Tambu

INTERVIEW III

"It sounds like you were getting it from all sides in the beginning," Erickson commented. Sympathy was always a good ploy to loosen a subject's defenses.

"Yes, we were quite alone then. Still, that is not particularly surprising. We were setting a new pattern, and change is always resisted. The people we dealt with were constantly assuming that we fit in the order they already knew. Our only consolation was that if they had realized then what we were about, they probably would have treated us much more harshly."

"How do you figure that?" the reporter urged.

"Well, I've always felt Blackjack could have given us more trouble, but he didn't. Pirates are not the devil-may-care adventurers people think they are. Even though they risk their lives in combat, they're usually very careful about the reward they are gambling their lives against. Before we armed our ship, we would have been easy prey for a ship such as Blackjack's, but there was no reason for him to fight us then."

"How about vengeance? You embarrassed him in front of his crew there in the bar. Wouldn't he want to get even for that?"

"Vengeance is an expensive habit, Mr. Erickson. It's a luxury few businessmen can afford, and for all his flaws, Blackjack was a businessman. No, he believed us to be cargo haulers and decided it would be better to wait until sometime when he caught us with a full cargo hold. If he realized our actual plan of becoming pirate hunters, he probably would have attacked us at the earliest opportunity."

"You make it sound as if a confrontation between your ships was inevitable. I should think it would be a long shot at best."

"Not really," Tambu corrected. "While space itself is vast, there are a limited number of settled planets, and even fewer which have substantial space traffic in and out. Most ship-to-ship encounters occur in orbit over a planet rather than in space. If both our ship and Blackjack's were prowling the heavily trafficked lanes, it would only be a matter of time before we collided--especially if we were looking for each other."

"I see," the reporter nodded thoughtfully. "Getting back for a moment to your early difficulties, what would you say was the greatest obstacle you had to overcome?"

"Ignorance."

"Ignorance?" Erickson echoed, caught off guard by the abruptness and brevity of the answer. "Could you elaborate on that a bit?"

"Certainly. Our biggest problem was our own ignorance... na‹vet‚, if you will. We were out to beat the pirates at their own game, but we had no real idea of what that game was. Blackjack was the first pirate we had met face to face, and we wouldn't have known it if he hadn't told us."

"And this ignorance hampered your early efforts?"

"It did more than hamper them, it crippled them. I've already given you an idea of how long it took us simply to find our suppliers. If any of us had crewed on a pirate ship, we would have had the information and known exactly where to go."

"But once your ship was outfitted, things started to go easier, right?"

"Quite the contrary. It wasn't until our ship was fully outfitted and we went hunting for our first opponent that we began to realize how little we knew about pirates. In many ways, that's when our real problems first began...."