Star Traders

Lars landed at daybreak the next morning with two other ships from the Expedition group. The ships landed in a circle around the Earth Princess and loading the ships with gravity wells began immediately. Three days later, by working all day and all night, the loading was complete and the ships were ready to leave Epsilon 4. They were able to get 200,000 gravity wells of various sizes aboard the four ships. This, along with the 10,000 promised by the Expedition group far exceeded their wildest expectations as to how many gravity wells the trader would bring back from this initial trading session.

“I don’t know a lot about math Jake,” Jayne said at dinner two days before departure, “but it seems to me even with the 210,000 wells we will be bringing home, it will take many, many years to acquire the vast number of wells we will need to realize Erics dream of introducing the gravity well to E-1.”

“That has worried me a bit too, Captain,” Jake admitted thoughtfully, sipping his after dinner coffee. “As far as I can determine, we are going to need billions of the damn things. Maybe not immediately, though. It’s possible we could spread it out over many years. I’m sure electricity wasn’t introduced the world over overnight. It took awhile. Probably years and years. I’m sure Eric thought of that and made allowances. We may get by with introducing the wells slowly. We don’t have to have everyone covered right away.”

“Now that I think about it, I’m sure you are right there, Jake. I just hadn’t thought it through, I guess. Any thoughts on how many we will need to kick it off?” Jayne inquired. She leaned back in her chair and relaxed, looking at Jake expectantly.

“I don’t have a clue as to what Eric’s plans are along that line, but it would be a considerable number. I‘d guess it would be in the hundreds of millions.”

“At the rate we are getting them, we can only supply 500,000 or so in a year with this ship. Eric mentioned we only had five other ship captains in the whole of the trading force. Again, my math isn’t the greatest, but that computes to a couple of hundred years to get enough wells. I hope he has better plans than that. I sure don’t want to spend the rest of my life jumping from world to world looking for gravity wells. This has been fun, but let’s face it, a little bit of this trading thingy goes a long way as far as I’m concerned!” Jayne frowned. “I will probably take a few more missions, but I don’t plan on making it my life’s work! Hell, I’m an author, not a swashbuckling sailor!”

Jake smiled widely. “You may think you’re not, but you sure have made it look like you are! You’ve made this crew into a fine cohesive team. I’ve never seen anything like it. They ALL love you! Especially the Larn! They’d lay down their lives for you. And so would the rest of us. It’s a happy ship, Captain, and one you can be proud of! It won’t be easy for you to leave us behind either, because I know you love us too! You may think you are an author, but, if I was a betting man, I’d bet your being an author will go on a back burner from now on!”

“Humph!” Jayne grunted. “Not a chance! I’m already outlining this story. It’ll be ready for publishing by the time we get back to E-1.”

Jake was impressed. “It might just sell, too. I understand science fiction is popular with a lot of people. That’s what it will be, you know. You certainly won’t be passing it off as a documentary. Who would believe it?” Jake smiled at her. “I can see the headlines now: TRADING 50,000 LIGHT YEARS AWAY! Or, A BATTLE FOR THE STARS! Or perhaps, THE INS AND OUTS OF HYPERLINK!”

“That’s not funny, Jake!” Jayne laughed.

“Yes it is! I think it’s hilarious! I don’t think E-1 is ready yet to believe there are nine other universes out there. It would be in the category of believing in UFO’s. No one would take it seriously, even if you had pictures.”

“I think you might be right,” Jayne agreed thoughtfully. “That means I might as well keep my mouth shut until this whole thing becomes public. And that won’t be for a lot of years from the looks of it. Shit! I could be stuck doing this forever!”

“Well, if it’s any consolation, I think you do it well, indeed. You will go a long way in this business. And for the life of me, I can’t think of doing anything more satisfying than opening up nine universes! Just imagine it! Nine universes! It’s so exciting it’s almost unbelievable!” Jake was waving his arms. He was so excited he had to wipe spittle from the corner of his mouth.

“Shees! Jake! Don’t have an orgasm here!” Jayne laughed.

Jake’s face turned red. “I didn’t mean to go that far, but you know? I think this is the most exciting time ever, and I’m very thankful that I have a part in it. We are making history every day. Just on this trip alone we learned we could drop in and out of hyperlink without going anywhere else. Remember the old Star Trek series on TV? I think I remember one of the adversaries of the Earth Federation was one who had a cloaking device for their ships. Well, your little trick of dropping into hyperlink reminds me of that. It’s a wonderful time to be alive! I find it hard to believe anyone would want to do anything else!”

