Harley's Intergalactic Moveable Restaurant

By Martin Beaulieu

Harley loves to eat. He loves women. He loves his sidekick and cook, Muffin Sam. Most of all he loves his restaurant, which has travelled down more space lanes than most freighters.

But when a space monster drifts into his corner of the galaxy, Harley's loves must take a back seat while he wrestles with a creature that has destroyed a fleet of the Federation's best fighter ships armed with nukes.

His allies are Muffin Sam; John Moonbow, an introverted space cartographer; the Great and Rotund Ruby, a travelling salesperson; and Rosemary, Ruby's lover and part-time rebel.

Harley knows he is facing an impossible task, but what choice does he have? The beast has taken over his restaurant.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tellwell Talent
• Release date: Jul 17, 2023
• ISBN: 9780228893233

Book preview

Chapter One

Muffin Sam’s Journal

I was told to make a journal. The others have been doing that for two or three years so I’m far behind. There are things that need to go into it, but they’re in the past now. Still, it’s relevant stuff so I suppose that I’ll have to go back and catch up as best I can. Meanwhile, I’m here on Starry, so I guess I’ll start with that. Don’t blame me if I get it out of sequence. I’m a cook, not a writer.

Harley and me have seen a lot of miles together. They weren’t ordinary miles, either; they were cosmic miles. Between the two of us, we have tramped from one end of the civilized galaxy to the other. Ragged, hard miles they were, but we logged them just the same. We have seen some strange things along the way; done some strange, too, I expect. We have been on hot planets and cold planets; clean planets and dirty planets… planets so filthy that even the soap needs a good dose of disinfectant before you even think of rubbing it against your skin. Your cooking pots too, for that matter. We have been with Traybix women (the kind that kill their mates when they don’t perform up to scratch), and we’ve been with Rangh women. That sort of female doesn’t kill, which is a blessing, but they do collect the occasional genital trophy, which is definitely not a blessing. In fact, it’s a serious inconvenience. Harley and me have seen both kinds and managed not to get collected in either manner. Find two other space warp veterans who can make that claim if you can.

We’ve seen every creature imaginable and avoided every trap that has ever been set for a pair of fools who don’t know enough to shake the space dust out from between their ears. That’s how long Harley and me have been together. So you’d think I’d have known him long enough to see when he was getting ready to dump us in one of those traps I just mentioned. But I don’t. I hardly ever do. Usually we are neck thick in laser nooses before Harley sees fit to mention that we’ve wandered into trouble. I guess that’s on me. It proves I’m not as smart as I think I am, I suppose. Don’t get me wrong though; I’m not as dumb as you think I might be after reading my above confession. I’m the greatest cook that’s ever boiled a water soup and made it taste like apple pie. It is my recipes that turn food into the gold that jingles in Harley’s pockets.

Okay, I’ve got to stop here and clear something up. I know, I just got started, but I want to be honest about everything. What’s the point of writing a journal if you never get your facts straight? So yeah, I did know we were headed for trouble. I’ve known since I hooked up again with Harley on Yorkon. And my cooking? It is good, but I sometimes use it as a crutch to shuffle past my deficiencies. Just so we’re clear on that, my skill in one area casts shade on my lack of competence in other areas. So now that we’ve got that straight…

A more charitable person would call Harley impulsive. Not me, though. I’m not that kind. I’ve never given to charity in my life. Don’t believe in it. Charity’s just a fool’s way of getting nothing for something. The simple truth is that Harley is not one of the galaxy’s great thinkers, plain and true. But don’t get me wrong, I’m not criticizing, I’m just stating a fact. I’d be the last one to cast slurs against Harley. I follow wherever he leads, so that makes me seven kinds of simpleton too, doesn’t it?

But it’s true; Harley doesn’t think. He gets an idea and acts upon it. He does it impulsively, with no attempt to sift through it for logic before leaping forward. Sometimes in this old dust-dish universe of ours, you gotta warp your eyes around the bends, you know? Harley just doesn’t do that. He’s got that tube vision you get when the tube you’re riding in slips into a tunnel through some mountain. You can’t see where you’re going, and you can’t see what’s coming at you.

Which is why we got into trouble above Starry. Sort of. Like I said, the seeds of that trouble were possibly planted on Yorkon, or perhaps even on Playdough. But I wasn’t with Harley on Playdough, so I guess I shouldn’t speculate on that part of it.

