“Why not half a million?” he said.
“Because,” I said, “you are going to pad the price of some of the items to make it come out to half a million but you are going to hand me ten thousand in cash.”
Oh, he could do that. He got permission to turn his desk back on and in seconds we had an office absolutely jammed with junior executives, accountants, stock clerks, shipping clerks and people to hold things for them while they ran off bills and orders and instructions. A beautiful display of utter efficiency.
I sat with lordly mien, puffing on an oversized puffstick the while. And soon they were all cleared out. They had left some paper on his desk. He was waiting expectantly for me to produce my identoplate and start stamping. I opened a fresh chank-pop instead.
“There’s one more thing,” I said. “Take a little scrap of paper—that blue blank there will do—and write on it, ‘Officer Gris: I consider your request for personal commission outrageous and refuse it. We only do business on proper channels and with total legality.’ And sign it.”
He did all that and gave me the paper.
“Now,” I said, “the ten thousand!”
Some clerk had already brought it in. It was in a fabric wraparound case.
He handed it over. I did not bother to count it. We big tycoons of business have to trust one another.
I began to stamp. Every time my identoplate hit a piece of paper, his grin appeared broader by half an inch. His head was practically split in half when I had finished. He was too satisfied. He was going to put in inferior goods or chemicals.
“As Inspector-General Overlord for the project,” I said, “I must warn you that I will catch all shorts and any spoiled chemicals or any faults in packing.”
A little bit of his smile faded.
“And if Lombar Hisst ever hears about this ten thousand, I will say all the goods arrived damaged and the chemicals spoiled.”
He looked at me for a moment. Then he jumped up and pumped my hand. “I appreciate a careful client, Officer Gris.” And he laughed. “We understand each other completely.”
“I will stop by your shipping department and tell them where the two different shipments are sent. I will also want fifty spare shipping labels just in case some fall off.”
He handed me the fabric wraparound case. I put it and the blue handwritten note into an old lunch sack I had, folded, in my pocket. He saw me out clear through the bustling shipping department and to my airbus. He even waved as I took off.
“Am I rich yet?” Ske badgered at me.
I handed him ten credits. “You’re rich,” I said.
Actually, I had a glow inside me like a gallon of bubblebrew.
I suddenly wasn’t poor! I could even buy some hot jolt and a bun!
“There was somebody watching this airbus,” said Ske. He didn’t seem as happy as I was. “I think you’re being shadowed.”
“Nonsense,” I said. “Who would be interested in a perfectly legal government transaction? There’s a jolt joint down there. Land so I can have some breakfast.”
Nothing was going to spoil this marvelous day!
Heavens help you now, Heller, I said to myself as I ravenously chomped down on a sweetbun. A clever Gris might not be enough. But a clever Gris and a rich Gris are an unbeatable combination! You’re sunk!
PART TEN
Chapter 1
I was on my way to getting even richer, but first I had to cover some tracks. Be neat, has always been my motto.
Still sucking crumbs out of my teeth, I stepped into a streetside message center and started dropping hundredths-of-a-credit tokens in the slots. I got a greetings envelope, a fancy note sheet used for sending presents and a pen. Using the little desk, I wrote:
Know All Lombar:
Happy going away present.
H. was adamant to buy these supplies but I got in real quick to protect your interests. I hope I did right.
Your alert subordinate,
Soltan
For a hundredth of a credit, you can get a facsimile of something. I took the million-credit Zanco bill, copied it and on the duplicate drew a huge circle around the total, put an arithmetical division sign on it and the figure 2.
Then I drew an arrow and wrote Lombar. He would certainly get the idea. We are used to using informal codes in the Apparatus.
On the greetings envelope, I wrote:
To a Great Chief
Then I took the blue paper that Zanco had written, refusing to give me a commission. I held it up to the glass and dropped in another hundredth credit to get a copy. I took the duplicate and diagonally across the bottom wrote:
Please can you lift this restriction a little bit?
