Dave Duncan - Wildcatter

Seth opened his eyes. A door stood open. The possible herm rose, crossed the room, and disappeared. His calf muscles were impressive, but his hips were not true male.

Everyone went back to what they were doing, except Lotus, who hadn’t reacted at all. No one had shown surprise at the number called, which either indicated that they already knew that the order was irrelevant, or else was a test to see if Seth could be rattled.

He closed his eyes again and sub-vocalized the code to check into ISLA’s status page. It showed near-Earth space remaining quiet. Golden Hind was still in assembly orbit, together with two new keels, presently unnamed. Galactic had four in refit: Bolivar , Courageous , De Soto, and Magellan . Indra also had four: Ganesha, Krishna, Shiva, and Rama ; but Indra was currently fully engaged in developing its world of Benares and would not be competing. Three of Bonanza’s ships were due in from the Sagittarius sector within days: Canopus , Polaris, and Sirius . They would need time to refit.

So if a good planetary prospect was reported in the next couple of months, Mighty Mite might not face any significant competition for it.

After about twenty minutes the door opened again. Candidate Fourteen stalked across to the outer door, his face expressionless.

“Number Twelve,” Anorexia said. None of the others squawked about having been there longer.

Seth rose and went to meet his destiny.

The CEO’s office was even larger, the carpet thicker, and windows forming two sides displayed a magnificent view of a sandy beach with surf rolling in and palm trees waving their fronds about. Considering that Mite’s HQ was on the forty-second floor, in the middle of one of the world’s largest cities, which was itself 3,500 meters above traditional sea level, Seth was disinclined to believe that the scene was real. Besides, it would be centuries before sea level stabilized enough for mature beaches like that to form again.

JC was standing behind a desk composed of a slab of black granite floating in the air with no visible support. Was that symbolic of Mighty Mite’s finances? He was dressed in a formal suit of white starsilk with a matching hat and a large black feather. He had large black-hairy forearms and was bigger than Seth had expected from his vid appearance.

He spoke his name, reaching a meaty hand across the desk to shake.

Seth spoke his, adding, “sir.” Neither tried to crush fingers.

He was told to take a seat. He had a choice of one. Some hugely padded armchairs off in a corner were doubtless for informal chatting, but he didn’t rank those.

On the far side of the desk, JC crossed his meaty legs and studied him for a minute or two. Seth studied him right back, noticing JC taking note of his arms and shoulders. Perhaps he should have worn long sleeves and long pants; in pink.

“Your resume is impressive, Broderick.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Why do you want to venture into the Big Nothing, as we spacers call it?”

“To get rich.”

“This will be a one-ship expedition. You know how risky those are.”

“Yes, sir.” On a ship-by-ship comparison, they weren’t much riskier than fleet expeditions, but Seth was not going to argue with the Great Man if he said the moon was made of cheese.

“Your chances of surviving would be better if you signed up for a tour in downside duty on a development world, where the risks are known.”

“Working for wages.”

“Do you know the odds on a prospector surviving a first landing on a virgin world?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You think you can operate coherently with that kind of risk hanging over you?”

“Yes, sir.”

JC shrugged. “We’re a start-up. You’d reduce your risk if you went wildcatting with Galactic or one of the other multinationals.”

“Still for wages.”

“Good wages.”

Why waste time like this? Why not just tell him he was hired or kick his butt out the door? “Sir, I told you wrong. I don’t want to be rich. I want to be filthy, flaming, fucking, disgusting rich. I want to be as rich as Drake when he took the treasure ship. You advertised a piece of the action.”

“One half of one percent.”

Seth managed to frown. “I was hoping for a full one percent.” In fact a half was astonishing; he’d dreaded being offered a tenth of that. Risks had to offer worthwhile prizes.

JC shook his massive head. The feather waved. “Eighty-five percent for the sponsors, fifteen divided among the crew: five percent for me, three for the captain, and so on, down to the prospector, one half. That’s still enough to make you a billionaire if we find anything worthwhile.”

Seth shrugged and said, “That would do to start with.”

“True, true! Old Mathewson used to brag that he’d built Galactic Inc. on one bucket of mud.”

Seth smiled and nodded. Everyone knew that story.

The big man laughed. “He was lying! He brought back forty-three sealed vials of mud, dirt, water, scum, plant material, and pickled fauna. Forty contained nothing of any interest whatsoever. It was the forty-first vial that turned up the antimalarzine bacillus. Galactic was built on the profits from antimalarzine.”

Seth tried to look impressed, but he’d known that, too, though. He had been working up to this day for more than half his life.

JC adjusted a pile of antique-style papers. “There are safer ways to get even filthy rich.”

“I don’t want safer, I want richer. We had a family legend about an ancestor who was a wildcatter when that meant someone who looked for oil. He struck it big and his descendants lost it all.”

That drew a flash of interest.

“I’ve heard that before from people in the business. And ‘prospectors’, too—men who used to stake gold mines. Tell me more about yourself.”

JC must have viewed at least three files of Seth telling about himself, plus his colonoscopy in living color.

“I was born on a farm in the New Desert.” The rain had gone, the aquifers dried up, the soil blown away, and the temperature reached fifty degrees Celsius by midmorning, when the power went off. “When I was three my parents gave up the struggle and moved into town.” City life had been even worse. He didn’t say more about his parents—his father had worked a pedicab and died of a mugging when Seth was twelve. His mother had taken in laundry, succumbed to breast cancer three years later. The sister he had tried to raise had died of leukemia. When he reached his enrolment in NWTU, the big man barked a sudden question.

“Who paid for that?”

“I won a boxing scholarship.”

“I understood that boxing was outlawed about the same time as gladiator shows.”

Seth granted him a fake smile. “It’s known as ‘pugilistics’ now and we fake the punches.” Officially they did.

“You must have done well, to stay there four years.”

“I was lucky. A lot of my opponents were very skilled at faking comas.”

This time he got what looked like a real smile.

JC consulted the top sheet. “Astronomy, physics, sky-diving, karate, bungee jumping, gym, two medals in weight lifting, three in pugilistics as a lightweight, three more when you switched to middleweight, survival both tropical and arctic, hydroponics, domestic science, biology, organic chemistry, exogeology, exobiology, wrestling, pilot’s license, history of space travel… on and on. You never completed a degree.”

“I hiked from school to school, taking courses from the best instructors—anything that might help me get into space, sir. I never failed a course. Prospectors need to be smart, tough, and fearless. I am smart, tough, and fearless. Plus I know a bit of everything in a pinch.”