“Second the motion, Mr. Chairman,” I said. “Bring them in, boys, will you?” My guards, grinning, began to lug in transfer cases full of proxies to me.
Eyes popped and jaws dropped as the pile mounted. It took a long time for them to be counted and authenticated. The final vote stood: For, 5.73 x 1013; Against, 1.27 x 1013. All the Against votes were Sillery’s and Sillery’s alone. There were no abstentions. The others jumped to my side like cats on a griddle.
Loyal old Harve moved that chairmanship of the meeting be transferred to me, and it was carried unanimously. He then moved that Sillery be pensioned off, his shares of voting stock to be purchased at par by the firm and deposited in the bonus fund. Carried unanimously.
Then—a slash of the whip, just to remind them—he moved that one Thomas Heatherby, a junior Art man who had sucked up outrageously to Sillery, be downgraded from Board level and deprived without compensation of his small bloc of voting shares. Carried unanimously. Heatherby didn’t even dare scream about it. Half a loaf is better than none, he may have said to himself, choking down his anger.
It was done. I was master of Fowler Schocken Associates. And I had learned to despise everything for which it stood.
XVI
“FLASH, Mr. Courtenay,” said my secretary’s voice. I hit the GA button.
“Connie arrested in Albany on neighbor’s denunciation. Shall I line it up?”
“How many times do I have to give you standing orders? Of course you line it up!”
She quavered: “I’m sorry, Mr. Courtenay. I thought it was kind of far out—”
“Stop thinking, then. Arrange the transportation.”
An hour later I was in the Upstate Mutual Protective Association’s HQ. They were a local outfit that had a lot of contracts in the area, including Albany. Their board chairman himself met me and my guards at the elevator. “An honor,” he burbled. “A great, great honor, Mr. Courtenay, and what may I do for you?”
“My secretary asked you not to get to work on your Connie suspect until I arrived. Did you?”
“Some of the employees may have roughed him up a little, informally, but he’s in quite good shape.”
“I want to see him.”
He led the way, anxiously. He was hoping to get in a word that might grow into a cliency with Fowler Schocken Associates, but was afraid to speak up.
The suspect was sitting on a stool under the usual dazzler. He was a middle-aged white-collar consumer of thirty or so. He had a couple of bruises on his face.
“Turn that off,” I ordered.
A square-faced foreman said: “But we always—” One of my guards, without wasting words, shoved him aside and switched off the dazzler.
“It’s all right, Lombardo,” the board chairman said hastily. “You’re to cooperate with these gentlemen.”
I sat down facing the suspect. “My name’s Courtenay. What’s yours?”
He looked at me with pupils that were beginning to expand again. “Fillmore,” he said, precisely. “Alonzo Fillmore. Can you tell me what all this is about?”
“You’re suspected of being a Connie.”
There was a gasp from all the UMPA people in the room. I was violating jurisprudence by informing the accused of the nature of his crime.
I knew all about that and didn’t give a damn.
“Completely ridiculous,” Fillmore spat. “I’m a respectable married man with eight children and another coming along. Who on Earth told you people such nonsense?”
“Tell him who,” I said to the board chairman.
He stared at me, goggle-eyed, unable to believe what he had heard. “Mr. Courtenay, with all respect, the entire body of law respecting the rights of informers—”
“I’ll take the responsibility. Do you want me to put it in writing?”
“No, no! Nothing like that! Please, Mr. Courtenay, suppose I tell the informer’s name to you, understanding that you know the law and are a responsible person—and then I leave the room?”
“Any way you want to do it is all right with me.”
He grinned placatingly, and whispered in my ear: “A Mrs. Worley. The two families share a room. Please be careful, Mr. Courtenay—”
“Thanks,” I said. He gathered eyes like a hostess and nervously retreated with his employees.
“Well, Fillmore,” I told the suspect, “he says it’s Mrs. Worley.” He began to swear, and I cut him off. “You know your goose is cooked, of course. Remember what William Vogt says on the subject?”
