Well, maybe I was wrong and maybe I wasn't. I didn't know as much in those days as I should have, either. But it was too late now—too late by a war and a hundred revolutions, too late by all the men who'd gone down before my guns, too late by years of loneliness and bitterness.
But if it was too late, why did I remember it all now, with Thorsten up in the Asteroids, a little king in his own right, with me in the New Shanghai, a white ray-burn splashed through my hair, with the Academy a dim thing behind both of us, and Pat—
Why was Pat here? What had she done through the years, while I fought my way from one end of the System to the other, and Harry took the easy way out during the war?
"Hello, Pat," I said. "I haven't seen you in a long time." Well, what else was I going to say?
I don't know what she had expected me to say. She kept her face in profile, and didn't let me see what it was showing.
"I'm here on business. I hear you're a good man, these days, for the job I've got." She twisted the words like a knife.
All right, if she wanted it that way, she'd get it.
"So they tell me," I said.
"Fifteen thousand for a month's work."