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beg.
    Finally, he writes saying he’s putting together another anthology of Jewish science fiction. I begin to feel like Dr. Frankenstein. Three cents, take it or leave it. So I sit down and write “The Mazel Tov Revolution”: a Jewish story about the effect of faster-than-light travel on political power. Sell it to
Analog for
a nickel a word
.
    Moral: I may prostitute my art, but at least I’m not a
cheap
whore
.

This is the story of thevenerated/despised Chaim Itzkhok (check one). And me. And how we omade 238 worlds safe for democracy/really screwed everything up (check another). With twenty reams of paper and an old rock. I know you probably think you’ve heard the story before. But you haven’t heard it all, not by a long way—things like blackmail and attempted murder, however polite, have a way of not getting in the history books. So read on, OK?
    It all started out, for me at least, when I was stranded on Faraway a quarter of a century ago. You’re probably thinking
you
wouldn’t mind getting stranded on Faraway, right? Garden spot of the Confederation? Second capital of humanity? Monument to human engineering and all that, terraformed down to the last molecule. I tell kids what it was like back in ’09 and they just shake their heads.
    Back then, Faraway was one of those places where you might see an occasional tourist, only because it was one of the places that tourists just didn’t go. It was one of the last outposts of George’s abortive Second Empire, and had barely supported itself by exporting things like lead andcadmium. Nice poisonous heavy metals whose oxides covered the planet instead of grass. You had to run around in an asbestos suit with an air conditioner on your back, it was so damned close to Rigel.
    Still is too damned close, but the way they opaqued the upper atmosphere, they tell me that Rigel is just a baby-blue ball that makes spectacular sunrises and sunsets. I’ve never been too tempted to go see it, having worked under its blue glare in the old days; wondering how long it’d be before you went sterile, lead underwear not-withstanding, feeling skin cancers sprouting in the short-wave radiation.
    I met old Chaim there at the University Club, a run-down bar left over from the Empire days. How I got to that godforsaken place is a story in itself—one I can’t tell because the husband is still alive—but I was down and out with no ticket back, dead-ended at thirty.
    I was sitting alone in the University Club, ignoring the bartender, nursing my morning beer and feeling desperate when old Chaim came in. He was around seventy but looked older, all grizzled and seamed, and I started getting ready an excuse in case he was armed with a hard-luck story.
    But he ordered a cup of real coffee and when he paid, I sneaked a look at his credit flash. The number was three digits longer than mine. Not prejudiced against millionaires, I struck up a conversation with him.
    There was only one opening gambit for conversation on Faraway, since the weather never changed and there were no politics to speak of: What the hell are you doing here?
    “It’s the closest place to where I want to go,” he said, which was ridiculous. Then he asked me the same, and I told him, and we commiserated for a few minutes on the unpredictability of the other sex. I finally got around to asking him exactly where it was he wanted to go.
    “Its interesting enough,” he said. Two other people had come into the bar. He looked at them blandly. “Why don’t we move to a table?”
    He got the bartender’s attention and ordered another cup of coffee, and must have seen my expression—the tariff on two cups of coffee would keep me drunk for a week—and ordered me up a large jar of beer. We carried them to a table and he switched on the sound damper, which was the kind that works both ways.
    “Can I trust you to keep a secret?” He took a cautious sip of his coffee.
    “Sure. One more won’t hurt.”
    He looked at me