April 3: The Middle of Nowhere (10 page)

"It wasn't like that at all, you seriously need to see the video," April insisted. "I'll bring it up on the screen."

"Wow, they were right
there
," Gunny admitted after watching it. "And you opened the lock up to shoot it right off your shoulder. I was treating you like some poser. I apologize, Ed."

Eddie just waved it away as unimportant with a flip of his hand.

"Yep, they were just a couple hundred yards away," April agreed. "We have external racks now, but back then everything was make-shift and jury rigged, we only had two missiles in little disposable launching tubes anyway."

"I was under stress from the combat for such a brief period," Eddie explained, "and my attention was really focused on doing my job and recovering Mr. Singh. I was worried because my family became involved more than any brief personal risk. I've experienced no bad dreams or anything. I can see how chronic stress happens however, especially when it keeps being reinforced over and over."

"You have family up here who were at risk?"

"No, I might as well tell you. My family are Earthies, but they are all Mafia. I've had a horrible time keeping my professional life separated from them. When I disappeared myself to work undercover they had this misapprehension I'd been kidnapped or worse. Once they were quite sure the fellow playing my double  hadn't harmed me they saw me safely back on our ship and quietly left."

"Does the mob have a boss running its business on Home?" Gunny asked.

"Do you know, I never wondered about that? Before the war I always assumed we were too small to support a criminal underworld. But now consider, how can you
have
organized crime when there is almost no law? If you want to sell drugs, or engage in prostitution or take bets you can. There are no cops to bribe and any conflict between competitors wouldn't have to be hidden."

"But you do have the community standards that are backed by the ability to call a duel. I heard it related there was very nearly one already. Until those boundaries are pretty well established and defined I'd tread very lightly on any activities that might get me called out."

"Indeed you are very much correct on that. There are already several services being offered that would be illegal below, but the practitioners are keeping a very low public profile to not call attention to themselves. It would be hard to call someone out if it wasn't a public matter. I expect it to stay that way for a long time," Eddie told them with an amused smile. "It isn't that much different from when I was growing up in a small rural town in Illinois. Everything looked prim and proper walking down main street, but you could buy any vice you wanted."

"What sort of stuff?" April wondered.

"Nothing you need to know and telling you would embarrass me. Do you really want to make me uncomfortable?" Eddie asked.

"No, I'll just ask my grandpa. I know he had a bookie before the war, so he probably knows everything going on and he's impossible to embarrass."

"That's one of the perks of being older. I suspect Life Extension is going to make it hard to play the grumpy old geezer. It'll be hard to carry off if you don't
look
old. The whole idea may vanish in time and people may not understand it in old literature."

"I've got to get started on that," Gunny admitted. "Before I look the part."

"I've recently begun some treatments. We have a fellow on station now who can do all the basic treatments. Another friend of April's by some coincidence," he said smiling at her.

"Everybody seems to be April's friend," Gunny scoffed.

"Except for the Chinese guy in Medical's cooler," April pointed out.

"Yes, there are a lot of folks down on the mudball that don't like you. And if they are smart they'll stay down there," Gunny said gruffly. It was the first time April heard him say mudball.

"Thank you again," that prompted Eddie to say, shamefaced. "We very badly misjudged the hazard we were exposing you to in North America."

"That's the main thing I wanted to talk to you about," April said, seizing the moment. "I don't feel I accomplished much, I certainly planned to stay much longer. I know my grandpa said if I didn't use any funds to keep the balance, but I felt it went so badly I should offer you a refund if you were not satisfied with my performance."

Eddie looked at her, mouth open a bit, which wasn't like him. "My thought was you might be going to chew me out for sticking you in the middle of such a mess. If you asked for a hazard pay fine for my having such bad judgment I wouldn't have argued. Just like we pay a premium to the lock guard on our ships at dock. No, keep the funds and more than welcome to them. I didn't expect you to have to shoot your way free to come home," he said, grimacing.

"We're square then?"

"Maybe for money, but if you ever need me to man up and travel into hazard I owe that."

"Let's try to avoid that for both of us," April said.

"Maybe Heather's real estate project will be an easy one for a change," Eddie hoped. "It's so far away from the other lunar bases, way off in the God forsaken middle of nowhere really. I can't see how anybody can object to it."

"You two certainly don't sound like typical hardcore businessmen, determined to see every nickel extracted that your contract says you are owed," Gunny observed. "I'm used to seeing companies suing each other in the news so often that it seems more important who wins in court than what they actually do or make."

 "That sort of behavior made a sort of sense once," April said. "At least down on the slumball, because they have so many other businesses and people jammed elbow to elbow you could write any one off and survive. Even on Earth the rise of internet reporting of crooks and scams on social networks and business rating boards was making that sort of behavior hard to hide."

Eddie nodded agreement. "The community above the atmosphere is really limited. We don't even need net boards to spread the word if somebody is a shyster. As April says I can't afford to have anyone unhappy with me. If one of my customers
or
suppliers has a failure that isn't even my fault I might take a loss to help him stay in business if I can, rather than take advantage of his misfortune. You can have a situation where there may only be three proto shops that can fabricate certain sorts of items. Losing one of them is a tragedy to the business community. You lose irreplaceable expertise and the others do not just absorb his workers and machines and keep offering the same services at the same price. I may need his services for a different one of my businesses. I can't imagine how long it will take to fill the solar system with so many businesses that reliable vendors become disposable like Earth." 

"I can see that," Gunny agreed, looking thoughtful. "And maybe you can afford to act that way easier when you aren't taxed down to razor thin margins," he guessed correctly.