I suppose I should tell you what I do, though I’ve already touched on the subject when I bragged about my cooking. But I’m going to mention it again so that you can understand the relationship between Harley and me. Harley owns a space restaurant, you see, and I’m his main culinary attaché; that is to say, chief cook and bottle washer. Been at it for longer than Harley can remember. Me, of course, I remember everything, so if I felt like it, I’d say how many years. But I’m not in the mood for it, so you’ll have to take it on faith that the pots aren’t shiny because they’re new. I’ve put more grease into those pots (the elbow kind) than Harley has put in his hair (the slicking own kind) on a four female Saturday night.

I say trouble, but I’d better qualify that. For you, it would be trouble. The kind of trouble you’re thinking of would be classed as only normal everyday hassles by Harley and me… the kind that everybody has and deals with almost unconsciously. Trouble is so second nature to Harley that we can’t rightly call it that anymore. For trouble to be trouble to us, it would have to be trouble fractionalized into one of those exponential mathematical formulas, multiplied by itself to a factor of ten or more. And probably at that, the fraction would have to be inverted to begin with. By inverted, I mean turned upside down. Forgive me if I over-explained that but not everybody gets math, am I right?

So, you see, I use the word trouble merely to describe the events that led to the trouble that came later – which was trouble in any man’s language.

Starry is one of those mining paradises that you hear about from time to time that the competing planets get so excited over. Paradise, they call it, because it has no population to restrict mining consortiums in the performance of their duly appointed rape. That means a greedy miner (is there any other kind?) can denude a planet – strip it bare of every resource – without interference from angry locals. Normally a planet like that gets shriven down to its husk and that’s the end of it. Paradise lost, so to speak, to paraphrase an old unknown classic.

But again, I use the word paradise to describe only one aspect of the planet. Don’t go getting idyllic, romantic ideas from that one narrow description; Starry is anything but a paradise. It is wild and temperamental, both in terrain and in weather, making for inhospitable living conditions and an unsocial climate – the kind you wouldn’t want to hang your shorts out in if you dared take them off. So, to be perfectly clear and honest, the theory of Starry is far more attractive than the practicality of it.

So why did Harley and me venture to set up shop in such an unappealing, unpleasant corner of the galaxy? Why, to feed the rapists, of course. In the short haul, there’s a pile of money to be made from miners, and Harley and me wanted to be there to grab our share. Mind you, it is not as easy as feeding them, burping them, and presenting them with the bill, but you get the picture. Home cooking like the sort I dish out is at a premium on a frontier planet such as Starry. That’s why Harley and me cut our gravity anchor at the last place we raked in from and headed out to Starry. That, and also to escape the trouble Harley got us into from the last place we were.

Okay, I stretched the truth there. We burned jets away from Yorkon, not the last planet we worked on together. The truth is the last planet where we were together has absolutely nothing to do with why we set course for Starry. Sometimes I tend to shortcut my stories just to get to the parts that matter. I was told not to do that because every detail matters. In my experience, however, not taking a good shortcut only serves to lengthen the journey, and as we all know, on a long trip, not every detail matters. For example, slowing down to avoid hitting a rodent crossing the road would be a trivial detail that doesn’t need mentioning. And as you can see, my explanation here only served to make the journal longer for no good reason, which proves my point.

Harley’s restaurant is a converted freighter, which means we have plenty of belly space for storing grub. When you factor in the fact that fresh food will last forever in an airless storage locker, we can be guaranteed that miners will be banging at our entry lock to get a seat at the table. But the drawback to Harley’s freighter is that we can’t brag about its sleek form. The old girl just ain’t structured that way. She’s built kind of like your mother and not your girlfriend, if you get my drift. That’s the reason why Starry was a going concern when we got there – we aren’t that quick. It’s also the reason why we weren’t as prepared as we should have been. In order to get the jump on anybody else with a mind to retail flapjacks and pastry, we had to cut loose in a hurry. I say we, but it was Harley who wanted to cut loose in a hurry. As for me, I’m a planner. I don’t enjoy being rushed faster than I can breathe. But since we had just been sprung from a Federation jail, we didn’t take time to inquire about such trivial necessities as licenses, permits, and parking fees. We just cut loose. Harley was only now finding out about them, and very unpleasantly so from Starry’s main jobber, a career government Captain by the name of McDaniels.

