The Ore-Ball Express

Illustration by Kelly Freas

“You’re fired!”

I’d heard J. Davis Alexander scream those words so often that I no longer paid any attention to them. So now I jumped hardly more than two meters in the 4 percent Cerean gravity, saving my head from a painful collision with the ceiling only by hooking my toes under the edge of my desk at the very last moment. Cursing myself for not always using the footbar beneath the desk, I slowly subsided into my chair while pondering the ominous words. Now what had I done to—

It was only when I heard the equally enraged screams of J. Davis Alexander’s benighted nephew emanating from the office where the lord and master of Hartman, Bemis & Choupette presided over the fortunes of the largest brokerage house in Ceres, that I realized that for once it was not the neck of Jonathan Welbrook White that was getting the chop.

Could it really be the obnoxious Hooten Delahooty who had finally strained his equally obnoxious uncle’s patience to the breaking point?

Apparently yes. “—Latest idiocy has cost us 217,000 Belter buckles,” came J. Davis Alexander’s anguished voice, “not to mention the dozens of clients you’ve driven away since I was stupid enough to hire you and your equally idiotic twin brother. Horton’s already gone, thank God! Now you have fifteen minutes to gather your affairs and get out of my life forever!”

Melodramatic, of course, but when you’re dealing with someone as intrinsically lazy, stupid, and dishonest as Hooten Delahooty had proven himself to be in the three years he had gone through the motions of pretending to be an ethical broker & bourse-man, a certain amount of pyrotechnics is sometimes necessary to get your message across.

After a few more shrieks of heartfelt fury by each of the parties concerned, I caught a brief glimpse of Hooten’s skinny frame streaking past the door of my modest cubicle on his way, I hoped, to the far more imposing door that led to the outer world. As much as I normally commiserated with all the other unfortunates constrained to slave for J. Davis Alexander, I could hardly contain my relief at finally being rid of his loutish nephew. Three years of—

“White!” My reveries were interrupted by J. Davis Alexander in full voice. “Get in here at once!”

The manager of Hartman, Be mis & Choupette had a fine corner office overlooking Clarkeville’s choicest piece of prime real estate, Westlake Park. Twenty meters above the park’s celebrated duck pond, we were another 20 meters below the realistic-looking blue and white sky that hid the carbonaceous chondrite rock ceiling separating our town and its 300,000 underground inhabitants from the hard vacuum of Ceres’s surface. As I half-bounced, half-floated into J. Davis Alexander’s office I caught a glimpse of a family of ducklings practicing their landings in the middle of the pond.

“White,” growled J. Davis Alexander, “I’ve just fired that idiot Hooten for pure, unmitigated incompetence.

Let that be a lesson—you could be next.”

I nodded, trying to keep my eyes focused on a spot just beyond his left shoulder. Unlike most Belters, who are long and lean in our almost nonexistent gravity, J. Davis Alexander was round and short and as hairy as a wolverine—with a disposition to match. For reasons of ideology or religion his parents had refused to give him his gravity pills during his childhood years. The result was the unpleasant spectacle that I was trying to avoid looking at.

“Now, then,” continued J. Davis Alexander, squinting at me fiercely with his baleful black eyes, “for all your faults, White, I have to reluctantly concede that you’re the least incompetent of all the many incompetents I’m burdened with. I’m therefore giving you a bonus: I’m turning over all the accounts my worthless nephew was supposed to be handling. Naturally, this means we’ll have to reduce your commission on all your other accounts, but overall your income will increase to—”

“Then fire me before I quit,” I said, glancing at the appointment schedule on my wristwatch. “Hooten’s accounts are worthless—unless you count all the million-buckle lawsuits for fraudulent malfeasance that have been filed against the firm because of him.” Tapping my watch pointedly, I now focused my vision clearly on J. Davis Alexander’s disagreeable features. “According to this, I have an appointment at the Ritz-Carlton in twenty minutes with those characters from Earth who’re backing the Ore-ball Express.” I scowled as ferociously as I could. “So either fire me now or let me go to my meeting—and we’ll say no more about me taking over Hooten’s accounts.”

The malignancy of J. Davis Alexander’s answering scowl was enough to stop a 50,000 ton ore shipment dead in its trajectory. For the thousandth time I marveled that so hideous a troll could be the blissful husband of Miss Grain Harvest of 2273, a creature half a meter his superior in height and the tallest, slimmest, blondest, and flat-out most beautiful woman in the entire Belt. “The Ore-ball Express,” he growled, “that’s this goofy venture Old Man Choupette has got us in for 14 percent of?”

“That’s the one,” I said evenly.

“And you’re the only one who knows what it’s all about?”

I shrugged. “Except for Mr. Choupette, of course.”

“Blackmail, White, sheer blackmail! I won’t forget it. Now get to your meeting!”

The ore-ball floated in the diamond-filled blackness of space like a giant orange from which a titan had taken a single enormous bite.

“This,” I said, gesturing at the hologram that filled one side of the conference room from floor to ceiling, “is what the Express looked like three days ago. It’s not really orange—that’s just the lighting we used to shoot these pictures for you.”

Tamuela Tetuanui, Minister of Development of the Queendom of Tahiti, pointed a thick brown finger at the ore-ball. “How much longer before they’ve finished the ball? It’s absolutely vital that it arrives on Earth in time for our Independence Day celebration.”

I gestured at the project’s lead engineer.

“Another week at the most,” said VettiLou Propokov, a pale blonde girl with prominent cheekbones who looked hardly old enough to be out of high school and who was the Belt’s leading engineer in the field of experimental virophage mining. “Using the usual rock-eating bacteria, two standard mining blocks of approximately 190,000 tons apiece have yielded about 55,000 tons of nickel-iron ore, just about the same weight as the standard 32-cubic-meter shipping blocks presently being sent to Earth. We’ve taken the refined ore and mixed and compressed it with the binding agents of our new technique to make our patented slurry. Then it’s just a question of spraying it all into place.”

She pointed at the orange ball and it immediately expanded to fill half the room. Now we could see half a dozen powersuits floating in space around the ball and its true size snapped into focus. “You can see the hoses they’re using to spray the slurry against the mold. When we go into full-scale production the process will be mostly automated. Right now, with this demonstration model, we re using far more manpower than we will in the future.”

“I can’t see any mold,” objected the only woman in the four-person delegation of Polynesians who had made the 538 million kilometer trip from Earth to check on the status of their project.

“It’s only transparent from a distance,” said VettiLou Propokov. “Where they’re working, spraying the slurry, they can see a network of light yellow veins throughout the mold. When the ore-ball’s complete, we’ll dissolve the mold with a solvent.”

