F Paul Wilson - LaNague 02

by Wheels Within Wheels (v5. 0)

  “Get to the point.”

  “I am: your grandfather – a most persuasive man – talked Junior and his wife into cloning a child from Junior. I helped them arrange it.” He paused. Then, regretfully: “You are that child.”

  “But I’m female. Junior Finch was male.” The blaster did not waver. “A clone is an exact genetic duplicate.”

  “Surely you know that a female can be cloned from a male. All that needs to be done is to discard the Y chromosome and duplicate the already existing X. That’s basic genetics. They decided on a female clone to head off any possible future suspicions. A male would grow up to look exactly like its donor, and if anyone ever raised the question, it would take only a simple chromosome test to put Junior in jail and you in a molecular dissociation chamber. There are laws against clones, remember? A female was safer.”

  Jo lowered the blaster. She believed him. The same instinct that had told her he was lying before, now told her that Old Pete was telling the truth. And it fit. It explained a number of things, especially the awe she seemed to inspire in the Vanek – they had recognized her for what she was.

  Jo was inspiring a little awe in herself right now. She should be reeling, numb, crushed, shattered. But she wasn’t. She felt strangely aloof from the revelation, as if Old Pete were talking about someone else.

  “I’ve kept this from you all along,” he was saying. “I never wanted you to know. When I went, I was going to take it with me since Junior’s death left me the only one alive who knew. Even the technicians who did the cloning never knew whose cells they were working with.”

  “Why would you keep that from me?”

  “Because I didn’t see any purpose being served by telling you that you’re not a real person under the law. I didn’t know how you’d react to being a clone… that knowledge could destroy someone. Don’t you see? Junior Finch isn’t dead. He’s you – and you’re Junior Finch.”

  Jo answered without hesitation, her voice tranquil and full of confidence. “No. I’m Josephine Finch. I always have been and always will be. Junior Finch lies buried out there. Josephine Finch will go on living as she always has – as Josephine Finch.”

  It was a declaration of identity that brought Old Pete to his feet and made his face light with relief. Jo knew who she was and intended to remain who she was, no matter what her origins. He stepped toward her, falteringly, until he stood before her.

  Placing his arms on her shoulders, he said, “I’m proud of you… Josephine.”

  She dropped the blaster and hugged him. She wanted to speak, wanted to tell him how glad she was that his only crime was trying to protect her, but her larynx was frozen. She could only squeeze his thin old body very hard.

  Old Pete understood and held her until his arms ached. Then he pushed her to arm’s length.

  “Can we be friends now?”

  Jo nodded, smiled, then began to laugh. Old Pete joined her and only the return of Larry and his bed prevented them from breaking into tears.

  “What’s so funny?” he asked. His voice sounded stronger than before. “And what are you doing here, Pete?”

  Jo waited until the bed had moved back into its old position, then sat on it next to Larry.

  “He came to see if we needed any help,” she said with a smile.

  “Well, we do. We’ve got to put some distance between Proska and us–”

  “No,” she said. “He’s dead. The Vanek killed him.” She then went on to tell Larry and Old Pete about Proska’s blackmail scheme against deBloise.

  “What a totally vile, amoral character!” Old Pete said when she was finished.

  “Almost as bad as deBloise,” Jo replied coldly. “He sent Proska to Danzer, then used my dead father’s name to further his filthy career.”

  She realized she still thought of Junior Finch as her father, and no doubt always would. And someday, she would explain it all to Larry. But now was certainly not the time.

  “But, Jo,” Larry said. “A Vanek committed the actual murder.”

  “He did the right thing.” Her voice was soft now. “I’d want the same for myself… you don’t know what it was like. The Vanek did the right thing for Proska, too. But the deBloise account stays open.”

  “He’s not even on Jebinose,” Old Pete said. “Left for Fed Central yesterday. I heard it on the vid while I was getting dressed earlier.”

  “DeBloise is finished already,” Larry said. “At least he is if what Proska told you about the recording is true.”

  “It’s true. There was no reason for him to lie to me. He said the original would go to the Federation ethics committee if ‘anything suspicious’ happened to him. When the news of his death is released, I’m sure the person to whom he entrusted the recording will find the circumstances sufficiently suspicious to warrant its forwarding to the committee.” Her smile was grim. “It should arrive within the next standard day. And that should put an end to deBloise’s career.”