McDaniels looked exactly like the career man he was. He wasn’t young and brassy like a new mine buggy, and he wasn’t dented and disjointed like an old one. He was somewhere in between. His hair was short and trim, army style, as opposed to government style, which was an oddity for a government Captain. Most career people tend towards whatever trendy style their superiors affect. At the moment, I believe spirals are in. Don’t like them myself – too much work to keep curlicued and too perpendicular once curlicued to suit my cook’s cap. Apparently McDaniels didn’t like them either, which meant that he had been at his job long enough to have lost his ambition, or at least, long enough to understand that playing the game doesn’t necessarily translate into promotion and advancement. Bootlicking is a stale game anyway. It dries the tongue and doesn’t accomplish much else. Sometimes it takes a young snapper a long time to find that out.

But like I said, McDaniels wasn’t that young, and at the moment, Harley was trying to leverage that fact to his advantage. Sometimes when a career guy gets passed over a few times, he becomes ripe for the old hand grease. Harley didn’t know if McDaniels fit into that category or not, but he was having a go at finding out.

Colonel McDaniels, he began in his oiliest tone, I’m prepared to pay double the usual parking fees as a penalty for not having paid them at the competing planets consulate. With, he added, noticing McDaniels’ frown, a suitable honorarium to compensate for the extra work required to process papers.

"And, he added, noticing further, the suddenly arched brow, payment will be by direct credit rather than by written promissory note."

It was perhaps too oily, even for Harley… especially the deliberate upgrading of McDaniels’ military title, which was amateurish. Sometimes when you overdo it, the mark gets annoyed. A good chef never overcooks a meal.

It’s Captain, McDaniels corrected brusquely, not admitting the flattery behind the error. And parking fees won’t do you much good without a proper restaurant permit.

I do have bona fide culinary licenses, Harley reminded him. According to the certificates, that entitles me to practice my craft anywhere.

Harley’s tone was slightly argumentative, which meant that he was backing off a bit on the bribe attempt. From behind the counter, I silently nodded my approval. There was no sense wasting energy by doubling a bad bet.

McDaniels waved aside Harley’s claim to legitimacy. Pfui. Those certificates aren’t worth the paper they’re printed upon. They’re probably ten years out of date.

He was wrong about the paper. Nobody uses paper these days. And he was also wrong about the ten years. Those certificates were imbedded into a silicon endorsement chip that was at least twenty years obsolete. In fact, you’d be hard pressed to find a scanner that could read them, much less authenticate them.

Be that as it may, Harley countered, seemingly unruffled by the resistance his pitch was getting, it is signed by the Prefect.

The fact that he didn’t attach a name to the Prefect wasn’t lost on McDaniels, who merely smiled. Prefects usually serve for life, and if McDaniels read his official communications, he knew that the last Prefect’s coffin, with him in it, had been fired into the sun less than a decade ago, and dead Prefects don’t get replaced overnight. In fact, it usually takes a couple of wars before the next one is chosen.

But by that time, I was at the table with my own form of bribery. My raffert-skin goulash has conquered better bellies than McDaniels’, if I do say so myself, and I had high hopes that once McDaniels had put himself around it, he’d let up on the parking fee issue.

McDaniels acknowledged my bribe with a curt nod, and then shoved it away from him untried. That was churlish, and I could see that Harley was not impressed with the bad manners either.

Better eat that, he told McDaniels. You won’t find better for many a light year from here.

I’ll eat it when we’ve settled the matter of parking fees. Then, I suppose because he noticed my scowl of disapproval, he threw me a bone. I admit that it does smell appetizing.

I offered to pay more than double, Harley barked. I don’t know what more you want.

McDaniels gave Harley a stare that hinted he was pausing only to dredge up his stock of patience.

Mr. Harley, this is a frontier planet, he explained, as if Harley was only twelve and just getting on in business. As such, we’ve no use for money. What is more important to us, and in fact, what is much more proper, is documentation. Without documentation there can be no legitimate parking within the orbit of this planet.

He leaned smugly back in his seat as if he had scored a telling point – which he had. That point being his refusal to accept bribery. I trust that clarifies matters for you?

It puts me in a damn hole, is what it does.

McDaniels nodded his agreement. That is unfortunate, of course. But since we can’t ignore the situation, I’m afraid that I must hold to the letter of the law.

We could land, Harley bluffed. Starry is still an unclaimed planet.

He meant, of course, unclaimed in the sense of ungoverned; the mining rights had long ago been filed and parceled out.

McDaniels smiled complacently, recognizing the bluff for what it was. What, land this tub? She’ll never make landfall.

It was possible of course, but I wouldn’t like to see us try it without a modern receiving and docking facility.

