I slugged him on the shoulder as we arrived at the captain’s door and I knocked before he could say anything else.
The captain acknowledged our knock with a single, terse word from the other side of the door, “Come.”
When we entered the cabin, we found her seated at her desk. We stood in the approved handbook fashion and I did the honors. “Carstairs and Wang reporting as ordered, sar.”
“Thank you for coming, gentlemen. Please, sit.” She nodded toward two chairs. “Make yourselves comfortable and tell me how the enterprise is fairing.”
I gave my recap and Pip gave his. We tried to be brief and succinct. When we finished she looked back and forth between the two of us.
“You’ll have enough to sell for the rest of our stay, then?” she asked.
Pip smiled. “It looks that way, Captain. Although it really depends if the pace can be repeated, and how many of the crew have goods to sell.”
“Of course.”
Pip grinned. “If we sell everything we have before we leave, I don’t think I’ll mind.”
The captain chuckled. “No doubt.” She turned serious. “Now, about this reimbursement to the ship?”
Pip glanced at me before going on. “Well, Captain, this isn’t, strictly speaking, ship’s business…”
She nodded. “Go on.”
“While it’s not a lot of creds in the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t seem like a ship’s expense.”
I nodded. “Yes, Captain, I agree with him. I appreciate…we appreciate…the opportunity to sell our stuff and help the crew, but-”
Pip finished for me, “Well, actually, we had no idea what the right thing was, so we just split the cost to reimburse the ship.”
“Who is we?” The captain looked back and forth between us.
“Pip and I, Captain.”
“So you two are underwriting this, and the rest of the crew can just take advantage of you?”
Pip and I glanced at each other before he answered, “Well, I don’t know that we thought of it that way, but fundamentally, yes, Captain.”
She nodded. “Very altruistic of you- and also extremely short sighted.”
Pip looked startled. “Captain?”
“If this little hobby of yours takes off, the crew will be selling hundreds, if not thousands of creds in your booth. The booth you two will be paying good creds for.”
We shrugged almost in unison. Pip answered, “True, Captain, but we’ll benefit as well. The overhead is low and fixed. The cost doesn’t go up with more sales.”
She nodded. “That’s true, but I don’t think you’ve thought this through. Are you going to use up your personal mass allotments for the materials needed in the booth? Are you planning to continue this beyond Margary? Will you both use up all your liberty time for every port we visit?”
Pip started to object, but I could see where the captain was heading so I spoke first, “You’re right, sar, we haven’t considered these things. With your permission, we’ll finish Margary the way we’ve started, and we’ll have five weeks to St. Cloud to figure out a better plan. Can we come back after we’ve had a chance to put our heads together in the Deep Dark?”
The captain nodded. “Not a bad approach at all, Mr. Wang. Permission granted. Any time you want to talk with me about this, please bip me for an appointment. Anything else?”
Pip and I shared a glance before we both said, “No, sar.”
She smiled. “Very well then, gentlemen. Dismissed.”
As we made our escape down the passage, Pip turned to me. “She never did say what she was going to do about the forty creds for the booth rental.”
I shrugged. “It’s probably coming out of petty cash. If regs say we can’t rent the booth, then it will probably go on the books as a ship’s expense.”
He nodded as we continued down the passage. “Yeah, I can see that, but technically it’s not rented by the ship.”
I remembered then where the reservation confirmation had come from. “What is the McKendrick Mercantile Cooperative?”
He shrugged. “I thought I knew, but I’m not so sure now.”
“I just remembered something else odd.”
He looked over at me but we didn’t stop walking.
“When we came back aboard and made our mass adjustments, the banner was pretty heavy. I wondered where it would be charged…you, me, or Bev.”
“Where’d it come from?”
“Rhon had the watch this morning and said it came with the captain’s compliments.”
“So it was charged back to her?”
“No, it was charged to Lois McKendrick,” I answered.
“You mean the ship?”
I shook my head. “No, ship’s gear gets tagged as ship on the logs. This was the name, Lois McKendrick.”
Pip thought for a tick before speaking, “But…she’s dead, isn’t she?”
I slugged him on the shoulder. “Dead or not, she’s not a member of the crew, ya goof.”
We didn’t say any more until we’d made it to the gym for our nightly work out. I was in a fog from the exhaustion of the long day at the flea market and the confusing evening that followed. I wanted to run a few laps, steam my sore muscles in the sauna, and then take a cold shower to forget about how that belt had looked strapped low around Bev’s hips.
When I got back to my bunk, I started thinking about Lois McKendrick again. I remembered the captain’s comments about a proud tradition and the way her fingers had stroked the fabric of the banner under our trade goods. I took out my tablet and pulled up the ship’s records. Sure enough, I found an entry on the history from the ship’s origin. It was built in a Manchester yard over in the New Hebrides Quadrant. The ship itself wasn’t all that old, nineteen stanyers-just one more than me. It explained that the ship was named for one Lois Marie McKendrick, a trade organizer.
The entry said that stanyers ago McKendrick had changed the face of company owned planets. Back in the bad old days, they completely controlled all dirt-side production. At that time everything an employee did belonged to the company. So if you gardened for a hobby, or your spouse knitted sweaters, or you made anything at all, it belonged to the company who ran the planet you lived on. I remembered reading about this in history, but my schoolbooks didn’t really explain what happened to change the system. Mom often said the company texts didn’t always reflect the unvarnished truth.
If this blurb was correct, Lois Marie McKendrick organized an opposition against the New Anglican Planetary Development Company on New Edinburgh. She and her group won the right for people to make things that the company didn’t own. Her movement caught on and spread not just through the New Hebrides Quadrant, but throughout the organized galaxy. In many ways, she was responsible for the burst of trade that heralded the deployment of the big sailing freighters and prosperity of the trading houses that have grown ever since.
Apparently, Lois McKendrick died shortly before the ship was completed, but her great-granddaughter christened the vessel when it launched. The article featured a blurry digital of a young woman swinging a bottle of champagne against the airlock. I didn’t recognize her until I read the caption, “Cargo Second Alys McKendrick Giggone christens Federated Freight’s newest solar clipper, the forty-three thousand ton Lois McKendrick.” Under that was another digital of a group of people standing in front of a familiar blue banner with silver letters that read McKendrick Mercantile Cooperative. Front and center, was a straight-backed woman with a warm smile holding the shoulders of a young girl standing just in front of her. On either side of her were a half dozen folks of various ages and the caption read: “Lois McKendrick (center) stands with the members of the McKendrick Mercantile Cooperative outside the courthouse at New Edinburgh.” Judging from the looks, I guessed this was when the Galactic Circuit Court ruled in their favor. I also couldn’t be sure, but I was willing to bet that I recognized that little girl.