“Go on.”
“I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of the Itzkhok Shipping Agency.”
“No … it probably would have stuck in my mind.”
“Very few people have. On the surface, it’s a very small operation. Four interplanetary ships, every one of them smaller than the Bonne Chance. But they’re engaged in interstellar commerce.”
“Stars must be pretty close together.”
“No … they started about twenty years ago. The shortest voyage is about half over. One has over a century to go.”
“Doesn’t make any sense.”
“But it does. It makes sense on two levels.” He set down the cup and laced his fingers together.
“There are certain objects whose value almost has to go up with the passage of time. Jewelry, antiques, works of art. These are the only cargo I deal with. Officially.”
“I see. I think.”
“You see half of it. I buy these objects on relatively poor planets and ship them to relatively affluent ones. I didn’t have any trouble getting stockholders. Hartford wasn’t too happy about it, of course.”
“What did they do?”
He shrugged. “Took me to court. I’d studied the law, though, before I started Itzkhok. They didn’t press too hard—my company didn’t make one ten-thousandth of Hartford’s annual profit—and I won.”
“And made a credit or two.”
“Some three billion, legitimate profit. But the important thing is that I established a concrete legal precedent where none had existed before.”
“You’re losing me again. Does this have anything to do with …”
“Everything, patience. With this money, and money from other sources, I started building up a fleet. Through a number of dummy corporations … buying old ships, building new ones. I own or am leasing some two thousand ships. Most of them are loaded and on the pad right now.”
“Wait, now.” Economics was never my strong suit, but this was obvious. “You’re going to drive your own prices down. There can’t be that big a market for old paintings and—”
“Right, precisely. But most of these ships aren’t carrying such specialized cargo. The closest one, for instance, is on Tangiers, aimed for Faraway. It holds nearly a hundred thousand cubic meters of water.”
“Water …”
“Old passenger liner, flooded the damn thing. Just left a little room for ice expansion, in case the heating—”
“Because on Faraway—”
“—on Faraway there isn’t one molecule of water that men didn’t carry there. They recycle every drop but have to lose one percent or so annually.
“Tonight or tomorrow I’m going to call up Faraway and offer to sell them 897,000 kilograms of water. At cost. Delivery in six years. It’s a long time to wait, but they’ll be getting it for a hundredth of the usual cost, what Hartford charges.”
“And you’ll lose a bundle.”
“Depends on how you look at it. Most of my capital is tied up in small, slow spaceships; I own some interest in three-quarters of the interplanetary vessels that exist. If my scheme works, all of them will double in value overnight.
“Hartford, though, is going to lose more than a bundle. There are 237 other planets, out of 298, in a position similar to Faraway’s. They depend on Hartford for water, or seed, or medical supplies, or something else necessary for life.”
“And you have deals set up—”
“For all of them, right. Under-bidding Hartford by at least a factor of ten.” He drank off the rest of his coffee in a gulp.
“What’s to stop Hartford from underbidding you?”
“Absolutely nothing.” He got up and started preparing another cup. “They’ll probably try to, here and there. I don’t think many governments will take them up on it.
“Take Faraway as an example. They’re in a better position than most planets, as far as their debt to Hartford, because the Second Empire financed the start of their colonization. Still, they owe Hartford better than ten billion CU’s—their annual interest payment comes to several hundred million.
“They keep paying it, not because of some abstract obligation to Hartford. Governments don’t have consciences. If they stopped paying, of course, they’d dry up and die in a generation. Until today, they didn’t have any choice in the matter.”
“So what you’re doing is giving all of those planets a chance to welsh on their debts.”
“That bothers you?” He sat back down, balanced the cup on his knee.
“A little. I don’t love Hartford any more than—”
“Look at it this way. My way. Consider Hartford as an arm of the government, the Confederation.”
“I’ve always thought it was the other way around.”
“In a practical sense, yes. But either way. A government sends its people out to colonize virgin lands. It subsidizes them at first; once the ball is rolling, it collects al -legiance and taxes.
“The ‘debt’ to Hartford is just a convenient fiction to justify taking these taxes.”
“There are services rendered, though. Necessary to life.”
“Rendered and paid for, separately. I’m going to prove to the ‘colonies’ that they can provide these services to each other. It will be even easier once Hartford goes bankrupt. There’ll be no monopoly on starships. No Confederation to protect patents.”
“Anarchy, then.”
“Interesting word. I prefer to call it revolution … but yes, things will be pretty hectic for a while.”
“All right. But if you wanted to choreograph a revolution, why didn’t you pick a more comfortable planet to do it from? Are you just hiding?”
“Partly that. Mostly, though, I wanted to do everything legally. For that, I needed a very small planet without a charter.”
“I’m lost again.” I made myself another cup of coffee and grieved for the lack of bourbon. Maybe if I went outside and took a deep breath …
“You know what it takes to charter a planet?” Chaim asked me.
“Don’t know the numbers. Certain population density and high enough gross planetary product.”
“The figures aren’t important. They look modest enough on paper. The way it works out, though, is that by the time a planet is populated enough and prosperous enough to get its independence, it’s almost guaranteed to be irretrievably in debt to Hartford.
