Halfway through the second hour, they cued Hubble in, and he nodded, stopped piddling around with his two-dollar and five-dollar coppered bets and began following Nome’s lead. Mundin and Don Lavin had switched to thousand-share lots by now, more than a million dollars’ worth of stock at every movement, and were sullenly hammering old 333 off a point, another pointa point and a half
Three times already the conditioned cashier’s messenger had come down through the aisles with the Exchange’s certified checks, taking away stock certificates and leaving the money; the transactions were getting that big. He came again and Mundin, catching a glimpse of the amount the check was made out for, felt his eyes pop. All of a sudden things came into focus: Charles Mundin, tossing millions of dollars’ worth of stock into the hopper every couple of minutes, Charles Mundin who ninety days before couldn’t scare up the price of his monthly installments on the Sleepless Secretary! He almost panicked; he looked up wildly, staring around at the watching hangers-on, the touts, the fascinated investors who had abandoned their own windows, the guards, the children of the civics class and their sedate teacher….
Something glinted and caught his eye. He hissed to the nearest kid, “Ixnay on the ottlebay!” The eight-year-old, squirming La his unaccustomed clothes, flushed and tucked the busted bottle farther out of sight hastily, but not so hastily that
the eldest of the “class,” a bony but sweet-faced thirteen, didn’t catch it and move ominously closer. “Forget it, Lana,” Mundin whispered. “Just keep them out of sight.” He glanced at the “teacher,” and then turned to the “teacher’s” brother, beside him.
“How much have we dumped?” he demanded.
Don Lavin looked up from his penciled computations. “I make it just over eighteen thousand shares.” A drop in the bucket, thought Mundin. They had started out with twenty-five per cent of G.M.L.‘s entire stock issueroughly seven million shares, hi all, and their bloc close to two million. At that rate, he thought, they’d be there all year.
“Don,” he said. “Donboth together, from now on. And twenty-five hundred shares at a time.”
Fourteen billion dollars.
Fourteen billion dollars is massive, fourteen billion dollars has inertia; you don’t shake it easily. Ram a Juggernaut into fourteen billion dollars. The Juggernaut crumples and spills its Hindic gods into the street; the fourteen billion dollars stands unmoved.
But fourteen billion dollars, or anything else that God ever made, has a natural rate of swing. Slap it with a feather, and wait; slap it again; slap it again. The oscillation builds. The giant construct vibrates and wobbles and sways.
And Don Lavin’s twenty-five per cent interest was no feather.
The Sgures on the Big Board were plunging now“333, off 10”; “333, off 6”; And even once, incredibly: “333, off 42.” By working like dogs, Mundin and Bligh and Hubble and the Lavins had succeeded in cutting their collective fortunes in half, or just about. And it was time for something to happen.
Something did. “Hup, two. Hup, two. Hup, two.” It was an eight-man squad of the City’s Finest, and in their vanguard
Del Dworcas.
He stepped coldly up to Mundin through a lane that opened in the slackjawed mob. “You,” he said bitterly, “you cheat, you ingrate, you deadbeat, you!” Oh, no! thought Mundin, incredulously. Dworcas couldn’t be “I hand you herewith,” Dworcas said formally, “this Summons & Complaint
give it to him, Herband attach all of your property pending adjudication thereof. Eight hundred dollars, Mundin! Loaned to you, to help you out, and you try to stiff me. With all the money you’ve got, too. Look at those stock certificates 1 Look at those checks! Boys, pick up his junk, and let’s get out of here.” He dried his eyes in a businesslike way and turned to go, as the cops reached for Mundin’s and Lavin’s stock.
“Hold it,” squawked Mundin. “Del, listenyou’re monkeying with something bigger than you are.” Dworcas involuntarily stepped back away from him, glanced behind him, and looked nervously again at Mundin. He licked his lips.
“Yeah, mister,” chimed in the sweet-faced thirteen-year-old by Dworcas’s elbow. “Give the guy a chance. Go ahead.”
Dworcas appeared to have trouble breathing. “Uhall right,” he got out. “Let’s go, Herb.”
“No, mister,” implored the sweet-faced girl. “You don’t want to go, just send the cops away. You want to stay here and watch that property, right?”
“Right,” said Dworcas bitterly. “Beat it, Herb.”
The big cop frowned and objected, “I give him the summons, Del. It says we got to take his stuff in pertective custody.”
“Beat it, Herb!”
The cop shrugged petulantly and, gathering his squad, marched glowering away.
“Good work, Lana,” breathed Mundin.
She shrugged. “All right, you kids,” she said. “You can put the bottles away again. He’ll stay put, won’t you, buster?”
Fervently Dworcas choked, “Sure,” watching the Wabbits with eyes as glassy as the bottles they were stowing away in their clothes again behind him.
Mundin turned limply back to the Big Board. He had missed a couple of movements, butbut
He held the glasses rigid on Line 333 for long seconds. It said, 333, off 13.
“Don,” he said unbelievingly, “Don, it’s started. Somebody else is selling tool”
Coett? Nelson? Green, Charlesworth themselves? They never knew. But in a minute it was everyone. Old 333 plunged and plunged and plunged. Howling like maniacs, Mundin and
Lavin poured in ten thousand shares at a time, and other thousands appeared from hidden portfolios, from ancient voting trusts, from the very air, it seemed. Off 15. Off 28. Off 47. Off 61.
The whole market was churning now, and the Big Board’s figures had little to do with what was happening then and there; they were minutes behind. Twice there was trouble, and the busted bottles came out, and a couple of bleeding hulks slid to the floor of the Exchange to be trampled into mush. But only twice. The density of the crowd protected them; Hitler’s panzers could not have driven through that mass to get at Mundin.
