“You can’t be as surprised as Andy and I were when we discovered we’d both been requested to investigate the same thing,” Easly said with a trace of a smile. His features were soft, gentle-looking, not at all what Old Pete had expected. “But we guessed what had happened and, since Andy got the assignment first, he had the honor of completing it.”
Andy Tella cleared his throat and straightened up in his chair. “Since you’re both here to learn of the mysterious doings on Dil, I’ll get right to them – and believe me, they make some story.”
Easly nodded in agreement as he ignited the end of a torpedo-shaped cigar, but said nothing. Clouds of blue-white smoke encircled his head for a brief instant before being drawn away by the ventilation system.
“First step,” Tella began, “was to go to the Fed patent office, use a few contacts, and find out if there’s been much activity in the way of new patents from Dil. Answer: yes. A spatial engineer by the name of Denver Haas has recently developed something he calls a ‘warp gate’ and is ready to go into production. I managed to get a quick look at his file, made a copy of it, naturally” – the briefest of smiles here – “and Larry and I went over it.”
Easly picked up the story here. “You must understand, of course, that neither Andy nor I have much of a grounding in physics and those papers were pretty damn technical. We couldn’t go around asking experts to decipher them for us because we weren’t supposed to have a copy. So we bought some teaching trodes and came up with a rough idea of what this ‘warp gate’ is.”
“Let’s lay some groundwork first,” Tella said, and turned to Jo and Old Pete. “Do you know how the warp unit on the average interstellar ship works?”
Jo shrugged. “It creates some kind of field that allows the ship to leave real space and enter subspace where it can take exaggerated advantage of the normal curvature of space.”
“Very nicely put,” Tella said with an approving nod. “I’ve been studying this stuff for the past week and I never could have capsulized it so well. But you’ve got just about everything there. The warp drive lets you travel under the curve of space; the higher the degree of warp, the longer the jump. That ‘some kind of field’ is important here, because it determines the degree of warp. Warp fields are a poor imitation of the field around a black hole; Haas has gone a step further. He has managed to link a pair of quantum black holes and generate one helluva warp field between them.”
“I knew it!” Old Pete slapped the table. “When I heard fifty years ago that they’d found a way to lock up quantum holes in a stasis field, I said someday somebody’s going to find a commercial use for those things! And sure enough, somebody has!”
Jo was pensive. “So he’s turned things around, eh? Instead of generating the warp from inside the ship, he generates it externally and lets the ship pass through – for a fee, I assume.”
“I suppose so,” Tella replied. “Either that or a company buys a gate and uses it exclusively for its own craft. They’re going to be hellishly expensive, though. Finding quantum holes isn’t too hard, but locking them up in a stasis field small enough to make the holes useful and large enough to prevent anything from accidentally entering their event horizons is pretty tricky. But that’s not the whole story. Wait’ll you hear this: Denver Haas is rumored to be working on modifications that will theoretically allow his warp gate to operate inside a planet’s gravity well!”
Stunned silence at Old Pete and Jo’s end of the table.
The major drawback to the current on-board warp unit was its inability to generate a stable warp field in the presence of any appreciable gravitational influence, whether stellar or planetary. This necessitated the use of peristellar drive tubes to travel past the point of critical influence for a given planet circling a given star. And this type of travel, despite the use of a proton-proton drive in tubes lined with Leason crystals, was maddeningly slow. But if all that could be eliminated, if all you had to do was shuttle up to the ship, board, and then flash through an orbiting warp gate…
“If that’s truly possible,” Old Pete said in an awe-tinged voice, “then humankind will be able to begin its golden age as an interstellar race.”
Easly and Tella glanced at each other and the latter said, “I never looked at it that way, but–”
“But nothing!” the old man retorted. “The first interstellar trips took decades; the perfection of the warp field made them a matter of days, weeks, or months, depending on where you were coming from and where you were going. We are now talking about hours! Hours between the stars! Think of what that will mean for trade!”
“The thing is, Mr. Paxton,” Easly said patiently, “that this guy Haas hasn’t perfected those modifications yet.”
“He must have if he’s going into production as Andy said.”
Easly shook his head. “He’s going to market with a prototype that can only operate beyond the critical point in the gravity well.”
For the second time that evening, there was dead silence at that particular pokochess table. Jo finally broke it.
“You must be mistaken, Larry.”
“I assure you I’m not.”
“But it simply doesn’t make sense. He’ll be trying to market a rather expensive device that offers no real advantage over the onboard warp unit.”
“Oh, it has advantages,” Easly replied. “The gates generate an extremely high-degree warp, high enough so a ship can travel from gate to gate in a single jump. No more jumping in and out of warp, checking co-ordinates, then jumping again. You just follow a subspace beam from one gate to another.”
“Not enough!” Jo said. “The big expense in interstellar travel is time, and the Haas gate that takes days to get to saves no time. The warp jumps are inconvenient, but they add little appreciable time to the trip. If Haas can eliminate the trip out past – and back from – the critical point in the gravity well, he’ll have revolutionized interstellar travel; if not, then he’s only invented an expensive toy.”
“Expensive to his backers, you mean,” Old Pete added.
