Chapter 4

“You know, Tom, I hadn’t thought about going to the Guild for legal help. I thought we would need to get a lawyer on our own, and that’s expensive.”

“I know, Sam. This is the first time I needed the Guild’s legal assistance, but I have friends, who consulted them in the past. The Guild’s lawyers are some of the best in the legal profession and very few lawyers want to confront them. Especially, when their client is in the wrong as Herman is in this matter.”

“What do you think is going to happen to Simm’s Seafood?”

“That is hard to say Sam. The grievance we filed, and those that the others may file, will cause Simm’s to lose its Preferred Employer status and six-star rating. They will remain on the boycott list with a zero-star rating until Herman changes his new policy, and resolves the legal issues our lawsuits raise.

“Knowing Herman, he is not likely to give in easily, but, without D-Hoppers he can’t ship product. Without being able to ship product, he will end up defaulting on his delivery contracts, which will cause him even more legal problems. Altogether, Simm’s is going to take a major financial loss, and I’m not sure Herman has the resources to recover from the loss. Their reputation will definitely suffer, so Simm’s may end up going out of business.”

“I’d hate to be responsible for so many people losing their jobs, Tom. Is there anything we can do to stop it?”

“Not really, Sam, but don’t feel too bad about it. Herman is the reason the people will be out of work, not us. We aren’t the ones responsible for people losing their jobs. Herman is the one responsible.

“I think Herman will have to sell off the business and use the money he receives to cover all of the legal judgements that will be levied against him. The new owners will keep the current employees on, and with Herman gone, the Guild will not list the new firm on the boycott list. Within a year or two, everything will be back to what it was before Herman pulled his bonehead move.”

“You know, Tom, it is really sad that all of John’s hard work in creating Simm’s is going to be destroyed, because Herman refuses to accept the reality of D-Hopping.”

“Yeah, I know, Sam. We’ve done enough for today, so I’ll hop us back to our cars and we can go home and relax.”

Tom and I agreed to meet for breakfast at our favorite restaurant the next morning. He also said he would contact Jim and the other D-Hoppers and have them meet us there, so we could tell them about filing a grievance and suggest they join us in the lawsuit.

Two hoppers were still out on their route, but Jim and the other four hoppers met us for breakfast the next morning.

Tom started off the conversation with, “Has everyone decided on what they want to do?”

Jim said, “Yes, we talked about it last night and decided to resign. The two guys still out on their route are due back later today. They don’t know about the new policy, but they will most likely resign, also.”

Tom said, “That’s good, Jim. Sam and I went to Wister yesterday, and filed a grievance against Simm’s Seafood, and we also spoke with a Guild lawyer. The Employment Specialist we spoke with told us we should all file grievances, and the lawyer said we should file a joint lawsuit against Simm’s for violating our contract. As of now, the Guild has boycotted Simm’s and given them an Employer Rating of zero. That means Herman will have no D-Hoppers and he won’t be able to hire more, which will put Herman out of business.

“I would consider going to work for whoever buys the company, but I won’t go back and work for Herman.”

Jim responded with, “We know what you mean, Tom. I’m going to wait for our other two hoppers to get back, and explain what has happened. Then we can go in together and resign.”

Vic said, “Herman is going to scream, when he finds out we all quit.”

I said, “Oh, you think so? Just wait until he learns the Guild has boycotted him. Now that will be a scream.”

After breakfast, our fellow D-Hoppers left Tom and I at the restaurant. They would go into work, so they could talk with the other two D-Hoppers and then resign. After that, they would go to the Guild office to file a grievance and add their names to the lawsuit. After they left, Tom and I talked while we were finishing our coffee.

“Tom, I was thinking of your niece. If things look good for us to start our own business, would you want a family member involved? If so, do you think she might be interested in joining us or should we look for someone else?”

