F Paul Wilson - LaNague 02

by Wheels Within Wheels (v5. 0)

  “You never know.” Her tone was serious.

  “Don’t be silly, Jo,” he laughed. “We may not be on the best terms with the Tarks – as a matter of fact, we’ve never been on good terms with those scoundrels – but there’s no such thing as a war in sight, despite the wails of the more panicky members of the Fed Assembly. And don’t go thinking of the Tarks as a potential market for the gate, either. They’ll buy one as a model, then pirate the design and build their own. The Tarks are a blind alley, I’m afraid.”

  “Perhaps you’re right. Anyway, on the deBloise end, I sent Larry to Jebinose to do some direct investigation on him. And while he’s there, I told him to look into my father’s death.”

  She watched Old Pete’s face closely for a reaction. She saw surprise and… was it fear?

  “Why Jebinose?” he said, the words coming in a rush. “I thought you’d send him to Fed Central. That’s where all deBloise’s machinations take place.”

  “Maybe he’s more careless at home.”

  Old Pete suddenly seemed anxious to leave the room. “Let me know the very instant he turns up anything.”

  “Oh, you can count on that,” Jo replied in a low voice as the door closed behind him. She’d never seen Old Pete so upset. What secret lay dormant on Jebinose that he feared disturbing?

  Never mind that now. Larry would find out. Right now another part of her brain was screaming for attention. Something Old Pete had said before had closed a circuit… something about a war with the Tarks when they were talking about Haas and his –

  She leaped to her feet and began to pace the floor. She knew deBloise’s plan. All the pieces that hadn’t seemed to fit had suddenly fallen together. And the Tarks were the key. Old Pete’s reference to them had brought a vast conspiratorial vista into sharp focus and Jo was struck by the genius and delicacy and deviousness of what she saw. She was terrified, too.

  The entire interstellar free market was threatened.

  She pressed a stud on her desktop. “Find Bill Grange – tell him to drop whatever he’s doing and get up to my office immediately!”

  The market. To some people it was the place where stocks and bonds were traded; to others it was the local food store. But these formed only a minuscule part of the market. For the market was life itself, and the free market was free life, the active expression of volitional existence. It was billions of billions of daily transactions: the purchase of a loaf of bread, the selling of an asteroid mining firm along with all its equipment and planetoid leases; every interaction and transaction – be it social, moral, or monetary-between every sentient being in Occupied Space added to its endless flux and flow.

  The free market was neither good nor evil, selfish nor generous, moral nor immoral. It was the place where rational minds met for a free exchange of goods, services, ideas. It played no favorites and bore no grudges. It had its own ecology, regulated by the inexorable laws of supply and demand, which were in turn determined by the day-to-day activities of every intelligent creature who interacted with another intelligent creature. If demand for a species of product or service dried up, that species became extinct. When new demands arose, new species sprung into being to satisfy them.

  The market’s urge toward a balanced ecology was indomitable. It could be warped, skewed, stretched, contracted, puffed up, and deflated by those who wanted to control it, and thereby control its participants; but not for too long. It always sought and found its own level. And if manipulators – invariably governmental – prevented it from finding its true level for too long, a great mass of people suffered when it finally burst through the dams erected against it.

  LaNague had taught the outworlds that bitter lesson. But three hundred years had passed since then and it was quite possible that history was ready to set the stage for a repeat performance. The Restructurists were fortunate to have a remarkable man such as Elson deBloise at their head in their drive for control of the Federation and, from there, control of the market.

  But the market had Josephine Finch. The market was inviolate as far as she was concerned. It was an integral part of human existence, especially Jo’s existence. Her professional life was spent in taking the pulse and prognosticating the course of the market and she would do her best to see that no one meddled with it.

  Right now, the only way she could see to put a stop to deBloise was to cripple Star Ways, the biggest interstellar conglomerate in Occupied Space. Hardly a realistic option, but it was all she had.

