“You think that someone’s gonna just drop money on ya? Money they can use? Well there ain’t people like that. There’s just people like me.”

I heard the man himself say that 60 years ago with my own ears. I know it don’t fit the legend of Jayne Cobb or anything. But I was there, you weren’t. Reckon to learn about what happened back then you have to remember it was a different time. You need to get into folks heads that you never met, and weren’t old enough to know. You also need to know about mud. That’s right, MUD.

You see, folks didn’t leave The Earth That Was overnight. Something that big takes planning. They tried their luck on the planet right next door first. Those who went to Mars didn’t do so well, but the rest of us learned from them. For starters, you can’t bring everything with you. Anyone who can afford to build ships that big are doin’ well enough where they are. No, you have to get where your headin’ and make due with what you got. So they built their houses out of what was there: dirt, and water ice. Mud. Allot more things could be made with mud, and it’s the only thing that you can make anywhere. Not much oil on some worlds to make polymers, but plenty of materials to make ceramics can be found in your average comet. And its cheaper than all that hokum refiney whatnot you get after you find some decent crude.

I bet you didn’t even know the first ships that left Old Earth for good were swimming in mud, did you? The black isn’t a natural place for a man. Charged particles, cosmic rays, micro meteors. One and all can tear into the tin can you’re sittin’ in and kill you in your sleep. The hulls of the old ships had a few feet of mud between the steel and the heat shields. The mud absorbed the radiation just as good as a planet’s atmosphere. And if the ship was struck by meteorites, the mud would freeze as soon as it was exposed to space making it as tough as the rest of the ship’s hull. “Dirt Rockets” they’re called. You can still find a few here and there, mostly in junkyards.

Nowadays ships