“That’s what all those immigration forms are for. Half of those stacks are immigration forms and the other half, limited powers of attorney. I’m going to claim this planet, name it Mazel Tov, and accept my own petition for citizenship on behalf of 4,783 immigrants. Then I make one call, to my lawyer.” He named an Earth-based interplanetary law firm so well-known that even I had heard of it.
“They will call about a hundred of these immigrants, each of whom will call ten more, then ten more, and so on. All prearranged. Each of them then pays me his immigration fee.”
“How much is that?”
“Minimum, ten million CU’s.”
“God!”
“It’s a bargain. A new citizen gets one share in the Mazel Tov Corporation for each million he puts in. In thirty min utes MTC should have almost as much capital behind it as Hartford has.”
“Where could you find four thousand—”
“Twenty years of persuasion. Of coordination. I’ve tried to approach every living man of wealth whose fortune is not tied up with Hartford or the Confederation. I’ve showed them my plan—especially the safeguards on it that make it a low-risk, high-return investment—and every single one of them has signed up.”
“Not one betrayal?”
“No—what could the Confederation or Hartford offer in return? Wealth? Power? These men already have that in abundance.
“On the other hand, I offer them a gift beyond price: independence. And incidentally, no taxes, ever. That’s the first article of the charter.”
He let me absorb that for a minute. “It’s too facile,” I said. “If your
plan works, everything will fall apart for the Confederation and Hartford—but look what we get instead. Four thousand-some independent robber barons, running the whole show. That’s an improvement?”
“Who can say? But that’s revolution: throw the old set of bastards out and install your own set. At least it’ll be different. Time for a change.”
I got up. “Look, this is too much, too fast. I’ve got to think about it. Digest it. Got to check out the ship, too.”
Chaim went along with me halfway to the air lock. “Good, good. I’ll start making calls.” He patted the transceiver with real affection. “Good thing this baby came along when it did. It would have been difficult coordinating this thing, passing notes around. Maybe impossible.”
It didn’t seem that bloody easy, even with all those speedy little tachyons helping us. I didn’t say anything.
It was a relief to get back into my own element, out of the dizzying fumes of high finance and revolution. But it was short-lived.
Things started out just dandy. The reason the control board was dead was that its cable to the fuel cells had jarred loose. I plugged it back in and set up a systems check. The systems check ran for two seconds and quit. What was wrong with the ship was number IV-A-1-a. It took me a half-hour to find the manual, which had slid into the head and nestled up behind the commode.
“IV” was fusion power source. “IV-A” was -generation of magnetic field for containment thereof. “IV-A-1” was disabilities of magnetic field generator. And “IV-A-1-a,” of course, was permanent disability. It had a list of recommended types of replacement generators.
Well, I couldn’t run down to the store and pick up a generator. And you can’t produce an umpty-million-gauss fusion mirror by rubbing two sticks together. So I kicked Mlle. Biarritz’s book across the room and went back to the dome.
Chaim was hunched over the transceiver, talking to somebody while he studied his own scribblings in a notebook.
“We’re stuck here,” I said.
He nodded at me and kept up the conversation. “—that’s right. Forty thousand bushels, irradiated, for five hundred thousand CU’s … so what? So it’s a gift. It’s guaranteed. Delivery in about seven years, you’ll get details … all right, fine. A pleasure to do business. Thank you, sir.”
He switched off and leaned back and laughed. “They all think I’m crazy!”
“We’re stuck here,” I said again.
“Don’t worry about it, don’t worry,” he said, pointing to an oversized credit flash attached to the transceiver. It had a big number on it that was constantly changing, going up. “That is the total assets of Mazel Tov Corporation.” He started laughing again.
“Minims?”
“No, round credits.”
I counted places. “A hundred and twenty-eight billion … credits?”
“That’s right, right: You want to go to Faraway? We’ll have it towed here.”
“A hundred and twenty-nine billion?” It was really kind of hard to grasp.
“Have a drink—celebrate!” There was a bowl of ice and a bottle of gin on the floor beside him. God, I hate gin.
“Think I’ll fix a cup of tea.” By the time I’d had my cup, cleaned up and changed out of my suit, Chaim was through with his calls. The number on the credit flash was up to 239,605,967,000 and going up slowly.
He took his bottle, glass and ice to his bunk and asked me to start setting up the rescue mission.
I called Hartford headquarters on Earth. Six people referred me to their superiors and I wound up talking to the Coordinator of Interstellar Transit himself. I found out that bad news travels fast.
“Mazel Tov?” his tinny voice said. “I’ve heard of you, new planet out by Rigel? Next to Faraway?”
“That’s right. We need a pickup and we can pay.”
“Oh, that’s not the problem. Right now there just aren’t any ships available. Won’t be for several months. Maybe a year.”
“What? We only have three months’ worth of air!” By this time Chaim was standing right behind me, breathing gin into my ear.
“I’m really very sorry. But I thought that by the time a planet gets its charter, it should be reasonably self-sufficient.”
“That’s murder!” Chaim shouted.
