The Billion Dollar Boy Read online

  The list went on forever.

  Actually, Shelby had found the idea of riding the beanstalk to space rather appealing, until he found out how long it would take to reach the cruise liner. The cable cars traveled at what seemed like a reasonable speed, three hundred kilometers an hour. But they had a long way to go. It was thirty-five thousand kilometers to the cruise liner's take-off point from geosynchronous orbit. You would have to sit in one of the unfurnished cars for nearly five days, whereas a laser-boosted rocket from the New Mexico launch site would have you up there in five hours.

  No wonder that the beanstalk cars were used only for cargo and maintenance staff. The Cheever luggage had been shipped as early as possible to the foot of the beanstalk in Macapa, on the equator at the mouth of the Amazon. Shelby had watched in disbelief as twelve large trunks were loaded onto the aircar at the Cheever compound. One-half of one trunk held his stuff—the rest were all Constance Cheever's.

  For a ten-day tour? What was his mother planning to do up there?

  It was three days into the cruise before Shelby realized that his mother, by accident or design, had made her travel arrangements much more wisely than he had.

  The Aurora cruise line tickets had offered disclaimers against everything—except boredom. And that proved to be the biggest danger of all.

  The Cheever party, naturally, had reserved the most luxurious staterooms aboard the biggest of the cruise liners. It sounded good, but in practice it translated to a set of rooms for both Shelby and his mother that was about half the size of his own bedroom back home in the compound. The food on the ship was advertised as "all you can eat." Shelby decided, after the first couple of meals, that wasn't very much.

  As for the passengers . . .

  He should have known. The cruises were expensive. The average member of Earth's fourteen billion humans could no more afford the cost of a cruise liner ticket than fly up to space unassisted.

  So who was Shelby supposed to consort with on their four-day trip to the asteroid mines? The same sort of boring well-off brain-dead old fogies that his mother hung around with back on Earth. Anything less like the fun-in-space comedy show that had first drawn his interest was difficult to imagine.

  His mother, on the other hand, seemed quite at home. One day was spent in playing a game of cross-connections with the other passengers—"Rawsley. Hmm. Are you by any chance related to the New Hampshire Rawsleys? Really? My godmother's younger sister, she married the oldest son of Willoughby Rawsley . . ." And then it was on to card-playing, and afternoon soirees, and little formal dinner parties with conversation so stunningly dull that Shelby couldn't bear to be in the same room with it.

  He stayed huddled in his own cabin for two days, going through all the material he could find about the ship and the cruise. The idea of an external jaunt in a spacesuit sounded as if it might be fun, until he went aft and mentioned it to a member of the crew.

  "It would be more than fun." The crewman, Garrity, was long-limbed and slow-talking, and he looked on Shelby's plum-colored leisure outfit with a skeptical eye. "I could even find a suit big enough to squeeze you into it. But there's a slight problem."

  "What's that?"

  "The Bellatrix is accelerating at a steady half-gee. That's a nice comfortable value, enough so we don't have any worries about free-fall sickness, and high enough to take us out to the Belt, allowing for midpoint turnaround, in four and a half days. But if you were to go outside the ship in a suit you wouldn't have the ship's acceleration anymore. We'd leave you far behind, and you'd go sailing on toward infinity."

  Garrity didn't add "you idiot." But Shelby certainly felt the words in his tone of voice.

  "Maybe I can do it when the Bellatrix gets out to the Belt and the old mines," he mumbled, and retreated to his cabin.

  The ship's description of the node network occupied another few hours of his time. It was a pure space development, one which could never be employed with any node that sat in a substantial gravity field. That meant there could not be any nodes on Earth, or closer to the Sun than the Asteroid Belt. The powers-that-be on Earth as a result acted as though the node network did not exist.

  But it certainly did, and it offered a near-instantaneous transition between nodes—no matter how far apart they were. A human in a suit or a ship could float into a node chamber in the Asteroid Belt, enter the correct transition sequence into the computer, and pop out in the middle of the Kuiper Belt, far beyond the outermost planet and twenty billion kilometers from the Sun. You could, if the ship's data bank was to be believed, choose a destination much farther away. There were nodes close to—but not too close to— other stars, or even in open space.

  Shelby did not understand one word of how the network operated, but the idea of an out-and-back to the Kuiper Belt, while his mother sat playing bridge and drinking tea, had great appeal. A node jump was permitted with his class of ticket. He had checked it soon after they came aboard. Again, though, he could do nothing until they arrived at the Belt— and that was still a full day away.

  He went aft to haunt the crew's quarters, just forward of the main engines. After a little pestering, Chief Engineer Dollfus took him back to show him the Diabelli Omnivores.

  "Now, aren't they something?" Dollfus patted one of the six bulbous cylinders with a hairy hand. "Fusion takes place right here, inside this section. We usually burn hydrogen to helium, with an internal temperature as low as ten million degrees. If we need to we can fuse helium to carbon, but that needs at least a hundred million degrees before it's efficient."

