Fayette was admiring. "For a man in poor health," she exclaimed, "you take it without a whimper—or a chaser!"
"Eh?" Unterzuyder blinked, then drew himself up stiffly. "Whiskey is the only medicine my doctor permits. And now, let's get down to the matter of the contract!"
One month later.
Ralph Unterzuyder was furious. He stalked the darkened decks of the trembling space ship Ares—a slick hundred-tonner with sixty square feet of firing surface—and reflected that the Beechers were making a worse sucker out of him than he'd expected them to.
First, they were a pair of fakers. That much had been obvious from the start, with that phony newspaper write-up, all that bragging about their knowledge of fire-arms when they didn't even know enough to keep a weapon pointed toward the floor. Well, he'd expected that much. But to discover they did not even have basic knowledge of how to outfit an expedition!
They had actually begun ordering lumber for building, until he pointed out the climate of Titan might be kinder to prefabricated glassteel sections.
They had actually paid out money for seeds, bulbs, and saplings until he showed that all farming on Titan must for the present be on an experimental or at best highly speculative basis.
Not only that, they had attempted to charter a ship twice as big as needed, one that used large quantities of chemical fuels. That ridiculous error had been amended with a smaller ship sporting atomic gas-thrust. As for the captain and crew, they had been hired by Unterzuyder himself—and, by means of the secret passage of one thousand credits from Titan Settlers' funds to Captain Foshag, the captain and crew were bought.
Unterzuyder balanced himself angrily down a companionway. As he passed a hanging ventilator, the drum-beat and skittering rhythm of a jury-rigged orchestra echoed up from the ballroom. A dance was in progress. Unterzuyder smiled sentimentally. Nothing like giving the settlers a run for their money.