“I certainly can’t say it’s been boring, that’s for sure!” Jayne admitted, smiling. “Who would have thought a couple of years ago that I’d be a starship commander? I still can’t believe it! This is the classic, If they could see me now! Thing. My first ex would have a fit!”

“Do you still think of him?” Jake asked innocently.

“Only to thank the stars I was smart enough to kick his ass out!” Jayne said with vehemence.

“Why did you do that?”

“He beat me up twice a week or more.”

“No shit?” Jake asked. “You mean you didn’t stomp on his instep and kick him in the balls?”

“Hell, I was so young and naïve I wasn’t sure what balls were!” Jayne grinned. “Wish the bastard was here now. I’d love to sic those three Larn on him! They could carve him up in little pieces while I watched!”

“My goodness!” Jake commented. “Your file certainly doesn’t say anything about your being quite so bloodthirsty as this!”

“And what do you know about my file? And if you have read a file on me, where’d you get it? More importantly, HOW did you get it?” Jayne said angrily.

“Guess I stepped in it, huh?” Jake asked sheepishly.

“If you read my file, you bet your ass you stepped in it. By what right did you see my file?”

“Hoisted by my own petard, as they used to say,” Jake grinned.

Jayne was looking at him oddly. She studied his handsome face, his curly blonde hair and pony tail. He stood at 6 ft 4 and was, for all purposes, a good-looking SOB. His great personality was also a factor in his entire make-up, and his face lit up as he smiled, which was often.

“All right, Jake,” Jayne said wearily. “Just what the hell is going on?”

“Nothing, really, is going on, as you say,” Jake admitted with yet another smile. “I read your file back in March of 2004.”

“March of 2004?” Jayne asked incredulously. “You realize I didn’t even meet Eric the Younger until April of 2004? How the hell did you get my file before I met Eric?”

Jake studied her carefully. “Cap’n,” Jake started, “My last name is Armitage. That obviously doesn’t mean anything to you. Let me fill you in. My mother’s maiden name is Gruber,” Jake looked at Jayne with a smile.

“You mean…” Jayne started to ask.

“Yep! Hans Gruber is my grandfather. Back in ’04 a lot of us in Lodge 16 saw that file. We are the ones that passed on your writing of the book, Sometime After Midnight. I was pretty young in those days, barely eighteen, and I think I was a junior in college.”

“A Junior in college at 18?” Jayne asked.

“You remember the journals of Lodge 16? Hell, I think you read them all. You saw how almost all of us excelled in school. I graduated at 16 from high school and graduated from the University of Chicago when I was 19. I picked up a masters degree

in math when I was 20. Then I came here to work on the starships. Been here a year now.”

“A whole year, huh? That makes you 21 or 22 at the oldest. I’m old enough to be your mother!” Jayne cried.

Jake shrugged and smiled again. “No big deal, Cap’n! I promise not to call you Mom!”

“Oh, shut up, you big shit! I guess I can understand where and why you saw my file,” Jayne said. “Why didn’t you say something earlier?”

“Why? I sure as hell don’t want to get any favors just because I belong to Lodge 16. I’m not the only one aboard who belongs, either. Well, I’ll amend that. I am now.”

“Are you trying to tell me that Peter was a member also?” Jayne asked, wide-eyed.

“He sure was. He was Ted Sobieski’s grandson.”

“Oh, My God! And Peter’s dead!”

“Don’t worry about it Jayne,” Jake waved a hand dismissively, “You have all the support you need from the rest of the crew. But to set your mind more at ease, Ted took me aside before we left and asked me to keep an eye on his grandson. He was very suspicious of his grandson’s motives. Evidently Peter had been giving them a hard time for months. I don’t think you have a thing to be concerned about. I got the feeling they were about to give him the axe, figuratively speaking, of course.”

Jayne sighed. “You mean they were going to send him to 10?”

Sending someone to 10 meant banishment to the tenth world of the Sol system. This is how the dissidents were taken care of. They were dropped off there in a remote place, given all they needed to survive, and just left there. It was banishment, but not particularly cruel. There were even a few settlements on E-10. Primitive, of course, and populated by the undesirable. They could not be sent back to E-1, of course.

