Merchanter's Luck

“Sandwich,” someone said, and he looked left as a male hand set a plate in front of him. He disposed of as much of it as he could in several graceless bites, then stuffed the rest, napkin-wrapped, into his jacket pocket, a survival habit and one which suddenly embarrassed him in the face of all these people who knew what the odds were and what kind of poverty would drive a man to push a ship like that. Dublin knew what he had done. Someone on Dublin had talked, and they knew he had done it straight through, stringing the jumps, the only way the likes of Lucy could possibly have tailed Dublin. They would arrest him soon; someone would talk it over with some official in station central, and they would start ru

“Allison,” he said, when she sat down in the other chair and leaned on her arms looking at him, “I want to talk to you. Somewhere else.”

“Come on,” she said. “You come with me.”

He pushed the chair back and tried to get up… needed her arm when he tried to walk, to keep his balance in station’s too-heavy gravity. Some spacer muttered a ribald and ancient joke, about a man just off a solo run, and it was true, at least as far as the mind went, but the rest of him was dead.

He walked, a miserable blur of lights and moving bodies—the dock’s wide echoing chill and light and then a doorway, a confusion of bizarre wallpaper and a desk and a clerk—a sleepover, a carpeted hall in either direction from here… He leaned on the counter with his head propped on his hand while Allison straightened out the details and the finances. Then she took his arm again and led him down a corridor.

“Keep them out of here,” she yelled back at someone, who said all right and left; she carded a door open and put him through, into a sleepover room with a wide white bed.

He turned around then and tried to put his arms around her. She shoved him in the middle of his chest and he nearly fell down. “Idiot,” she said to him, which was not the welcome he had hoped for, but what he reckoned now he deserved. He stood there paralyzed in his misery and his mental state until she pulled him over to the bed and pushed him down onto it. She started working at his clothes with rough, abrupt movements as if she were still furious. “Roll over,” she hissed at him, and pulled at his shoulder and threw the covers over him.

And he fell asleep.

Chapter V

He woke, aware of bare smooth skin next to his own, of a warm arm about him, and turned, blinked in confusion. She was still here, in the room’s artificial twilight. “Allison,” he said hoarsely, hoarse because his voice like the rest of him was not in the best of form. He stroked her hair and woke her without really meaning to ruin her sleep.

“Huh,” she said, looking up at him. “About time.” But when he tried with her, there was nothing he could do. He lay there in wretched embarrassment and thinking that at this point she would probably get up and get dressed and walk out of his life forever, about the time he had just spent most of it.

“What could you expect?” she said, and patted his face and took his hand and carried it against her mouth, all of which so bewildered him that he simply lay there staring into her eyes and expecting her to follow that statement with something direly cutting.

She did not. “I’m sorry,” he said finally. I’m really sorry.”

“There’s tomorrow. A few more days. What are you going to do, Stevens? Is it worth the handful of days you bought with this stunt?”

He thought about it. For a moment he found it even hard to breathe. It really deserved laughing about, the whole situation, because there was something fu

“You’re absolutely out of your mind.”

He found a grin possible, which at least kept up his image. “I don’t make a habit of it.”

“Why’d you do it?”

“Why not?”

She frowned. Scowled. She shook her head after a moment, got up on her elbow, looking down at him, traced the old scar on his side, a gentle touch. “What are you going to tell your company?”

He lay there, stared at the ceiling with his head on his arms, considered the question and truth and lies, gri

A fist landed on his ribs. ‘I’ll bet you will. No cargo. No clearance. You jumped out of Viking on the wrong heading. What are they going to do to you, Stevens?”

“Actually,” he said, “it’s a minor problem.” He shut his eyes, still with a smile painted on his face and a weariness sitting on his chest that seemed the accumulation of years. “I’ll talk my way out of it, never fear.” And after a moment: “Why don’t we try it again, Reilly? I think it might work.”

It did, oddly enough—and that, he thought, lying there with Allison Reilly tangled with him and content, was because he had started thinking again how to con his way through, and about saving his skin and Lucy’s, which got his blood moving again, however tired and sore he was. He was remarkably placid in contemplating his ruin, which he figured he could at least postpone until Allison Reilly had put out of Pell Station aboard Dublin some few days hence. And there was the gold: he had that. If by some miracle no one had known his face, he might get himself papers, get himself cargo—go back to Voyager without routing through Viking, a chancy set of jumps, then come in with appropriate stamps on his papers to satisfy Viking—if Dublin had not reported that message about his change of destination…

He could find out. Allison might know. Would tell him. And maybe, the irrepressible thought occurred to him, he could claim some tie to Dublin for the benefit of Pell authorities, use that supposed co

He turned his head and looked at her, into eyes which suddenly opened, dark and deep and warm at the moment; and his gut knotted up at what he was thinking to do, which was to beg; or to cheat her; and neither was palatable. She hugged him close and he fell to kissing her, which was another pleasure he had discovered different with Allison Reilly.

It was hardly fair, he thought, that he himself had fallen into such hands as Allison’s, who could con him in ways he had never visited on his most deserving victims. She was having herself a good time, not even maliciously, while he was paying all he had for it.

And it was finished if she knew, in all senses. She might not, even then, turn him in; but she would know… and hate him; and that was, at the moment, as bad as station police.

“Actually,” he said during a lull, “actually I’ll tell you the truth. I’m not in trouble. It’s all covered, my shifting to Pell.”

“Oh?” She stiffened, leaned back and looked at him. “How?”

“Because I’ve got an account to shift here. I’m a small enough operator the combine gives me quite a bit of leeway. All they ask is that I make a profit for them. They let me come and go where I can do that. Wyatt’s can’t be figuring down to the last degree where to have me break off an operation: that’s my decision to make. You made Pell sound good. I heard the rumors. And you just tipped the balance.”