“That, too,” Jo agreed with a nod. “Star Ways will see to it that he doesn’t sell too many gates.”
“How can they do that?” Tella asked. “And why?”
Jo signaled the waiter for another round of drinks before answering. “Star Ways is known as the biggest corporation in human history, right? It’s a conglomerate with subsidiaries in every sector of Terran space. Everybody knows that. But what is the basis for its growth to its present size?”
Comprehension suddenly dawned in Tella’s face. “Of course! The on-board warp unit!”
“Right. The warp gate is an eventual threat to the product that forms the economic basis for the conglomerate. Star Ways is not going to let anything hurt its warp unit sales if it can help it. It will cut prices to the bone until Haas has to fold.”
“The Haas warp gate,” Old Pete summarized, “is doomed if it goes to market in its present form. It might have a chance if there were no competition from the conventional warp unit sector – some of the trade fleets might decide to invest in gates as their present onboard units depreciated – but it would be a very slow seller. If someone asked me whether or not to venture any money on Mr. Haas, my answer would be a definite no!”
He halted discreetly as the waiter arrived with the fresh drinks, and resumed when the four of them were alone again.
“But the question still remains: what’s the connection between Haas and deBloise? There’s no doubt in my mind now that Doyl Catera was talking shout the warp gate when he referred to a technological innovation that could make all planets neighbors. But why is it so important to the Restructurists? What do they hope to get out of it?”
“Well,” Easly said after carefully weighing and assessing the facts and opinions that had crisscrossed the table since they had seated themselves, “certainly not a return on their investment.”
“You mean deBloise and his crew are backing Haas?” Old Pete sputtered, almost c
hoking on a sip of scotch.
“One hundred percent. But apparently they don’t want anyone to know. They’ve gone to an awful lot of trouble – three or four dummy investment groups, I’m told – to keep their names out of it. Haas probably doesn’t even know they’re involved. They’ve done an excellent job, according to my informant; no one could ever prove conclusively that there was a connection between Denver Haas and the Restructurist big shots… and my informant says he’ll deny any knowledge of the whole affair if I try to use him as a source.”
“Sounds sinister,” Joe mused with a glance at Old Pete. “Your conspiracy theory sounds more and more plausible every minute. But the rationale behind the whole thing completely eludes me at the moment.”
“I may not know the means,” Old Pete offered, “but I know the end: the end of the free market.”
Jo wrinkled up her nose in a frankly skeptical grimace.
“You look like you just got a whiff of week-old chispen innards,” Old Pete said.
“It’s just that it’s such an absurd idea. I mean, how can you have commerce without a free market?”
“It can be done. It’s not easy, but it can be done. Traders can always find a way. They’re the most resourceful members of the species. If a government tries to destroy a free market, as it is often wont to do, by controlling the supply of certain commodities or restricting the free movement of goods, traders and buyers will always manage to get together some way. If the free market is declared void by the government, they make their own. Only then it’s known as a ‘black’ market.”
Old Pete paused as he noted the puzzled expressions around him. “I forgot. Your economic education in the outworlds is still very naïve. You lack my advantage of growing up on Earth. I’m all too familiar with things such as excise taxes, trade bureaus, commerce commissions, sales taxes–”
“Sales taxes! What are they?” Tella asked with an amused smile.
“That’s a new one on you, is it? You’ve heard of the income tax, of course. Most outworlds have it in some form or another. That’s the way the politicos get your money as it enters your pocket. And when they’ve taxed that to the limit the populace will tolerate, they go to work on finding ways to get a piece of what’s left of your money as it comes out of your pocket. That’s called a sales tax: you pay a tribute to the current regime every time you buy something.”
Jo shook her head in disbelief. “I find it incredible that any population would put up with such abuse. There’d be rioting in the streets here on Ragna if anyone tried to foist that kind of nonsense on us!”
“Don’t count on it. As that famous Earth philosopher Muniz put it a long time ago: ‘The masses are asses.’ And while I don’t subscribe to such a cynical, elitist point of view, I fear he may have been right. I never cease to be amazed at what people will put up with if it’s presented to them in a pretty package. These tax schemes are always preceded by a propaganda blitz or by a financial crisis that has been either manufactured or caused by the bureaucracy itself. The ‘public good’ is stressed and before you know it, the public has allowed someone else to slip his hand into its pocket. As time goes on, little by little the state manages to funnel more and more money through its myriad bureaus and eventually the politicians are running the entire economy.”
Jo was still dubious. “Who in his or her right mind would allow politicians to make economic policy? Most of them are small-town lawyers who got involved in planetary politics and wound up in the Federation Assembly. They’ve had a year or so of economic theory in their undergraduate education, usually from a single source, and that’s the extent of their qualifications in the field of economics. How can they possibly have the gall to want to plan the course of an economy that affects the lives of billions of people?”
“They not only have the gall for it; they will claw and scramble over each other in a mad rush to see who can do more of it.”
“Okay. Granted, such men exist and some of them are probably in the Federation Assembly. But I’m sure they’re outnumbered.”
“I’m going to tell you Paxton’s First Law,” Old Pete said, raising his index finger: “Never trust anyone who runs for office.”
