The Big Black Mark - A. Bertram Chandler [22]
Davinas laughed. "Don't be so sure. Rim Runners'll take anybody, as long as he has some sort of certificate of com patency and rigor mortis hasn't set in!"
"If they ever get me," declared Grimes, "that'll be the sunny Friday!"
"Or me," agreed Davinas. "When the Sundowner Line finally folds I'm putting my savings into a farm."
The two men sipped their good coffee. Davinas lit a long, slim cigar, Grimes his pipe. The cat purred noisily between them.
Then: "I hear that you're on a Lost Colony hunt, John."
"Yes, Bill. As a matter of fact, Commander Denny did mention that you might be able to give me a few leads."
"I might be. But, as a Rim Worlds citizen, I'm supposed to make any reports on anything I find to the Rim Worlds government. And to my owners, of course."
"But the Rim Worlds are members of the Federation."
"Not for much longer, they're not. Surely you've heard talk of secession lately." Davinas laughed rather unpleasantly. "But I'm not exactly in love with our local lords and masters. I've been in the Sundowner Line practically all my working life, and I haven't enjoyed seeing our fleet pushed off the trade routes by Rim Runners. They can afford to cut freights; they've the taxpayer's money behind them. And who's the taxpayer? Me."
"But what about your owners? Don't you report to them?"
"They just aren't interested anymore. The last time that I made a deviation, sniffing around for a possible new run for Sundowner, there was all hell let loose." He obviously quoted from a letter. " 'We would point out that you are a servant of a commercial shipping line, not a captain in the Federation Survey Service . . .' Ha!"
"Mphm. So you might be able to help me?"
"I might. If you ask me nicely enough, I will." He poured more coffee into the mugs. "You carry a PCO, of course?"
"Of course. And you?"
"No. Not officially. Our head office now and again—only now and again, mind you—realizes that there is such a force as progress. They found out that one of the early Carlotti sets was going cheap. So now I have Carlotti, and no PCO. But—"
"But what?"
"My NST operator didn't like it. He was too lazy to do the Carlotti course to qualify in FTL radio. He reckoned, too, that he'd be doing twice the work that he was doing before, and for the same pay. So he resigned, and joined Rim Runners. They're very old-fashioned, in some ways. They don't have Carlotti equipment in many of their ships yet. They still carry psionic communication officers and Normal Space-Time radio officers."
"Old-fashioned?" queried Grimes. "Perhaps they still carry PCOs for the same reason as we do. To sniff things out."
"That's what I tried to tell my owners when they took away Parley's amplifier, saying that its upkeep was a needless expense. A few spoonfuls of nutrient chemicals each trip, and a couple of little pumps! But I'm getting ahead of myself. This Parley was my PCO. He's getting on in years, and knows that he hasn't a hope in hell of finding a job anywhere else. Unlike the big majority of telepaths he has quite a good brain and, furthermore, doesn't shy away from machinery, up to and including electronic gadgetry. He actually took the Carlotti course and examination, and qualified, and also qualified as an NST operator. So now he's my radio officer, NST, and Cariotti. It breaks his heart at times to have to push signals over the light-years by electronic means, but he does it. If they'd let him keep his beagle's brain in aspic he'd still be doing it the good old way, and the Cariotti transceiver would be gathering dust. But with no psionic amplifier, he just hasn't the range."
"No. He wouldn't have."
"Even so, if one passes reasonably close to a planet, within a few light-years, a good telepath can pick up the psionic broadcast, provided that the world in question has a sizable population of sentient beings."
"Human beings?"
"Not necessarily. But our sort