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any work to do?' I
asked him. 'I have to check the cannons from outside,' he replied. 'But not
while that crowd's still hanging around."
'DelArco will get them cleared away,' I said. 'He'll give the port authority
hell for letting them in, in the first place.'
'Can't keep them off the port,' Johnny pointed out.
'A little effort would keep them out of this bloody bay. It could be sealed,
if the authority could be bothered. Legally, they're trespassers.'
'Does it matter so much?'
I shrugged. 'Not to me. It's delArco's ship.' There was a pause. 'Well,' I
continued. 'You got what you wanted, didn't you? Shipping out from Earth in
the morning. The Halcyon rim in a couple of days.'
 I don't know why they hired me,' he said. 'I've no experience in space, and
I'm not too familiar with this type of drive.'
'Maybe they were in a hurry,' I said. 'I shouldn't worry too much about it. If
they had any specific reason, then it was in the interests of neatness. The
New Alexandrians are neat people. The pilot of the ship is the key man, and
they probably planned to build the crew around me. All that's really new in
this ship is in my job, so they could afford to pass up the best men for the
other jobs in the interests of giving me people I know and can work with.'
'Then why is delArco captain, not you?'
That had been bothering me, too. I had to tell him that I simply didn't
know. But I had my suspicions. While delArco was captain, I was nothing. A
ship's captain has a great deal of res-ponsibility, and hence a certain amount
of authority under the law. A captain can exercise discretion about where to
take his ship, how and when. Maybe the New Alexandrians only wanted my talent,
not my ideas about how things should be run. While I had no power in the eyes
of the law, they had complete power over me by virtue of their contract.
Johnny left to help Rothgar check out the drive. I had work to do as well -
laborious checking of every circuit I'd used, to see that everything was still
working as it should. But for the moment, I wanted a couple of hours' rest.
The flight had left me exhausted. So I leaned back in the cradle and talked to
the wind.
You got your way, too, didn't you?
That was the first time that I ever initiated conversation with the wind. I
was getting used to him, and accepting his presence as something more than
just an unpleasant fact that I couldn't do anything about.
" I got your way, he replied.
It's nice to know someone has my interests at heart.
" I have both our interests at heart. So should you. They ought to be more or
less the same. A
Page 40
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dispute could prove embarrassing.
Maybe so, I agreed, then added: But more so for you than for me. I have the
casting vote, don't
I? I own the body.
This was a point which bothered me - just what was the wind capable of, once
he was settled in?
Could I be dispossessed of my own body?
But he agreed readily enough that I had the body, and in the event of a
dispute, he'd have to go where I took him. I re-flected that if I were he, I
would object most strongly to being taken into the
Halcyon Drift.
11
The second take-off wasn't like the first. The day before, I'd choked the life
out of the piledriver before it had any chance to develop real thrust. This
time, it was all for real - the cannons would really let go, and the flux
would flow.
I held her on the pad while I poured impulse from the dis-charge points into
the deration system, to cycle the flux and build up a syndromatic power charge
that would hurl us clear of the Earth within seconds after I let her go.
The bird climbed on the blast as if she'd been lusting for clear space all her
young life, and now it was offered to her, she couldn't wait to grab it. I
threw the relaxation web into operation the moment I
closed the cannons, and a surge of power spread through the nerve-net like a
Shockwave. Suddenly, the whole sub-surface was alive and participating in the
thrust. The bird was really going now - not lifting on the cannon-blast or
soaring on her wings, but driving on the internal release and consumption of
power.
She was living. Faster and faster and faster.
I couldn't see the Earth in the hood, save as a location mark. Even the sun [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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