"But it means that good, honest businesses can hold customers longer too, April said. "Used to be if a business lasted a hundred years it had to have three generations of good proprietors. Soon it will be one. A single owner consistently managing a business two or three hundred years may be something we'll see in our lifetimes. It's going to concentrate customer loyalty and concentrate wealth and make it much harder to break into any sort of venture that has other established vendors. The volume of business is going to grow faster than the number of suppliers. I want to take good care of my business associates so we have stable long term relationships," April said.

"The shop Eddie and I use to build ships will call up their supposed competitors and share out work if they get a sudden load they can't handle. I can't see that happening among Earthies."

"Gary Chalmers," Eddie said to April. "Prime example of shooting self in foot."

"Oh yeah! Gunny, this fellow Chalmers was secretly working as an agent for North America back when we had the war. He
thought
he was going to be running the whole habitat for the USNA soon, so he stopped making any pretense of being polite. For example, when one of his customer's sons sat at the cafeteria table and tried to talk to his daughter he very rudely separated them since the kid wasn't a proper Christian to dare speak to his daughter. You can imagine how that went over with the boy's father," she said rolling her eyes.

"He alienated all the dozen or so people he could do business with by stupid stuff like that in a matter of months and had to shut down his business. His guys all went off to other companies. What was even worse, he had moral objections to life extension and wasn't shy to say so. All these other owners looked at him and saw any business they had with him as temporary, because all the other guys were buying extension treatments. See how it works?"

"Indeed, I see I better get treated if I want customers. Is there no medical privacy up here? How does word get out whether somebody has LET or not?"

April looked surprised. "Gunny, you've been living down on Earth. I bet you haven't seen a dozen people with LET face to face. Up here over half the population has it and we've seen the changes when they went through it. You see it in their face and hands, the little wrinkles disappear and the voice changes, even how they walk changes sometimes."

"Oh."

"It's different, but you'll figure it all out and fit in soon," Eddie promised.

"I'm making more tea," Gunny announced, getting up. He looked like he had absorbed as much different as he could for now.

"Would you bring us a bunch of those cookies too, please?" April requested.

"Are we operational now on the new ships? I have to become involved in that again. My grandpa must be sick of dealing with it."

"Your grandpa is good at delegating. He hired Jed Allison who worked for Dave at Advanced Spacecraft Services. He's tired of doing the nut turning and ready to try his hand at administrative work. He's been doing most scheduling and even some sales. Your grandpa has just been reviewing what Jed does. We have a couple new guys coming in for flight crew too."

"Well, if that is working, fine. I'll leave it alone. I have enough other things to keep me busy. I have to see what condition all of Bob's old companies are in and decide if I want to keep them or sell them. I have some ventures with both Jeff and Heather and of course Heather's moon thing," April explained.

"We have the
Happy
of course,
Home Again and
Eddie's Scooter. Eddie's Rascal
and
Eddie's Folly
are functional, but still missing some systems," Eddie counted off on his fingers. "Hopefully the Earthies can't tell they are not in full fighting trim. We have
Eddie's Fortune
on the rack, but we are building it slow because of material shortages and because we don't want to build any more of that series. Call it a spare. We are stretching the market for fast couriers. I'm making them pay for themselves in order to have them for our defense, but I think we could actually make more money running two fewer ships and charging higher rates."

"You take lower priority loads to keep them busy?" April guessed, interested.

"Exactly and I don't want to drive any of the older outfits out of business. Having more eyes at other docks and more Home ships in flight at any time is good for us. You'd be amazed what an informal intelligence outfit Jon has made of all of them. He has them bringing him video and recording of local radio chatter everyplace they stop."

 "I've invested more in Heather's venture than I planned, pushed the money at her actually. I simply made more on my investments than I expected and had to put it somewhere." He looked slightly embarrassed at his good fortune.

"It isn't something I expect to continue. The economy is heating up. Some things look to be building to a bubble. We kind of put a damper on it with the war temporarily, but a lot of my so-called wealth will disappear overnight if there is a recession. I'm trying to convert paper wealth to tangibles, but it is a very difficult thing to do. Even buying land is uncertain because one of the first things countries in trouble do is nationalize the holdings of foreigners."

"At least you shouldn't have that trouble on the moon." April stopped and looked worried. "Does that mean they might take my house in Hawaii?"

"If we end up shooting at each other again, yeah, that might easily happen. The fact that we didn't do that with Mitsubishi-3, with the actual physical habitat, was a bright spot of modern politics. But whatever dollar value we refrained from stealing it was certainly worth the support it gained us from Japan and Tonga. And I think it only could have boosted the investment we see now, because people see us as a stable and safe place to invest instead of waiting to see how our government acts and if they will go crazy nationalizing things."

"It was all your money that bought my house. You might not think I'd value it, but I went out and picked furniture and colors and really got attached to that place even though I didn't get to live there," April admitted. "I just don't get politics at all. I agreed to study economics now for Jeff, because we're starting a bank. But what good does it do to understand how an economy works if some politicians can just change all the rules and steal your stuff ? How can you plan anything? I intended to ask you about that today. You have so much money now I figure you have to have learned something about economics. Or maybe you've hired an economist by now?"

Eddie closed his eyes and took a deep breath. He had his hands wrapped around his tea mug like he was warming them. His lips were unhappy and April was starting to think he was going to refuse to answer her when his eyes popped open again. He got in his case and pulled out a wallet and laid a USNA hundred dollar bill on the table.

"How did this come into existence?" he asked her.

"Well I don't know much about printing, but I think you are asking more than that."

"Yes, you're a bright young woman. I should say what is the basis upon which it was created?"

"Well I understand it isn't backed by tangibles. I've read several times it is backed by the full faith and credit of the USNA. Do I have that right?" April asked, afraid of sounding silly.