“That mold, or wall, or whatever you call it, looks awfully thin to me,” said the Minister of Development. “Are you sure it’s thick enough for a trip to Earth and a splashdown?”

“Unless every computer in the Belt is malfunctioning,” said VettiLou Propokov, “the Express is theoretically strong enough to support a constant 4.6 g’s and a splashdown at a speed two and a half times greater than the one actually programmed. To reduce costs, of course, our actual propulsion system will only be thrusting at .087 g’s for three and a half days, but that’s still enough to get it to Earth in a little over twenty-four days. I give you my word, Mister Minister, the Ore-ball Express will function exactly as designed—and will deliver 55,000 tons of highly refined nickel-iron to Port Pomaré for 23 percent less than any competitor on the Moon or in the Belt.”

“There’s really 55,000 tons in that ball?” demanded another of the Tahitians. This one’s face was covered by an intricate pattern of blue and black tattoos that made him look more like a ceremonial devil’s mask than a human being.

“Absolutely. A cubic meter of refined ore weighs about 1,600 kilograms at one standard Earth gravity. The wall of the ore-ball will be exactly three meters thick, with an exterior surface area of 12,870 square meters and an interior volume of 92,000 cubic meters—according to our computer modeling the perfect proportion of cargo to flotation value to cost.” VettiLou Propokov flicked her pale blue eyes from one Polynesian face to the next. “Believe me, it will work.”

“For 78 million solid gold Belter buckles,” I said dryly, finally breaking my long silence, “it had better work. Especially from Mr. Choupette’s point of view. Fourteen percent of those 78 million are his.”

“Except that your Monsieur Choupette didn’t actually put a single buckle of his own into this project, either plastic or gold,” groused the Minister of Development equally dryly. “The only thing Hartman, Bemis & Choupette has done for us was to handle the initial stock offering—and take 13.64 percent of the ownership in return. Her Majesty the Queen is still smarting about that.”

It was clear that Polynesians still didn’t grasp the concept of venture capital. Diplomatically, I shifted the subject. “The ore-ball’s only 800,000 klicks away, about seven hours at a constant .5 g. If you’d like to visit it, we’ve made arrangements for a ship. We can leave anytime you’d like.”

“As soon as we can,” said the Tahitian with the tattooed devil’s mask. “The industrial zone at Port Pomaré is still under construction. As soon as we’re assured that the Express will be on schedule, we’ll step up the pace to make certain it’s finished in time for the Independence Day ceremonies.”

“And exactly which day is that?” I asked. I always have trouble remembering the significant dates of the three or four thousand squabbling nation-states that make up Earth.

“Why, the 10th of August, the 281st anniversary of the day we achieved our independence from the French colonialists.” Everyone in the delegation of Polynesians seemed surprised that I didn’t know the date by heart.

It was my turn to be surprised as we drifted through the brightly lighted interior of the Ore-ball Express inside our borrowed powersuits. In the four days since the hologram we’d seen at the Ritz-Carlton had actually been filmed, the basic structure of the ore-ball had been completed and a simple airlock installed in its thick wall of highly compacted nickel-iron ore. A dozen figures in powersuits darted about the relatively tight confines of its interior in purposeful fashion. Some of them, it was obvious, were checking the inner wall of the multi-million-buckle ore-ball for structural defects. The others were occupied in less obvious ways.

“You didn’t know about that?” marveled VettiLou Propokov, her big blue eyes batting at me innocently from behind the faceplate of her powersuit. “That’s the acceleration couch we’re installing for the Crown Prince.”

“The acceleration couch? The Crown Prince?” Now that I knew what we were dealing with, I could see that the device mounted in the middle of a complex system of heavy-duty gimbals was indeed an acceleration couch, a very well padded one. The gimbals, in turn, were secured in the center of the ore-ball by an elaborate structure of tubing sprouting from all sides of the walls.

“That,” said VettiLou Propokov complacently, “is the chair that Crown Prince Ata of Raiatea will be sitting in when the Ore-ball Express makes its historic descent from Earth orbit to splashdown at Port Pomare. All those tanks, tubing, and hoses you see are the life-support system—not that he’ll need very much: it’s only a seventy-seven-minute ride from orbit to splashdown.”

“From orbit to splashdown?” I frankly goggled. “You mean a human being is going to ride this thing down at a million klicks an hour?”

“Much, much slower than that.” I could see her shrug inside her powersuit. “It’s to prove how safe the ore-ball is. That’s why the Crown Prince himself will be the passenger. No one has ever done anything like this before—everyone in the Solar System will be watching: it’ll generate enormous publicity. If the Crown Prince is willing to risk his skin, it’s got to be safe.”

“Safe.” I slowly raised my jaw from where it had been hanging on my chest. “Has anyone asked the Crown Prince his opinion of this?”

“Not yet,” VettiLou Propokov conceded. “But he’ll go, all right. His mother the Queen will speak to him very’ firmly about the matter—she can be very persuasive.”

I could believe that. I’d seen holograms of Her Royal Highness Queen Teraimateata Mara Pomaré, Protector of the Seas, Fisher of the Heavens, and Dancer upon the Waves. She was as big around as any three sumo wrestlers together, and her round brown face was fixed in a permanent scowl that make J. Davis Alexander’s seem merry by comparison.

“Besides,” the Belter engineer added, “we’ve got a bit of an inducement on board for the Prince courtesy of some shareholders on Pallas.” She nodded in the direction of a half-dozen gleaming metal drums that were being attached to the far side of the curved wall. “His Highness is, let us say, a man who will take a drink from time to time. Even two or three of them, if you see what I mean.”

“In other words—a drunk.”

“Well, yes. Apparently he particularly likes fruit brandies. There’s a French immigrant with a hydroponic orchard over on Hygeia who’s been distilling the stuff for years now.” She shuddered convulsively. “Horrible stuff: sweet and sticky, completely colorless, and all of it at least 180 proof.” She gestured at the barrels. “It’s also so harsh you could sell it as paint remover, or, if you ignited a barrel, you could use it as a propulsion unit and drive the whole damn ore-ball to Earth.”

I wasn’t completely convinced of that, but, as I lifted my own infinitely more civilized glass of Pernod and water to my lips at the Café des Mondes, my thoughts drifted back to the drums of high-priced rot-gut stored away inside the Ore-ball Express.

