"Do what we ask," the hyperspacers—the xhindi, they called themselves—said softly, "and you will have enough from just a single voyage to have her for a week, a month, a year. Do what we ask and you can have her for all eternity."
"But all I want is just one night!" he protested.
And they had laughed, and one with a honey-sweet mind had said, "Is that all you want, really all?" Then they began naming the things a man could want—and they certainly seemed to have a full knowledge of humanity and its most secret desires.
Afterward, Len had started to think. It would be nice to have Lyddy all to himself—for a while, anyway. It would be nice to be able to buy her pretty dresses and jewelry. There were other things that would also be nice. Maybe he could have his teeth fixed and his leg straightened. His stepfather had broken it the night his mother died and it had never set properly. With money, he could do a lot of things. He hadn't realized there was so much in the universe to be wanted.
Now his wages began to look as picayune as once they had seemed large. He could make more elsewhere, he told himself; he might not be educated, but he had a good mind, plus rapidly dwindling principles. He didn't need the hyperspacers, though. There were plenty of illegal ways of making money within the framework of normspace activities. So he left the secure monotony of the starship to seek an enterprise which would bring in quick and copious profits.
His first step was to go see a rather disreputable acquaintance of his, Captain Ludolf Schiemann. Schiemann was an ancient spaceman from Earth, who owned and commanded a ramshackle craft of prehistoric design, held together with spit and spells.
Schiemann operated out of Capella IV with cargoes of whatever he could get. He was able to make a living with the Valkyrie only because he would take on jobs that no sane skipper would touch. Some were dangerous; most were illegal into the bargain. The risks were out of all proportion to the profit, which was why the only helper he'd been able to get was Balas—a big, powerful man, not old but mad. He'd been a deckhand on one of the big starships and had broken too early to be entitled to a pension.
Mattern had met old Schiemann at a bar in Burdon, the capital of Capella IV, and had had a few drinks with him whenever the Perseus and the Valkyrie had happened to hit port at the same time. Schiemann had a favorite joke he kept repeating over and over: "If you ever get sick of the Perseus, Lennie—sick of good food and hot water and decent quarters—you can always come to the Valkyrie. I'll take care of you."
Now Mattern went to him and said he'd like to take Schiemann up on that offer.