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cures. I still say that girl lucky. She's fine. Could have had worse happen to
her."
"I guess. Maybe she'll make it."
"Yeah, man. You might, too. You make your five jumps, you come see me
there. Maybe some luck rub off on me. What's your call?"
"Call?"
"Name, man. What we call you?"
"Oh. Derik. Derik Anders."
"My call Clinton. Clinton Williams."
"Clinton. You're named after a president, way back."
"Yeah, man. A fade, too. He got around, so Mama told me. Five jumps?
Not likely we'll meet down on the Spore."
"Not likely at all," Derik agreed. He rolled over and tried to sleep,
while the boat made its slow way to the Hawaiian spaceport, but Clinton stayed
on his mind. The man seemed more cheerful than he had a right to be, facing a
fifty-fifty chance of starvation in space. Nevertheless, if by some wild toss
of the dice he survived his jumps, it might be well to have a friend on
Sporeworld. The man seemed unusually well informed.
* * * *
Wendy Waltz, nee Wendy Tremaine, still had the taste in her mouth of the other
women in the octet she was chained to. It had been a degrading experience and
she huddled as far from the other females as her chains allowed. It was still
hard for her to believe where she was, chained and sentenced to three crew
jumps on the Crazy Ships, effectively a death sentence, although not quite so
certain as the man she had witnessed being given five jumps right before her.
She wondered briefly what he had done to deserve such a harsh judgment, then
turned back to her own concerns. Three jumps? She knew what the odds were of
her surviving that many -- one in eight -- and what might happen to her on
Sporeworld should she make it. Dean Tremaine, though only a junior
stockholder, had teased some supposed facts out of his grandfather, old John
Tremaine, while he was still in his good graces, and passed them on to her. Or
so he said. She wouldn't trust his word now, though, not for a thousand shares
of Tremaine stock. Not for a million, either. Nevertheless, she knew some of
the stories he told were true, if conditions on the colony world were anything
like they were on earth, where attractive bondies almost always wound up in
some sort of sexual arrangement with corporate executives. It was a man's
world again for the vast majority of unmarried women.
At first her marriage to Dean had seemed to be made in heaven for her.
The Tremaine heir plucked her from the relative obscurity of a computer
analyst for financial trends and made her his wife. At first, everything had
gone well. Eventually, though, his at-home comments drew her into the dark
side of corporate policy, things she really didn't want to hear about, not the
way Dean told them. Before that, she had taken her position in life more or
less for granted, accepting the perks and privileges of being born to lower
rung corporate parents. It was her looks that had catapulted her up into a way
of life that ultimately proved too alien for her sensibilities. Dean Tremaine
turned out to be a shallow person, entirely concerned with her sexual allure,
and when she rejected his sadistic fantasies, it was the beginning of the end
of the marriage. The actual end came one night after his sister, Sheila
Tremaine, comforted her a little too intimately.
Wendy still remembered the night in vivid detail. After rejecting a
really outrageous proposal, she had ordered Dean from her room, then curled up
in the bed and cried, wishing she could just go back to her old job and forget
she had ever met young Dean Tremaine. Sheila Tremaine, her sister-in-law,
entered her bedroom soon afterward, at first making excuses for her brother,
then ultimately telling of her own abuse from him as a child. From there,
comfort had progressed to intimacy.
Wendy still wasn't quite sure how it had happened. She didn't think she
was really inclined toward women; certainly she had never done such a thing
before. It was more a combination of desolation and someone she truly liked
and admired being available to console her. Sheila, like her, was a captive of
the Tremaine Corporation and its family, but unlike her, Sheila was protected
by blood relation within the family and by also being a shareholder, though a
minor one. There was no way she would ever be sentenced to three jumps on the
Crazy Ships, though she would probably be forced to chance one jump to exile
on Sporeworld, just because of her involvement. Dean had walked unexpectedly
back into her bedroom and everything else followed from that. Like a fool, she
had thought she had some financial stake coming from the marriage. Like a
fool, so had her lawyer, or perhaps not. It would have been just like Dean to
use his position to influence her attorney into jumping into something over
his head. After the adverse judgment, she was indebted to both the court and
her lawyer and the sentence inevitably followed. It probably wouldn't have
been near as harsh had she not been married to a Tremaine and gone before a
Plemmons-controlled judge. But it was no use thinking of that now. The Crazy
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