Уильям Макгиверн - Collected Fiction - 1940-1963

Stu Englander nodded. Like Ramsey he was a hyper-space pilot, but although he had an Earth-style name and had been born of Earth parents, he was not an Earthman. He had been born on Capella VII, and had spent most of his life on that tropical planet. The result was not an uncommon one for outworlders who spent any amount of time on Irwadi: Stu Englander had a nagging bronchial condition which had kept him off the pilot-bridge for some months now.

Englander nodded again, dourly. He was a short, very slender man a few years older than Ramsey, who was thirty-one. He said: “That ties it. And I mean ties it, brother. You’re looking at the brokest Capellan-earthman who ever got himself stuck on an outworld.”

“You mean it?”

“Dead broke, Jase.”

“What about Sally and the kids?”

Englander had an Arcturan-earthian wife and twin boys four years old. “I don’t know what about Sally and the kids,” he told Ramsey glumly. “I guess I’ll go over to the New Quarter and try to get some kind of a job.”

“They wouldn’t hire an outworlder to shine their shoes with his own spit, Stu. They have got the planetarization bug, and they’ve got it bad.”

Sally Englander called from the kitchen of the small flat: “Will Jase be staying for supper?”

Englander stared at Ramsey, who shook his head. “Not today, Sally,” Englander said, looking at Ramsey gratefully.

“Listen,” Ramsey lied, “I’ve been lucky as all get out the last couple of months.”

“You old pro!” grinned Englander.

“So I’ve got a few hundred credits just burning a hole in my pocket,” Ramsey went on. “How’s about taking them?”

“But I haven’t the slightest idea when I could pay back.”

“I didn’t say anything about paying me back.”

“I couldn’t accept charity, Jase.”

“O.K. Pay me back when you get a chance. There are plenty of hyper-space jobs waiting for us all over the galaxy, you know that.”

“Yeah, all we have to do is get off Irwadi and go after them. But the Irwadians are keeping us right here.”

“Sure, but it won’t last. Not when the folks back in Capella and Deneb and Sol System hear about it.”

“Six months,” said Englander bleakly. “It’ll take at least that long.”

“Six months I can wait. What d’you say?”

Englander coughed wrackingly, his eyes watering. He got off the bed and shook Ramsey’s hand solemnly. Ramsey gave him three hundred and seventy-five credits and said: “Just see you make that go a long way supporting Sally and the kids. I don’t want to see you dropping any of it at the gaming tables. I’ll knock your block off if I see you there.”

“I’ll knock my own block off if I see me there. Jase, I don’t know how to thank—”

“Don’t is right. Forget it.”

“Do you have enough—”

“Me? Plenty. Don’t worry about old Jase.” Ramsey went to the door. “Well, see you.”

Englander walked quickly to him and shook his hand again. On the way out, Ramsey played for a moment or two with the twins, who were rolling a couple of toy spaceships marked hyper-one and hyper-two across the floor and making anachronistic machine-gun noises with their lips. Sally Englander, a plump, young-home-maker type, beamed at Ramsey from the kitchen. Then he went out into the gathering dusk.

As usual on Irwadi, and particularly with the coming of night, it was bitterly cold. Sucker, Ramsey told himself. But he grinned. He felt good about what he’d done. With Stu sick, and with Sally and the kids, he’d done the only thing he could do. He still had almost twenty-five credits left. Maybe he really would have a lucky night at the tables. Maybe... heck, he’d been down-and-out before. A fugitive from Earth didn’t have much choice sometimes...

“Red sixteen,” the croupier said indifferently. He was a short, heavy-set Sirian with a shock of scarlet hair, albino skin, and red eyes.

Ramsey watched his money being raked across the table. It wasn’t his night, he told himself with a grim smile. He had only three credits left. If he risked them now, there wouldn’t even be the temporary physical relief and release of a bottle of Irwadian brandy before hitting the sack.

Which was another thing, Ramsey thought. Hitting the sack. Ah yes, you filthy outworlder capitalist, hitting the sack. You owe that fish-eyed, scale-skinned Irwadian landlady the rent money, so you’d better wait until later, until much later, before sneaking back to your room.

He watched the gambling for another hour or so without risking his few remaining credits. After a while a well-dressed Irwadian, drunk and obviously slumming here in the Old Quarter, made his way over to the table. His body scales were a glossy dark green and he wore glittering, be-jeweled straps across his chest and an equally glittering, be-jeweled weapons belt. Aside from these, in the approved Irwadian fashion, he was quite naked. An anthropologist friend had once told Ramsey that once the Irwadians had worn clothing, but since the coming in great number of the outworlders they had stripped down, as though to prove how tough they were in being able to withstand the freezing climate of their native world. Actually, the Irwadian body-scales were superb insulation, whether from heat or from cold.

“... Earthman watching me,” the Irwadian in the be-jeweled straps said arrogantly, placing a fat roll of credits on the table.

“I’m sorry,” Ramsey said. “Were you talking to me?”

“I thertainly wath,” lisped the Irwadian, his eyes blazing with drunken hatred. “I thaid I won’t have any Earthman thnooping over my thoulder while I gamble, not unleth he’th gambling too.”

“Better tell that to your Security Police,” Ramsey said coldly but not angrily. “I’m out of a job, so I don’t have money to throw around. Go ahead and tell me—” with a little smile — “you think it was my idea.”

The Irwadian looked up haughtily. Evidently he was looking for trouble, or could not hold his liquor, or both. The frenzy of planetarization, Ramsey knew from bitter experience on other worlds, made irrational behavior like this typical. He studied the drunken Irwadian carefully. In all the time he’d spent on Irwadi, he’d never been able to tell a native’s age by his green, scale-skinned, fish-eyed poker-face. But the glossy green scales covering face and body told Ramsey, along with the sturdy muscles revealed by the lack of clothing, that the Irwadian was in his prime, shorter than Ramsey by far, but wider across the shoulders and thicker through the barrel chest.

“You outworlderth have been deprething the thandard of living on Irwadi ever thince you came here,” the Irwadian said. “All you ever brought wath poverty and your ditheath germth and more trouble than you could handle. I don’t want your thtink near me. I’m trying to enjoy mythelf. Get out of here.”

It was abruptly silent in the little gambling hall. Since the establishment catered to outworlders and was full of them, the silence, Ramsey thought, should have been both ominous and in his favor. He looked around. Outworlders, yes. But not another Earthman present. He wondered if he was in for a fight. He shrugged, hardly caring. Maybe a fight was just what he needed, the way he felt.

“Get out of here,” the Irwadian repeated. “You thtink.”

Just then a Vegan girl, blue-skinned and fantastically wasp-waisted like all her kind, drifted over to Ramsey. He’d seen her around. He thought he recognized her. Maybe he’d even danced with her in the unit-a-dance halls reserved for humanoid outworlders.

“Are you nuts?” she said, hissing the words through her teeth and grabbing Ramsey’s elbow. “Don’t you know who that guy is?”

“No. Who?”