“No, sir,” the voice said. “Just unfortunate planning on your part. You shouldn’t have filed for—” Chaim reached over my shoulder and slapped the switch off, hard. He stomped back to his bunk—difficult to do with next to no gravity—sat down and shook some gin into his glass. He looked at it and set it on the floor.
“Who can we bribe?” I asked.
He kept staring at the glass. “No one. We can try, but I doubt that it’s worth the effort. Not with Hartford fighting for its life. Its corporate life.”
“I know lots of pilots we could get, cheap.”
“Pilots,” Chaim said without too much respect.
I ignored the slur. “Yeah. Hartford programs the main jump. Nobody’d get a jump to Rigel.”
We sat in silence for a while, the too-sober pilot and the Martian-Russian Jew who was the richest person in the history of mankind. Less than too sober.
“Sure there’s no other ship on Faraway?”
“I’m sure,” I said. “Took me half a day to find someone who remembered about the Bonne Chance.”
He considered that for a minute. “What does it take to build an interplanetary ship? Besides money.”
“What, you mean could they build one on Faraway?” “Right.”
“Let me see.” Maybe. “You need an engine. A cabin and life support stuff. Steering jets or gyros. Guidance and com mo equipment.”
“Well?”
“I don’t know. The engine would be the hard part. They don’t have all that much heavy industry on Faraway.”
“No harm in finding out.”
I called Faraway. Talked to the mayor. He was an old pilot (having been elected by popular vote) and I finally reached him at the University Club, where he was surrounded by other old pilots. I talked to him about engineering. Chaim talked to him about money. Chaim shouted and wept at him about money. We made a deal.
Faraway having such an abundance of heavy metals, the main power generator for the town, the only settlement on the planet, was an old-fashioned fission generator. We figured out a way they could use it.
After a good deal of haggling and swearing, the citizens of Faraway agreed to cobble together a rescue vehicle. In return, they would get control of forty-nine percent of the stock of Mazel Tov Corporation.
Chaim was mad for a while, but eventually got his sense of humor back. We had to kill two months with six already-read books and a fifty-bottle case of gin. I read “War and Peace” twice. The second time I made a list of the characters. I made crossword puzzles out of the characters’ names. I learned how to drink gin, if not how to like it. I felt like I was going slowly crazy—and when the good ship Hello There hove into view, I knew I’d gone ’round the bend.
The Hello There was a string of fourteen buildings strung along a lattice of salvaged beams; a huge atomic reactor pushing it from the rear. The buildings had been uprooted whole, life support equipment and all, from the spaceport area of Faraway. The first building, the control room, was the transplanted University Club, Olde English decorations still intact. There were thirty pairs of wheels along one side of the “vessel,” the perambulating shanty-town.
We found out later that they had brought along a third of the planet’s population, since most of the buildings on Faraway were without power and therefore uninhabitable. The thing (I still can’t call it a ship) had to be put on wheels because they had no way to crank it upright for launching. They drove it off the edge of a cliff and pulled for altitude with the pitch jets. The pilot said it had been pretty harrowing, and after barely surviving the landing I could marvel at his power of understatement.
The ship hovered over Mazel Tov with its yaw jets and they lowered a ladder for us. Quite a feat o
f navigation. I’ve often wondered whether the pilot could have done it sober.
The rest, they say, is history. And current events. As Chaim had predicted Hartford went into receivership, MTC being the receiver. We did throw out all of the old random bastards and install our own hand-picked ones.
I shouldn’t bitch. I’m still doing the only thing I ever wanted to do. Pilot a starship; go places, do things. And I’m moderately wealthy, with a tenth-share of MTC stock.
It’d just be a lot easier to take, if every exbum on Faraway didn’t have a hundred times as much. I haven’t gone back there since they bronzed the University Club and put it on a pedestal.
To Howard Hughes:
A Modest Proposal
One good reason for a novelist to write short stories is that they serve as a proving ground for new techniques. If a structure or texture doesn’t work in a short story, you’ve only lost a few days, and learned something. If a novel goes sour, and I do speak from experience, you lose a thick stack of paper and more. And you might not learn as well, be cause of your deeper involvement, as a parent might see his child go wrong and never see how he’d caused it.
I admire the work of John Dos Passos, especially the USA trilogy, and wanted to borrow his intricate technique for a science fiction novel.* I wanted to boil it down, make it even more rapid and nervous. This story was the test case, and I liked it, so I used the technique for Mindbridge (St. Martins Press, 1976), which I think is my best novel, so far.
When I wrote this I was in the process of putting together an anthology of science fiction alternatives to war, which languished for some years before St. Martins Press published it as Study War No More (1977). The story was written for the anthology, and was meant to be sarcastic. But at that time its basic premise seemed rather absurd.
Some few predictive elements of some of my stories have come true. I’m afraid this one will add to the list.
* In the real world it’s against the law to take something that somebody else is trying to sell. But since John Brunner already adapted Dos Passos’s technique in his powerful novels Stand on Zanzibar (Doubleday, 1968) and The Sheep Look Up (Harper & Row, 1972), I guess my crime is the receiving of stolen goods rather than kleptomania.