  Shelby backed away a step. Ten million degrees didn't sound particularly low to him. "What would happen if you were inside that chamber when the fusion started?"

  Even before it was out of his mouth he wished he hadn't asked the question. It sounded stupid.

  Dollfus regarded dryly Shelby's swelling plum-colored suit.

  "Well, let's say that if you were in there you'd be nicely rendered down before you came out. But you'd also interfere with the fusion cycle, and the engine would turn off automatically. In practice, you'd never get in. There are a dozen monitoring machines to sound alarms and close off access."

  Machines again! Space was full of damned machines, more machines than people. There were never enough people to give a customer decent service.

  Shelby returned to his cabin in a petulant rage. It was obvious that Dollfus had been deliberately rude to him—to a top-paying passenger! Rendered down, indeed.

  His first thought was to go right back to the crew's quarters and give Dollfus a tongue-lashing. Then he changed his mind. There were other and more lasting ways of getting your revenge. The Aurora cruise line owners would receive a rocket of their own on the letterhead of Cheever Consolidated Enterprises, just as soon as the sole heir to that organization could find a way to send it. He would teach nonentities like Engineer Dollfus not to mess with the real powers in the solar system.

  Shelby went across to one of his lockers and pulled out official Cheever stationery. From under a pile of clothes he took a bottle that he had sneaked on board with his hand baggage. He took a swig, gasped as the liquor hit his stomach, and sat down to compose his complaint.

  It was just as well that Shelby did not know what went on in the crew's quarters while he sat writing. Four off-duty crew members were sitting around and talking, and Shelby himself was the subject of their conversation.

  "Never in his life, if he's to be believed." Krupa was purser of the Bellatrix, and her job brought her more than the other crew members into contact with Shelby. "Never made his own bed, never washed his own clothes, never made a meal for himself. Makes you wonder just what he has done— other than stuff his face with food while he complains about how it's inedible."

  "He's a Cheever," said Garrity. "He's never had to do anything for himself, and he never will. Know what he told me? He gets a hundred million dollars."

  "You mean, he'll get it when he's twenty-one?"

  "No. He gets a
hundred million a month—that's what his trust fund produces in interest on investments. Over a billion a year. And when his father dies he'll be a whole lot richer. It's criminal. There's no way he can possibly spend a thousandth of what he makes, while there's ten billion down on Earth going short of a meal every day."

  "That's not his fault," Dollfus said. "He didn't choose to be born a Cheever. Though I must say, if it was offered to me I wouldn't say no."

  "What he needs is discipline." Krupa made a movement with her arm, as though she was slapping somebody with her open palm. "He won't get it from his mother, I can tell you that. He runs her ragged. And it looks like he doesn't see much of his father."

  "Too busy making money." Garrity snorted. "Another few tens of billions, while his only child goes downhill. The boy has potential—he's not at all a fool, and he can ask smart questions. But he'll come to nothing without discipline. His father's the one that deserves the smack on the head."

  The fourth crew member was a brooding Irishman, Malone, who seldom spoke. Now he roused himself. "I'll agree with ninety percent of what you're saying. But not that about Jerry Cheever."

  "Who?"

  "The boy's father—Jerome Prescott Cheever. I know him, or at least I used to."

  "You never told us that," said Dollfus, in a tone suggesting that he didn't quite believe it.

  "There's a lot about me you don't know." Malone sniffed. "I worked for him over twenty-five years ago, when I was still down on Earth and Jerry Cheever hadn't made his first million."

  "But that can't be," Krupa protested. "I've stood by in the lounge while Constance Cheever and her friends were playing cards. She talks all the time about 'old money.' "

  "No doubt she does. And no doubt she is." Malone shook his dark head. "But not him. Believe it or not, Jerry Cheever started out with no more than me. But he was the smartest man I ever met—and an honest one, too."

  "Then he must be double sick," said Dollfus, "to see what a spoiled mass of blubber he's brought into the world. The worst thing is, Shelby Cheever thinks he deserves everything he's got. And because he has all that, with people on Earth bowing and scraping and falling over themselves to satisfy his every whim, there's no way he'll ever change."

  Garrity reached out a long arm to refill his mug, and regarded Dollfus with a cynical eye. "And would you be any different, Chief, if you had all that?"

  "Maybe not. Probably not. Not if I'd been born to it." Krupa repeated her gesture, swinging her arm in a slapping movement. "That's all the boy needs. Morning and night, and repeat as necessary 'til he acts human."

  "Aye. But you can be sure he'll never get it," said Garrity gloomily. "Shel Cheever will always have what he wants, but never what he needs."

  For twenty-four hours Shelby had been waiting for the arrival at the Belt mines to break his boredom. It did, but not quite in the way that he had expected.

  It had never occurred to him that the comfortable half-gee field inside the Bellatrix was entirely the result of the ship's acceleration. On their arrival at the Belt mine, that acceleration had to end. One moment he was standing at a forward port, staring with a high-magnification scope at the disfigured ovoid of an asteroid identified by the ship's computer as CM-67—Company Mine Number 67. The next second his feet were barely touching the deck, and his stomach was floating up into his throat.