“Who?” he asked distractedly. “Never mind. I have a lot of money. I can set up a generous pension for your family if you cooperate and admit you’re a Connie.”
He thought hard for a few moments and then said: “Sure I’m a Connie. What of it? I’m sunk, so why not say so?”
“If you’re such a red-hot Connie, suppose you quote me some passages from Osborne.”
He had obviously never heard of Fairfield Osborne and slowly began to fake: “Well, there’s the one that starts: ‘A Connie’s first duty, uh, is to, to prepare for a general uprising—’ I don’t remember the rest, but that’s how it starts.”
“Now how about your cell meetings? Who comes there?”
“I don’t know them by name,” he said more glibly. “We go by numbers. There’s a dark-haired fellow, he’s the boss—”
“Skip it,” I told him. “You’re no Connie. Don’t worry about the pension. It goes through anyway.”
“Thanks, mister,” he said in a small, dry voice. “I’m not begging. But can you make it big enough so they can move out of the room with the Worleys? He’s a wolf. His wife’s jealous and sore about him. I guess that’s why this happened. My wife told me and told me to inform on them before they informed on me, but I didn’t listen. I didn’t want to do anything like that. You shouldn’t have to do anything like that just to get along—”
He was crying when we left.
I told the board chairman, hovering anxiously outside in the corridor: “I don’t think he’s a Connie.”
I was president of Fowler Schocken Associates and he was only the board chairman of a jerkwater local police outfit, but that was too much. He drew himself up and said with dignity:
“We administer justice, Mr. Courtenay. And a basic tenet of justice is: ‘Better that one thousand innocents suffer unjustly than one guilty person be permitted to escape.’ ”
“I am aware of the maxim,” I said. “Good day.” I made a note to have the pension taken care of and left.
MY instrument corporal went boing as the crash-crash priority signal sounded in his ear, and handed me the phone. It was my secretary back in Schocken Tower, reporting another arrest, this one in Pile City Three, off Cape Cod.
We flew out to Pile City Three, which was rippling that day over a long, swelling sea. I hate the Pile Cities—as I’ve said, I suffer from motion sickness.
This Connie suspect had tried a smash-and-grab raid on a jewelry store, intending to snatch a trayful of oak and mahogany pins, leaving behind a lurid note about Connie vengeance and beware of the coming storm when the Connies take over and kill all the rich guys. It was intended to throw off suspicion.
He was very stupid.
It was a Burns-protected city, and I had a careful chat with their resident manager. He admitted first that most of their Connie arrests during the past month or so had been like that, and then admitted that all their Connie arrests for the past month or so had been like that. Formerly they had broken up authentic Connie cells at the rate of maybe one a week. He thought maybe it was a seasonal phenomenon.
From there I went back to New York, where another Connie had been picked up. I saw him and listened to him rant for a few minutes. He was posted on Connie theory and could quote Vogt and Osborne by the page. He also asserted that God had chosen him to wipe the wastrels from the face of Mother Earth. He said of course he was in the regular Connie organization, but he would die before he gave up any of its secrets. And I knew he certainly
would, because he didn’t know any. The Connies wouldn’t have accepted anybody that unstable if they were down to three members with one sinking fast.
We went back to Schocken Tower at sunset and my guard changed. It had been a lousy day. As far as results were concerned, it was a carbon copy of all the days I had spent since I inherited the agency.
There was a meeting scheduled. I didn’t want to go, but my conscience troubled me when I thought of the pride and confidence; Fowler Schocken must have felt in me when he made me his heir. Before I dragged myself to the Board room, I checked with a special detail I had set up in the company’s Business Espionage section.
“Nothing, sir,” my man said. “No leads whatsoever on your— on Dr. Nevin. The tracer we had on the Chlorella personnel man petered out.”
“Keep trying,” I said. “If you need a bigger appropriation or more investigators, don’t hesitate. Do me a real job.”
