[Note: it's been a long time. Read the first installment of the story here.]
My first few days working with Terry, I was confused as hell. He'd supposedly brought me onto his hopper because he liked my skill, but I couldn't seem to do anything right.
"Don't put the drill bit in that way, you'll snap it off. Come on, dummy.
"No, not there. No no no no nononono. Are you looking at the rocks right now? Get over here!
"If you crack it that way one more time, I'm going to have you sent back to those two punks you were working with before. Come on. Act like you've got some sense now.
"What the hell are you doing? Jesus! You know better than that. You're going to lose half of it into space. If I see you come up underneath it like that one more time, I'm taking you back to NRX for another lesson.
"No, no! You're killing me, Jack! I'm going to have a heart attack and die right here on this asteroid. Pay attention!
"What are you, still asleep today? Get your head into it! You have a brain, you idiot, use it!"
It was the most incompetent I'd ever felt in my life. Of course I was pulling out more ore every week... it was hard not to, with him there watching my every move... but the comments never ended. So in the space of a couple months I went from being miserable and terrified of death to miserable and terrified of Terry. And it was laughable. Because he wasn't at all imposing, either, in stature or in volume. He stood maybe 5'8" and looked like somebody's unmarried brother (which he was) and talked with a sort of high boy's voice.
I can't say whether I preferred working with Terry to working with Caleb and Jason because I didn't give it any thought. I was so busy. We put in extra hours almost every day, and I came in and ate my supper and went to bed. But if I was still miserable, I was miserable in a different way. I was working so damn hard. Partly because I was afraid not to, but partly because every once in a while, Terry would say something less insulting.
"Good," he said once, when I sunk in the drill. I was so shocked I nearly jerked the bit in two right there. We'd been working together for weeks and it was the first time he'd liked anything I'd done.
"You're getting better at finding the edges of the ore pockets," he said a few days later. I didn't say a thing. I was afraid to break the spell.
After a few months, one day he told me he liked the way I scoped out an asteroid. "You've got more pure rock smarts than all the other rock jockeys put together. I decided I'm taking you out to the Hatch Patch next month."
I had an appointment with Harold Slawski, V.P. of Mobile Extraction, that one afternoon and I wasn't thinking. I remember waiting outside his office with my suit half off, the arms tied around my waist and the legs dirty and baggy over my sweaty long underwear. I'd come back early from the asteroids and didn't even think about cleaning up. So I was waiting there in the two-foot-wide hallway outside his office and this group of bigwigs came past me, all clean-shaven and dressed up, and talking about some expansion, and I didn't even look at them. I suddenly wanted to get out. But then the door opened and they let me into the office.
Harold Slawski was well-fed. He had big teeth and a slightly crooked nose, and a big gold thing on his desk with his name on it. He stood up when I came in and leaned over his desk. I jerked my sweaty hands out of where I'd stuck them in the tied-off arms of my suit and shook his hand, and then I sat down before he could offer me the chair.
"So you're Jack Lipstein! They tell me you're the next Danny Engall." He sat back down and beamed at me.
"Uh... that's what they tell me."
"I wanted to meet you. We've been hearing a lot about you up in the office. You know, you bring in about seven thousand kilos a month? Of platium?"
I had no idea I was bringing in that much. "No sir," I said.
"Well, it's very impressive. We've had maybe three, four people in my time here who were able to locate that much in a month. All of them, I would have said, they had the eye for it." He tapped under his puffy eyelid. "Or maybe you can smell it."
I laughed. "That's what Terry says."
"Terrence Spratt... yeah, he worked with Danny too. Funny guy. He's been here a long time. Never worked outside of piloting. Back in 84 they wanted him to be a manager, fought for it, but he wouldn't. That was before my time."
A side door opened and a young guy came in and told Harold that he had some report from Shipping and they needed a reply. Harold said to give him two seconds to look it over, so the young guy brought in the report and I looked around the office. It was very clean. Lots of wood, which we don't see a lot in space. Carpet. Lots of gold and platinum touches. There was some kind of award with a platinum hammer on the wall.
"So, how long have you been with us now?" Harold was asking me. We were alone again.
"Two years."