  Bill Grange was IBA’s resident expert on Star Ways and his knowledge would be a critical factor in Jo’s plan. Of course, it would save her an intolerably large amount of time and effort if she could go up to someone in charge of Star Ways and tell him that a monstrous political plot was afoot and that his company was going to be used as a scapegoat. But you couldn’t do that with a conglomerate, you couldn’t deal person-to-person with it. So Jo would have to induce co-operation from Star Ways; she’d have to jab at it, stab at it, slice away at its appendages until it was forced to do her bidding. And she’d relish every minute of it.

  For there was no love lost between Josephine Finch and the interstellar conglomerates. They disturbed her sense of fair play. It was not that they broke any of the rules of the free market – they sold to those who wanted to buy and bought from those who wished to sell. But there was something about them that… offended her.

  The conglomerates were faceless monoliths. Nobody seemed to be in charge. There were boards of directors and committees all composed of people; they hired and directed the work of other people; products were turned out which were sold to still other people. Human beings were intimately involved in every function of the conglomerates, yet the final result was a structure devoid of all human qualities. It became a blind, impersonal leviathan lumbering through the market, obliterating anything that got in its way – not through technical skill or marketing expertise, but through sheer size.

  And it was not size itself that Jo found offensive, although that was part of the problem. Despite the fact that people made all the decisions for them, their huge size prevented their humanity from showing through. Smaller companies each seemed to have their own personality. Conglomerates strode through the market, the testing ground for all human endeavor, like giant automatons.

  Yes, they were huge, and their size and diversification inured them and insulated them from immediate changes in the market. But no insulation is perfect. The conglomerates were not invincible. If a subsidiary company was ailing, there was a great financial pool from which it could draw. But there were limits to any pool. And if more than one subsidiary were in trouble…

  Leviathan could be wounded and caused to retreat if attacked at multiple vulnerable sites.

  Jo only hoped that Star Ways had a few vulnerable sites.

  The door opened and Bill Grange walked through. He was tall, gaunt, graying, fifty-four years old – he liked to say that he and IBA had been born the same year. He had been with the firm nearly a decade when Joe, Sr., died and had stayed on through all the turmoil that followed. He had been neither for nor against Josephine when she took over IBA; all he wanted was someone in charge who could get the company going again. If she could do it, he was all for her. If she loused it up, he’d walk. As it stood now, there wasn’t much he wouldn’t do for Josephine Finch.

  “Something wrong, Jo? The message sounded urgent.”

  “I need some information on Star Ways,” she said, taking her place behind the desk again, “and I need it now.”

  Grange visibly relaxed at this statement and took a seat. He probably knew more about Star Ways than many of its board members. He knew it from dealing with it on a daily basis in the current market, and he knew it from a historical perspective. The conglomerate was centuries old, born in a small company on old Earth celled Helene Technical, which happened to develop the first commercial interstellar warp unit. The old name was quickly scrapped for the more picturesque Star Ways, and the new company sever
ed its ties with Earth, relocating on the planet Tarvodet – a tiny world but one that afforded mammoth tax advantages.

  It became a huge, successful corporation. Through imaginative marketing, tricky financial maneuvers, and the old tried-and-true business practice of hiring the best and making it worth their while to stay on, SW moved into other fields, buying up subsidiary companies and becoming the first interstellar conglomerate. Other conglomerates had developed since, but Star Ways Corporation was still the largest.

  “What do you want to know? I could talk all day.”

  “I’m sure you could. But I want to know where, in light of what’s going on in the current market, SW can be hurt. If it can be hurt at all.”

  Grange’s eyebrows lifted. “Hurt Star Ways, eh? Not so hard these days as it might have been when you arrived on the scene.”

  “Oh, really?”

  “Yeh. SW’s mortgaged to the hilt and overextended in all quarters. It needs some new blood on those boards, and when the financial reports come out” – he chuckled – “there’ll be a lot of screaming from the stockholders.

  “I wasn’t aware of this.”