He swore loyalty and hung up, probably thinking that the boss was a fool, mooning over a wife that was not even permanently married to him. What he made out of the others I had asked him to trace, I didn’t know. They had vanished, each of my few contacts with the Connies in Costa Rica, the sewers of New York and on the Moon. Kathy had never come back to. her apartment or the hospital; Warren Astron had never returned to his sucker-trap on Shopping One; my Chlorella cellmates had vanished into the jungle—and so it went, all down the line.
BOARD meeting. “Sorry to be late, gentlemen. I’ll dispense with opening remarks. Charlie, how’s Research and Development doing on the Venus question?”
He got up. “Mr. Courtenay, gentlemen, in my humble way I think I can say that R. and D. is in there punching. Specifically, we’ve licked the greenhouse effect—quantitatively. Experiments in vitro have confirmed the predictions of our able Physical Chemistry and Thermodynamics section based on theory and math. A CO2 blanket around Venus at 40,000 feet, approximately .05 feet thick, will be self-sustaining and self-regulating, and will moderate surface temperatures some five degrees a year, steadying at 80 to 85 degrees. We’re exploring now the various ways this enormous volume of gas can be obtained and hurled at high velocity into the stratosphere.
“Considered broadly, we can find the CO2 or manufacture it, or both. I say we should find it. Volcanic activity is present, but your typical superficial Venus eruption would seem to be liquid NH4 compressed by gravity in crevices until it seeps to a weaker formation through faults and porous rock and then blows its top. We are certain, however, that deep drilling would tap considerable reservoirs of liquid CO2—”
“How certain?” I asked.
“Quite certain, Mr. Courtenay. Phase-rule analysis of the O’Shea reports—”
I interrupted again. “Would you go to Venus on the strength of that certainty, other things being equal?”
“Absolutely,” he said, a little offended. “Shall I go into the technical details?”
“No, thanks, Charlie. Continue as before.”
“At present, we are wrapping up the greenhouse effect in two respects. We are preparing a maximum probability map of drilling sites and we are designing a standard machine for unattended drilling. My policy on the design is cheapness, self-power, and remote control. I trust this is satisfactory?”
“Very much so. Thank you, Charlie. One point, though. If the stuff is there and if it’s abundant, we have a prospect of trouble. If it’s too abundant and easy to get at, it might become feasible for Venus to export liquid CO2 to Earth, which we definitely do not want. CO2 is in good supply here, and no purpose would be served by underselling Earthside producers. Let’s bear in mind always that Venus is going to pay its way with raw materials in short supply on Earth, and is not going to compete pricewise with the mother planet. Iron, yes. Nitrates, emphatically yes. We’ll pay them a good enough price for such things to keep them buying Earthside products and enable them to give Earthside bankers, insurance companies and carrying trade their business.
“But never forget that Venus is there for us to exploit, and don’t ever get it turned around. This is the time to head such mistakes off. I want you, Charlie, to get together with Auditing and determine whether tapping underground CO2 pools will ever make it possible for Venus to deliver CO2 F.O.B. New York at a competitive price. If it does, your present plans are out. You’ll have to get your greenhouse effect blanketing gas by manufacturing it in a more expensive way.”
“Right, Mr. Courtenay,” Charlie said, scribbling busily.
“Does anybody else have anything special on the Venus program before we go on?”
Bernhard, our comptroller, stuck his hand up and I nodded.
“Question about Mr. O’Shea,” he rumbled. “We’re carrying him as a consultant at a very considerable fee. I’ve been asking around—I hope I haven’t been going off-side, Mr. Courtenay, but it’s my job—and I find that we’ve been getting no consultation whatever from him. Also, I should mention that he’s drawn heavily in recent weeks on retainers not yet due. If we severed our connection with him at this time, he’d be owing us money. Also—well, this is trivial, but it gives you an idea. The girls in my department are complaining about him annoying them.”
My eyebrows went up. “I think we should hang onto him for whatever prestige rubs off, Ben, though his vogue does seem to be passing. Give him an argument about further advances. And as for the girls, I thought they didn’t complain when he made passes at them.”
“Seen him lately?”
I realized I hadn’t.
BACK in my office, I asked my night-shift secretary whether O’Shea was in the building and, if so, to send for him.
