“Start feeling around and see if you can’t get that young Khadra fella to head it up. I knew him when he was a patrolman on Beta. Got a good head on his shoulders.”
“I’ll do it,” Fane said, “but I still think you’re painting a pretty gloomy picture.”
“Maybe I am,” Rainsford admitted, “but if Zarathustra does turn into a sinkhole populated by riffraff and cutthroats, it sure won’t be because I didn’t try to head it off before it got out of hand. For one thing, this government couldn’t stand the blow to public confidence if things go to Nifflheim and we get another dose of Martial Law from the Navy.”
“He’s right, Max,” Brannhard said. “The same thing happened on Fenris. The Chartered Fenris Company went off half cocked with colonization, then found they couldn’t turn a profit. When the Company went bust, it stretched the Colonial Government too thin. There weren’t enough stabilizing influences on the economy to keep it from getting lopsided. A lot of rip-offs and power grabs here and there. In no time at all the only people left on the planet were about ten percent of the original population—they were the only ones tough enough and smart enough to stay alive.”
Chapter Twelve
Christiana Stone lay face down at an angle across the bed, sobbing, and thrumming her fists noiselessly on the sylkon coverlet. In one fist was a crumpled piece of message printout.
“Damn him! Damn him! Damn him! Why did he have to go and die? Before I could keep him out of jail.”
Coming to Zarathustra had been the only way out that she could see at the time. That was all right. But she knew now that she had failed to do her homework when she refused to go to work for Ivan Bowlby and insisted on striking out on her own. Bowlby controlled all the prostitution in Mallorysport and he became very cranky if anyone tried to buck into his monopoly. He had systematically terrorized her with rough trade and dried up the rest of her business, forcing her to drain away what little assets were left after buying passage from Terra, and grandiosely sworn, “So long as I’m alive, that broad will never turn another trick on Zarathustra.”
Now, when she was broke, beaten, and demoralized completely, the news came that her father had died. The father she idolized—the father she couldn’t bear to tell that she knew about his embezzlements—the father who had been drinking himself into an early grave with guilt—gone.
The communication screen exploded with a burst of colors, then steadied into the image of Captain Ahmed Khadra.
George Lunt made a minor adjustment of the screen at his end. “You’re going to have to get yourself out here, Captain. I need you.”
“But, George,” Khadra protested, “my detached leave won’t be up for two more weeks.”
“Mmmmm,” George said, “I know. I don’t want to discuss it on screen, but how soon can you get yourself back over here and go to work for me?”
Khadra looked pained. “Well, Sandra and I are about to set the date. What’s the rush?”
“I should think you would,” George Lunt grumped. “A year you’ve been engaged to that girl and I’ve barely gotten a tap of work out of you the whole time.”
“I come from a very formal family,” Ahmed said stiffly. “We wanted to wait till Holloway Station is a little more civilized before I drag her out to live in the bush. Besides, Grego keeps wheedling at her to stay on ‘just a little while longer.’ “
“No more frittering, Ahmed,” George said, “and no more giving in to slick talk from Victor Grego. I’m going to need you. Now! I’ll get a bungalow up for you and Sandra right away—though Ghu knows how I’ll justify it in the budget. You get your affairs in Mallorysport wrapped up. I want you, bride, and baggage out here bright and early no later than a week from Tuesday.”
“That’s not much time,” Khadra protested.
“Sure it is,” George said. “You can take your honeymoon on the installment plan.”
The Right Reverend Father Thomas Aquinas Gordon leaned forward in his chair and pushed the box of tissues across the desk. He thought to himself of the countless times he had done this drill before, although this was the first in his cool, quiet office in Junktown. The walls were a reassuring pastel tone and still smelled of newly applied vyathane spray coating.
“I didn’t know where else to turn,” Christiana said. She snatched two tissues from the box and blew her nose.
“You turned to the right place,” The Rev said. “There are things in life that you can control, child, and there are things you can’t. The things you can’t have to be carried as best you can—till you can get the upper hand on them.”