Harley smiled back, doing his best to keep the wind in his bluff. Laws of gravity favor it, Captain, he assured the government man blandly, as if nothing in the world could be any easier. It was like saying your sister could keep her virginity in a room full of hard miners, and McDaniels knew it.

I repeat once more, Mr. Harley. No parking permit, no parking. Once that matter has been taken care of, we’ll take up the issue of your problematic restaurant license.

What are the limits of your parking boundaries? Harley asked, directing the conversation away from any immediate discussion of licensing. Harley was a firm believer that taste buds should be the sole authority on whether a restaurant should be permitted to operate.

Standard docking distances, naturally, McDaniels replied evasively. His deliberate vagueness left him a lot of wiggle room in the matter of parking orbits, and none of it, I expected, would be in Harley’s favor.

You’ll extend me the courtesy of letting me wait for my man to return from planet-side? Harley asked bitterly.

I beg your pardon. A man?

McDaniels showing his surprise was a mistake. It meant that he didn’t have his monitoring equipment in place, which meant that until he did, we could probably do business.

I’ve a man down foraging, Harley told him in a barefaced lie. It was, in fact, one man and two women. And they were not foraging… our larder was well stocked. Although you could say that scouting for miners was foraging of a sort.

Mr. Harley, there is no consumable life on Starry.

Tut-tut, Captain. Every planet has consumable life – this planet, particularly so. It’s a culinary certainty. Harley was gambling that McDaniels hadn’t yet made a study of the planet’s life forms, which was a miner-guild requirement. But since he had not yet positioned his monitoring equipment, it wasn’t much of a gamble.

You may believe so, McDaniels said huffily, not willing to admit a second error of omission, but regardless, your man’s presence planet-side without official sanction is totally improper.

But not illegal, Harley reminded him curtly. Harley is nothing if not the universe’s most accomplished space lawyer. Speaking in a practical sense, of course.

I grant you six hours.

He may be gone six days, Harley protested.

McDaniels remained unmoved. You have radio equipment – call him in.

He may not be reachable, Harley countered. Our radio equipment lacks the sophistication of your long-range military grade communicators.

Captain Daniels’ features suffered a fleeting burst of alarm that Harley’s man could possibly be unreachable. But that was just me. It may not have been alarm at all, but something more mundane like a bubble of indigestion rising from his gorge. Anyway, whatever it was, was gone in a heartbeat, as evidenced by his bland repeat of his deadline.

As I said, six hours.

With that issue settled, McDaniels reached for my raffert-skin goulash, intending to devour it, possibly as his reward for doing his job. However, just as he was about to place bowl to mouth, Harley snatched it out of his hands.

You can’t eat this, Harley said, straight-faced. It’s much too cold to eat now. It will give you cramps.

He immediately scuttled away with the bowl, leaving me to cope with McDaniels’ empty stomach. I suppose it was that childish gesture on Harley’s part that precipitated our troubles as much as anything.

I did offer Captain McDaniels a substitute item, which he declined, so I took him to the streaming platform to await Harley’s return. It took a while – long enough for Harley to devour the stew himself, but eventually Harley came back and brusquely streamed the Captain off his ship.

I believe that man lied to us, I informed Harley after Captain McDaniels had departed.

Don’t worry about it, Harley returned casually. We lied too.

Chapter Two

So now, tracking became the issue. McDaniels had the ability to track us with his ship’s equipment, and he probably did as soon as he was able to give the command. That didn’t bother Harley too much. We simply jet-fired out of orbit, and then maneuvered back in on McDaniels’ blind side – it’s the easiest tactic there is – and now here we were, parked (illegally, of course) on the opposite side of Starry, hidden from McDaniels’ electronic eyes. Unless McDaniels leaves his orbit to sneak a peek, here we’ll stay, and Harley was smugly confident that McDaniels would not do that.

Why would Harley believe that you ask? Well, because losing our line of sight to the miner camp significantly impacted our ability to welcome miners. Losing our sightlines meant that we could no longer molecule-stream them aboard, which meant we would have to shuttle them up a few at a time. Molecule streaming is undetectable (or nearly so), while running a landside-to-space taxi service is not. By moving to the far side of Starry, we had sidestepped McDaniels, but in my opinion, we had also made our situation more complex. Harley was sure McDaniels wouldn’t fly around the planet just to verify our presence. But then he wouldn’t need to, would he? All he would need to do is scan the sky above his mining camp. If we weren’t tagged by the scan, then obviously there were only two places we could be. We could either be gone, or we could be on the far side of the planet. So, you see, that’s just another example of Harley’s not so brilliant thought processes. The truth of the matter is that we could be outed in a heartbeat. But Harley is the type that crosses his bridges when he comes to them, so that was that.