  “It’s not public knowledge yet, but that’s what our informants tell us. And I’ve seen it coming for years. But don’t worry. Star Ways will pull through just fine – minus some dead wood at the top.”

  Jo mulled this over. It was encouraging. “Give me some specific weak points.”

  “I can think of three right off the top of my head: General Trades, Stardrive, and Teblinko. General Trades has always generated a lot of income on luxury items, but has lately run into hordes of competitors and lost part of its share of the market.

  “Stardrive is a different story. That’s their tube drive subsidiary – SW’s oldest subsidiary, as a matter of fact. When they picked that up, they were able to outfit ships for both interstellar and peristellar travel – that’s when they really started to grow. Stardrive Inc. has always had competitors, but lately a little company by the name of Fairleigh Tubes has been giving it a real run for its money.” He grinned. “Does that name sound familiar?”

  Jo nodded and returned his smile. “Certainly does.” Fairleigh Tubes was an IBA account.

  “Then we come to Teblinko Corporation, the pharmaceutical firm Star Ways acquired a few years back – that’s been a real problem lately. They had to pour a lot of money into it to get it moving, and it’s only now just starting to pay off. Once Teblinko starts consolidating its gains, it’ll be less crucial to SW’s over-all profit picture; but right now it’s touch and go.

  “If you’re still looking for more cases, I can–”

  Jo held up her hand. “That’ll do for now, I think.” She paused. “Teblinko’s biggest competitor is Opsal Pharmaceuticals, right?”

  Grange nodded. “We did some work for them in the past.”

  “How come they’re not with us now?”

  “Don’t need us. They’re doing fine, so we put them in the inactive file.” He grinned again. “But with the way Teblinko is moving up, I expect to be hearing from them soon.”

  Jo nodded absently, making mental notes.

  “What’s this all about, if I might ask?”

  Jo considered bringing Grange in on it, then vetoed the idea. If she told him what deBloise was planning, he’d think she was paranoid; and if she explained what she wanted to do to Star Ways, he’d be fully convinced that she had crossed the line into overt schizophrenia. No, better keep it to herself.

  “Just working out a theoretical problem,” she told him. “And you’ve been a big help. Can I call on you again if I need some more information?”

  “Of course,” Grange replied, taking the hint and rising. He was too canny to be fooled by Jo’s lame explanation – you weren’t told to drop everything and get up to the head office because of a theoretical problem – but he was sure he’d be filled in on all the details if and when he came to be involved.

  He turned at the door. “It occurs to me that you might not have a certain factor in your theoretical problem, a factor that has the potential to put Fairleigh way ahead of Stardrive: the Rako deal. If that ever comes through–”

  Jo’s eyes widened. “Rako! Of course! You know, I’d forgotten all about that. Thanks, Bill.”

  When he was gone, Jo ordered the complete files on Fairleigh Tubes and Opsal Pharmaceuticals. She also asked the same questions she had asked Bill Grange. The information came up. It agreed with Grange that General Trades and Teblinko were the weak links in SW’s chain of subsidiaries. But Stardrive, the subsidiary Grange had emphasized, was conspicuous by its absence.

  Jo wasn’t surprised. Bill Grange approached the market with an intuitive sense that could not be programmed into any machine, no matter how sophisticated.

  The records department informed her that the Fairleigh and Opsal files were now keyed to her viewer and she could activate them anytime during the next two hours. This was part of the IBA security routine. Client files were available only to authorized personnel on specific request and only for a strictly limited time period. Most contained sensitive and confidential information that would be invaluable to a competitor.

  Current information on Opsal was scanty. It was a reputable firm with a long-standing history of high quality pharmaceutical production. Teblinko was coming up in the field and pushing Opsal, but the older company was maintaining its lead by virtue of its superior distribution system.

  Not much help there.

  She moved on to Fairleigh. The peristellar drive tube market was a stable one. The proton-proton drive had remained the best real-space propulsion method for centuries and the Leason crystal had remained the only practical lining for the drive tubes for an equal amount of time. Emmett Leason, an extra-terrestrial geologist, first identified the crystal on one of the three tiny moons of Tandem. When he could not determine the melting point of the crystal by conventional means, he knew he had something.