"What'd you do before this?"
"I worked a lot of jobs on Earth," I said.
"One of those, huh? We see a lot like you up here, you know. You know how many new people I hired this week? Maybe fourteen. And that's not so unusual. We have a lot of people go through here. So you know I'm not lying when I tell you that your gift is really something special. Let me break it down this way. You've got the bottom ten percent, they're here to get away from something, you can tell right away. They don't necessarily want to be here, but they don't want to be on Earth either. I won't lie, some of those folks are our best workers. Whatever's driving them. But they're usually rotten. We terminate a lot of them early.
"Then maybe... the next fifty percent who come through here, it's just another job. They're working for the paycheck. That's our backbone, really. Some of the rest, say twenty-five percent, they're real frontier men, they just love it up here, some of them stay for life. They're part of that backbone too, really. And... what's that leave?"
"I don't know."
"Say, about fifteen percent, the remainder, they have some actual talent for what they do. They're good pilots or they're good at finding ore, or they're leaders, that sort of thing. It's the sad truth but we have a hard time holding onto that fifteen percent. The truth is, smart folks, talented folks, they don't want to be stuck at some menial job in the middle of nowhere all their lives. Am I right?"
"I guess not."
"With most of them, we try to offer them incentives to stay with us once their first contract is up, but a lot of them leave anyway. But for the really exceptional folks, we really try to make arrangements. OMC has a lot to offer for those kinds of skills. And you know you're up there, in that area, right?"
I wiped my palms on my dirty suit legs. The sweat on my back was getting cold. "Well, people tell me I'm all right at finding ore."
He laughed at that. "Don't be modest, now, Jack, that's not going to get you anywhere in life. Don't be cocky, but don't be modest. Let me tell you, you have a lot of people in this department with their eye on you. But not everybody knows or cares how important a good orehound is, and sometimes you have to tell them yourself."
The side door opened again and Harold stood up. "Just let me finish up with Jack here..." he said to his assistant, already taking the offered sheaf from his hands. I stood up too. "Jack, we want a real good relationship with you. You understand why. If you keep up this kind of performance, there's no reason even to wait until your contract's up in three years. We understand that other companies might offer you enough to make you think about breaking your contract with us. I just don't want you to do anything rash without seeing what we have to offer, all right? We'd like to keep you."
I nodded, quickly, taking a step toward the door. Harold came around the desk, leaving his assistant holding his stylus in the air. He leaned in close and looked me right in the eye. "Just so you know... you might have heard what Dynacorp put out for Danny Engall. Most of it's not rumors; eleven million a year is a lot of money, but like I said, a good orehound is... worth a lot, to a company in this business. Just think about it. We didn't want to lose him and we don't intend to make the same mistake twice. Okay?" He clapped me hard on the shoulder, hard enough to make me lose my balance, and stuck out his hand again. "Great to meet you, Jack. I'm glad we could talk. Say hello to old Terry for me!"
And then the door behind me was open and I was out in the little hallway again, more bigwigs rushing through on their way to some high-level meeting. Some of them were younger than me. I sagged against the wall. I was making seventy thousand a year on this contract I'd signed in this smelly recruitment office in downtown Chicago when I was half-drunk and hated myself. And that was more than I'd made for dog handling, but it wasn't exactly a fortune.
I got lost trying to find the mess hall and by the time I got there I was pissed at myself. How hard could it be to find my way around a station I'd already spent two years on? They had that tofu meatloaf that was usually all right, but I got sick of it halfway through and went back to my bunk and went to bed early. I didn't want to be awake. For some reason I just wanted off this hunk of metal I was on. I thought about Mojo, in the ring, at the training course, and got myself good and miserable, and then I went to sleep.
I woke up early the next morning and actually had enough time to get dressed and have a real breakfast. I felt a little better. I started thinking about how I might be able to get a new contract, maybe fewer hours... maybe I might even like to go back to Earth. It was too much to think about yet. I just liked having that hope there, a big new house I could explore when I wanted.
Terry showed up when I was finishing my toast. "Ready for another day of misery, rockmuncher?" he said, grinning. I stopped chewing. My mouth was real dry all of a sudden.
