Sparks in Cosmic Dust by Robert Appleton Page A

sleep—almost two days.
    “Uh-huh.” Grace swigged a last mouthful of McCormick’s from her flask and then poured the slimy residue onto the floor. “Okay, y’all, how about a quick once-around before I waste any more breath. Who’s of a mind to go digging for a fortune before the boom falls?” She held up the middle three fingers of her right hand, boy scout style. “I’m in. It’ll be dangerous, but what worthwhile adventure isn’t? Two more of you would be do-able. Three’s company. The four of you together would be best. I can’t promise you we’ll strike it rich, but let’s just say I’ve got rather more than an inkling. Who’s interested?”
    The dark duo across, egged on by Lyssa’s vociferous whisperings, soon assented. “Sniff the gold dust out, we’re there,” the girl said with an arrogance that made Clay roll his eyes.
    He pointed his thumb at her. “What she said.”
    All gazes turned to Varinia and Solomon.
    “Count us in.” Solomon gripped her shoulders.
    What? “But—” Varinia’s protest relented when he pressed a finger to her lips. What was he thinking? Signing them up for a wild-goose chase with Ma Peters and the two Goths? What a great way to waste the tips she’d earned this year.
    “Okey-cokey.” Rubbing her veined, bony hands together, Grace shot them each a kind of neglectful maternal look, as though she’d hatched a plan to palm her kids off onto a babysitter for the weekend and was thrilled about getting some hot nookie instead. The idea turned Varinia’s stomach. “I’ll need you all to drag your cots together,” the old-timer said. “What I have to say is for your ears only. Come on, come on. Don’t be shy. I don’t bite on a first date. That’s it. Close as you can.
    “Lyssa, Clay, Dixie, Solomon. You all have trustworthy faces, did anyone ever tell you? No? Good, ’cause I’m full of shit. But that’s all right. The main thing to remember in prospecting is you’re not supposed to trust the folks you’re digging with. They’re not supposed to trust you. Not really. Because trust, like all valuable commodities, is bought and leased on the day you ship out.
    “Let me explain. Say you go off rigging derricks on a new moon. The money is great, but the other tool-pushers are complete suck-baits and you get paid every day on the job rather than when you make it back to civilization. Tricky. You’re trusting your life every day, teetering a hundred feet up, when you don’t know how competent those other guys are. You have to find a hiding place for your clips, but you know for a fact most of these border riggers have serious criminal records. Let me ask you—what’s keeping you aloft on that derrick instead of guarding your clips every hour of the day?”
    “Your contract,” Solomon replied confidently. “You do what you signed on for because you want the whole wages.”
    “True. But I can sum it up in one word, sunshine. Greed. You stay up there, trusting your colleagues’ handiwork, because you’re a greedy son of a bitch who’s taken a job without knowing who the fuck you’re really working with. You’re fairly sure no one will steal your clips because you’re all on a fucking moon with nowhere to go, and if word got out, the thief would be strung up by his scrotum. Greed keeps everyone working and everyone happy. Greed sits on trust’s face and doesn’t let up ’til it’s time to skedaddle.”
    “What a load of crap,” Varinia butted in, a little annoyed at the old woman’s gleeful nihilism. “You need some real trust, or else it’ll be a free-for-all on the shuttle home.”
    “Agreed. No expedition lasts purely on greed. What about friendships formed along the way?” Clay’s furrowed brow beneath his untidy, too-long fringe restored a smidgeon of Varinia’s faith in humanity. At least she wasn’t the only one who saw through Grace Peters’s misanthropy.
    Lyssa clasped her hand over Clay’s—perhaps to make it clear to