Rohan let out a loud laugh. "Hark at him! Don't let him kid you, Trehearne. We do well, but not that well."
Yann said seriously, "I mean it."
"Would you mind telling me how?"
"I saved my money," Yann told him virtuously. Then he grinned. "Besides, you're forgetting that I spent almost a year on the ground, filling in for some damned Vardda factor that died. I didn't waste my time." He turned to Trehearne. "Wait until we hit that system. I'll show you things you never saw before. Real barbarism. Good people, though. I got along with 'em fine."
"I guess," said Trehearne, "that there are all kinds of worlds in the Cluster."
"Just wait," said Rohan sourly. "You'll have a bellyful before you're through. There are beautiful ones, and picturesque ones, and very quaint ones, all right, and some are even civilized. But there's a hell of a lot that are just plain godawful. You must have guessed that there's a reason for the high pay on this run."
The great Cluster of Hercules grew from a patch of hazy brilliance lost in the blaze and crash and thunder of the universe, to a monstrous star-swarm, blinding even through a darkened port—a swirling hive of suns, white, red, yellow, peacock blue and vivid green, booming across the eternal void with the rush and roar of a cosmic avalanche toward some unknown destination, guided by the evil blinking eyes of the Cepheid variables. The Saarga plunged in at last among the edges of the swarm, and Trehearne discovered at least one reason why Edri had warned him about the Hercules run.
"All the globular clusters are bad," Yann told him cheerfully. "Omega Centauri—there's another one to break a starman's heart. A strong ship, a strong captain, and no imagination—that's what it takes for a voyage like this."
Trehearne was introduced to gravity tides and for the first time in his life he knew what real fear was. The generators throbbed incessantly. The Saarga groaned and shrieked in all her iron bones, moving in erratic bursts of speed and sudden brakings, pitching and swerving as she felt her way in through shoals of suns, fighting the complex, ever-shifting gravitational fields. Trehearne got the feeling that he was trapped inside a giant football being battered back and forth between the stars.
Yann grinned. "It gets worse as you go farther in."