On The Far Edge: Captain Mitch And His Spirit

[This's not my authorial voice but one from the other side of the line, a kind of gossip reporter for an Edger news site.]

I knew he was a glocker crewman the first time I saw him. The skinsuit gives them away; the working stiffs never bother to unfasten their gloves, even in civic pressure or on a planetary surface. He was sitting disconsolate in one of the little bars near the old cargo port on Smitty's World. These days, the big transfers use Newport, thirty miles away, big enough and modern enough to handle Earthside containerized freight in bundles and the fat, fourth-generation bell-ringers our guys use both independently and to carry cargo on and off the huge station-ships. The older ships and the smaller carriers still find it easier to get a spot in the pattern for the old port, easier to deal with the freight-wallopers and, perhaps, easier on their pride, too.

It was just 1900, 22nd December, Greenwich. Like most ships, stations and planets with cycles too far from the human norm, Smitty's kept strictly to Greenwich Mean Time, or as close as they could. These days, with the phase-rotation ansible and modern computational horsepower, that's close as anyone could want.

The bar'd made a few concessions to the calendar in the form of a bedraggled banner draped across the top quarter of the backbar mirror and twinkling little led lights circling the ceiling, sagging markedly in several spots. It wasn't doing anything for the glocker's mood; he sat by himself near the wall, attention on his sippie of station gin-and-water as though all the worry in the world was contained therein. Or perhaps an anodyne to it and he wasn't hopeful of a successful treatment. He looked up as the door -- and on Smitty's, most of them are merely doors -- jangled behind me and I caught the dark curls, hazel eyes and freckles of one of the Materjacks. Clearly not Micki or little Martha but that still left Mikey and Mitchell, Mark and Marvin, the whole lot of them originally out of some little industrial installation doing mining and refining around La-A's star, or maybe it was Otherstone's. They're all well-known among the smaller starships as fair pilots, navigators and captains, starting even before their father and family ship was lost on Ganymede, early during the war. Skiddoo had been serving as a gunship, all the younger family safely elsewhere, but an entire generation of Materjacks had flashed to a ball of steam and molten metal and with it, their legacy.

Stringing for the newssite FreeTradeCetera, I tried to keep up with the shipping news, the lifeblood of civilization, our Edge on the mudballers from old Earth. Oh, that is boosterism; but it is who we are. I had spent the first of the week at Newport and not paid much heed to the small fry.

"You, I should know," I said to him. "You might be the Martian or the Saint, or the young one--"
"Or the oldest," he replied, "And that is me, just old Mitch. But you, I do not know, with the big fine notepad" -- he nodded at my well-worn SlateBook -- "and the talk of a glocksman but you wear no proper suit for working," with a frown at my bared hands. He had my story soon enough, as well as any interviewer could. "So you write about the Free Traders and the big Earth shippers for the webs, is that so? You would know, then, if there were to be any openings for a Captain shortly?"

I demurred. "I know them when they're posted, same as you. Someone you know needs a berth?"

"Me. Just me. They've come and took my Spirit Of Skidoo and here I am, an honest man walking the docks with a lamp in my hand. Spirit is gone."

That pile of patches! It was coming back to me. One of the small ones, a Derby or a Cloche, with an older MOF 'Drive and only enough power and mass for the third-level effect: slow and uncertain. The Materjacks had put it together from salvage thirty years before and run short-haul freight to keep the family afloat. "I'd heard it was lost, bounced into a rock free-trading around Sol?"

"No, no, a rumor. Stove up. Stove up some, was all, and I had to sell my share to get her fixed, but the best Cloche flying is still at it and I was still her Captain. What a beauty! As shiny as a silver dime. Smooth as silk to land and in and out of the Jump. She shouldn't be carrying anything but shareholders and their luggage, you know."

"I'd heard her 'Drive tended to glitch and the boom was off-center?"

He replied with some heat, "It is a lie, a jealous lie. There was never a finer little bell."

"Wasn't she down to half a year per light-year underway?" I asked, just to see if he'd bite.

He leapt up. "Six months? Show me the man who told you that and I will show him six months all right! She goes two months per, and that with a light hold and half power! And a beauty, like to blind you under any light, all the portmasters know her."

"So the stories of air leaks and coolant in the lifesystem..?"

"Not one bit of truth in it. Not one bit. She was a beauty, a real beauty," and he slumped back over his sipper, took a long pull and looked near to tears.

