Free Ride the Star Winds by A. Bertram Chandler

Liberians.”
    Grimes looked around him. Apart from the servants all those present seemed to be of Terran Anglo-Saxon or Latin stock. There were no Orientals, no Negroes.
    “Have any outworlders yet achieved citizenship?” he asked.
    “Er . . . no. You see, Your Excellency, the major qualification is freedom. As long as a person is in debt to the State he is not free. Once he has earned enough money to repay the debt he is free . . .”
    “Debt?” asked Grimes.
    “Resettlement is a costly business, Your Excellency, as you as a shipowner must know. Transportation between worlds . . .”
    “The responsibility, I understand, of the Federation.”
    “Even so, there are costs, heavy costs. People come here. They must be fed, housed, found employment. . . .”
    “Employment,” echoed Grimes. “Menial work. Manual labor, for not very high wages. . . .”
    “And would you pay a field hand, Your Excellency, the salary that you, highly trained and qualified, would expect as a shipmaster?”
    “The laborer, in any field, is worthy of his hire,” said the President.
    Her hand firmly on Grimes’s elbow she steered him away from Lopez, toward the flamboyantly red-haired Kitty O’Halloran, Director of Tri Vi Liberia. She was a large woman, fat rather than plump, and she gushed. “Your Excellency. Commodore. I’m dying to get you on to one of our programs. Just an interview, but in depth. Just the story, told by yourself, of some of your outrageous adventures. . . .”
    “Outrageous?” parried Grimes. “I’m a respectable Governor. “
    “But you weren’t always. You’ve been a pirate. . . .”
    “A privateer,” he corrected her.
    “Who knows the difference?” She tittered. “From what I’ve heard, you didn’t know yourself. . . .”
    Again there was the guiding pressure on his elbow. This time he was to meet Luigi Venito, Minister of Interstellar Trade, a tall, distinguished man with steely gray hair and—unusual in this company—a neatly trimmed beard.
    “I thought, Your Excellency,” said Venito, “that I might one day deal with you in your capacity as a shipowner. To meet you as a Governor is an unexpected pleasure.”
    “Bad pennies,” said Grimes, “turn up in the most unexpected places.”
    “Ha ha. But I refuse to believe that the Terran World Assembly would appoint a bad penny to a highly responsible position.”
    “You’d be surprised,” said Grimes. “And, in any case, governments are rarely as moral as those whom they govern.” (There are times, he thought, when I feel that I should have a Boswell, recorder in hand, tagging after me . . .) “I hope that your government is an exception to the rule.”
    Venito chuckled. “Some say that we shouldn’t have a government at all, not on this world. But after the first few years our founding fathers—and mothers, of course, Madam President—were obliged to admit that pure Anarchism doesn’t work. A state of anarchy is not Anarchism. But we are free, unregimented, doing the things that we want to do as long as we do not infringe upon the rights of our fellow citizens. From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs. My own ability is trade, buying in the cheapest markets, selling in the dearest. All for the greatest good, naturally, of Liberia . . .”
    He had been drinking, of course, not too much, perhaps, but enough to loosen his tongue. Grimes ignored the President’s attempt to push him along to another group. There was one point that he wanted to clear up, a matter that had not been fully dealt with in the data that he had been given to study on the voyage out from Earth.
    He said, “You must have made some interesting deals in your time. . . . Agricultural machinery, for example. . . .”
    Venito laughed. “Yes. That was a good deal! The new colony on Halvan—and the ship carrying all their robot harvesters and the like months overdue! She’s listed as missing, presumed lost, at Lloyd’s. I think that the