Starliner(6)

Trident Village was a huge operation; more accurately, two large operations. Would-be emigrants arrived at the input side, either individually or in batches of up to a thousand delivered by a labor contractor. They were housed in barrack blocks one stage better than prison accommodations while they were bathed and examined, and the strictly-limited volume of their baggage was checked and sterilized.

When the emigrants were cleared, they were marched by blocks—now called Loading Units on internal documentation—to the output side of Trident Village. Output side was the finest living and social environment that most of the emigrants had ever seen in their lives. It was vanishingly improbable that any of them would see its like again.

On the output side, shops provided cheap, high-quality clothing, information on various destinations, and social events which integrated frightened individuals into groups with their own pride and ethic. Group identity would help the emigrants on their long voyage and ease their life on the world which received them.

"Tsk, he'll be staging out of Port Southern," Danalesco said. "I could never do that. The facilities are all right, I suppose, but I'd have to root up my family and move from Metro Chicago. Is Kropatchek married?"

"Yeah, but I don't think that's very high on his list of priorities," Wanda said drily. "Red thinks he's god's gift to women."

The shops around the Trident Village concourse were closed. Fairy lights drifted from lamp standards, providing a friendly, private illumination for the group dance going on. Traditional patterns formed and rotated, while the aurora borealis rippled the sky overhead.

"Chinese this time?" she asked. She was a pretty woman without being a stunner: of average height and a little too conscious of her weight to be comfortable about it. At the moment she was wearing her hair short and a color close to orange, but she would change back to her natural light brown before boarding the Empress on the outbound voyage.

"That's right," agreed the supervisor. "Thirty-five hundred for Biscay, the rest to Hobilo." He cleared his throat. "You don't think Kropatchek is god's gift to women?"

"Depends on the woman, I suppose," Wanda said. "I didn't notice that Red ever lacked for company."

Trident Village was not solely a humanitarian gesture, though there might have been some of that also. Even the largest corporations are run by humans, and humans not infrequently have humane whims.

There were business reasons for the solicitude as well. Most of the Third Class emigrants didn't pay their own fare: that was arranged by the recipient world, working through labor contractors. But, while the emigrants themselves were unlikely ever to make another interstellar journey, they did send letters back to family members and compatriots about the way they had been treated en route to their new life.

Urban slums and back-country villages accounted for virtually the whole of labor emigration, splitting the total down the middle in an average year. Word-of-mouth was the only form of advertising which worked in either environment.

Trident Starlines was willing to spend a little effort to encourage contractors to use its hulls because, though the fare per head was relatively low, four thousand Third Class passengers together paid the round-trip running costs of the Empress of Earth. Figures for smaller Trident Starlines vessels were in proportion. The First and Second Class fares became pure profit when steerage was full.

"We're breaking in a new Third Officer this run," Wanda said. She opened an unoccupied console with her ID chip and began to run the medical profiles of the emigrants slated to embark on the Empress of Earth. She kept her finger on the scroll button, pausing the display only when someone spiked above the normal parameters. In each case that she checked, Wanda found that the individual was a member of a family group of four or more.

The recipient worlds could afford to take a few grandparents. Besides, old folks were useful to watch the infants while all the younger adults in the community were working.

"Well, I'm glad to have you back for one load, Wanda," Danalesco said in a mild, serious tone. "You're tough, but you ought to be. Some of the officers coming through, they act like Third was mud and me and my people were just janitors. That's not right."

He nodded toward the village dance. From the edges of the concourse, Emigrant Staff officials watched helpfully. Danalesco's personnel wore light cotton garments like those of the emigrants, with only saucer hats and Trident Starlines badges to set them apart from those they directed.

"They're people," Danalesco went on. "They oughta be treated like people, at least by us. When they get to Biscay or wherever, well, that's out of our hands."