"What?" I said, startled.
"Immortal. You know, he lives forever." He poured me another brandy and leaned on the bar. His other customers had left and he was obviously in the mood for talking.
"I thought everybody knew about Joseph," he went on. "He was one of the first spacebarons, a real bigshot, controlled the whole of Calypso; him and his brother. They not only personally owned all of the satellite, but even all of the space lines that served it. When it came to law there, he was judge, jury, and owner of the courthouse and jail. Brother, that was one monopoly."
"You mean that old man that was just here?" I said in amazement.
"That's right. Joseph, we call him now. He probably had a longer name then. It was a long time ago.
"Anyway, to get back to the story, one day a space liner radios in that it wants to make an emergency landing on Calypso for medical assistance. They had some virulent disease on board and the passengers and crew were dying like flies.
"Well, this brother of Joseph, Micheal, or something like that his name was, advises Joseph not to give them permission to land. The captain of the liner pleads with him, but Joseph tells him to move on, he doesn't want to take any chances. The ship tried to make the next port, I forget just what it was, but, anyway, to cut it short, they all died. That's what started things churning in Joseph's bailiwick; a full-scale revolution, no less."
"You missed something there," I said. "The people wouldn't have been expected to be so upset. After all, no matter how mistaken, he must have thought he was acting in the interests of everyone on Calypso."
"Yeah," Sam pointed out, "but the thing is that among the passengers was Joseph's own boy, the most popular person on the satellite and the apple of his old man's eye. Nobody had known it, but the kid was playing hookey from his school on Terra and was making a cruise of the Jupiter moons.