The Duke Of Uranium by John Barnes

Author:John Barnes [Barnes, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science fiction
Publisher: Aspect
Published: 2012-04-25T00:13:48+00:00

that you keep making it.”

“Just now I don’t think I could forget.” Jak shook his head. “You know, I realize it was for good reasons, but you all probably really did dislike that poor kid, after a while, since he fit in so badly.”

“I suppose we did. And he might have sensed that. But we were also trying to keep him from dying the way he did. Look, I didn’t mean to bring up anything so gloomy; I just wanted to make sure you don’t get too enthusiastic and become careless. Since you seem to really like working shipboard, Lewo deputized me to talk with you about it. Really, he’s doing it because he’s impressed, and because he specks you might stick with it and become a crewie, and you need to be a good one.”

“I appreciate that, but I haven’t been careless yet, I don’t think—at least he hasn’t said a word about it—”

“I guess he was looking through your vita and he found the thing about you climbing the light shaft, and started to think maybe you were more reckless than you looked.”

“Well, I have to admit it was pretty stupid of me to get involved in that, so I can understand his concern.”

Jak smiled, hoping to get the subject changed; he had a feeling that the light shaft incident would be with him for a long time. “All the same, I have to say that dangers and gloominess and all, I like being a CUPV. It’s better than just being a passenger—I don’t know what I’d have done with all that time if you and your friends hadn’t gotten me into this.”

Piaro seemed to hesitate for a moment and then said, “I should probably confess. There’s something I didn’t tell you about because I was afraid of scaring you off. Nothing awful, we all live with it regularly, but in all fairness you should have known before you decided to sign up, and I guess now, as we’ve gotten to be better friends, I’m starting to think you probably do have a right to know, right now, while there’s still plenty of time to just go back to being a passenger. Have you heard everyone grumbling about the cargo switch at Mercury?”

“Once or twice. Since there seemed to be need for general labor, and since I don’t have anything like enough points to stay out of the pool for the jobs nobody wants, I just signed up for GL for that whole period. Lewo says I’ll really learn what being a crewie is all about.”

“Oh, no! Well, you’ll certainly learn that. But I didn’t tell you, and I should have, and now you’re going to hate me.”

“How much am I going to hate you?” Jak was thinking that he could always suggest that they do some more sparring, depending on just what he was about to hear.

Piaro sighed. “It’s just that when we do cargo switch at Mercury, we do it on the loop. It takes the

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