennan could see of the cargo hold. Brennan jumped down at them, wrapped his fingers in the net to bring his eyes closer.
The smell became hugely more intense. He’d never smelled, imagined, dreamed anything like it.
They still looked like pale yellow roots: a cross between a sweet potato and a peeled piece of the root of a small tree. They were squat and wide and fibrous, pointed at one end and knife-flattened at the other. Brennan reached through the net, got a two-finger grip on one, tried to pull it through the net and couldn’t.
He’d had breakfast just before the Outsider pulled alongside. Yet, with no warning grumblings in his belly, suddenly he was ravenously hungry. His lips skinned back from teeth and gums. He stabbed his fingers through the net, grasped for the roots. For minutes he tried to pull one through holes that were just too small. He tore at the net, raging. The net was stronger than human flesh; it would not tear, though fingernails did. He screamed his frustration. The scream brought him to his senses.
Suppose he did get one out? What then?
EAT IT! His mouth ran saliva.
It would kill him. An alien plant from an alien world, a plant that an alien species probably saw as food. He should be thinking of a way out of here!
Yet his fingers were still tearing at the net. Brennan kicked himself away. He was hungry. The fragments of his suit were gone, left behind in the Outsider’s cabin, including the water and food-syrup nipples in his helmet. Was there water in here? Could he trust it? Would the Outsider guess that he had a use for partially burnt hydrogen?
What would he do for food?
He had to get out of here.
The plastic bag. He fielded it from the air and examined it. He found out how to seal and unseal it — from the outside. Wonderful. Wait — yes! He could turn the bag inside out, seal it from the inside. Then what?
He couldn’t move around in that plastic bag. No hands. Even in his own suit it would have been risky, jumping across eight miles of space without a backpac. He couldn’t get through the wall anyway.
He had to distract his stomach somehow.
So. Why were the contents of this hold so valuable?
How could they be worth more than the pilot, who was needed to get them to where they were going?
Might as well see what else is here.
The rectangular solid was a glossy, temperatureless material. Brennan found the handle easily enough, but he couldn’t budge it. Then the smell of the roots made a concerted attack on his hunger, and he yelled and pulled with all the strength of killing rage. The handle jarred open. It was built for Outsider strength.
The box was filled with seeds, large seeds like almonds, frozen in a matrix of frost, bitterly cold. He wrenched one loose with numbing fingers. The air about him was turning the color of cigarette smoke when he closed the lid.
He put the seed in his mouth, warmed it with saliva. It had no taste; it was merely cold, and then not even that. He spit it out.
So. Green light and strange, rich-smelling air. But not too thin, not too strange; and the light was cool and refreshing.
If Brennan liked the Outsider’s lifesystem, the Outsider would like Earth. He had brought a crop to plant, too. Seeds, roots, and… what?
Brennan kicked across the clear space to the stack of crates. Not all the strength of his back and legs would tear a crate loose from the wall. Contact cement? But a lid came up with great reluctance and a creaking noise. Sure enough, it had been glued down; the wood itself had torn away. Brennan wondered what strange plant had produced it.
Inside was a sealed plastic bag. Plastic? It looked and felt like a strong commercial sandwich wrap gone crinkly with age. What was inside felt like fine dust packed nearly solid. It was dark through the plastic.
Brennan floated near the crates, one hand gripping the torn lid. He wondered.
An autopilot, of course. The Outsider was only backup for the autopilot: it didn’t matter what happened to him, he was only a safety device. The autopilot would get this crop to where it was going.
To Earth? But a crop meant other Outsiders, following.
He had to warn Earth.
Right. Good thinking. How?
Brennan laughed at himself. Was ever a man so completely trapped? The Outsider had him. Brennan, a Belter and a free man, had allowed himself to become property. His laughter died into despair.
Despair was a mistake. The smell of the roots had been waiting to pounce.