Read Infinite Dreams for Free Online Page A

for a long time. “How would you like to get a share of a couple of million CU’s?”
    A ticket back cost about a hundred thousand. “That depends on what I’d have to do.” I wouldn’t have, for instance, jumped off a high building into a vat of boiling lead. Boiling water, yes.
    “I can’t say, exactly, because I really don’t know. There may be an element of danger, there may not be. Certainly a few weeks of discomfort.”
    “I’ve had several of those, here.”
    He nodded at the insignia on my fading fatigue jacket. “You’re still licensed to pilot?”
    “Technically.”
    “Bonded?”
    “No, like I told you, I had to skip out. My bond’s on Perrin’s World. I don’t dare—”
    “No problem, really. This is a system job.” You need to be bonded for interstellar flight, but planet-to-planet, within a stellar system, there’s not that much money involved.
    “System job? Here? I didn’t know Rigel had any other—”
    “Rigel has one other planet, catalogued as Biarritz. Itnever got chartered or officially named because there’s nothing there.”
    “Except something you want.”
    “Maybe something a lot of people want.”
    But he wouldn’t tell me any more. We talked on until noon, Chaim feeling me out, seeing whether he could trust me, whether he wanted me as a partner. There were plenty of pilots stranded on Faraway; I later found out that he’d talked to a half-dozen or so before me.
    We were talking about children or some damn thing when he suddenly sat up straight and said, “All right. I think you’ll be my pilot.”
    “Good … now, just what—”
    “Not yet, you don’t need to know yet. What’s your credit number?”
    I gave it to him and he punched out a sequence on his credit flash. “This is your advance,” he said; I checked my flash and, glory, I was fifty thousand CU’s richer. “You get the same amount later, if Biarritz doesn’t pan out. If it works, you’ll also get a percentage. We’ll talk about that later.”
    The other fifty thousand was all I wanted—get back to civilization and I could hire a proxy to go to Perrin and rescue my bond. Then I’d be in business again.
    “Now. The first thing you have to do is get us a ship. I’ll arrange the financing.” We left the bar and went to Faraway’s only public (or private) stenographer, and he made out a letter of credit for me.
    “Any kind of a ship will do,” he said as I walked him back to his hotel. “Anything from a yacht to a battlewagon. We just have to get there. And back.”
    On any civilized world, I could have stepped into a booth and called Hartford; then strolled down to the nearest port and picked up a vessel: local, interplanetary or,if I was bonded and could wait a day or two, interstellar. But Faraway was Faraway, so it was a little more complicated.
    Let me digress, in case you were born less than twenty years ago and fell asleep in history class.
    Back then, we had two governments: the Confederation we all know and love, and New Hartford Transportation Rentals, Ltd. There was nothing on paper that connected the Confederation with Hartford, but in reality they were as intertwined as the skeins of a braid.
    New Hartford Transportation Rentals, Ltd., owned virtually all of the basic patents necessary for interstellar travel as well as every starship, including the four clunkers left over from George VIII’s disastrous imperialistic experiment.
    Tired of your planet? Seek religious freedom, adventure, fresh air? Want to run from creditors? Get enough people together and Hartford would lease you a ship—for an astronomical sum, but at very generous rates. In fact, the first couple of generations hardly paid anything at all (while the interest built up), but then—
    Talk about the sins of the fathers coming home to roost! Once a colony began to be a going concern, Hartford was empowered to levy a tax of up to fifty percent on every commercial transaction. And Hartford would carefully keep the