That done, I splurged and bought a two-hundredths-credit cover envelope, put it all inside and addressed it formally—and top secret—to Lombar Hisst as Chief of the Coordinated Information Apparatus.
Of course, I didn’t put it in the regular post. I walked a little way up the street to a place I knew was a cover operation for the Apparatus—a women’s underwear shop—and gave it to the agent in the back office for immediate transmission.
It made me feel very virtuous. I could hear Lombar purr when he got that! He might even say, “Ah, that Gris: a perfect subordinate.” Lombar never turns down money!
I had breakfasted rather well. I had bought five huge sweetbuns and had only been able to eat four and a half. As a benign philanthropist, I handed the leftover half to Ske. He just glanced at the teeth marks in it and put it down on the seat. Ungrateful.
Nothing could dampen my euphoria. “Power City!” I commanded in a lordly fashion. “Boulevard of the Metal Markets!”
My driver made muttering noises. It is natural. Nobody likes to fly over Power City if he can help it. I was shortly looking down upon it. That is to say, trying to.
The air over the place is a violent yellow. It is not smoke: it is the effect of huge induction fields on the surrounding atmosphere; it does things to molecules, whether gaseous or colloidally suspended solids. These induction fields come from the huge conversion energy generators that hum and roar away, furnishing the bulk of the power for this side of the planet and providing, at the same time, most of its rarer metals. The conversion of one element to another delivers both the metals and the power. It is very neat, really. But there is a lot of ore dumping and downblasts from heavy flying trucks and the atmosphere is pretty clogged. The whole complex, with its towering elliptical transformers and elliptical streets, was first created about a hundred and twenty-five thousand years ago—at the time of the first invasion—and although it has vastly expanded, it is said that nobody has cleaned it up since.
Drivers and pilots hate to fly over it and through it. It gets their vehicles filthy. It also makes car radios and controls operate in weird ways. Traffic control beams get distorted and there are crashes. And all this, coupled with having to battle flying lorries and ground lorries arriving and leaving for all parts of the planet, has prompted some wit to call it “Profanity City.”
Ske dodged and cursed his way to the Boulevard of the Metal Markets. About a two-mile stretch of hit-or-miss shops and warehouses, it is not where one would choose to drive for a scenic holiday.
My driver really cursed when I made him drive not just up it but also back down it. I ignored him. I was looking at the price signboards. They change daily and no company ever knows what another company is going to post and a smart operator like myself doesn’t just pick up a communications link and say, “Give me three lorry loads of lead.” No, indeed.
I finally chose one that seemed lowest today and directed the driver to land at the office. It was the Reliable Ready-Pack Take Away Metals Company.
I went in. They are used to dealing with factory agent buyers from Industrial City and there are no sales talks. It’s all old-pal and put-it-in-the-truck. They are not used to seeing someone come up in a smart airbus, smoking a fat puffstick and looking down his nose at them. They looked surprised. Deali
ng in metals has made them metallic in appearance. Even their aprons look like they are cast.
“Military purchases are out back,” clanked the salesman.
“This is personal,” I said. I laid the old lunch bag on the counter and he started to walk off. I pulled a sheaf of gold-colored money out of it and he came back.
“A cash deal?” he clanked. His eyeballs click-clicked this way and that to see if anybody else in the place was watching. I knew he was wondering how much cash he could skim off for himself.
“You are posting,” I said, “gold for eleven credits the pound today.”
“Special,” he said. “Only .001 percent impure.”
“I think,” I said, “you have some for ten?”
“Come into this tank,” he said quickly.
He did some rapid clanking on an old calculating machine. It was very complex. How much did he have to steal off the stockpile and add to my order in order to arrive at ten credits a pound. Then how much more did he have to steal and add in order to pocket how much for himself.
But my calculation was not obscure at all. I was going to hold on to one thousand credits to spend. I was not going to return any advanced pay—as I couldn’t spend it where I was going. I had nine thousand credits to buy with. I wanted nine hundred pounds of gold.