“I don’t think Mary and I working together would be a problem, Sam. Her mother and I were never very close, but she and I always seemed to get on with each other. Of course, there is a big difference between saying ‘Hi’ at a family reunion once every three years, and seeing each other in the office every day.

“The last I heard, she was happy where she’s working. I don’t know if she would be willing to give that up to come to work for us.

“Unfortunately, she also has a boyfriend named Charles Stafford. On my last visit to Kottle, she introduced him to me and I got the impression she was extremely interested in pursuing a long-term relationship with him. He treated me in a way that made me think of him as a stuck up, self-center, egotistical ass. However, he didn’t act that way when he was around Mary.”

“Stafford. For some reason, that name sticks in my mind, Tom. I don’t think I know anyone by the name of Stafford. Oh well, it will probably come to me eventually.”

“The only thing I know about his family is that they are supposedly a distant branch of the Archer Family. Some sort of poor relatives from what Charles said.”

“Yeah, that’s where I heard the name. Toward the start of my last year in public school, I got sick and had to stay home from school. My mom tuned into the Nipar Report. I watched it with her, because I was in lust with Tandra Nipar. Something about the bluish cast that the people of Sultana have to their skin, really turned me on back then. I don’t know if her green hair was natural or dyed, but that vibrant shade of green really made her skin tone stand out. She was doing some sort of a historical report on the Archer Family, and she did a small section on the family’s distant branches. I think the Stafford family was one of the branches she mentioned.”

Tom asked, “Wasn’t Tandra Nipar the Multiverse News Network’s roving reporter in the Home Universe about thirty years ago? I think she was the one that covered that Ambassador’s wedding on Vora. If they are the same person, then I don’t blame you for being in lust. I was attending the University on Vora at the time, and some of my fellow students, male and female, wanted to date her. I personally think, they wanted their date to be in her bed with her being willing and in heat for anyone she could get between her legs. From what I recall, she did have a very nice pair of legs. Oh well, I haven’t thought of her in years.

“There may be a branch of the Archer Family named Stafford, Sam, but somehow I doubt, this Charles is a member of that family. He just doesn’t have the class that I think of when I think of the Archer Family. However, every family seems to have its uncouth members.”

“That may be, Tom, but does it really matter. We are interested in your niece Mary, not him.”

“True, but if she has married him, or if she intends to marry him, she will be bringing that piece of baggage with her to wherever we decide to locate our company. I would prefer not to share a planet with him.”

“Well, if she is still attached to him, we can always pick someone else, Tom. The first thing we need to decide is what type of hopping we should do. After we do that, we can select a planet, and decide if she would be a suitable addition to our company.”

“I know that, Sam. In fact, she may not have any interest in joining us.

“I planned to retire from Simm’s, so I haven’t given other employment any consideration. If I had my druthers, I would avoid going into a business that required me to be out on a route for days at a time in all kinds of weather - been there, done that, and I’m tired of it.”

“I wasn’t with Simm’s long enough to get tired of running the same routes, Tom. I like variety and I suspect that I would have tired of Simm’s after a couple of years. Lately, I’ve been thinking of a Passenger Service. What I would like to do is establish a clientele of important people, such as, politicians, businessmen, celebrity entertainers, and others. Did you notice that the Archer Conglomerate upgraded its old line of travel shelters?”

“No, I didn’t. I remember when they first released that product line. Before they started the product, hoppers who wanted something like a travel shelter always built their own by putting together something using a standard storage shelter. The Guild suggested a product like that to the Conglomerates about twenty years before I first started hopping. The Conglomerates told the Guild that they had considered it, but there just wasn’t enough of a market to warrant development of that type of a product.”

“Wasn’t that short sighted, Tom. I mean, travel shelters are very popular with commercial hoppers and their clients. I don’t know how many shelters would need to be sold to make it profitable to develop such a product, but it seems like they vastly underrated the potential market. Do you know why the Archer Conglomerate developed the product line, when the others weren’t interested?”

