before you
approach, and lights came on.
“Come on in and look around,” Derek said. “This is our third control room. Not too many people know we have it.”
Harold looked around the shining place. First incredulously, then with something like growing awe. He glanced at Derek Alston. “Mind if I check these?” he asked.
“Not at all. Go ahead.”
Once, some two years before, he’d been in the control room of Earthplanet’s biggest, newest, and proudest outsystem transport. What he’d seen then was dwarfed, made trifling and clumsy, by what was here. His skin shivered with a lover’s delight. “You have power to go with it?” he asked presently.
“We have the power.”
“Where’s the asteroid going on interstellar drives?”
“I told you mankind hadn’t got to the outsystems yet,” Derek said. “But it’s ready to move there. We’ve been preparing for it. The outsystems won’t know for a while that we’re around—not till we’re ready to let them know it.”
“This asteroid is moving to the outsystems?”
“Not this one. Not for some years. We still have functions to perform here. But a few others—the first will be ready to start within the next three months. They can use an experienced transsolar navigator. They think they can also use a fighting captain with an outsystem background. If you’re interested, I’ll take you over to one of them this afternoon.”
Harold drew in a long, deep breath.
“I’m interested,” he said.
Gone Fishing
Barney Chard, thirty-seven—financier, entrepreneur, occasional blackmailer, occasional con man, and very competent in all these activities—stood on a rickety wooden lake dock, squinting against the late afternoon sun, and waiting for his current business prospect to give up the pretense of being interested in trying to catch fish.
The prospect, who stood a few yards farther up the dock, rod in one hand, was named Dr. Oliver B. McAllen. He was a retired physicist, though less retired than was generally assumed. A dozen years ago he had rated as one of the country’s top men in his line. And, while dressed like an aging tramp in what he had referred to as fishing togs, he was at the moment potentially the country’s wealthiest citizen. There was a clandestine invention he’d fathered m