The Golden Globe

Finally he slapped a shipping tag on the side of the Pantech, and I watched it trundle away on a conveyor belt into unknown depths. Now I was in a big hurry.

There was a convenience store at the train station. I filled a grocery bag full of granola bars, jerky, honey, corn syrup, and as many other items of concentrated fat, sugar, and carbohydrates as I could carry. Then I set off in search of the sort of merchant you can always find hanging around a spaceport. The sort who doesn't display his wares on shelves, or hang out a sign.

She wasn't too hard to find. Most drugs are legal on Pluto, and even the ones they try to control are readily available if you know where to look—as has always been the case. I was directed to a back booth of a coffee shop on one of the lower levels. I sipped a hot chocolate while we haggled about price, then she left and I sat looking out a big picture window overlooking the freight-sorting yard. Millions of crates and parcels slid down ramps and along conveyors until they fetched up at the doors that would soon open and disgorge their loads onto shuttle trucks.

The pusher returned with a small plastic envelope, and told me the quickest way to the yard.

This place was probably more dangerous than Pearl. The mechanized mayhem of the Vegas was predictable, most of it was smart, and programmed to be on the lookout for fragile humans getting in the way. Not so in the freight yard. If you didn't stay on your toes something might roll up behind you and crush you like a bug under silent wheels. I moved quickly, following the homer beacon in my pocket, and soon I was standing where the Pantechnicon had come to rest, midway down a line of larger crates.

I was about to activate it when a movement in the corner of my eye made me stop and duck down. I looked up cautiously... and let out a deep breath. Two lines over a man was on his hands and knees, crawling under the metal frame of a conveyor. This was all right with me; cops never crawl, and they never look furtive. Neither do yard bulls. They can sneak just fine, but they do it with entirely different body language.

In fact... I thought I knew this guy.

I gave a low whistle, three notes known to hoboes throughout the system, and he looked up at me and gri

"Sparks," he said, in a husky voice.

"Lou? Is that the uke man?"

"You don't believe me, I'll play you a tune."

Ukulele Lou was a legend in his own time. He was rumored to have some sort of brain damage, which made his conversations a little hard to follow, and he was crazy as a mudlark. But his memory for music was amazing. He claimed to know words and music to fifteen thousand songs, and I'd never doubted him. He was wearing a battered pressure suit. His precious ukulele was in his hand.

I swear, the helmet faceplate had a crack in it. It made me sweat just to think about it. Lou and some of the other 'bos always traveled this way, and without the comforts of top-of-the-line luggage.

"Where you bound?" I asked him.

"Where else? Uranus." He pronounced it your-anus.

Where else, indeed? I'm largely ignorant of these things, but my understanding was that due to orbital dynamics, nearly all the outer planet commerce for the last decade, and for a few decades to come, was the triangle of Pluto, Uranus, and Neptune, then back to Pluto, in that order. It had to do with the relative positions of the planets. Pluto had for some years been at the lowest point in its orbit, which meant it was closer to the sun than Neptune. Uranus was about sixty degrees ahead, and Neptune clear around the sun from Uranus. No orbit in the outer planets that gets you there in a reasonable time is a truly economical orbit, but going against the direction of planetary motion is the least economical orbit of all. It's like stepping off a moving train. Before you go anywhere else, you first have to kill your own motion.

"What about you?" Lou asked.

"Uranus," I confirmed. I pronounced it Urine-us. Was there ever an orb so inelegantly named? Nobody's ever agreed on how to say it, and both ways stink.

"The Bard's World?" he asked, with a cackle.

"Where else?"

"Can't get them stars outta your eyes, is that it? Go

I ignored the ribbing and saluted him. "Good luck, Lou," I said.

"Break a leg," he urged. Then he pried up a corner of a three-story packing crate and squeezed himself inside. I could hear him working, faintly, as I activated the shelter on the Pantech.

I did a little research on tramps and hoboes while struggling through an ill-advised update of The Grapes of Wrath. ("Ke

Then, as now, the owners of the railroads were aware of the informal passengers, and then, as now, they didn't like it much. What they did about it depended largely on where you hopped the freight, or where you got off.

The clerk I'd bribed had been fully aware of my real intentions. Declaring a live animal was the most common ruse to obtain air and water en route. He'd heard that story about the dog before. (Ironically, I really had a dog, of course, but he would not need any consumables.)

Maybe that clerk meant what he said when he wrote "bitching freeze." It would be one hell of a bitchin' freeze if anything went wrong with any of the Pantech's systems along the way. Or any of the freighter's systems, for that matter, and let's face it, they just aren't as careful about things as they are in even the worst passenger liner. You lose a passenger and it's lawsuit time. If the Pantech sprang a leak I'd be little more than spoiled freight, who shouldn't have been in there in the first place. Like those old 'bos who fell off the rods; gathered up, bagged, and tossed in a hole in potter's field. Maybe a token effort to contact the kinfolk.

We are used to a high standard of safety, and fear of vacuum is the most common phobia, one I share with eighty percent of humanity. Though I believe I have it in a greater degree than most.

Then there are the old space rats like Ukulele Lou. Cracked faceplate and all. He seemed immune to the fears that now began to bore into my spine like an electrified dental drill.

I heard him as I squeezed myself through the lock and into the newly deployed shelter half-made of memory plastic. He was doing what you might expect a guy named Ukulele Lou to do: singing.

The memory plastic can remember a variety of shapes. This time, since the Pantech was standing on end, and since we'd soon be in vacuum, it was best to be spherical. From the outside it looked like a cubist's idea of an icecream cone, and from inside, the hatch I could open to gain access to the interior was now under my feet, the Pantech becoming my basement. I lifted this hatch and fiddled with the environmental controls, preparing it to accept the external air and water feeds when they were hooked up, just prior to loading aboard the ship.

Luck. I'd need some of it. The trip would be eighty-four days. I had enough food to stretch for about thirty... if I stayed awake and my metabolism worked as usual. I didn't plan on staying awake.