This was the critical point, Mundin told himself desperately, hunched over his keys, punching out orders and waiting for the slow, the agonizingly slow, response of the once-instantaneous Big Board. This was when they had to feel the pulse of the market, and know when, quietly, to stop selling and when, invisibly, to begin to buy. A hand snaked over his shoulder and picked something up.
“Watch it, bud!” Mundin ordered hoarsely, glancing up. But it was only Del Dworcas, taking back the summons & complaint his man had given Mundin.
His face white but composed, Dworcas quietly tore the paper up. “Yours,” he said to Mundin, letting the pieces slip to the floor. “I know when to get off a losing horse, Charles. And don’t forget who put you in touch with the Lavins.”
The judgment of a practical politician, Mundin thought wonderingly. It was like a voice from the grave, Ryan’s voice.
And by it he knew that they had won.
Chapter Twenty-Six
they celebrated that night in Belly Ravethere seemed no more fitting place. It was quiet but prideful. They had won, all of them together. And they all of them owned the biggest concentration of power the world Lad ever seen. Even now, they didn’t know the full extent of their holdings. Mundin and Norvie had made a laborious computation of their G.M.L. holdingsnearly seventy per cent. All of their own stock back, and probably Coett’s and Nelson’s and enough more to mean that they had dipped into the Green, Charlesworth reserves. But, wherever it came from, enough.
Enough to make the Lavin Houseno longer the G.M.L. Homewhat Lavin had meant it to be.
“Belt Transport Common B,” sang out Hubble, “two hundred fifty shares.” Don Lavin scouted through his lists, made a mark, called:
“Check.”
Hubble carefully laid away the voucher and picked up another. “Nation
al Nonferroushey, that’s Nelson! National Nonferrous, fifteen hundred shares.” He scratched his head. “Did I buy those? Well, no m&tter. Tioga Point Kewpie Corporationwait a minute.” He stared at the Exchange’s voucher. “Anybody here ever hear of a Tioga Point Kewpie Corporation? We seem to have picked up a controlling interest. Got Poore’s around, Mundin?” Nobody had ever heard of it. Hubble shrugged, made a paper plane of the voucher and sailed it to Lana. “Here, kid. Looks like a doll factory. Yours.”
Lana looked startled, then belligerent, then lost. She picked up the voucher and stared at it. “Dolls,” she said, wonderingly.
Hubble threw the rest of the vouchers in his briefcase and slapped Don Lavin on the shoulder. “Hell with it. We’ll finish tomorrow. It isn’t exactly a balanced portfolio but” his face was oddly young and eager when he smiled “we put it together hi kind of a hurry. Anyway, it looks like we own a little bit of everything.”
“We’ll need it,” said Norma, nestled against Mundin’s arm. “Those old monsters in their glass bottles… .”
Mundin patted her hand. “I don’t know,” he said, after a moment. “They’re as good as dead, you know. They didn’t have anything to live for but power, and when we broke the market we took that away from them. We”
He stopped. The house shivered and sang. A white flash of light sprang up outside, turned orange and faded away.
“What’s that?” demanded Norvie Bligh, a protective arm around his wife.
No one knew; and they all ran up to the battered second floor, where there was a window with glasswhere there used
to be a window with glass, they found. The glass was in shards across the floor.
Across the slaggy bay, luminous even in the evening light, where Old New York had stood and rotteda mushroom-shaped cloud.
“Green, Charlesworth,” mused Norvell. “I guess you weren’t the only one who realized they were as good as dead, Charles.”
They stood there for a long moment, watching the cloud drift out to sea, an insubstantial monument to the suicide of the Struldbrugs, but the only monument they would ever have… .
“We’d better get below,” said Mundin. “We’ve got cleaning up to do.”
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
frederik pohl, is a double-threat science fictioneer, being the only person to have won science fiction’s top award, the Hugo, both as an editor and as a writer. As a writer, he has published more than thirty novels and short story collections, including The Space Merchants (with C. M. Kornbluth), The Age of the Pussyfoot, Day Million and The Gold at Star bow’s End. His awards include four Hugos and the Edward E. Smith Award. As an editor, he published the first series of anthologies of original stories in the science fiction field, Star Science Fiction, and for many years he was the editor of two leading magazines in the field, Galaxy and //. He is currently science fiction editor of Bantam Books. His interests extend beyond science fiction to national affairs (his book, Practical Politics, was a handbook for party reformers in the 1972 election year), history (he is the Encyclopedia Britannica’s authority on the Roman Emperor, Tiberius) and almost the entire range of human affairs. He is currently president of the Science Fiction Writers of America, and makes his home in Red Bank, New Jersey.
cyril M. kornbluth began writing science fiction for publication at the age of fifteen, and continued to do so until his early death in his mid-thirties. In his own right, he was the author of four science fiction novels, including The Syndic, a number of works outside the science fiction field and several score of the brightest and most innovative shorter science fiction pieces ever written. Some of bis short stories and novelettes have been mainstays for the anthologists and have also been adapted for television production, such as The Little Black Bag and The Marching Morons. His collaboration with Frederik Pohl has been described as “the finest science fiction collaborating team in history.” Together they wrote seven novels and more than thirty short stories. Among their works are such classics as Wolf bane, Gladiator-at-Law and The Space Merchants, which has been translated into more than thirty-five languages and has appeared on most lists of the most important science fiction novels ever written.
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Gladiator-At-Law Page 20