The Golden Globe

Then there were the vast, slow cargo carriers, unma

And last, there were the "zipper" ships, small and fast, like the Guy. The Guy Fawkes was infinitely superior to the Big Q in one area, and that was velocity. In every other way, it suffered.

Certainly, the Quisling's staterooms smelled bad. Sure, the food was indifferently prepared and usually cold. Yes, the whole cast did come down with an infestation of fleas just short of Boondocks. The tiny bars of soap crumbled in your hand—if you could get the rusty water to flow in your shower in the first place—and the toilets muttered menacingly all night and flooded on some sort of lunar cycle. Ah, but a smelly stateroom is better than no room at all. The toilets were unreliable, but they were there, one to a room. There's an old joke about one actor turning to another and commenting on how terrible the food is in this hotel. To which the other replies, "Yes, and such small portions." I'd never really appreciated it until boarding the Guy. Soon I was thinking of my cantankerous toilet on the Quisling with real nostalgia: a poor thing, but mine own. There was one toilet on the Guy, for 150 passengers. There had been two, but one had exploded a few months before. That's right, I said exploded. You could still see blood stains on the ceiling above it. I'll say this: it reduced the waiting time. Most of us stalled until we were dancing, then sort of hovered over it, alert for any premonitory gurgle. Which proved to be a good idea, as one brave soul who actually sat became the victim of a "transient pressure deficit," a term I wrote down as soon as the captain told us, it being the best euphemism for vacuum—a word spacers avoid—I'd heard in my many years in space. If you want to know what happened, I propose an experiment for the curious student. Drop a few burning matches into a beer bottle, then set a hard-boiled egg over the mouth. We pried for fifteen minutes before we could get him loose. He described the experience as "like an enema in reverse" and improvised a bedpan for the rest of the trip, as did most everyone else.

I know it's in mighty poor taste to dwell at length on such a subject. Normally I wouldn't, but nothing else could so quickly and succinctly give you a picture of conditions aboard the Guy. It had all the stinks, fleas, cockroaches, rats, and rusty water the Quisling did, and it was crammed into a much smaller space. It had worse food, and not enough of it. We slept on drawers that rolled in and out of the wall like slabs in a morgue. This put you about a foot away from your neighbors on each side, above, and below, and gave you a unique opportunity for research into the sounds and smells of a class of humanity most people never get to meet.

I did mention that much of Brementon was a prison colony, didn't I? Then it stands to reason that more than half my fellow passengers were parolees, or people who had finished their terms. Mostly the latter, as Brementon didn't get a lot of the sort anybody would ever trust on parole. So night after night I lay there and listened to conversations that would curl your hair, and to other, involuntary sounds polite society tries to pretend don't exist. So that's what a man who murdered his mother sounds like when he farts. Interesting. And that smell, that's the dirty socks of a ritual ca

"It's all material, Dodger," my father used to say when events had brought us to a particularly perilous pass. "You can use all of this. Next time you have to play despair, why, you can just think back to this." And he'd smile, and pinch my cheek.

I said "night after night," but that's misleading, too. Of course, there is no night in space, particularly out where we were. And my sleep period was not even ship's night. We shared the bunks, you see, in eight-hour shifts. And if you think the linen got changed between shifts you haven't been listening. I don't think the linen got changed between flights.

And while I've got the chance, I'd like to complain to the management about that transit time of six months. Is this any way to run a railroad? What we did was blast at an ungodly acceleration for what seemed like days (they swore it was more like hours), and then we coasted the entire trip, until it was time to slow down at Pluto. I tried complaining to the captain, but he was exasperating about it, as spacers always are. Trying to tell me it was more "economical" to use all our reaction mass in one big kick, as hard as we could stand it, and then another one at the end. I ask you, does that make sense? Wouldn't it be better to boost at a sane, comfortable one gee until we got halfway there, then do the same thing slowing down? Or if we didn't have enough fuel for that (I'll admit I'm a bit vague on some of the details), at least spread the acceleration out. It stands to reason we'd build up more speed that way, and I'm sure we'd get there more rapidly. I'm convinced we were cheated. I shall write my congressperson, really I shall.

Because the kicker to the whole sorry mess was that, for all that uncomfortable "economy," we ended up paying an eighty percent surcharge on our tickets! As if that third-rate cattle car were some crack liner! And what did we get for our money? Bone-breaking jackrabbit starts and stops, and six months of free fall with no soap or showers.

That eighty percent fee almost killed me. After beating a hasty retreat from the Playhouse, thinking the hounds were literally nipping at my heels, I trundled my trunk into the spaceport secure in the knowledge that I had a confirmed booking on the next ship out, which was the Fawkes. Out of long habit I had made such a reservation, in Elwood's name, on every ship that was scheduled to leave Brementon. This wasn't much of a chore, as Bremen-ton was not King City Interplanetary; arrivals and departures were at an average rate of one every three days. At more civilized facilities I would memorize flight schedules for a selection of possible emergency destinations. At Brementon, it was take it or leave it.

One precept my father put right up there with "always cut the cards" was never to embark on a road trip without your return ticket in your pocket. If you were my best friend, and came to me swearing that without the loan of a fiver your dear sweet mother would die of a horrible disease, and all I had in my pocket was my return ticket, I would look you in the eye and swear I was pe

So I thought I was in good shape when I slapped my ticket down on the counter, trying not to look over my shoulder, and that's when I was let in on the closely guarded secret (actually, it was buried in the fine print when I looked, later) that sent me scrambling to my purse to discover that, even with gold fillings in my teeth, I couldn't do better than sixty percent. Not, that is, until I recalled the antique diamond brooch I'd discovered only the day before, carelessly and shamefully neglected upon Dahlia Smithson's dresser top. I'd just been passing by in the corridor, honest, when the thing seemed to call out to me. I feel that when you own something as fine as that you are obligated to be more careful with it. I'd meant to tell her that, too, but events intervened, and here I was shy a bit of cash, so there was nothing for it but to sell the brooch to a larcenous ticket agent for a twentieth of what it would have fetched in any pawnshop in Luna.