“It’s tiny details like that,” I pontificated, “that sometimes make the difference between a successful stock offering and a failure. I have to admit it, whoever thought of this stunt of using the Crown Prince is a genius. But personally I’d rather go over Angel Falls in a gravy boat.”

Isabel, my long-time girlfriend, grinned at me over her tequila sunrise, then shook her glossy black bangs. “I thought you’d already had your stock offering, the one that made Hartman, Bemis & Choupette 13.64 percent part-owners of this holding company that owns the ore-ball.”

“Orbex, Incorporated? Yes, but that was only the initial public offering,” I corrected. A little more than a week had passed since our inspection of the Ore-ball Express and this was the first time I’d had to get together with both Isabel and her wife, Jin Tshei. We were sitting under the green and white striped awning of our favorite sidewalk cafe just across the street from the duck pond and within full view of the baleful scrutiny of J. Davis Alexander. Isabel has two degrees in resource allocation management, a high-powered job in the assessor’s office in City Hall, and a fine head for precise figures, even out to two decimal places.

“Once this first shipment to Earth has shown how practical and profitable this method is,” I went on, “we ll have a secondary offering to raise another 225 million buckles. That’s what we’ll use to get the ore-balls into full-scale production.”

“What I don’t understand,” said Jin Tshei, sipping delicately from her kir royale, “is why you’re spending millions and millions of buckles to reinvent the wheel—a broken wheel, at that.” She turned the full wattage of her almond-shaped eyes upon me and I felt my knees quiver. Jin Tshei is the Assistant Curator at the Clarkeville Museum of Art and Human Achievement and, after Miss Grain Harvest of 2273, hands down the second loveliest creature in the Belt—or perhaps the entire Solar System. I occasionally had sharp pangs of jealousy that it was Isabel who was married to this exquisite woman and not me, but for the most part I maintained a reasonable stoicism about the limitations of our informal little triad. “I know we’ve got a model somewhere in the museum of the earlier ore-balls that used to be shipped to Earth. I think they were in regular use up to about 50 years ago.”

“Absolutely right,” I agreed. “And then one of them broke into a million pieces in the upper atmosphere over the Indian Ocean and gave Western Australia the most beautiful shooting star display in history. And 67 million buckles worth of nickel-iron either burned up or sank to the bottom of the Indian Ocean. The insurance companies suggested very strongly that we Belters find another method of shipping our ore. So we started sending it back in nothing but solid cubes.”

“Then how come you’re doing the balls again?”

“Fifty-three years have passed. An entirely new technique for temporarily bonding the nickel-iron molecules together has been developed by Polymer Metals over on Camilla, the company VettiLou Propokov works for. This new ore-ball we’re putting together will have at least seven times the rigidity and tensile strength of the old ones. It’s like comparing a rope suspension bridge to the Golden Gate. This one could be accelerated at a constant 4.6 g’s all the way to Earth if need be. And Orbex has bought 100 percent of Polymer Metals, so no one else will be able to copy our technique—we’ll have the market entirely to ourselves.”

Isabel, who’s about my age, around thirty-one or thirty-two, if it matters, and nearfy as tall as I am but far rounder and smoother in those places of interest to practicing heterosexuals like myself, nibbled pensively at a tiny green cornichon. Through a series of events too tedious to chronicle here, she, Jin Tshei, and I are the proud parents of a gorgeous little six-year-old girl who, for the time being, is unfortunately constrained to live on Earth. So every now an I then the three of us get together at the Café des Mondes and, among other things, discuss which of us will make the next trip to Earth to visit Valérie-France. Which was how we had gotten onto the topic of the Ore ball Express.

“Four point six g’s?” repeated Isabel incredulously. “That’d get it to Earth in a couple of days! What’s the hurry?”

“Well, in general, anything that saves you time will eventually save you money. Those solid cubic blocks of ore we’ve been shipping to Earth for 50 years now could probably withstand the same amount of g’s but it’s just too expensive to rig them with such powerful propulsion systems. Where we’ll kill them on the costs is on the other end, on Earth. Right now they have to put the block into high Earth orbit, attach all sorts of guidance and flotation devices, then send it down to a soft, soft landing. Then they have to haul 50,000 tons of dead weight through 3,000 klicks of Indian Ocean, still sitting in the middle of all its flotation junk, to the nearest factories in Perth or Flinders Bay. None of the countries sitting beside the ocean will let it come down any closer than that.”

I popped my daily gravity pill into my mouth and washed it down with a long swallow of Pernod. “What the Queen of Tahiti wants to do, though, is to land the Express right smack in the middle of her backyard—and it’s a big one. The Polynesians have got 115 islands scattered over 9 million square klicks of Pacific Ocean to use for splashdown. And instead of having to tow the damned thing a couple of thousand klicks, they’re building their own metallurgy industry ten or fifteen klicks away from splashdown.”

“So this whole project is just as important to the Polynesians as it is for you and this new company you and your crooked bosses have floated?”

“Orbex, Inc.? More so. Without the ore, they’ll have built an entire industrial and manufacturing zone in the middle of the Pacific Ocean for nothing. I don’t know if they still cook their queens and eat them in Tahiti when things go wrong, but—”

I was interrupted by the beep of my wristphone.

“That was one of my crooked bosses,” I said, setting down my empty glass, “the round, hairy one with the sunny disposition. He wants me back in the office. At least I think he does—he was gobbling so badly I could hardly tell what language he was speaking.”

J. Davis Alexander was still barely coherent when I entered his office on the other side of the park. Lurking behind the foliage of his furry face was something more than simple rage, though, some other emotion I couldn’t immediately put my finger on.

“White,” he croaked, having slammed shut the door and pulled tight the curtains that I had never before seen closed. “Give me your wrist-phone.”

“Give you my… wristphone?”

“Now!” He glowered at the inoffensive instrument as he turned it over and over in his hairy hands as if it were a time bomb about to explode. “Just making sure no one could be listening in on us.” He jammed the phone into his pocket, then gestured me closer… closer… closer—until one meaty arm was clamped around my neck and his fleshy lips were pressed nearly against my left ear. I recoiled from his hot breath—had he finally gone irrevocably crazy?

“White,” he whispered fiercely, “if you ever breathe a word of what I’m going to say, I’ll... I’ll kill you! Do you understand?” His grotesquely powerful arm tightened around my neck.

“Umph,” I grunted, “you are killing me!”

If anything, his grip only tightened. “It’s my nephew Hooten—he wants to kill me! You’ve got to stop him, White!”

“Hooten? Kill you? Then he’ll just have to get in line with all the rest of us.” I pushed with all my strength and managed to wriggle a few centimeters away from his embrace. “You mean your nephew wants to kill you just because you fired him? You’ve fired me dozens of times—and you’re still alive.”

