He was the only passenger for Kimon and those aboard the ship lionized him because he was going there.
To land him at his destination the ship went two light-years out of its way, an inconvenience for which his passage money, much as it had seemed to him when he'd paid it back on Earth, did not compensate by half.
But the captain did not grumble. It was, he told Selden Bishop, an honor to carry a passenger for Kimon.
The businessmen aboard sought him out and bought him drinks and lunches and talked expansively of the markets opening up in the new-found solar systems.
But despite all their expansive talk, they looked at Bishop with half-veiled envy in their eyes and they said to him: "The man who cracks this Kimon situation is the one who'll have it big."
One by one, each of them contrived to corner him for private conversations and the talk, after the first drink, always turned to billions if he ever needed backing.
Billions - while he sat there with less than twenty credits in his pocket, living in terror against the day when he might have to buy a round of drinks. For he wasn't certain that his twenty credits would stretch to a round of drinks.
The dowagers towed him off and tried to mother him; the young things lured him off and did not try to mother him. And everywhere he went, he heard the whisper behind the half-raised hand:
"To Kimon!" said the whispers. "My dear, you know what it takes to go to Kimon! An IQ rating that's positively fabulous and years and years of study and an examination that not one in a thousand passes."