“Maybe better news tomorrow. They do turn up again.”

“Yeah,” he said, “thanks.”

So they’d lost a tag. It happened. You sampled a rock, you took a sample in and ran your on-site tests, and if you liked it and thought Mama would, you called and told her you had potential ‘driver work here. You got your big bounty when your second, official Assay report confirmed your work; and you got a certain monthly fee just for having it on the charts; but you didn’t get paid percentage on the mineral content until some ‘driver finally got around to chucking it back in bucket-loads, until the Shepherds got it in, and the refinery reported what it reallyhad. Which happened on the company’s priorities, not yours.

And if you had a Loss of Signal that meant Mama had to do the bookkeeping on it, and Mama had to re-tag it, pick it up on a priority, or let it go until another pass—all that was shitwork Mama didn’t like to do, when a nice neat tag that stayed on was what you got that bonus for, and back it came unless you personally could firm up those numbers and keep track of it. If it got perturbed out, as did happen, you could lose it altogether, or have to fight it in Claims Court.

So, well, this one was too good to let slip or leave to chance. Maybe a little computer work could find it. There was a remote chance it could just be occulted for a while, something in the way that wasn’t on the charts—a LOS could sometimes put Recoveries onto another find, in which case you got that credit; it had happened in the long ago; but generally a rock just, in the well-known perversity of rocks, got to turning wrong, and managed to turn in some way that the strip transmitter was aimed to the 3% of the immediate universe Mama’s ears didn’t cover—or the transmitter could have died: they didn’t live forever, especially the junk they got nowadays.

So it was hike over to Recoveries and pay a couple more c’s out of the account for the technicians to pull up a file and figure probable position and talk to it and listen with a little more care, first off, in the hope of getting contact, before they went to the other procedures. Meanwhile the bank didn’t pay interest on what Mama had taken out, that was why they did immediate withdrawals these days: every damn penny they could gouge.

“Odd-shaped rock,” he typed on the form, and invoked the data up out of Mama’s storage. Photos. And mass reckoning. And the assay report on the pieces they’d knocked off it.

The Recoveries clerk took the dump, looked at it, and lifted an eyebrow. “Thorough. Makes our job a lot easier. We might have a real chance of waking this baby. Or getting a ‘driver on it before it gets out of reach. Real nice piece, that.”

That made him feel better at least. You kept the people in Recoveries happy and they maybe paid a little more attention to getting you found or a little more urgency to getting you picked up—unlike the guys who took only one sample and that from the only good spot on the rock.

A lot of novice miners had gone bust that way—talk Mama into a whole lot of expensive tags on junk, just collect the bounties and puff up the bank account and buy fancier analysis gear—and a few took the real risk and outright falsified the samples. It paid off in a few instances—but the sloppy work that usually went along with that kind of operation sooner or later started showing up in reprimands and fines, and a crew got back to Base some trip to find out their bank account had been holed while they were gone—

Mama didn’t ask you to write a check these days: under the New Rules, she just took it, and you could sue if you thought you’d been screwed—if you could afford to hire the company’s own lawyers.

And you’d never say that ‘drivers ever, ever cheated in reckoning the mass they’d thrown; and you’d never eversay that a refinery would short their receipts. ‘Driver captains and refinery bosses never, ever did things like that.

But you did do real well to get a reputation for being meticulous, taking multiple samples, being clean with your records, making it so ‘drivers and tenders knewyour tags were worth going after. Knowing your mass. Photographing all the sides, including after the tag was on. Most of all knowing the content—rocks being their individual selves and damned near able to testify in court who their parents were.

No skimmer liked to mess with his claims, no, sir—because Morris Bird was real friendly, he was on hailing terms with most of helldeck; and when he got a few under his belt he told everybody far and wide how he kept accidents from befalling his claims and how suspicious it was if it came in short.

There had only been one or two uncharitable enough over the years to remark that sleeping with the two most likely to do the skimming couldn’t hurt. But he had stood up for Meg and Sal, and so had no few others.

It made him happier just thinking about it—

Made him outright laugh, thinking how that had probably done more to reform Meg Kady than all the Evangelicals and the Islamic Reformeds who handed out their little cards on helldeck.

Sal, now, he thought—reforming Sal was a whole different proposition.

You got all kinds on helldeck—except you didn’t walk it in any business suit, not if you didn’t want to get laughed out of The Hole. So Ben shed it at the locker he kept on 3-deck, put on his casuals and his boots, after which it was safe to go home.

Change of clothes, change of style—Ben Pollard went most anywhere he cared to go on R2 and nobody would find him out of place.

But fact was, helldeck was where he most liked being—down in the hammering noise and the neon lights. He’d been scared as any company clerk when he’d first laid eyes on it, at 14, even if his mama had belonged here—but even at that age he’d known sure as sure that Ben Pollard was never going to have the pull to get out of the company’s lower tiers. He’d learned how it really was: the ideal the company preached might be classblind; but funny thing—kids without money ended up like Marcie Hager, in the middle tiers, where you had certain cheap perks, but you’d never get a dime of cash and you’d never get further—and aptitudes and Institute grades had damned little to do with it. President Towney’s son, for an example, was about as stupid an ass as had ever graduated from the Institute—and they put him in a vice-presidency up in the methane recovery plant… while Ben Pollard, a Shepherd’s kid, got a stint at pilot training (at which he was indifferent) and geology, at which he was good; and a major in math, thank God. But he couldn’t get into business administration, not, at least, tracked for the plum jobs. They went to relatives of company managers. They went to company career types, who had paid their dues or whose parents had, or who tested high in, so he had heard, Company Conformity.

Shit with that. He took a little jig step on his way back from the Assay office, and on helldeck nobody took exception to a little exuberance—if a guy was happy, that guy must have reason: in a society that lived on luck you wanted to brush close to whoever looked to have it, because that guy might lead you to it.

What he had was a card in his pocket that said they had a couple of nice pieces, and that money was going into the bank, dead certain. You tagged things and you didn’t know how long it was going to be til the ‘driver got there, but what you had in your sling was money—and in this case, a good chunk of it.

Yeah!

“Meg or Sal in?” he asked Mike at the bar when he got to The Hole—he knew where Bird probably was, where Bird had been this time of day for the last week.

Mike said, “They aren’t, but the cops were.”

He looked at Mike a moment. It was hard to change feet that fast. “Cops.”

“They weren’t in uniform. But they had badges. Anything I should know?”

He sighed, said, because, hell, you needed the local witness on your side if it came to trouble: “All right, Mike. The guy we rescued—out in the Belt. We got a claim in on the ship. He owned it. Sole survivor. The guy’s crazy. God only knows what he’s said. Police are probably checking us out to be sure we’re on the straight.”