I hate to see a man with years in Jump space and with stripes on his sleeves cry. I inquired how he'd come to lose her altogether before he sprang a leak himself.

"A misunderstanding, really, a misunderstanding. When you come right down to the rivets, it was Dutch's fault, my Navigator, though we both sat Pilot, of course. He was the one took on the 'prentice, though we all should have known better. There we were at Witherspoon's, full up with fuelwax" -- kerogen, that is -- "for The Rind, and he shows up with a youngster in tow. She looked young but she had all her papers; we'd had to leave Jack W., the Third Hand, back at La-A with a broken leg, him having lost an argument with the cargo-jack, and we were plenty tired of hash-and-eggs from Engineer Jo, plus if her precious 'Drives were out of true, why, she'd tell us to sling a packet in the 'wave if we were that hungry! It was a trial. --How I miss that neat, fine galley!-- But the 'prentice, she wasn't a Welles or a Witherspoon or a Faux-Smith and on Witherspoon Processing--"

I nodded. It's not that big a drift and if you're not born or married into one of the three families, you are a rare bird indeed.

"Mind you, those papers looked all right. Jo ran them and the local web said they were jake. 16, uncontracted, Basic rating."

Not unusual. If you're a NATO or Russky mudballer, 16 likely sounds young. We figure if you can claim your majority, you've reached it. Even for an underpowered cloche like Spirit of Skiddoo W-Proc to The Rind could be hardly more than four months, five at the outside, long enough to take a 'prentice's measure, short enough to not be a bother if he falls short. Or she.

"It wasn't until the second night out Dutch heard her crying. Took Jo to find out why. She was no sixteen and no Glocker 'prentice, either. Crystal Smith she was, the very granddaughter of the Smith himself, out to see the world."

A scion of Johnathon Harper Cameron Smith, Smitty, sole proprietor of the non-aligned (and sunless) world that bears his name. I told Mitch that sounded like a pickle, but no reason for a man to lose his command, and he nodded.

"You would think that, would you not? Dutch was sure there was money in it, and wanted to divert to whatever port or drift or station was nearest. Jo cursed our lack of an ansible -- you'd think the owners would have one piped in, her the finest Cloche in the firmament! -- and said we should head on Rind-wards and send a message out with one of those Mad Russian couriers after we'd docked. But that is not my way. No, I told them, no, we must get this little one to home, first and foremost, and keep it quiet to not embarrass her gran-dad. Oh, I was clever, clever!"

He paused in his narrative, drained the last few cc's from his sippie and gave it a significant glance. I was eager to hear how he got from a mission of mercy to a captain without a ship, so I waved the bartender over and got him a fill.

"Was I not so clever. We pushed her hard, my little Spirit; dropped out, reset and made the Jump here to Smitty's in under two months, almost--"

A run the big station-ships will do in a week and Gen Fours solo in a month.

"--And the Smith himself welcomed her back as a prodigy and us as heros. He'd have nothing for us but the best, the very best, the finest accommodations and whatever we wanted, entertainments every night and it was not even two weeks gone by before I got word."

I asked just what that word might have been.

"The owners! When we'd gone overdue at The Rind, they'd put out a circular to all their agents; and when their man here sent back we'd been seen on a drunken carouse for nigh the past week, he rounded up a crew and took her out, my very own Spirit." He returned his attention to his drink, pondered it and emptied the sippie as though its contents were only water. "So if you know of anyone out for a Captain, qualified as navigator and pilot alike, and very discreet, mention my name to them, will you?"

And with that, he turned away, as if he had gone suddenly shy of saying more.


I'm told Spirit of Skiddoo had life-support problems before she could get up enough velocity to Jump out from Smitty's and in the subsequent towing and repair, somehow word of the miscarried justice reached the desk of one J. H. C. Smith, Prop., Smitty's World; I cannot say precisely what happened from there, but I am pleased to report that by Christmas Eve, Captain Mitch Materjack and his crew were back aboard Spirit of Skiddoo with commendations to boot and perhaps the only glockers qualified to keep "the finest cloche in the starry sky" actually in the sky.


Merry Christmas from the Far Edge of the Hidden Frontier!