“This is serious, White. You’ve got to save me.”

“From Hooten? I’m an ethical broker & bourseman, remember? Not a bodyguard.”

“It doesn’t matter, you’re the only one I can trust.”

“Then why don’t you stop trying to strangle me and tell me what it’s all about?”

Eventually, in disjointed bits and pieces intermingled with threats and self-pitying whines, I got the gist of J. Davis Alexander’s sad tale.

Years before, at the successful culmination of one of his more remunerative deals of dubious legality, the managing director of Hartman, Bemis & Choupette had opened a numbered bank account in Liechtenstein, a tiny nation-state in Europe that exists primarily to service clients with the ethics of J. Davis Alexander. As time went by, his bank account grew larger and his paranoia more pronounced. He converted the numbered account into cash, gold ingots, and bearer bonds. These he stored in a box 2,000 meters beneath the Alps in the same Liechtensteinian bank, secure now against even nuclear fusion.

“And now,” groaned J. Davis Alexander in piteous tones, “that unspeakable Hooten, my own flesh and blood, is on his way to Earth to steal everything I own. He’ll kill me, White, kill me!”

I extracted the rest of my neck from his python-like grip and eyed him coldly. “You mean all of this hoohaw is because you think Hooten is going to steal your money? From a Swiss bank box two klicks beneath the Alps? You don’t need a bodyguard, you need a custodian!”

“Liechtensteinian, not Swiss.” J. Davis Alexander’s angry glare was only a pitiful travesty of its former nova-like wattage. “You don’t understand, White, it’s not just a regular bank box where you have to prove your identity to get access to it, it’s a bearer box!”

“A bearer box?”

“Like a bearer bond—anyone who bears the codecard to it is assumed to be the rightful owner. With absolutely no questions asked.”

“Oh. And Hooten has the codecard?”

“He stole it, White, right out of my office safe! Oh, the perfidy of the man!”

“How can you be so sure it’s Hooten who has it? Who else—”

“The safe is only keyed to two thumbprints, you idiot, mine and Hooten’s! I was so... distracted when I fired him that I forgot to cancel his authorization. Any time the safe is opened, a video is made of whoever’s using it. It was Hooten, all right, two days after I fired him, that bloodsucking murderer Hooten!”

I fingered my chin. “So now he’s on his way to Earth with your codecard. And all he has to do is waltz into the bank, stick the card into a slot or two, and walk off with all of your money.” I considered my boss carefully—it was hard to believe that so basically dishonest and conniving a schemer could ever have been so stupid.

“It’s worse than that, White,” he murmured in mortified tones. “There are... other... things in the box. Things that if Melinda ever saw, she’d… she’d... it’d be the end of our marriage, White, the absolute end! If she didn’t shoot me first.” He turned away, his shoulders quivering.

I regarded him with amazement. Melinda, of course, was Miss Grain Harvest of 2273, the Belt’s most gorgeous woman and J. Davis Alexander’s improbable trophy wife. Was it possible that inside the old wolverine a few reputable human emotions still existed—such as shame, remorse, love? I shook my head in wonder: J. Davis Alexander a human being? Such a fanciful notion had never before crossed my mind.

And now I finally realized what other emotion his furry face was concealing besides simple rage: out and out fear.

“So what is it you want me to do?” I asked finally.

“Do? Go to Earth, of course, and get to the bank box before he does, you numbskull! What else do you think there is to do?” I was relieved to see a little bit of his basic nature reasserting itself.

“So there’s another codecard, is there? One I could use to open the box?”

“Yes, I kept a second one hidden at home—just in case.”

“Very wise.” I pondered J. Davis Alexander’s words. Our daughter, Valerie-France, was on Earth, in a special school/home/medical center for the very occasional Belter child who is afflicted with Kesler’s Syndrome in spite of the gravity pills that all children begin taking as soon as they leave the Earth-normal gravity of Maternity Rock. Unless Vally wanted to end up looking like J. Davis Alexander, she would have to stay on Earth until her growth stabilized at eighteen or nineteen standard years. It had been eleven months now since I had last seen her. “You want me to go to Liechtenstein?”

“Yes.”

Liechtenstein was next to Switzerland, and Valerie-France’s clinic was in Switzerland.

“Why don’t you go yourself? Now there’s one more person who knows about the bearer box.”

“You expect me to be able to take two months off from my duties, White? Are you crazy? With that billion-buckle Medimax issue coming up? Of course you’re going!”

“First-class round trip, all expenses paid? Full salary while I’m gone, at double overtime?”

“Yes, yes, yes! Just go, White, go!”

“I’ll do it,” I said. “Let me go find out about packets.”

“I’ve already done it,” said J. Davis Alexander, settling back in his seat and fixing me with his customary beady eye. “Hooten took the Yankee Flyer, which left Ceres eleven days ago. Luckily for us, it’s going via Vesta, so he won’t be getting into Earth orbit until around three in the morning GMT on August 12th. If he hurries, he could be at the bank the same afternoon. So, just to be on the safe side, you’ve got to get to Earth by at least the 10th.”

“Yippee,” I muttered, my mind already turning to the presents Isabel, Jin Tshei, and I would be getting for Valérie-France, “that means I’ll be there in time to celebrate Tahitian Independence Day. So what packet have you got me booked on?”

“It’s not exactly a packet,” snapped J. Davis Alexander. “There are no ships from anywhere in the Belt that could get you to Earth by then.” He leaned forward, his malevolent little eyes boring into mine. “You, White, are about to go down in the annals of history: you are going to be the first human being to travel from the Belt to Earth inside an ore-ball express!”

This, I reflected sourly as I scowled at the cramped quarters of the tiny beltship that were going to constitute my living space for the next twenty-three days, was a scheme you could pull off only if you owned 13.64 percent of the stock in Orbex, Inc. You could delay the departure date of the Ore-ball Express by thirty-six hours and have its feeble little propulsion system reprogrammed to thrust at .1 g instead of the .087 already scheduled—just enough, according to VettiLou Propokov, to get me into Earth orbit by August 10th, just in time for the Polynesians’ Independence Day celebrations, and nearly two full days before the Yankee Flyer bearing Hooten Delahooty and his favorite uncle’s codecard were due to arrive on their way to the Banque Unione de Vaduz.

It was, I supposed, remarkable—and reflected the extent of J. Davis Alexander’s desperation—what the resources of Hartman, Bemis & Choupette had managed to get done in a mere thirty-six hours.

