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unpleasant.
    He’d made up his mind to take action. They were a displaced people on probation; and while the Bench provided well enough for them to evade public outrage and avoid creating discord from extremes of want, the Bench did not provide for them generously, in any sense.
    Hilton’s parents had grown old at war, serving with the Langsarik fleet. The cold season was coming on in the settlement, and the weary bones of retired warriors creaked in the chill wind that blew from the south-southwest. He was young and fit and could labor; and also he had destroyed the latest in a long line of speed machines, and needed the wherewithal to buy another.
    But he wasn’t about to admit to Kazmer, of all people, that Hilton Shires was looking for a job. Kazmer knew him as a lieutenant in the Langsarik fleet, a man of acknowledged capability, authority, daring. Kazmer still had space transport, and no Fleet directive to restrict him from using it. Hilton was grounded and flightless, emasculated, powerless.
    He had swallowed a good deal of humiliation over the past two years, as the necessary price of purchasing their lives and eventual freedom from a vengeful Bench; but there were limits to how low he could tolerate forcing himself to bend, and confessing his sorry estate to Kazmer was right down there near rock bottom.
    It was almost enough to put him off his enterprise altogether: but Kazmer was gone, and the weather was still slowly but surely on its way toward wintertime. The Combine Factor in Port Charid — a big, brash, bearded man named Shiron Madlev — had been a friend to the Langsarik settlement in too many quiet subtle ways to deserve rude behavior from Hilton. Accepting Madlev’s offer of a job interview and then canceling at a moment’s notice would be an entirely gratuitous slap in the face.
    And without a speed machine to remind him, howsoever briefly, of the freedom of the stars, Hilton was not sure he could survive; so he took a deep breath and composed himself, and walked on.
    It was easy enough to find the Factor’s front office, even though Hilton hadn’t been there before. There was a man behind a desk with a high counter, and another man sitting by the beverage server having a flask of the leaf-based beverage that Combine people drank by preference — rhyti, that was right. It smelled like flowers to Hilton, but his aunt liked the stuff.
    “Good-greeting. My name is Hilton Shires.” The man at the desk had watched him come in; clearly the doorkeeper, so Hilton spoke to him first. “I have an appointment for an interview.”
    Out of the corner of his eye Hilton saw the other man present put down his flask of rhyti and stand up. The doorkeeper nodded at the second man, but he was speaking to Hilton.
    “Yes, Shires, you’re expected. This is floor manager Dalmoss. Factor Madlev has asked the warehouse foreman to interview you, you’re to go with Dalmoss to find him, if you please.”
    Well, Hilton had found the prospect of talking to Factor Madlev himself about a job a bit awkward. He was just as glad he would be talking to a foreman; the less overall power the foreman had in the organizational structure of the Combine Yards, the less keenly Hilton expected to feel the gap between what the foreman had the power to dole out and what he himself could expect or hope to be offered.
    Something like that.
    “Dalmoss Chzagul,”, the floor manager said, coming up to Hilton. Then, unexpectedly, Dalmoss offered his hand to clasp in the Langsarik fashion. Hilton didn’t particularly need to clasp hands with any non-Langsarik, but it was a nice gesture and would be rude of him to ignore it, so he took Dalmoss’s hand and clasped it politely.
    “Pleased. Hilton Shires. Thank you for seeing me.”
    Dalmoss seemed as willing as Hilton to call the gesture complete and break contact, but that was entirely fair as far as Hilton was concerned. “I’ll be honest with you, Shires, it’s not my idea.” But the