She dabbed at her eyes. “I feel better, already, just getting it all out and telling someone.”
The Rev nodded.
She had poured out the whole story to him, in a jumble of words and tears. The accidental discovery that her father was embezzling money from his company and using it to keep another woman and pay the gambling debts of the woman’s worthless brother, and Christiana’s inability to bring herself to tell him for fear it would completely break his spirit. She was certain that her fiance could be depended on for help. That had been young Rodney Schuyler of the shipping family—very old family, very wealthy family. He had proved his loyalty by breaking the engagement and dumping her. The only thing she could think of then had been to come out to Zarathustra, earn money as fast as she could— preferably in a way calculated to horrify Rodney—and try to get her father off Terra before the authorities caught up with him. If one could get off-planet, one’s chances of being extradited back to Terra for anything as piddling as grand theft were quite small.
Now it was all gone—all come to nothing. Ivan Bowlby had her blacklisted. Daddy was dead. What did it all mean?
“I just can’t see the use of going on,” she said.
The Rev leaned back in his chair. “I don’t imagine you can; and that’s understandable right now. I’m not going to give you any fancy advice about waiting for Almighty Intervention, but I will tell you this: in every disaster that happens to people no matter how overwhelming it seems at the time there is the seed of something you will find you want much more, something that is far more wonderful than what you seem to have lost. But, you gotta look for it.”
“But what am I going to do?” she sobbed.
“Well,” The Rev said, “this might be one hell of a good time to get a regular job and go straight. At least if you don’t like it, you can earn enough money to get off Zarathustra, and from what you tell me I don’t see that you’ve much chance of turning a sol any other way. Look—I bet you know how to run a processor—a data terminal—a transcriber deck—that sort of thing. Don’t you?”
She nodded.
The Rev spread his hands and smiled. “There you are. Get uptown and apply for work at every tall building you can find. You don’t belong down here, anyway.”
“… Ahmed has to go back out to Holloway Station,” Sandra Glenn finished. “In just over a week!”
“You’re going to get married right away and go with him, of course,” Grego said.
“Of course,” she replied.
“Mmmmm. You’d be crazy not to—the way that man worships you is beyond belief.” He paused. “But, then, you are a treasure, Sandra. I wonder why Major Lunt was so insistent.”
“Well!” Grego leaped to his feet. “I’ll tell Myra to take charge of all the details you want with the ceremony itself. I’ll plan the reception. I think we can do the whole thing here. How about Saturday afternoon, with the reception staggering on into the evening?”
“I’ll have to talk to Ahmed,” she said.
“Of course you will,” Grego agreed. “I want the two of you back here to have cocktails with me promptly at 1700. That’s the one time of day when I know where to lay my hands on anyone and everyone. We’ll get it all discussed and start the ball rolling. Now, we want to make a big bash out of this—”
“I’m not sure we can—” she started to interrupt.
Grego bent toward her and
smiled benignly. “—Afford it?” he said.
She nodded.
“The Company,” he said evenly, “will insist on paying all the bride’s expenses. That takes care of the reception, the entertainment, and practically all of it.”
“But—” she said.
“You see,” Grego said, “I am giving the bride away— heh, heh—and appropriate it is, too. Best damned Fuzzy sitter I ever had.” He rubbed his hands together. “Yes, yes. We’ll have all the Fuzzies in for it, too. And invite all the girls from the Company Executive Offices. Yes, yes. Some good-looking young women around this place will have an ameliorating effect on the dispositions of old coots like Ben Rainsford and me.”
By the end of breakfast the next morning, Victor Grego had amassed a hefty sheaf of notes. As he poured a second cup of coffee and lit a fresh cigarette, he riffled through them, looking for the must-do-right-now items he had underlined. On the communication screen across the breakfast room, Myra Fallada finished some notes on his instructions and pushed her pencil back to its roost in her elaborately curled white hair. Myra had been his secretary since he first came to Zarathustra.