A one-man beltship small enough for its essential components to be passed through the airlock in the side of the Ore-ball Express had been located and chopped to pieces. Nothing remained of it now except for its living quarters and life-support system. My new home was hardly larger than a good-sized powersuit but infinitely more comfortable. Besides having a narrow bunk that folded down from the port wall, it boasted a tiny bathroom and an even smaller galley.

“Everything looks all right?” asked VettiLou Propokov, floating upside down in her powersuit in the ship’s airlock. I nodded glumly. “I personally checked the water supply, power, lighting, the galley, the head, and the air-recycling,” she assured me. “Everything is fine—you should have a very comfortable trip.”

“I’ve got thirty classic books I’ve always told myself I was going to read someday and an instructional chess program—the trip may be boring, but at least it’s going to be educational.”

It was also, I discovered, three and a half days later, going to be cold.

They’d forgotten to install the beltship’s heating system.

In another two days, when the power inside my self-contained powersuit ran out, I was going to freeze to death.

They’d also forgotten the communication system—or, more likely, simply overlooked the fact that it wouldn’t function from inside a sixty-four-meter ball of nickel-iron ore with three-meter-thick walls.

By the time I discovered that, the Ore-ball Express was 36 million klicks from Ceres and still accelerating at a constant .1 g. We were, my pocket calculator informed me, now moving at 286 klicks per second and picking up speed with every passing moment. Already it was far too late for anyone in the Belt to match courses with me—even if I had been able to get anyone to hear my frantic screams for help.

But why, you ask, had it taken me three and a half days to discover that I was going to freeze to death?

The answer, it seems, is in the intrinsic insulating properties of nickel-iron ore walls three meters thick—and the almost equally fantastic insulating values of a beltship’s far thinner metal and ceramic skin. Together they had served to retain the substantial heat buildup that a week or so of various engineering tasks had generated within the hermetically sealed ore-ball. Then, once we were underway, these same walls had kept the near-absolute cold of interplanetary space from seeping through.

Fora while....

When first my numbed fingers and then the beltship’s thermometer told me that I was getting cold I merely growled irritably. Carefully dog-ear-ring page 379 of Moby Dick—it was fully as tedious as I’d expected it to be—I moved carefully from my bunk through the unaccustomed 10 percent gravity to the thickly upholstered easy chair that had been brought in to replace the pilot’s command chair.

I scanned the control panel, idly fingering the outlines of J. Davis Alexander’s all-important codecard that for safety’s sake had been taped to the bare skin in the center of my chest. Where, I muttered, were the life-support controls?

Ah, here.

One dial was clearly marked CABIN TEMPERATURE. I turned it from the present arctic-like 8 degrees Celsius to a toasty 28, tightened the bunk’s blanket around my shoulders, and sat back to wait.

Nothing happened.

Twenty minutes later I had located the nine widely scattered vents through which warm air was supposed to be pouring into the cabin. I held my hand in front of each small opening.

The only air coming through was cold enough to form icicles on my fingernails.

I didn’t panic—yet.

It took another five minutes to get what remained of the beltship’s computer system to bring up the repair manual on screen. I jumped it to Heating, Cabin, Internal.

Then to Source, Schematics.

I wanted to scream.

Heating for the beltship’s living quarters was generated and stored as a by-product of its propulsion system.

The propulsion system had been cut out and discarded 36 million klicks away so that the rest of the beltship could be installed in the ore-ball.

The only cooking heat in the galley was provided by microwaves.

There was no way to heat the cabin. And no way, I now discovered, to call for help. Unless I did something clever in the next few hours I was going to freeze to death.

I folded the blanket in two, pulled it around my shoulders, and tried to think.

After a while my glazed eye and numbed brain came to the yellow and blue powersuit that I had worn when I’d made the final transit through the airless ore-ball into the beltship cabin. Now it hung forlornly in a niche next to the galley.

The powersuit—it had its own internal heating system!

I leapt to my feet, my heart thudding violently.

I was saved!

Every Belter, even the most chair-bound ethical broker & bourseman, knows how to use a powersuit. Ninety seconds later I was inside the suit and had snapped the faceplate shut. A warm glow suffused mind and body as the subtle heat of the life-support system automatically swung into action. I sank back into my easy chair and wriggled my half-frozen toes luxuriously. It was going to be a long, boring nineteen and a half days inside the powersuit but at least I would make it to Earth as a hunk of animated warm meat instead of a frozen corpsicle.

And I could always play chess on the faceplate’s holographic display visor.

Which reminded me...

I pressed the wrist controls that were just one of the powersuit’s four independent ways of activating the display, then brought up the suit’s operating system info. My eye ran over the red characters arrayed in neat lines.

Everything was normal.

Interior suit heat was already 11 degrees Celsius at waist level and rising rapidly to the default setting of 22.

Oxygen content was—

My eye halted, went back to a previous line.

Power reserves: 48 hours, 23 minutes, .02 seconds.

Even as I stared at it the minute display changed to 22.

For a long breathless moment I once again felt the stirring of incipient panic. Then sweet reason reasserted itself.

All I had to do was recharge the suit by plugging it into the ship’s power system. If there was enough power in what remained of the beltship for lights and air recycling, there had to be enough to run one miserable powersuit.

That was when I discovered that the suit’s recharging cord with its universal adapter plug was missing. All that remained of it in the zippered pocket on the suit’s left leg was a ten-centimeter section of heavily insulated wire with a badly frayed end. Even on Ceres, I reflected incredulously, there were rats hungry enough and stupid enough to chew through six-gauge cable...

My eyes swung back to the power display—48 hours, 19 minutes, 24 seconds.

I ground my teeth angrily. I refused to be turned into a corpsicle on account of J. Davis Alexander and his wretched bearer box!

We Belters are a resourceful lot.

I shrugged myself out of the powersuit, then located the nearest of the cabin’s standard power outlets. The galley provided a knife sharp enough to strip away the insulation from the recharging cable’s two wires. A few minutes later I had three centimeters of neatly exposed copper wires on the end of the cable that projected from the powersuit.

I ran a quick mental review of what I had done, gave myself a mental pat on the back, and jammed the naked wires into the two slots of the outlet.

Flash!

Hiss! Crackle! Bang!

Sizzled fingers!

The acrid smell of power overload!

A wisp of pale blue smoke drifted out of the recharge pocket.

