Free Starman Jones by Robert A. Heinlein Page B

tried to imagine such anarchy and could not, he had never experienced it. “But don’t the guilds object?”
    “What guilds? Oh, the mother lodges back earthside squawked when they heard, but not even the Imperial Council backed them up. They’re not fools—and you don’t shovel back the ocean with a fork.”
    “And that’s where you mean to go. It sounds lovely,” Max said wistfully.
    “I do. It is. There was a girl—oh, she’ll be married now; they marry young—but she had sisters. Now here is what I figure on—and you, too, if you want to tag along. First time I hit dirt, I’ll make contacts. The last time I rate liberty, which will be the night before the ship raises if possible, I’ll go dirtside, then in a front door and out the back and over the horizon so fast I won’t even be a speck. By the time I’m marked ‘late returning,’ I’ll be hundreds of miles away, lying beside a chuckling stream in a virgin wilderness, letting my beard grow and memorizing my new name. Say the word and you’ll be on the bank, fishing.”
    Max stirred uneasily. The picture aroused in him a hillbilly homesickness he had hardly been aware of. But he could not shuffle off his proud persona as a spaceman so quickly. I’ll think about it.”
    “Do that. It’s a good many weeks yet, anyhow.” Sam got to his feet. “I’d better hurry back before Ole Massa Dumont wonders what’s keeping me. Be seeing you, kid—and remember: it’s an ill wind that has no turning.”

7
ELDRETH
    Max’s duties did not take him above “C” deck except to service the cats’ sand boxes and he usually did that before the passengers were up. He wanted to visit the control room but he had no opportunity, it being still higher than passengers’ quarters. Often, an owner of one of the seven dogs and three cats in Max’s custody would come down to visit his pet. This sometimes resulted in a tip. At first, his cross-grained hillbilly pride caused him to refuse, but when Sam heard about it, he swore at him dispassionately. “Don’t be a fool! They can afford it. What’s the sense?”
    “But I would exercise their mutts anyhow. It’s my job.” He might have remained unconvinced had it not been that Mr. Gee asked him about it at the end of his first week, seemed to have a shrewd idea of the usual take, and expected a percentage—“for the welfare fund.”
    Max asked Sam about the fund, was laughed at. “That’s a very interesting question. Are there any more questions?”
    “I suppose not.”
    “Max, I like you. But you haven’t learned yet that when in Rome, you shoot Roman candles. Every tribe has its customs and what is moral one place is immoral somewhere else. There are races where a son’s first duty is to loll off his old man and serve him up as a feast as soon as he is old enough to swing it—civilized races, too. Races the Council recognizes diplomatically. What’s your moral judgment on that?”
    Max had read of such cultures—the gentle and unwarlike Bnathors, or the wealthy elephantine amphibians of Paldron who were anything but gentle, probably others. He did not feel disposed to pass judgment on nonhumans. Sam went on, “I’ve known stewards who would make Jelly Belly look like a philanthropist. Look at it from his point of view. He regards these things as prerogatives of his position, as rightful a part of his income as his wages. Custom says so. It’s taken him years to get to where he is; he expects his reward.”
    Sam, Max reflected, could always out-talk him.
    But he could not concede that Sam’s thesis was valid; there were things that were right and others that were wrong and it was not just a matter of where you were. He felt this with an inner conviction too deep to be influenced by Sam’s cheerful cynicism. It worried Max that he was where he was as the result of chicanery, he sometimes lay awake and fretted about it.
    But it worried him still more that his deception might come to light. What to do