He came in smelling of liquor and complaining loudly. “Damn it, Mitch, enough is enough! I just stepped in to pick up one of the babes for the night and you grab me. Aren’t you taking this consultation thing too seriously? You’ve got my name to use; what more do you want?”
He looked like a miniature of the fat, petulant, shabby Napoleon at Elba. But a moment after he had come in, I suddenly couldn’t think of anything but Kathy. It took me a moment to figure it out.
“Well?” he demanded. “What are you staring at?”
The liquor covered it up some, but a little came through: Menage a Deux, the perfume I’d had created for Kathy and Kathy alone when we Were in Paris, the stuff she loved and sometimes used too much of. I could hear her saying: “I can’t help it, darling; it’s so much nicer than formalin, and that’s what I usually smell of after a day at the hospital . . .”
“Sorry, Jack,” I said evenly. “I didn’t know it was your howling night. It’ll keep. Have fun.” He grimaced and left, almost waddling on his short legs.
I grabbed my phone and slammed a connection through to my special squad in Business Espionage. “Put tails on Jack O’Shea. He’s leaving the building soon. Tail him and everybody he contacts. Night and day. If I hit paydirt on this, you and your men get upgraded and bonused. But God help you if you pull a butch!”
XVII
I GOT so nobody dared to come near me. I was living for one thing only—the daily reports from the tails on O’Shea. Anything else I tried to handle bored and irritated me.
After a week, there were twenty-four tails working at a time on O’Shea and people with whom he had talked. They were head-waiters, his lecture agent, girls, an old test-pilot friend of his stationed at Astoria, a cop he got into a drunken argument with one night—but was he really drunk and was it really an argument?—and other unsurprising folk.
One night, quietly added to the list was: “Consumer, female, about 30, 5' 4", 120 lbs., redhead, eyes not seen, cheaply dressed. Subject entered Hash Heaven (restaurant) 1837 after waiting 14 minutes outside and went immediately to table waited on by new contact, which table just vacated by party. Conjecture: subject primarily interested in waitress. Ordered hash, ate very lightly, exchanged few words with contact. Papers may have been passed, but impossible to observe at tailing distance. Female operative has picked up contact.”
About thirty, five-four, one-twenty. It could be Kathy. I phoned to say: “Bear down on that one. Rush me everything new that you get. How about finding out more from the restaurant?”
Business Espionage began to explain, with embarrassment, that they’d do it if I insisted, but that it wasn’t approved technique. Usually the news got to the person being tailed and—
“Okay,” I said. “Do it your way.”
“Hold it a minute, Mr. Courtenay, please. Our girl just checked in. The new contact went home to the Taunton Building. She has Stairs 17-18 on the thirty-fifth floor.”
“What’s the thirty-fifth?” I asked, heavy-hearted.
“For couples.”
“Is she—?”
“Unattached, Mr. Courtenay. Our girl pretended to apply for the vacancy. They told her Mrs. 17 is holding 18 for the arrival of her husband. He’s upstate harvesting.”
“What time do the stairs close at Taunton’s?”
“2200, Mr. Courtenay.”
I glanced at my desk clock. “Call your tail off her,” I said. “That’s all for now.”
I got up and told my guards: “I’m going out without you, gentlemen. Please wait here. Lieutenant, can I borrow your gun?”
“Of course, Mr. Courtenay.” He passed over a .25 UHV. I checked the magazine and went out on foot, alone.
As I left the lobby of Schocken Tower, a shadowy young man detached himself from the wall and drifted after me. I crossed him by walking in the deserted street, a dark, narrow slit between the mighty midtown buildings. Monoxide and smog hung heavily in the unconditioned air, but I had antisoot plugs and he did not. I heard him wheeze behind me. An occasional closed cab whizzed past us, the driver puffing as he pumped the pedals.
Without looking back, I turned the corner of Schocken Tower and instantly flattened against the wall. My shadow drifted past and stopped in consternation, peering into the gloom.
Collected Short Fiction Page 173