I gaped in dismay at the powersuit I had reflexively jerked away from the outlet and across the cabin. The two wires I had exposed were now a fused mass of melted copper. With leaden fingers I pulled myself back into the powersuit. I snapped the faceplate shut. The faint susurrus of its life-support system hummed sofdy in my ears. Warm air caressed my skin. At least the suit was still working.

I activated the faceplate display—and stared at it in horror.

“Power system storage failure,” I read. “See a qualified technician immediately for replacement of storage unit. Unauthorized attempts to repair the system may further damage the SafetySuit’s operation and void its warranty. Power remaining for normal operation: 4 hours, 17 minutes, 51 seconds.”

Not only had I irreparably destroyed the suit’s recharging system, I had also discharged most of its stored-up power.

My torpid brain kept my eyes focused on the ever-diminishing seconds of my remaining life without really registering them.

That was when I began to panic.

I might well have arrived in Earth orbit literally frozen into a fetal crouch if yet another factor over which I had absolutely no control hadn’t come into play.

It took me a long, long while to become aware of it. Finally, however, I noticed that my powersuit and I were no longer huddled in the beltship’s easy chair; now we were floating a good 20 centimeters above it.

Sluggishly my brain began to function again.

I was no longer constrained by the puny .1 gravity of the accelerating ore-ball. Some time in the 15 minutes and 43 seconds since I’d last been really aware of the remaining time in the powersuit, the Express’s propulsion system had shut itself off. According to VettiLou Propokov’s programming, we were now drifting towards Earth at a constant 305 klicks per second—without gravity.

I floated aimlessly around the cabin, my mind racing furiously. No gravity, no gravity, no gravity—how did that help me in my present predicament?

I couldn’t see that it did.

Did it, in fact, make things worse?

My focus came back to the inexorable passage of time in my faceplate display: 3 hours, 43 minutes, 07 seconds remaining in my powersuit.

The absence of gravity was definitely making things worse: just thinking about it, I had already wasted sixteen minutes of my few hours of remaining life.

For want of anything better to do, I let my gloved hands clumsily explore the various pockets and pouches attached to the powersuit. All of them were empty—except one.

Here I found two meters of neatly coiled recharge cable that some tidy soul had conscientiously tucked away for future repairs. On the end unchewed by my hypothetical Cerean rat was the universal adapter plug. One side of the plug had several lines of fine print on it. Squinting, I read:

“Your SafetySuit has been designed to work on its custom-made, built-in, 28-volt alternating current storage unit. Any attempt to recharge it from a standard 28-volt, direct-current prime power outlet without the use of this adapter will result in severe damage to the SafetySuit and will void any warranty or guarantees regarding its power unit.”

So I’d plugged an AC suit into a DC outlet. To laugh or to cry, that was the question.

Instead, I uttered a sharp scream of rage and threw the plug so viciously into the galley that I was launched backwards across the cabin. Tumbling and waving my arms, I ended up with my head rapping the porthole beside the airlock. Through the porthole I stared vacantly into the darkness of the ore-ball’s interior. Somewhere on the far side of the blackness I could catch a few faint glints of light reflected from the beltship’s cabin. The barrels of booze they’d stored aboard for the alcoholic Crown Prince Ata, I told myself idly, and tugged my mind back to—

Barrels of booze?

Of 180 proof booze?

Two seconds later I had pulled myself down to the airlock and was fumbling frantically with its controls.

If only the barrels were small enough to go through the airlock....

They were—with one centimeter to spare.

If there’d still been any gravity, of course, I wouldn’t have been able to do it. Even without it, the 250-liter double-walled, stainless steel barrels still retained all of their mass and inertia. It was all I could do to pry them away from their fittings and then slowly shepherd them over to the beltship. By the time I’d manhandled the seventh and final barrel through the airlock and into the almost negligible remaining cabin space there were only twenty-seven minutes of power remaining in the suit—its life-support system had been working double-overtime to keep me warm in the icy chill of the ore-ball.

Now two of the barrels lay on my bunk, one sat upright in the easy chair with another perched on top, and the three others filled what remained of the deck space. There was just enough room on top of those three to lay the mattress I’d previously taken from the bunk. When the ore-ball flipped over and began its deceleration three days and fourteen hours out of Earth, and gravity returned to the cabin, I’d need somewhere to sleep.

Assuming, of course, I was still alive...

Once again free of the confines of my powersuit, I inspected the seven barrels of high-class rot-gut. The Crown Prince either had a very catholic taste in alcohol or his well-wishers on Pallas were taking no chances in trying to capture his fancy. Each barrel of “Genuine Hygeian Eau de Vie, Guaranteed 180 Proof” was a different flavor: plum, passion fruit, apricot, pineapple, cherry, mango, and pear.

Eau de Vie, according to my limited knowledge of French, seemed to mean Water of Life. I supposed that if you were alcoholic enough, it probably was. In my own particular case, I fervently hoped it would live up to its name.

I cast a thoughtful eye upon the two barrels lying lengthwise on the bunk. I would start with them because their bungholes were already pointed towards the ceiling, but I’d start carefully. I’d already nearly irredeemably doomed myself with my feckless recharging of the powersuit. Another mistake of that seriousness, I knew, would absolutely kill me.

I tugged at my chin. I needed three things: a wrench to unscrew the stainless steel plug from the bunghole; a wick; and a starter.

The wrench was easy. Along with half a dozen other basic tools I found one in the galley’s closet.

The wick was almost as easy. A spare shirt labeled 100 percent cotton that I’d tucked away in a drawer behind the bunk was torn into strips.

The starter was harder. In fact, half an hour later, I was still thinking about it, with an ever-mounting degree of panic lurking a hair’s breadth away.

There was nothing at all in the belt-ship to start a fire, no matches, no electric sparker, no cook top, no soldering iron.

Not even two sticks to rub together.

The people who design and furnish beltships don’t want you to have fires on board.

Think, White, think!

While I was thinking, I unscrewed the plugs from the two barrels of hootch that occupied my bunk. Purely out of intellectual curiosity I stuck a finger into the liquid in the closer of the two. It felt cool but not icy, and certainly not frozen; the drums, I realized, were actually enormous thermos bottles with half a dozen centimeters of vacuum between their double steel walls. Cautiously I licked my finger. VettiLou Propokov was right: the Water of Life was both sweet and sticky and yet harsh enough to peel the skin from the back of your throat. The pineapple was really bad; the cherry, on the other hand, perhaps wasn’t all that awful. Thoughtfully, I stuck my finger in again, licked it clean. A warm glow ran through my body. It had been a long time since my last Pernod and water at the Cafe des Mondes. And I was awfully, awfully cold....