Now you might think that a group of miners would care less about keeping their eating haunts a secret, and they probably don’t, unless McDaniels was the kind that docked their pay for breaking the rules. But that wasn’t the point. The point was that we didn’t want McDaniels to see what kind of hours we kept. Harley and me, you see, never keep our eggs all in one basket, and we surely don’t use them all to cook with.

I mentioned earlier, two women… or maybe I didn’t. Can’t remember. Regardless, they are women in the same way that a mountain is a hill. Know what I mean? We use them for appetizers. Nothing makes a horny miner hungrier than having his horn shorn, and our two girls can sheer with the best of them. Take my word on it. Their performances, however, are so good that it would be next to impossible to put a zipper on the talk around McDaniels’ staff room.

So again, what I’ve just recorded about us having whores is all untrue. We do have sex bots, but they’re for show only. Oh, I suppose we’d use them if a market for them suddenly developed, but like I said, they were just props. And while I’m on the subject of lies, Harley and Captain McDaniels could chat about miners all day long, but the nearest miner can be found on Playdough, which is about a million miles away from Starry.

Don’t get mad at me for lying because I’m reporting what I thought I knew at the time. I believed in the sex bot venture because I believed there were miners on Starry. Call me stupid, but the idea that a military man would run a mining operation was as likely as a hotel clerk managing a gaggle of hardened miners didn’t occur to me. I found all of this out only later. If you don’t mind, I’m going to continue telling it as if sex bots and miners existed until I reached the point where I realized they didn’t. You’ll have to bear with me and catch up later like I did.

All problems have solutions, some good, some disastrous. Since we needed to discover a way to successfully put our problems to rest, Harley decided on holding a rare staff meeting. We needed a couple of alternate plans, at least, to keep us afloat above Starry.

I won’t beat this horse to death, but here again was another example of Harley not thinking straight. With three fifths of our ship’s compliment Starry-side, there was just Harley and me to hold a meeting, and we really didn’t need a meeting for that – we could just sit down and talk it out. In fact, we were already in the conference room, and sitting as well, so there you have it.

But Harley wanted a meeting, and that meant coffee and sweets, and, of course, a medium lunch buffet. In Harley’s dictionary, medium meant sizeable. To put it bluntly, without any fine trimmings of terminology, Harley is fat. Fat, fat, fat. He blames my cooking, but it’s his appetite that is out of control, not my cooking, which is quite nutritious. I pride myself on that, and you’d better believe it.

But since I’m describing Harley, I may as well give you the entire picture, which if you took one would require a wide-angle lens. He’s short and round like a Transic water sprite. Understandably, a Transic water sprite is not always round, since its shape depends on its movements, but Harley pretty much remains a round phenomenon, whether walking, sitting, or sleeping. His stubby legs, arms and fingers serve primarily as counter-balancing pegs to keep him from rolling away in a strong breeze. They too, of course, are chubby. Harley, by the way, describes himself as corpulent, which, of course, is just a longer word for fat.

His skin color is mostly subdued olive, with just a hint of camouflage green, although you would need a bright light to detect the subtle change in coloration. His nose defines his face, or, more accurately, obscures it. It’s a big one. Not big enough to conceal your pregnant warf while going through customs (which is illegal, by the way), but nearly so.

His eyes, as with most eyes belonging to fat people, are sleepy, and they don’t blink often, thus giving the illusion that he’s both awake and sleeping.

As for describing myself, just know that whatever Harley is, I’m the opposite, which is probably why we get along as well as we do.

While I prepared the meeting buffet, Harley kept busy by wandering down to the bot-room to tinker with the design of the sex bots. Ruby didn’t approve of Harley tampering with her bots, but Rosemary assured her that Harley’s fiddling wouldn’t damage them in any way; their critical functions were locked down and Harley wasn’t clever enough to find the key. She was wrong, of course. Harley is an excellent programmer.

