Starman Jones Read Online Free PDF

went to the Tivoli, eighty miles down the stretch. Then the new owner threw away the machinery and hired girls and business picked up. Nothing makes food taste better than having a pretty girl put it in front of you. Right?”
    “Uh, I guess so. Sure.” Max had not heard what was said. He had seldom been in a restaurant and then only in the lunch counter at Clyde’s Corners. The prices he read frightened him; he wanted to crawl under the table.
    His companion looked at him. “What’s the trouble, chum?”
    “Trouble? Uh, nothing.”
    “You broke?” Max’s miserable expression answered him. “Shucks, I’ve been there myself. Relax.” The man waggled his fingers at the waitress. “Come here, honey chile. My partner and I will each have a breakfast steak with a fried egg sitting on top and this and that on the side. I want that egg to be just barely dead. If it is cooked solid, I’ll nail it to the wall as a warning to others. Understand me?”
    “I doubt if you’ll be able to get a nail through it,” she retorted and walked away, swaying gently. The hauler kept his eyes on her until she disappeared into the kitchen. “See what I mean? How can machinery compete?”
    The steak was good and the egg was not congealed. The hauler told Max to call him “Red” and Max gave his name in exchange. Max was pursuing the last of the yolk with a bit of toast and was considering whether it was time to broach the subject of a ride when Red leaned forward and spoke softly. “Max—you got anything pushing you? Free to take a job?”
    “What? Why, maybe. What is it?”
    “Mind taking a little run southwest?”
    “Southwest? Matter of fact, I was headin’ that way.”
    “Good. Here’s the deal. The Man says we have to have two teamsters to each rig—or else break for eight hours after driving eight. I can’t; I’ve got a penalty time to meet—and my partner washed out. The flathead got taken drunk and I had to put him down to cool. Now I’ve got a check-point to pass a hundred thirty miles down the stretch. They’ll make me lay over if I can’t show another driver.”
    “Gee! But I don’t know how to drive, Red. I’m awful sorry.”
    Red gestured with his cup. “You won’t have to. You’ll always be the off-watch driver. I wouldn’t trust little Molly Malone to somebody who didn’t know her ways, I’ll keep myself awake with Pep pills and catch up on sleep at Earthport.”
    “You’re going all the way to Earthport? ”
    “Right.”
    “It’s a deal!”
    “Okay, here’s the lash up. Every time we hit a check-point, you’re in the bunk, asleep. You help me load and unload—I’ve got a partial and a pick-up at Oke City—and I’ll feed you. Right?”
    “Right!”
    “Then let’s go. I want to scoot before these other dust jumpers get underway. Never can tell, there might be a spotter.” Red flipped a bill down and did not wait for change.
    The Molly Malone was two hundred feet long and streamlined such that she had negative lift when cruising. This came to Max’s attention from watching the instruments; when she first quivered and raised, the dial marked ROAD CLEARANCE showed nine inches, but as they gathered speed down the acceleration strip it decreased to six.
    “The repulsion works by an inverse-cube law,” Red explained. “The more the wind pushes us down, the harder the road pushes us up. Keeps us from jumping over the skyline. The faster we go, the steadier we are.”
    “Suppose you went so fast that the wind pressure forced the bottom down to the road? Could you stop soon enough to keep from wrecking it?”
    “Use your head. The more we squat, the harder we are pushed up—inverse-cube, I said.”
    “Oh.” Max got out his uncle’s slide rule. “If she just supports her own weight at nine inches clearance, then at three inches the repulsion would be twenty-seven times her weight and at an inch it would be seven hundred and twenty-nine, and at a quarter of an