The Devil was shaking me violently by the shoulder. “It’s time to go to hell, White!” he was shouting at me, “time to go to hell!” All around his evil red face, orange and yellow flames flickered and twisted. I moaned feebly. Already the heat was overwhelming—and I wasn’t even in hell yet. Even when I was dead, life wasn’t fair....

The voice continued to pound at me.

Eventually I forced a single eye open and saw, inside a powersuit, a blurry face bent over me. It wasn’t red, and didn’t seem to have horns. But I was still hot.

Awfully hot.

“Hot,” I muttered as I felt hands tugging gently at all parts of my body. Once again I seemed to be floating, as if there were no gravity. Wherever I was, it definitely wasn’t Earth. “Hot, hot, hot/”

“Too bloody right, mate,” came the answering voice. “My suit here says it’s 51 bleeding degrees centigrade in this hellhole. It’s a bloody miracle you’re still alive!”

“Drink,” I whispered, clutching an arm. “Gimme a drink.”

I felt a bulb being placed against my lips. Water squirted into my mouth and throat. I began to choke. “Not that!” I croaked. “Gimme a drink!”

“From what it looks like, mate, you’ve drunk it all—or burned it all up.”

“Heating system,” I explained as my eye closed under the million-ton weight of its eyelid, “jus’ my liT ol’ heating system...”

When my eyes opened again I was floating in another room altogether, surrounded now by brown faces. Polynesian faces. But since I was still weightless, it was obvious that I still wasn’t on Earth. So what were all these Tahitians doing here? And why were they scowling at me so ferociously?

“You drank all of Prince Ata’s present?” demanded a voice incredulously.

“Didn’ drink it all,” I retorted indignantly, “jush made itsy-bitsy li’l’ fire to keep ol’ Jonathan warm, warm, warm...” I could feel the side of my head bumping against my shoulder. My eyes closed again.

“Wake up, White!” A hand shook my shoulder. “You’ve got to do something for us.”

“No, gotta do sump’in’ for J. Davish Alexander.” I blinked. “Don’ know what, but gotta do it.” I extended an arm imperiously. “Gimme drink, real drink.”

A bulb was placed in my hand. I drank greedily. This was a real drink, just like the stuff in the barrels.

The roundest of the brown faces leaned closer. “All you have to do, Monsieur White, is just stay in the ore-ball a little while longer.” Shiny white teeth flashed blindingly. “Not in that horrible cabin, though; in that nice big chair we’ve arranged especially for you.”

“Nice big chair?” Vague memories drifted elusively through my mind. “Nice big chair for Crown Prince—not for li’l’ Jonathan.”

“Yes, but now it’s for Jonathan.” Another bulb was thrust against my mouth. Automatically I took a swallow. “It’s just for a little while. And then we’ll give you lots and lots to drink.”

I nodded so vigorously that my chin fell against my chest and remained there. “Sure, sure, jus’ give Jonathan a li’l’ drinkie first.”

“Of course. But first—” a screenpad and stylus materialized in front of my eyes “—just sign this little release, and then we’ll give you a nice drinkie....”

I slept, I suppose, all the way down to Earth—it really was a nice chair.

Then I slept for another thirty-two hours.

When I awoke, another set of brown faces was looking down at me. Gravity—heavy gravity—pinned me to my bed.

“Felicitations, Monsieur White,” said one of the Polynesian faces. “You are the first man in history to ride an ore-ball down from orbit.”

“I am?” My eyes widened. “But... but... there was a Crown Prince. He was supposed to ride it down. You mean that I...?”

“The Crown Prince was unfortunately indisposed. You, Monsieur White, very gallantly volunteered to take his place.”

I jerked erect in horror. “I did?”

“For a very substantial bonus, of course. And for the eternal gratitude of her Majesty the Queen. The pictures of you coming out of the ore-ball and falling to your knees to kiss the Queen’s feet were most touching. Not to mention eliciting the gratitude of the stockholders of Orbex, Incorporated, as well as that of your charming associates, especially Monsieur Alexandre.”

Monsieur Alexandre: J. Davis Alexander! My heart lurched like a struggling animal imprisoned within my chest and my hands flew automatically to where the long-forgotten codecard had been taped to my bare skin. Against all probability, it was still there!

And now I remembered what I was on Earth for.

“Quick!” I yelped, somehow managing to swing my legs over the edge of the bed. “What day is it?”

“Day?” Six Tahitian faces looked at me in profound puzzlement. “Why it’s the evening after Independence Day, August 11th.”

Six hours later, thanks to a miraculous connection with the once-a-week Papeete-Paris fractional orbiter that left Tahiti at midnight, I set down halfway around the world in the spaceport carved out of the beet fields northeast of Paris. Here the ninety-minute flight had taken me into early afternoon. Twenty minutes after landing I was in a chartered air-cab on my way to Liechtenstein and J. Davis Alexander’s bearer box at the Banque Unione de Vaduz.

I was far too nervous to even look at the stupendous beauty of the Alps as they drifted past far below.

Not to mention having the father and mother and grandparents of all hangovers. Kettle drums played the William Tell Overture over and over in my throbbing skull and it was all I could do to keep from bleeding to death through my eyeballs.

An eternity later, now deep in the purple shadows of the majestic mountains, the aircab settled slowly into the bank’s tiny parking lot. I focused blearily on my watch: it seemed to say twenty minutes before closing time. On wobbling legs I staggered into the cool, dark, wood-paneled lobby. Hooten’s ship from Ceres, I knew only too well, had gone into orbit sixteen hours before. More than enough time to get the shuttle down to Earth and then to Liechtenstein....

And if Hooten had gotten to the bearer box before I did, I might as well stay on Earth: my future with Hartman, Bemis & Choupette would be very, very circumscribed indeed.

The codecard worked precisely as J. Davis Alexander had promised it would. No human being challenged me as I pushed the card into one slot after another, gradually making my way through one security measure and then another, through the lobby, along a corridor, then down to the vaults far beneath the surface. Finally I watched a set of massive steel bars swing slowly aside and I stepped into a narrow vault filled with gleaming stainless steel deposit boxes. There before me was what I had come 538 million klicks for: J. Davis Alexander’s bearer box.

With fingers that visibly trembled I pushed the card into the slot on the box’s glistening face.

Whirring softly, its door began to open.

Hardly daring to breathe, I pulled the exposed box towards me. Suppose Hooten had gotten here ahead of me....

I opened my eyes.

The box was jammed with currency, coins, glittering gold ingots, sealed manila envelopes, and colorfully printed bearer bonds.