Ruby, whose professional name is The Great and Rotund Ruby, is both our chief whore, and our whore Chief. I hope you recognize the difference. And yes, her name describes her well. She is rotund, but not fatty rotund like Harley. The difference lies in her height, which nearly doubles Harley’s. Her weight distribution, combined with her height, therefore, allows for a more contoured appearance. Along with her sidekick and lover Rosemary, she is responsible for transforming miner fantasies into focused desire (which is harder than it seems) and assigning them the appropriate robot sex partner to help them achieve that fantasy. The trick, of course, is never to allow the miner to realize he’s doing the jig-a-boo with a synthetic, which is why tinkering with their design is a no-no. Rosemary’s programming is as meticulous as it is subtle. Harley, on the other hand, is as subtle as a runaway tanker.

That only leaves John to describe. I’m deliberately leaving out Rosemary because Ruby has a jealous streak in her that could break the arms of an unwary flatterer. I’ll just say that Rosemary is a good technician, well versed in robot production.

I am not going to describe John either, because as it turned out, John was the primary subject of our meeting.

Chapter Three

Happy? I asked.

Harley nodded, being too busy stuffing himself to answer. Harley eats like a chipmunk; he fills his cheeks before chewing, which understandably hinders his ability to speak properly. I didn’t mind. I like it when people enjoy my food.

When the last morsel slid down his gullet, he deigned to speak. Have you heard from John?

When I replied to the negative, he frowned. It’s not like him to ignore protocol. He should have called in by now.

It’s not like us to be out of range, I replied, stating the obvious. As for Harley’s comment about protocol, I ignored that. There is no protocol – never has been. That was just Harley being pompous. Whenever Harley felt he had somehow screwed things up, he pulled rank, pretending that he ran the ship in tight military fashion, which was funny, really. The only way he could fly a ship in formation was if there were no other ships sharing the galaxy with him.

What do you know about John? he asked suddenly.

Why, as much as you do, I suppose, I stuttered back. I hadn’t expected to be asked an opinion on a shipmate.

Well, if that’s true, then you don’t know anything about him.

What do you mean by that?

I mean that I don’t know anything about John. When it comes to John, I’m as ignorant as a newborn warf with a brain made of bone.

How can that be? You hired him. You must have examined his credentials, or at least submitted them to the Prefect’s collegiate database for authentication.

No, I did none of that, Harley confessed. I just looked into his eyes, and he looked so employable that I hired him on the spot.

As I recall, we picked him up on route. I assumed you had a prior arrangement with him. Are you telling me that you didn’t know John before you streamed him aboard from Playdough?

Harley shrugged. I had a hunch about him.

Harley was lying. Like anybody, Harley has hunches, but never where his restaurant is concerned. He loves that ship like a banker loves money, and he would never risk it on a hunch. The real reason he had taken John was because of something Rosemary told him. Of course, I was aware of none of this. So naturally I took Harley seriously and barreled ahead totally ignorant and totally sincere.

Hmm… that sounds weird. I’ve never known you to make decisions based on gut feelings. The way you said it makes it seem like he used some unethical trick to get past your customary testing. Was it a pheromone thing, where he seduced you into hiring him?

Don’t be silly. I’m no novice when it comes to pheromone exposure. And anyway, I don’t always test.

It was possible that John had seduced Harley in some manner, and then scrubbed the encounter from Harley’s brain, but it was pointless to mention it. Harley’s ego wouldn’t have entertained the idea for a second. And if the encounter had been scrubbed clean, he wouldn’t have remembered it anyway, so why harp on it?

As for not always testing, that wasn’t true. Harley always tested, even if his testing wasn’t always done in orthodox fashion. In my case, Harley had sampled nearly everything on my menu before allowing me to board his freighter restaurant. But then again, Harley likes to eat, so that probably didn’t count as testing. It was more like taking advantage to get a free meal.

But the possibility (albeit remote) of unconscious compulsion nagged at me and left me annoyed with myself. The annoyance sprang from a shadow memory of my own. There was an old legend about Mindbenders, who existed in past times – or perhaps in a past alternate dimension – who were capable of such subtleties. If such creatures exist, they would certainly be capable of altering a person’s mind in any way imaginable. I tried to recall when and where I had first heard the legend but couldn’t. I suppose that’s why they’re called shadow memories – they’re there, but you can’t actually squeeze them out of the folds of your brain. Well, no matter, I could always research it later.

But you must have had reason to believe he could fly a ship, I protested. After all, you did give him the job as secondary pilot.

Flying a ship isn’t that hard, Harley replied sanguinely. It’s not like gourmet cooking.

Yes, but ship’s maintenance isn’t easy. It’s not… I stopped before saying the words. Of course ship’s maintenance is easy. We have diagnostic software that can quickly identify any possible malfunction, and provide the robotics