  Someone eventually devised a means of coating the inner surface of a proton-proton drive tube with the crystals and found that the new lining prevented the tube from vaporizing as had all the previous prototypes. An experimental means of transportation suddenly became the norm.

  Leason crystals became a hot item among prospectors but it was soon discovered that natural deposits were rare. While these were being mined down to bare rock, the laboratory boys were hard at work developing a synthetic substitute. They were successful, but the man-made crystals were hellishly expensive.

  And that was how the drive tube market stood. The patents on the synthetic process were long defunct and anyone who wanted to make Leason crystals was welcome to do so. But that didn’t make the process any cheaper. As the human race expanded and colonized more new worlds, the demand for p-p tubes grew steadily, and more and more companies entered the market. Still, no one was able to reduce significantly the cost factor in synthesizing the crystals, so they remained the major contributor to the tubes’ high price tag. It was thus the dream of every company to stumble upon a mother lode planet of natural crystals.

  Fairleigh had found such a planet: Rako. But there was a hitch. As a matter of fact, there were a number of hitches.

  One of them was the Tarkan Empire.

  Jo frowned. The Tarks were popping up more and more lately. There would no doubt be a clash someday – a big one. But not in the near future. The Tarkan Empire was ruthless and active and probably took the loose, formless structure of the Federation as a sign of weakness. One day it would overstep its boundaries to test the Federation’s mettle. The empire’s economy was rigidly controlled and centralized and such economies needed periodic armed conflicts to rejuvenate themselves. Free markets tended toward the other extreme: wars meant killing, and killing meant a reduction in the overall total of available customers.

  She activated her intercom. “Get hold of Mr. Balaam at Fairleigh for me.”

  The smiling, distinguished face of Harold Balaam soon filled her vid screen. He had held the pre
sident’s seat of the drive tube company, which kept its main office on Ragna, for the past decade. He and Jo enjoyed an excellent working relationship.

  After the usual amenities, Jo asked, “How’s the Rako situation going, Hal?”

  The smile faded. “Don’t ask. It’s costing us a fortune and we’re getting nowhere. I’m afraid I’m going to be forced to pull the team if we don’t start getting some results soon.”

  “Anything in particular holding you up?”

  “Yes. The Rakoans themselves.” He gave her a brief summary of the situation.

  “Sounds like you need a public relations man out there.”

  Balaam grunted. “Know of a PR company that has any experience with degenerate aliens?”

  “Not exactly,” Jo laughed, “but if I can have an authorization from you, I may be able to send somebody out there who can help.”

  Balaam considered this for a few seconds, then nodded. “I think we can commission a trouble shooter through you. You haven’t steered us wrong yet… and if you come through on this, you can name your fee.”

  “The usual contingency percentage will be fine. Just beam the authorization over as soon as possible and I’ll get right to work on it.”

  When the screen was blank, Jo leaned back in her chair. She needed someone to send to Rako immediately, someone with good judgment, a quick mind, and the ability to improvise. That was Larry. But he was on Jebinose and so she’d have to settle for whoever was next in line. Perhaps “settle” wasn’t fair. Larry had the utmost confidence in Andy and that should be sufficient endorsement for anyone.

  She hoped he was available. She was going to send him out to the far edge of the human sector of the galaxy.

  deBloise

  WHEN THE WINDOWS in his a corner office were set at maximum transparency, the view was impressive. Copia, the capital city of Jebinose, was a showcase for the planet. The average outworld could claim one large city and it was usually located near its major – and sometimes only – spaceport. Into this city was poured all the technical skills and available funds the inhabitants could muster. Some cynics denounced the efforts as hypocritical window dressing, but to most inhabitants of the planet it was very important to put on a pretty face for visitors, important to leave an impression of prosperity and well-being.