“Oh, yes,” Grego said. “There won’t be time to have any invitations printed up and be certain that they get to all the guests at a decent time for them to reply. We’ll go ahead and do that, of course, as a matter of courtesy and etiquette, but I want you to take the guest list and program a reasonably flowery invitation into the computer so it will inform everyone by communication screen and log their replies. The caterer is going to be temperamental at best, given the short notice, so we’ll have to let him know how many to expect immediately.”
Myra ran the pencil in and out of her hair a couple of times as she braced for a reply. “Mister Grego,” she said, “this is more than any one person can manage—if I drop everything else, like—” she pursed her lips “—Company business, for example.”
Grego drew thoughtfully on his cigarette. “Yes, Myra. I know there’s a lot to do. Sandra can help a little—while she’s not with Diamond. No, that won’t do it. Listen, have we had any applications for office jobs lately?”
Myra consulted some clipped-together papers. “Yes,” she said. “Two yesterday.”
“Good,” Grego boomed. “Hire one of them this instant. That’ll give you a full-time assistant until we see the happy couple off to Beta. Also, you can spread around some of the detail work among the other workers in the office. After all this Company has weathered in the past year, I think we can cope with putting a large wedding together on short notice.”
Myra nodded and looked at him with half-closed eyes. “Yes, Mister Grego,” she said.
“That’s the stuff, Myra. I’ll be down in a half-hour. I’m going directly to the Conference Room for the department heads’ briefing, so I should be at my desk in less than ninety minutes.”
After the meeting, Grego was chatting in the corridor with his Construction Director.
“… So, by developing Company-owned real estate, we can head off some of the land grabbers and speculators, and still keep ourselves in an aggressive posture—profitably—as the largest builder on the planet.”
“I see what you mean, Don,” Grego replied. “It’s human nature. People will rent apartments and commercial space from us first if we have selection and price. Volume will give us the price by drying up supply to the smaller builders. It’ll keep them from snowballing things for a fast buck—like what happened out in Mortgageville.”
Leslie Coombes tugged gently at Grego’s sleeve. “Okay, Don,” Grego said. “Work up some presentations on specific projects and get back to me.”
Then he turned to Coombes. “What is it, Leslie?” he said.
“I’ve been looking at your ops sheet for this wedding reception, Victor. Did you know that Jerry Panoyian is listed as the caterer?”
“Of course I know it,” Grego said. “I specifically asked that he be the caterer.”
Coombes looked like he had just tasted something very sour. “But, Victor, surely you know he’s in very thick with all the underworld bigwigs.”
Grego nodded. “Um-hmm. I know that. But as far as the police can find out, he’s only involved in catering their social functions for them. That aspect of it is disturbing to me, I’ll admit, but he is the best caterer in all Mallorysport. And I want this to be a party to remember for some time to come. I want to have only the finest of everything, so that means we’ll be using Jerry Panoyian.”
He looked sideways at Coombes. “However, if it’ll make you feel better, I’ll have a couple plainclothes Company Policemen watch him from the moment he sets foot in Company House until he and his people have gone.”
“And count your silverware before you let them leave,” Coombes added.
Chapter Thirteen
Mr. Chief Justice Frederic Pendarvis stepped deftly to one side of his wife and presented her formally to the bride and groom—although they had met each other before the ceremony.
“I hope you will be as happy together as we have been,” she said, after shaking hands with both Ahmed and Sandra. Then she turned her gentle face toward her husband, with the soft light in Victor Grego’s living room catching her white hair with a halo-like glow, and smiled at him.
“Oh, Claudette,” Pendarvis said, “you’ll make these young people blush.”
“No one is ever embarrassed by love,” she chided him easily.
It was only fitting that Claudette and Frederic Pendarvis be the first to join the reception line. The newlyweds had chosen him to perform the ceremony, and Ben Rainsford was the only person in the room whose civil rank was higher.