With many clicks and cracks of his face, he finally had it worked out. It really didn’t cost the company all that much. Lead was a third of a credit a pound. Converting it down to gold, which is lighter on the atomic scale, delivered enormous power generation and paid for the processing. The main cost to the power company was in packaging and wholesaling to such companies as Reliable Ready-Pack and it in turn had overheads and commissions. The only reason gold stayed up as high as it did was because the power combines preferred to do lighter element atomic conversion, due to electrical demands. The metals themselves tended to be secondary. So skimming off a few ingots was nothing he would be tagged for. It would go down as “ordinary business wear and tear.”
“That welds the deal,” he said.
“One more thing,” I said. “I want heavy ingot packing cases, nine of them, one hundred pounds to the case.”
“That’s extra,” he said.
“What’s the name of that company just south of you?” I said.
“That welds the deal,” he said.
With a bunch of “Hey, Ip” and “You there,” he got the laborers at it. They found nine battered-up but lockable ingot cases in the trash heap.
I took one of the fifty-pound ingots off the pile. Gold is deceptive. It looks small but it’s heavy. It almost broke my arm. I poked at it with a fingernail and then put my teeth into a corner of it. Nice and soft. Pure gold. Gleaming, lovely! Gold is so pretty!
Into the cases it went, eighteen fifty-pound bars of it. The metal man falsified the inventory log. Out to the front loading platform went the dolly.
I counted nine thousand credits out of the sack and into his pincer-grip fingers. I got my personal receipt. We clanked hands.
The deal was finished. The laborers left. And the dolly sat fifty feet away from the airbus. But an airbus can’t get up to the loading platform and still open its doors. I called Ske. I pointed.
He started to lift one of the boxes and then stopped to give me an awful look. I gestured impatiently.
It was warm and it was dusty. Nevertheless, a sweating Ske soon had nine boxes sitting on the floor of the airbus.
I lifted a lordly finger. “To the Apparatus hangar, my man.” And he got in and the airbus rose lumberingly, staggering into the sky.
Ske was snarling to himself and the airbus was lurching about. This was silly since the load it carried was only a hair above the full-rated passenger load.
The bouncing around made it a bit hard to do, but I got out the spare Zanco labels and began to affix them, one to the case. They were the immersion type label: when you put them on, they sink into the material of the case and nothing can remove them. The labels said:
DANGER
HEALTH HAZARD
RADIOACTIVE CELLOLOGICAL ELEMENTS
THE ZANCO COMPANY IS NOT RESPONSIBLE
FOR SERIOUS BURNS OR DEATH
RESULTING FROM OPENING THIS CASE
Bright red. Delightful! They would glow even in the dark!
And as the somewhat dusty airbus lurched through the sky, I did some glowing of my own.
Nine hundred pounds of gold was ten thousand, eight hundred ounces, troy.
On Blito-P3, the current average price of gold was a minimum of six hundred dollars American an ounce, to say nothing of what it brought on the black market or in Hong Kong.
This meant that one Soltan Gris would have six million, four hundred and eighty thousand personal dollars American to play around with. This was so ample I didn’t even bother to adjust it for gravity differences. What was a million, more or less?
That would buy an awful lot of Turkish dancing girls.
It would also buy, if I was pushed to use it, an awful lot of Hells for Heller. I giggled because the words are similar in English.
Not only a clever Gris, not only a rich Gris, but a lofty, millionaire, tycoon, fat-cat Gris was not just unbeatable. He was inexorable!
“This ain’t no truck!” snarled Ske, narrowly averting a nose-dive crash.
I ignored him. Power, power, who saith it doth not have a sweet taste? I was spending it in English already. And in my imagination, Heller, a ragged, shabby and starving, panhandling bum, approached on the street and begged me for a quarter and I pulled the sleeve of my tailored jacket out of his bony, clutching fingers and slammed the door of my limousine in his tear-streaked face.
