Look Out For Space (Seven For Space) by William F Nolan

weren't groaning.

Eighteen
     
    The planet didn't have a name. And nobody cared enough to give it one.
    It was a triple sun system. The planet's surface was semi-liquid, and it smoked and bubbled with noxious gases. Each worker was encased in an armored heatsuit which was supposed to resist the killing temperatures, but the suits were almost as hot as the planet. After a six-hour workday in one, you felt as if your skin had been boiled in oil. The oil was your own sweat.
    Cutter had the right word for it: Hell.
    My job, along with dozens of other convicts, was to scoop up the semi-liquid soil with an instrument that looked like a giant soupspoon. The gook was then deposited in a large bowl-like container. The containers were rolled into an ugly metalloid structure for processing. Workers refined the stuff and canned it. Periodically the cans were shipped out to Earth.
    I was told that the stuff sold as fast as it could be delivered. The demand never slacked.
    "What can anybody do with it?" I asked Cutter, who was toiling beside me in the furnace heat. "You can't eat it. Can't drink it. What good is it?"
    "They use this stuff fer bod rubs in sexdens," Cutter told me. "Supposed to be bloody erotic, it is. Stimulates the bloody glands in the jennyteel area."
    "All this so some fat bozo in New Oshkosh can get his pipes cleaned?"
    "That's one way to put it, mate. They call it Erectile Miracle Heat. An' I hear tell the FSG boys make a tidy profit out of every shipment."
    I was pissed. Shanghaied aboard a Hellship by a corrupt Moonking, then ripped off in the Black Gulfs by the Federated Space Government. No wonder the average solar citizen had lost faith in cosmic justice.
    What good was one honest dick from Bubble City in the greater scheme of things … the universal warp and woof? I was an overage knight tilting at the windmills of galactic corruption. "But dammit, Space," I told myself, "somebody's got to play the game straight! Somebody's got to expose the sharks and the con men and the quick-buck boys who walk this mean universe." And I was elected. By a vote of one. Me.
    Sam Space, the last free lance for hire in a cosmic cesspool.
    "Hop it, mate!" Cutter warned me. "Cuz 'ere comes trouble!"
    I'd been standing idle while all these depressing thoughts were running through my brainpan and an overseer, electrowhip in hand, was zipping toward me in his hoverbug.
    But how could you whip a man in an armored heatsuit?
    I quickly found out. The whip was electrically charged to react against the metallic surface of the suit. A searing bolt of raw voltage stabbed into me with each blow.
    I got ten lashes.
    By the last of them, I was a mass of quivering nerves.
    "Now, you lazy sod, maybe that'll teach you not to dream on the job. Move that juice!"
    That's what they called this sex-muck. And that was my job.
    I was a sex-juicer in Hell.
    And if there's a worse job, I haven't heard of it.
    Obviously, I had to escape.
    * * *
     
    "There's no escape," said Cutter, when we talked that night in our cell, which was located in one of the planet's hastily-constructed work-dens. "An' even if there was, where would ya escape to ?"
    "Out of here, first of all," I said. "Then, I'd …"
    And I stopped. Cutter was right. Where would I go on a planet of liquid fire?
    "When does the next Hellship arrive?" I asked.
    "Don't matter," he said. "They come, drop off leeks like us, then go on, deeper into the Gulfs." He spat on the nearstone floor. "Hellship's no way out."
    "Then what about the juice rockets — the ones they use to ship this muck back to Earth? I could stow away on one."
    "It's been tried, mate, an' now they got scanners fer every inch a' the ships. A bloody Martian sandflea couldn't hide in one a' those tubs!" He nodded darkly. "I tell ya, mate, you'll never get off this planet. We'll die here, the both of us, scoopin' juice."
    "I don't intend to do that," I said flatly.
    Cutter gave me some "Har, hars!" — exposing his rotten stumps.