They took their places alongside the bride and groom to greet the balance of the guests—a process which might occupy the rest of the afternoon, judging from the mob of people milling about the penthouse, the outdoor pavilion on the terrace, and the bars and buffet that had been set up outdoors in the shade of the north and east sides.
Next to join the line was Victor Grego, the host and the man who had given the bride away, looking as jolly as a character from a Dickens novel in his stand-up shirt collar and gray swallow-tail coat.
Properly, Ben Rainsford should have been in the reception line, too, as the ranking civil official, but he had begged off on the excuse that he had a sprained hand and that standing there for so long would make his “gimpy leg”—invented along with the sprained hand—start acting up.
Chief Earlie of the Mallorysport P.D. sloshed the ice around in his glass and remarked to his opposite number in the Company Police Force, “Y’know, Harry, if I was a crook this is the time I’d pick to stick up a bank.” He motioned to where the temporary coat rack in the penthouse foyer was festooned with a perfect jungle of pistol belts and berets, hung there by their owners whose ethics forbade them to drink while wearing those badges of office. “Why, I bet every senior cop in town is here this afternoon.”
With the skyrocketing population every peace officer in the city no longer had the luxury of putting on his tuxedo to attend a social event; they never knew when they might have to drop everything and jump into some crisis. And, most agencies had a current standing order to maintain a high visual profile to reassure the citizens that there was literally a policeman on every landing stage, esplanade, and escalator.
Harry Steefer nodded. “What I don’t get is why George Lunt didn’t come over for the wedding. He’s only three hours away—and he and Ahmed are pretty close. I mean, they go ‘way back—to when George was a lieutenant and Ahmed was a patrolman in the Constabulary.”
They were joined by a roundish man in khaki gabardines, holding his champagne glass gingerly, as though it might explode at any moment. “I don’t get that, either,” Max Fane said. With his free hand he tapped his nose. “This educated member of mine smells something odd about that. It’s not like George Lunt to throw his tail in the air that way—cancel Khadra’s leave—tell him to beat it back to Beta on the double. Something’s in the wind, if you ask
me.”
Harry Steefer shrugged. “‘Spose they might have made another big sunstone strike up in the Fuzzy Reservation? That would cause a lot of fuss and fury.”
“Oh, hell, no,” Fane said, waving his free hand in a gesture of dismissal. “George has an army of cops to take care of that—it’s just patrolling and keeping people out who don’t belong there. No, sir. Sumpin’s funny in the wind.”
Chief Earlie nodded. “I’ll admit I’m curious, too, Max, but that’s on Beta—three hours away from here. The rats down in Junktown are getting bolder; too many of them, now, to make a living off each other. They’re starting to drift up into the new city, in little knots of three and four. I’m handling double the number of robberies I was this time last year—and getting fewer arrests. That’s what I’m worried about. It looks like it’s going to get a lot worse before it gets any better, at least by the rate the population is rising.”
“You don’t think the immigrants are all criminals, do you?” Steefer said.
“Oh, of course not, Harry,” Chief Earlie said. “But, when you get a population boom on immigration, the rats always move in with the immigrants. We’ve all seen it before—if not when Mortgageville bloomed up out of the ground north of town eight or nine years ago—then someplace else. The rats come in their pockets, riding their coat-tails, and hiding under their hats. Lotta times, its the same rats that were living off them back home; when poor people pull up stakes and move on to try for something better, the rats pack their little rat carpet bags and go right along with them—like a cockleburr on a dog’s tail.” He stepped over to the east terrace’s portable bar—a painted white rattan affair—and handed his glass over to the liveried bartender.
Max Fane chuckled. “And that’s only the amateur rats, the professional rats can smell a compost heap of money halfway across the galaxy. Why, they’re practically waiting for the marks at the spaceport when they arrive—with rigged rat card games, little rat shylocks, and little rat swindlers with mustaches.”
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