A Distant Yuletide Evening

(A Christmas story)

His streetcar went clanging away to the next stop and the end of the line. The three-story apartment building where he lived had holiday lights festooning balconies in front of a few apartments and greenery draped on the railings of a few more. Not much decoration, none at all around his — even in this, its fiftieth year, the settlement and settlers didn't have a lot to spare on frivolity. What caught Joel's attention was a cat crying somewhere nearby as he plodded up the drive. There weren't a lot of cats, either; the population had started small, smuggled-in to begin with, and some of the local animals kept the feral population near zero. The first flakes of a fresh snowfall were swirling through the twilight — nothing unusual for the long, harsh Winters of the planet nicknamed "Blizzard" by the earliest settlers but it made the source of the sad sounds all the harder to locate.

"The kitty's stuck in that tree, it's been up there almost all day!" It was one of his apartment-building neighbors, one of the newlyweds in the adjoining apartment. She'd be too embarrassed to speak if she ever figured out how easily sound got through the utility connections, Joel mused, and probably not very relieved to learn his solution, once the hubbub had become tiresome, had been to start keeping earplugs handy near his bed.

Right now she looked worried. Pointing earnestly up at the "tree" — more of a giant fern, looking something like a flattened pine — she said, "The guy upstairs got mad and threw his kitten out the window. It doesn't know how to get down! My Husband's out of town, can't you Do Something...?"

Joel grunted. Even here on the unknown frontier — the starship program and the Settled Worlds established in the 1950s in response to the threat posed by modern nuclear and biological weapons were still classified, hidden from nearly everyone Earthside — even here, there were plenty of people who would rather talk and feel rather than do. "They also serve, who only skin their knuckles," he muttered, grinning to take the edge off.

"Oh, I knew you'd help!"

The fern-trees weren't very strong for their size but Joel was light enough to climb the larger ones. This one was small enough to be questionable and, of course, the kitten was shifting around nervously near the end of a higher branch. And still wailing. Joel set his toolbag down on the porch, away from the damp and the increasing snowfall, and began to climb.

The tree swayed badly as he climbed to the second-story level. This had the benefit of causing the silver-gray kitten to stay put, clinging for dear life. The flip side was that the little cat was even more frightened by the time he got close enough to reach out. It hissed and retreated to the tip of the branch, now sagging down and back towards the slender trunk. Joel backed down a couple of branches, leaned out as far as he dared towards the hissing, spitting kitten, reached for it and took a pinprick paw-swipe in response, then scooped up the now-furious animal. "Got it!" he announced, trying to climb down with the frantic kitten clutched to his chest.

Slipping a few times on the way, he succeeded in returning to solid ground without any major damage to himself or the cat. "There you are," he said, holding the baby cat out to the young woman.

"Me? I don't want a cat! I was just worried. Anyway, it belongs to the man upstairs. But thanks for getting it down." She turned and headed for her door.

"...Unh...?" Joel replied, climbing onto the porch as the door to her apartment shut. And locked. "Great." Still holding the squirming cat, perhaps a bit tighter than necessary, he shuffle-kicked his toolbag down the porch to his door, changed his hold on the cat, fished his keys out one-handed, opened the door, shoved the toolbag inside, made a frantic two-handed grab to retain the kitten. He hooked a foot around the door and pulled it shut, looking down at the cat as it swung to. "Time to take you home, I think."

In two years living in the concrete-block apartment building, one of the first set of buildings made from local materials on Blizzard and originally a barracks, Joel had never been to the higher floors. A set of stacked, interlocking modules, the layout of each floor — and originally, of each apartment — was identical. Outside stairs linked balconies to the first-floor porch, two apartments side-by-side on the East and West sides, one in the center on North and South. The "guy upstairs" in question was a recent arrival, a man he'd never met. This didn't make him especially unusual; turnover in the building was high and Joel was anything but outgoing. Careful arrangement of Christmas lights along the new guy's section of the balcony, no name on the door; he knocked and waited. Nothing. Knocked louder and eventually heard a stir. The door opened a crack and a bleary, annoyed-looking young man looked out. "What do you want?" he asked.

"Is this your cat?" Joel held up the cat, which obliged by trying to bite him and mewing.

"Not any more! Damn thing pulled the drapes down on me when I was sleeping! It ruined my couch! It's hyperactive!"

"Uh, it was in a fern tree, the one up by the porch...?"

"Yeah, well, cats climb trees. So?"

"Neighbors said it was crying up there all day?"

"It cries a lot. I threw it out!"