It was a cheap way to manage those who didn’t agree with the policies of Lodge 16 and who became disenchanted. Rather than wait until those people became powerful enough to become a problem, they were sent to E-10. It was impossible to expect everyone who came to the outer universes to agree entirely. There was a wide range of disagreement as it was. Only the very radical were sent to 10. It was a credit to Lodge 16 and PerSec that these dissidents were very few.

“What made Peter so bitter, Jake,” Jayne asked.

“Jealousy,” Jake answered immediately. “He complained to me before we even left E-6 that he thought he should have been made a captain. And when they chose you as captain, he flew into a rage. I was surprised that Eric even sent him along.”

“Eric was aware of the possible trouble?”

“Well, I guess aware is not necessarily the word I should have used. Perhaps apprised would have been more appropriate. Eric knew Peter wasn’t happy.”

“I hope to hell he’s happy now!” Jayne said with vehemence. She decided to change the subject. “So, you graduated college at 19, huh! I was going through my divorce when I was 19. That must have been hard, though. You must have missed a lot of childhood.”

“At Lodge 16? Miss childhood? Hell no! We had a great childhood there! Lot’s of playmates there. And we all grew up together. I had lots of childhood friends. School was a little tough at times, what with being the youngest in the class and what they thought to be a nerd, they picked on me a bit. But not for long. I, like all of us at Lodge 16, could hold my own. And the summers at the lodge more than made up for any shortcomings we might have encountered.” Jake added wistfully.

“And college?” Jayne asked.

“I had no trouble with the math and sciences at college. Math and science are exact sciences. There’s a clear set of rules for both. Once you know the rules, the rest is easy. Where I had trouble was in the area that was not an exact science. I had trouble in history, for instance. Oh, I knew all the canned answers, but I had a hard time with essay type questions. I would start answering the question and then have a hard time collecting my thoughts and putting them into a cohesive whole. I would say way too much about the question without really answering it, and when the time was up, I didn’t have time to finish.”

“Must have been discouraging,” Jayne nodded.

“It was, until I found the right parameters,” Jake smiled. “One day I was in the library and ran across a book called the History of History. I thought that to be hilarious, and couldn’t pass up reading it. It discussed the reasons for historical change. I listed all of those reasons. I reasoned that, if I could cover all the reasons, I would cover every phase of any question.”

“Did it work?” Jayne asked.

“Like a charm! Like a charm! You see, those reasons are, 1—Politics, 2—Intellectual, 3—Great Men, 4—Geography, 5 – Economics and 6—Religion. I put them all together to form one word with their first letters---PIGGER. With this word association, I was never to forget these six areas of historical thought. Every time I was asked an essay question, I merely associated PIGGER, and started answering. By the time I reached the “R” I had answered every aspect of the question. So thoroughly, in fact, that most of my papers from then on received a grade a notch higher than an “A”. In other words, the professors usually placed an “A” on it with a note that said good job.”

“Smart ass!” Jayne smiled. “That’s almost cheating!”

“I know. I actually did cheat on some of my math. I knew where to find all the formulas I needed and I knew how to work the formulas once I had them. My trouble was in memorizing the formulas themselves. Not that I couldn’t, I just didn’t want to clutter up my mind memorizing them. I would write them all down in test booklet first. I cheated. But I got an “A” anyway!” Jake laughed. “Hell, I still have to look up formulas!”

“And your masters degree? Did you cheat on that too?” Jayne asked with a grin.

“No. By then I knew as much about math as the professors. I studied logic and higher math for that and did my thesis on Boolean Algebra,” Jake offered.

“Boolean Algebra? Is that like Lobachevskyan Geometry?” Jayne asked.

Jake looked at her sharply. “You remember our talk, huh?”

“Yes, but that doesn’t mean I understood the geometry thingy. Come on, Jake! Space is infinite but bounded? I didn’t get that, and something tells me I won’t get what Boolean algebra is either, so I’m not going to go there.”

“Anyway,” Jake said, “I graduated from that prestigious school with honors. And here I am.”

“Girl friends?” Jayne smiled a question.

Jake turned a little red. “Of course. Boys are not my thing!”

“Don’t be a smart ass again bucko! I’m just making conversation here!”

“For your information, yes, I have a special girlfriend and we will be getting married soon. She is one of Eric’s second cousins. Christine Tanner. If you’d like, I’ll introduce you to her when we get back.

“I’d like that, Jake. I really would,” Jayne muttered. “Now, let’s go meet with Artur and his cohorts. I understand they have come up with a ceremony in our honor tonight.” Jayne stood and headed for the door.