“I’m not certain it’s true, Sam, but the way I heard the story is that after the owner Henry Archer died he left his Archer Conglomerate stock to the Earth’s Ambassador. The Ambassador was an Exploratory Hopper and he was tired of getting caught in rainstorms and bit by insects. So he had the conglomerate build a shelter for him. The chairman of the conglomerate at that time, a guy by the name of Smart, liked the idea and wanted one for himself. Several of the conglomerate’s executives and board members wanted one, too. So Smart made it one of their minor product lines. The product took off before Smart retired, and since that guy Jones took over as Chairman of the Archer Conglomerate, the travel shelter has become a status symbol. Now everyone wants one.

“One of the hoppers I know told me that he was hired to transport a group of businessmen to some convention. They all had their own personal Travel Shelter, and they insisted that he hop everyone’s shelter to a single destination. I’ll have to get him to tell you that story sometime, for I don’t do it justice. What basically happened was there were so many Travel Shelters that they couldn’t fit into the clearing he normally used for hops to one of the interim planets, so he did a lateral shift to a large, open meadow.

“Unfortunately, it was migration season for one of the planet’s large herbivores, and he set them down in front of a large herd that was approaching the meadow. It later came out that these businessmen didn’t know how to use their shelter’s defensive system. They had their target systems configured for automatic target selection, and they didn’t know about the lockout options on the system’s Field of Fire Configuration page. His clients all thought the herd was attacking them, so they pressed their FIRE buttons, and their shelter’s defensive system fired its energy weapons at the herd.”

“Oh shit! Let me guess, Tom. The defensive system’s automatic targeting system used the shelter’s mass sensor readings to determine its targets, and the system fired the shelter’s energy weapons at every large item in the area. It aimed at the herbivores and all large items within the range of the sensors, which included the other shelters.”

“You got it on your first guess, Sam. Fortunately, the defensive systems still had their default setting of ten seconds of fire when the Fire button was pressed and no one was killed. They tried to pay my friend a great deal of money to keep their names out of his report, but the planet was a Provisional World, and he was required to file a report, to include the names of all parties involved in the incident. It turned out that the herbivores were a protected species, and his clients ended up in a lot of trouble. They were able to use their positions to suppress news of the incident, and my friend accepted a good bit of cash to not mention their names to the media in relationship to the incident. He told me he had never been so scared in his life, so he figured he should get something out of it, besides being reimbursed for the cost of replacing his shelter.”

“Tom, if we go into the business of hopping people, and they have Travel Shelters, we need to make it clear that we hop our clients in our Travel Shelters. If they want us to hop their shelters also, we will do so, but their shelters will be shut down, and hopped as uninhabited freight with a freight charge tacked onto their transportation fee.

Our conversation finally ran down, so I pulled the report about hopping businesses out of my travel case, and we started to go through it. Opportunities that didn’t appeal to us got crossed out and those that did were highlighted. Lunchtime came and went as we ate and continued with the report. By the middle of the afternoon, we were finished for the day.

A night on the town sounded good to me. After Tom left, I went home, kicked back, and relaxed for an hour. Then, I started to cleanup and get dressed in my club hopping clothes. I hadn’t been out on the town for at least a month, and my thoughts were turning to women. Yeah, I was horny and I wanted to find a nice-looking woman, who would go to bed with me this evening for a bit of shared pleasure.

Before I left and after I first returned to Everett, Teal seemed to be a dull boring place with nothing to do. Compared to Cinnity on Vora, Teal was a small town. I had lived in Teal my entire life, until I left for the University, and during that time, my impression had been there was nowhere to enjoy yourself in Teal. What I didn’t realize was, I hadn’t been frequenting the enjoyable places. That was because I was too young to get into that sort of place. The enjoyable places were what my friends and I called hookup joints, and before going to Vora, I wasn’t interested in finding a hookup. All I wanted was a girlfriend.