Without examining it any further, I began to shovel everything in sight into the Air Polynesie flight bag I had picked up somewhere en route. Moments later the box was empty and the bag zippered tight.

Even the smallest gold bars are far heavier than you’d ever think possible. I was concentrating on using both hands to lug the flight bag through the door of the vault when I unexpectedly bumped into somebody rushing into the vault.

“White! What are you doing here?”

“Hello, Hooten.” When I’d stilled the beating of my heart, I managed a polite nod for J. Davis Alexander’s least favorite nephew and tried to sidle past his lanky frame.

His long, equine face thrust into mine. “I said, What are you doing here?”

“Just checking my bank box.” With a determined bit of shoulder work I made it past Hooten and into the small paneled foyer at the base of the elevator. I thumbed the button.

Behind me I heard a muffled cry of rage. “It’s empty! It’s—”

The elevator door opened and I stepped inside. Two hands fastened around my neck and yanked me back out. The hands tightened. “You’ve stolen it, White, you’ve—”

The fingers fell away from my neck and I whirled around, the flight bag clutched protectively to my chest.

Hooten was in the grip of two bulky gentlemen wearing discreet blue suits. “Please, Mein Herr,” one of them murmured to the furiously thrashing Hooten as he tightened his forearm around the Belter’s scrawny neck, “this gentleman is under the protection of the Banque Unione de Vaduz.” He turned to me. “Would you care to give him in charge, sir?”

I stepped back into the elevator and cast a final glance at Hooten. “No, just keep him calm until I’m in an air-car.”

The elevator door shut on Hooten’s indignant shrieks.

“So now you’re rich beyond the wildest dreams of avarice,” marveled Isabel with an ironic twist to her lips, “and you can use whatever evidence you found in the box to pry Miss Rutabaga of 2270 away from J. Davis Alexander and into your own little harem.” She exchanged complacent smiles with Jin Tshei, who reached across the table to pat her hand fondly.

“I admit the thought flashed briefly across my mind,” I grinned, raising my eyes from our table at the Cafe des Mondes to the corner office of Hartman, Bemis & Choupette where even now J. Davis Alexander was undoubtedly casting about for reasons to fire me.

“The dreams of avarice, that is,” I added hastily, “not Miss Grain Harvest of 2273- But on mature consideration I decided it would be far less stressful just to step into the Farmers Bank of Liechtenstein on the other side of the street and dump everything into a new bearer box over there. Let J. Davis Alexander worry about having Miss Grain Harvest find the new code-cards.”

Both ladies patted my hand simultaneously. “Very wise,” approved Jin Tshei, enveloping me in the radiance of the multi-gigawatt smile that always turned my legs to jelly. “But you still haven’t told us how you managed to keep from freezing to death.”

I shrugged casually, as if I made Houdini-like escapes every day of the week. “Very easy, when you think of it. I stuck one piece of torn-up shirt into one of the barrels, the pineapple brandy, I think, as a very small wick, tightly stoppered, and kept that going as my pilot light. Then, with a little experimentation, I got a much bigger piece burning in the other barrel. That’s the one that was doing the actual heating.”

“But the smoke,” objected Isabel. “It must—”

“Beltships have very efficient recycling and scrubbing equipment, even if their heating systems leave something to be desired. All I had to do was make sure I didn’t run out of clothes to burn—and to remember to change barrels whenever one of them was used up.”

“Yes, that must have been the hard part,” said Jin Tshei tartly, “especially since you seem to have been as busy drinking the stuff as you were burning it. Falling down on the feet of the Queen! Really, Jonathan White, you ought to be ashamed of yourself! Ten billion people watched you make a fool of yourself!”

“The Queen thought it was a very nice gesture,” I muttered defensively. “Showed the proper deference to her lofty stature and all that. No one told her I had simply passed out.” I took a sip of the Coca-Cola that had been my only drink at the Café des Mondes since returning from Earth and grimaced. “Her son the Crown Prince was drying out at a clinic in New Zealand with the D.T.’s, you know. That’s why he couldn’t make the trip down to Port Pomare.”

“But how did you get the damned wick burning in the first place?” demanded Isabel impatiently. “I thought you said you didn’t have any matches or any way to make a fire.”

“Yes, that was a little bit of a problem. But after a while I stopped licking the Water of Life off my fingers and remembered that I’d just nearly charred them to the bone by fiddling around with the powersuit’s wiring. So I ripped a couple of meters of wire out of the suit, jammed one end into the ship’s outlet, and crossed the other together over the pilot light in the barrel. Bingo! A nice bright spark—and a nicely burning wick.”

Isabel gave me a hard stare. “Would you ever have done anything so absolutely stupid if you hadn’t been drunk?”

A long silence. “We’ll never know, will we?” I shrugged at last. “Anyway, it wasn’t entirely my fault. I said that the air-scrubbers were super-efficient at cleaning the air and removing smoke. Very true—but it’s also true they weren’t designed to cope with the fumes of several thousand liters of burning mango brandy, either. At the same time they were filtering out the smoke, they were pumping pure alcohol vapor back into the cabin. That’s what kept me drunk for nineteen and a half days.”

Jin Tshei grip’s tightened on my hand. “Brave, intrepid Jonathan Welbrook White, pioneer drunken space hero!”

“I’ll never live it down,” I admitted. “On the other hand,” I added, my tone brightening, “the demonstration of the Ore-ball Express did just exactly what we wanted it to. The secondary offering for 220 million was oversubscribed, Orbex Inc. is getting ready to go into full-scale production of ore-balls, and the stock the three of us own from the initial offering has already quadrupled. And just between us, I just may have made a copy or two of some of the… spicier material in those sealed envelopes I found in J. Davis Alexander’s bearer box. Who knows: it might be useful to mention that fact the next time our furry friend up there takes a notion to fire me.”

I gestured imperiously to the lifelike robot attendant in his old-fashioned black suit and white apron. “Garçon! Another round of drinks for the ladies—and a Coca-Cola for the gentleman!”

MANY THANKS TO GERALD NORDLEY FOR INITIALLY SUGGESTING THE IDEA OF THE FLOATABLE ORE-BALL AND THEN DOING CALCULATIONS ON ITS FEASIBILITY. ANY MISTAKES IN THE STORY, HOWEVER, ARE ENTIRELY THE AUTHOR’S.

Editor’s Note: Earlier stories of Jonathan Welbrook White, Ethical Broker & Bourseman, include “Six Million Solid Gold Belter Buckles” (August 1994), and “Deep-Fried Black Diamonds” (January 1995).