“Maybe it’s time someone paid a visit to Mr. Haas and got some first-hand information,” Easly suggested, getting back to business.
“Good idea, Larry,” Jo began. “Why don’t you–”
Old Pete interrupted. “I think Jo and I should go see Mr. Haas ourselves. We’ll go as representatives of IBA; he’s got a product and we want to help him market it. That’s our business. What could be more natural?”
Tella and Easly agreed that it was a reasonable approach, but Jo objected.
“Sorry, can’t go. Too much work to do.”
“You can get away for a while,” Old Pete said. “IBA won’t fall apart without you. And think of the impact on Mr. Haas when the head of IBA pays a personal visit to his humble abode. Why I’m sure he’ll fall all over himself telling us everything we want to know!”
Everyone laughed and Jo reluctantly agreed to accompany Old Pete to Dil. She hated interstellar travel, hated the wave of nausea that hit her every time the ship came in and out of warp. But Dil wasn’t that far away and IBA employed a first-rate jump engineer for its executive craft. He could probably make the trip in two jumps and that wouldn’t be too bad. She’d bring along some data spools just so the trip wouldn’t be a total loss.
The conversation turned to other matters and Old Pete leaned back with a smile on his face and sighed with relief.
Junior
SOMEONE SPLASHED WATER into his face. It was Heber. His expression was grim as he helped Junior to his feet.
“I was afraid something like this would happen.”
“You were, huh? Why didn’t you let me in on it?”
Junior glanced around as he tried to piece together his whereabouts. He last remembered standing over by the lorry. He had been beaten, then dragged away from it… about half a dozen locals stood around him. Acrid smoke filled the air.
“The lorry!” he cried, and looked past Heber’s shoulder. The vehicle was still smoking, though covered with a thick coat of hissing foam.
“Two of Zel Namer’s boys did it,” Heber told him. “They’d been drinking a bit too much, started feeling mean, and things got out of hand. We’ve got them locked up for now. I’m just glad they had the sense to drag you far enough from the lorry so’s you wouldn’t be hurt by the blast.”
Junior nodded and gingerly felt his swollen face. “So am I.”
The lorry had been parked about one hundred meters from the town center. The locals must have heard the explosion and come running with fire-fighting equipment. His eyes came to rest on a familiar figure: Bill Jeffers stood off to the side, a spent extinguisher dangling from his hand. He sensed Junior’s scrutiny and turned.
“I want you to know that I had nothing to do with this, Finch,” he said. “Even if you are doing your damnedest to put me out of business.”
“You know something, Bill,” Junior said in a low voice, “I believe you. And the last thing I want to do is put you out of business. All I want you to do is change a few of your policies.”
“You’re trying to get me to feed a bunch of half-breeds in my store!”
“I’m not forcing you to do anything,” Junior said, maintaining a calm, reasoned tone for the benefit of the other locals nearby who were all ears. “Whatever you decide, the choice will be yours and yours alone. I’m just making it more profitable for you to see things my way.”
Jeffers fumbled for an answer. Failing to find a suitable one, he wheeled and stalked away.
“Well, whether it’s force or not really doesn’t matter much now,” said Heber, glancing after Jeffers. “Without that lorry, the game is up.”
Junior nodded slowly, grimly. “I guess it is. Peck will never jeopardize another one, and I can’t say I blame him.”
“Maybe something can be worked out,” Heber said.
His eyes were fixed on the horizon.
“Like what?”
He shrugged. “I’m not sure, yet. But we can always hope, can’t we?”
“Guess so. But hope by itself has a notoriously poor efficiency record.”
Heber laughed. “Agreed. And since it doesn’t look like you’re going to make it back to Zarico, you’ll need a place to spend the night. Come on back to the office and I’ll fix you up with a cot.”
They walked back to the town in silence. Once in the office, Heber reached down between the side of the desk and the wall and pulled out a folding cot.
“I keep this here for times when it gets too hot upstairs.”
“You mean you don’t have a temperature regulator?” Junior asked.
Heber snorted. “The human race may be able to travel between the stars but there’s no temperature regulator in this building, or in any other building in Danzer. You’ve got to get it into your head, Mr. Finch, that people out here are just scraping by. You may see a flitter truck now and again but don’t mistake it for affluence – it’s a necessity for some farmers. We live here at just about the same level as pre-space man back on old Earth. It’s a different story in the capital, of course; but Danzer and Copia might as well be on different planets. And speaking of Copia, I’ve got a call to make.”
“Where to?”
“You’ll find out. But for now, why don’t you just lie down on that cot and get some sleep. Things may look better in the morning.”
Junior doubted that but nodded agreement. When Heber was gone, he lay back on the cot and put his hands behind his head, planning to stay awake until Heber’s return. He was asleep in minutes.
SOMEONE WAS SHAKING HIM and he opened his eyes. The morning sun was turning from orange to yellow and was streaming through the window into the office.
“Wake up!” Heber was saying. “I’ve got a vid reporter from the capital waiting to meet you.”
Junior jerked upright in the cot. “A vid reporter? Is that who you called in Copia last night?”