PART TEN
Chapter 2
At the Apparatus hangar everything was well. Ske crunched down on the landing target, went into ground mode and rolled off to the side.
From where I sat, I could see Tug One continuing to boil. The back fin was finished. They were doing something to the whole outside hull. In addition to other crews on other jobs, over a hundred contractor men, in bright yellow cover suits, were working with bright yellow spray which instantly went black when it hit the plating.
I knew what this was: Heller was redoing the original Fleet absorbo-coat. You could see the difference between the old coating and the new. The old coating was a tiny bit gray; the new coating was so black it was almost not there. Absorbo-coat takes all incoming waves and simply drinks them up; absolutely no energy gets reflected, visible or invisible. Not the most searching beams or screens can get a bounce off of it. The vessel becomes completely undetectable unless it blocks off a light behind it like a star. It will defeat any modern surveillance system.
I smiled when I thought of going to all that work just to baffle the primitive detection systems of Blito-P3. Even a shabby, old, chipped Apparatus vessel could do it. And then I felt less cheerful: all this absorption would multiply the dangers of Tug One blowing up. She would shed nothing! Screaming through space, picking up fields and light . . . I looked away quickly to get my mind off it.
Ah, something more cheerful! The Blixo! The Blixo was just clearing in! My luck was really holding!
One of the several Blito-P3 run freighters, the Blixo was no better or worse. These are small freighters, only about two hundred and fifty feet long. They are rather skinny and light. But they carry good tonnage, certainly all the tonnage that could be utilized. And they would carry fifty or sixty passengers in addition to a twenty-spacer crew. Their warp-drives push them about six weeks one way, sometimes more, sometimes less. Uncomfortable and shabby, they can slip in and out easily and they are no more dangerous than any other freighter. The best part of them is, they look ordinary: nobody remarks about them coming in and out of Voltar—just some of the thousands every week.
I motioned to Ske and he ground-drove over—a half a mile was too far to walk in my exalted state.
She had settled into her gantry within the last half-hour and the huge trundle dolly had
finished taking her into the hangar and lowering her to the floor. It was now pulling back out.
But that wasn’t all that was beginning to leave the Blixo. Behind the tall hangar screens that had been dropped down for security, I could hear the chatter of small cranes.
A convoy of armored flying lorries was standing by in a short column. They were one by one inching ahead. The Blixo was discharging her priceless cargo under the cover of screens.
The first lorry, all buttoned up after loading, drew out and stood waiting. When joined by the loaded remainder, they would go roaring off across the desert, advertisedly to Camp Endurance, actually all the way through to Spiteos. The vast storage spaces of the antique fortress would be getting filled up. Just a small amount as yet, but as the months went on, it would be appreciable. Lombar would be in jumping glee to see these lorry loads roll in.
Half a regiment of Apparatus guards were standing about to keep the area secure. It wasn’t very important to them. They were leaning haphazardly on their blastrifles, talking to one another about some prostitute or some dice game.
It wouldn’t take them long to discharge this priceless cargo. I sat and waited and at length, all the flying lorries were full and the convoy drove over to the nearby landing target and one after the other, they lumbered into the sky. The chain of them thundered off toward Camp Endurance.
I nudged Ske and we drove up near the guard commander and I flashed my identoplate. An orderly near him took its reflection on his board and we went through the security screens and stopped at the air lock ladder.
Actually, it was by my authority as head of Section 451 that these freighters came and went. But you wouldn’t have thought it by the attitude of the spacer by the air lock ladder. He was plainly anxious to get off and go into town and have himself a binge.
“Tell Captain Bolz that Officer Gris is here,” I said.
“Tell him yourself,” said the spacer. They are always a bit surly when they come in from a run.
But we didn’t have time for me to administer proper discipline. I was just getting out of the airbus when there was a row in the air lock.