"But it was your cat...?"

"Was. You want it? It's yours. Good luck." He shut the door.

Joel looked down at the cat. It hissed at him. "Oh, well," he said, and headed for the stairs.

He hadn't bothered to lock his own door; he shifted to a one-handed hold on the kitten, opened the door, look a step and fell sprawling over his toolbag. The cat escaped as he put his hands out to break his fall and scurried away under the couch. "Da-yum!" Joel yelled as he hit, but nothing felt too damaged. He turned, sat up, and kicked the door shut with half a smile, "I'm an idiot." He turned back to the couch, where, leaning down, he could see two eyes glinting in the far corner. "Fine, you. Stay there."

* * * *
A can of tuna (imported) and a bowl of water had proven enough to lure the kitten out from hiding long enough to growlingly bolt down a third of the food, be briefly sick, take a long drink of water, eat a little more and dance away when he went to wipe up the mess. He'd half-filled a plastic dishpan with dirt hacked from the straggly plantings along the porch and set it near the couch, hoping the kitten would take the hint. Stretched out on the couch, half-listening to the evening news on the radio, he'd reread the Christmas card from the elderly aunt who was his only living relative (and convinced he worked for a oil-exploration firm in some hard-to-reach tropical jungle back on Earth). After ten years, the homeplanet seemed less and less real, drifting away into an improbable nightmare. A bookish, mumbling loner, he'd had a cat back on earth, a gray-and-black tiger-striped tomcat named Ralph. That cat had been his constant companion and the terror of small animals and lesser toms for miles around for years, until the day it stopped coming home. He'd found the little body next to the road a few days later, stiff, unmoving, hit by a car along the road he drove to school every day and vowed, fiercely, Never Again. No More Cats.

Graduation, tech school, military service, the house fire that took both his parents and a short, flawed career in uniform later had found him in the office of an annoyingly-vague employment agent, signing a long-term contract. Months later, he'd been dazzled to find himself aboard a starship, furious to learn "long term" meant "lifetime" and found resignation turning willy-nilly into fascination as he learned more about his new home. The years since arrival, he'd found over-full with work, moving from site to site, installing and maintaining a mad assortment of radio communications equipment, fifty-years worth of military surplus, low-bidder lots and local improvisation. No close friends, no ties back "home" and that home increasingly strange and foreign; the Hidden Frontier retained an element of crew-cuts and "squareness" long-vanished on Earth. Always short on workers and long on things to get done, each world determined to become as self-supporting as possible, the challenges and the society they formed were like nothing contemporaneous on the home planet. His employers rated him adequate, occasionally even brilliant. His neighbors barely noticed him at all.

A noise caught his attention, the kitten carefully making a hole in the improvised litter and he thought, now, this. Outside, the snow continued to fall. The automated streetcar had gone clanging blindly back not long before, the sound eliciting a worrying flurry of panicked scratching from under the couch as it swelled and then faded. Calmer now, the kitten finished its business and made to climb the couch. He started to reach and thought better of it, watching through half-shut eyes as the little cat made its way to the cushions at his feet. Newscast over, the radio began a program of holiday music, schmaltzy old Christmas songs, as the cat, step at a time, climbed up onto his legs and made slowly for his lap, pausing to look around at every sound. Making its way to his lap, it turned around three times, sat down and began kneading at his waist. He moved a hand carefully, stopping as the kitten stopped kneading to look. It settled back down and began to purr.

Looking over at the card and then out the window at snow, now whirling down faster and thicker, catching glints of the colorful lights as it fell, he reached again for the cat, carefully, petted it and it sighed and started to purr louder. "No More Cats for me?" he thought. "No more cats for me on Earth."
-30-
(All I saw was a skinny, happy guy getting food for his cat, after I wangled a day-off trip down to Blizzard's landing-site "city," Frostbite Falls. I made up all rest. --Geesh, I wondered why the guys in the Eng. Shop were so highly amused at me wantin' to see the sights: snow, funky flat evergreen-analogs, a robotic trolley system right outta Loonie Tunes, and a whole lotta Metabolist-style semi-prefab buildings on rolling terrain, and that's it. Oh, and some scary native critters, but I never saw any. Kinda Christmas-y, though.)

Merry Christmas to you all and may all your dreams be as warm and happy as a sleeping kitten!

Roberta X aboard the Starship Lupine, Somewhere Out There. Way out there.