  It was small consolation to learn over the next few hours that he was one of the lucky ones. He couldn't face the idea of food, but at least he wasn't confined to his cabin like his mother. Constance Cheever was throwing up and wailing to the purser that she was dying, and would Krupa please bring "dear, dear Shelby" to see her so that she could take a last look at him.

  Dear, dear Shelby made a token visit to her, but the sights and sounds were disgusting and he left as soon as he could. Since their arrival in free-fall he had been nipping liberally at the bottle in his cabin, hoping to settle his stomach.

  It seemed to be working, but the price was a light-headed giddiness that made him long to get outside the confining hull of the Bellatrix. When the opportunity came for a space-suited tour of CM-67, he jumped at the chance.

  By this time he was not surprised to find that he was the only passenger who was interested in going outside. Anyone who was not throwing up would be playing cards, just as though they had never left Earth. Why did they come? Probably just to talk about it when they got home.

  After a training session with Garrity, who showed Shelby how to perform the complete thirty-six-point suit check and then went over everything one more time to make sure it had been done right, the two of them exited through the airlock of the Bellatrix. By this time Shelby was feeling not only light-headed but distinctly superior. He alone, of all the passengers, had what it took to handle a space environment. He alone was a natural spacer, coordinated and confident.

  He followed Garrity to the looming derelict mine, throwing questions along the way over his suit radio.

  "Not for more than a century," Garrity said when Shelby asked if CM-67 was still in use. "The last active mine in this part of the Belt was completely worked out nearly a hundred years ago. It's a matter of economics. There's still ore to be found here, but not as much as in the Kuiper Belt, and not in such high concentrations. You have to go out there to find the action today. There, or with the independents in the Messina Dust Cloud. But for that you'd have to use the node network."

  Shelby intended to, but he didn't propose to discuss his plans with Garrity. "What's that?" he asked. He was pointing to a great shining cylinder, a couple of hundred meters long and almost as wide, that floated beside the irregular bulk of CM-67. "Is it a node?"

  "Nah." Garrity sounded amused. "We'll be in node territory tomorrow. That's an ore smelter. Works by simultaneous rotation and electric heating of the ore body you put inside it, to separate out metals and slag by a centrifugal field. The technique's less popular than it used to be, because there have been some horrendous accidents. Spin too fast, and the whole smelter can explode."

  "Wow. Has that happened near here?"

  "Not for a long time. But it's only six years since the Kuiper Belt mines had their worst accident ever with a centrifugal smelter. Two hundred and ninety-seven people died in the Trachten blow-out. And there was just one survivor."

  "Boy." Shelby's eyes were wide inside his suit's visor. "It must be great to see something like that—I mean, real close up, when it's actually happening."

  "I'm sure." Garrity's tone was carefully neutral. "Unless you're a bit too close. Lucky Jack Linden was the Trachten blow-out survivor. He came through without a scratch, but he never mined again."

  "What happened to him?"

  "You got me. Before the accident he also had a reputation as the Kuiper Belt's top pilot, but he never flew a ship again. They say that the accident destroyed Lucky Jack's mind. Maybe he got a job back on Earth."

  Shelby stared at the crewman. The comment sounded like an insult, but Garrity's face was inscrutable behind his suit visor. Had Shelby imagined the contempt for Earth—and for Shelby himself—in the man's voice?

  Suddenly, the whole expedition away from the ship no longer seemed interesting. When Garrity suggested that unless Shelby wanted to take a trip into the mining tunnels that riddled the derelict interior of CM-67 they might as well head back to the Bellatrix, Shelby agreed at once.

  Worked-out mines were dull. They had been abandoned for decades and nothing was going to happen near them. The real action was farther out, in the Kuiper Belt.

  One more day. Shelby couldn't wait for a chance to use the network and take a look.

  Thirty hours later he was drinking again in his cabin. He was getting ready to write another letter of complaint to the Aurora cruise line owners.

  He had asked politely enough, but Krupa had been totally unreasonable.

  "I know exactly how your ticket reads," the purser said. She hadn't even given Shelby the courtesy of stopping what she was doing while she talked to him, but
had gone on checking the schedule of stewards against cabins. "It does say you can make a trip through the node network to the Kuiper Belt. And you can. But it doesn't say to me, 'Drop everything else the second that a passenger tells you he wants to go.' Of course, if you would be willing to let one of the machines take you . . . they're perfectly competent."

  "I won't go with a stupid machine. I want a human guide."

  "I was afraid you'd say that." Krupa sighed and rubbed her eyes. It was late at night, and she was very tired. "But it gives me a problem, because we're shorthanded at the moment. As soon as Sha-Ming is well enough to come back on duty, he will take you."

  "When?"

  "Maybe the day after tomorrow."

  "That's not good enough." Shelby slammed his fist down on the table. "I paid top dollar. I expect service."