The Compleat McAndrews by Charles Sheffield

Author:Charles Sheffield [Sheffield, Charles]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: sf_space
ISBN: 067157857X
Publisher: Baen
Published: 2000-08-25T04:00:00+00:00

* * *

I think my inner voices are pretty good when it comes to warning of trouble. The problem is, I don’t always listen to them.

This time I allowed another event to occupy my mind when I ought to have been worrying about McAndrew’s visit to Earth. In my own defense, I must say that the intrusion came from outside. When the linked spheres of the Assembly were halfway to Earth, with Mac and me cozy in the Control Section, I received a message from Hermann Jaynsie at the United Space Federation Headquarters.

It was long and wordy, because Hermann is long and wordy, but I can boil it down. It said, in essence, “What the devil did you do, Captain Roker, on your last cargo haul from the Jovian system to Earth? We thought we had a deal with them for four billion tons of vegetable foodstuffs, grown in our Europan ocean farms. Now Earth is telling us they don’t want to take delivery of any more shipments.”

The lightspeed round-trip travel time to USF Headquarters was seven minutes, so I couldn’t exactly chitchat back and forth. But I did send him a pretty long reply, which again can be boiled down to, “Damned if I know, Hermann. They seemed happy enough with what I dropped off last time.”

My livelihood wasn’t hurt by the cancellation of a food supply contract with Earth; but my ego was, and I spent a good deal of time fuming. Was it Anna Griss, getting at me in a remarkably indirect way? I knew she was capable of subtle malice. But I still looked for a more logical explanation. I couldn’t see even Anna risking Earth’s food supply just to get at me.

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