  “Well, that’s fine,” Old Pete observed testily, “and it’s well deserved, and it’s about time. But it doesn’t do anything for the purpose for which we all became involved in this mess. What’s there to keep the rest of the Restructurists from carrying through with the Haas plan, whatever it is?”

  “That may not be a problem any more,” Jo said, her smile brightening. “I’ll know for sure after I make a single call.”

  She went to the vidphone by the bed and asked to be connected with the Jebinose brokerage house, galactic stocks division.

  “At this hour of the morning?” Larry asked.

  Old Pete explained: “The Galactic Board never closes, Larry; and on a sparsely populated planet like Jebinose, there’s usually only one office dealing with galactic stocks. So, to take orders from all over the planet, they have to stay open ’round the clock. The younger brokers usually get stuck with the night watch.”

  “But what’s all this got to do with deBloise and Haas?”

  “I haven’t the faintest idea,” Old Pete said with a shrug.

  “You will,” Jo said as she waited for a connection. “I’ll explain it all just as soon as I get a few quotes.”

  A youngish male face appeared on the screen. “Galactic stocks division,” he muttered wearily.

  “Good morning,” Jo said with as much pleasantness as she could muster. “I’ve decided to buy stock in a couple of companies and would like to know the current selling price.”

  “Surely. Which ones are you interested in?”

  “Fairleigh and Opsal.”

  The broker’s hand had been reaching for the computer terminal built into his desktop with the intention of punching in the company names. Jo’s words arrested the motion. He smiled wanly. “You and everybody else.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that it seems like half of Occupied Space wants to buy shares in those two companies. I’ve been trying to beam in a bid all night and I can’t even get through!”

  “Why the sudden interest?”

  “It started as an unsubstantiated report by one of the news services that Fairleigh had tapped a lode of natural Leason crystals and that Opsal would soon be coming out with the most revolutionary antibiotic since penicillin. When the companies confirmed, the Galactic Board began to go crazy. Everybody wants to get in on the ground floor. Let’s face it, Fairleigh will be able to cut its production costs by a half – it’s going to have the peristellar drive field pretty much to itself for a while. And Opsal’s new product is going to make hundreds of other antibiotics obsolete.”

  “May I leave a buy order with you?”

  “Yes,” he sighed, “but I don’t think I’ll be able to do anything for you until the stocks split – which I expect to happen any minute.”

  “How about Teblinko?”

  “Down. Way down.”

  “And Stardrive?”

  “Same story. A lot of people are trying to dump their Stardrive and Teblinko for Fairleigh and Opsal. As a matter of fact, the whole
Star Ways family is being hurt by this. Now, how many shares did you want to–”

  “Thank you,” Jo interjected with a pleased smile. “You’ve been most helpful.” She abruptly broke the connection and the broker’s startled visage faded from the screen.

  “What was that all about?” Larry asked.

  Old Pete shook his head in admiration. “My boy, you’ve just seen the largest conglomerate in Occupied Space knocked on its ear! And your lady friend here is the one responsible for the whole thing!”

  “I had a lot of help from Andy… couldn’t have done it without him, in fact.”

  Larry struggled to a sitting position. “Now wait a minute! Why does everybody seem to know what’s going on here except me? And how did Andy get involved?”

  Jo slipped into the chair next to the vidphone. “I said I’d explain, so let’s start with the Restructurists. The main thrust of all their activities and all their rhetoric is to get the Federation into the free market and start exercising some controls on the interstellar economy – that’s where real power lies. But the LaNague Charter prevents the Federation from doing anything of the sort. So, the Restructurists must find a way to nullify the charter, and the only way to do that is to activate the emergency clause.”

  “If you remember your Federation history, Larry,” Old Pete added, “that’s the clause that temporarily voids the entire charter and thus all the limits on the Federation as a government. LaNague disowned it, even though it was designed to be activated only in times of threat to the Fed and its member planets; he wanted no emergency powers at all and fought tooth and nail against the clause. But he was ignored and it was tacked on against his protests.”

  “I vaguely remember learning something about that once,” Larry said, “but it’s not exactly recent history.”

  “Maybe not,” Jo replied, “but it’s very important history to the Restructurists. They’ve had their eyes on the emergency clause for a long time – it’s the one weak spot in the charter. And this time they figured they’d found the way to get to it. The Haas warp gate was going to be the trigger to activate the emergency clause.”

  She leaned forward and alternated her gaze between Larry and Old Pete. “Now comes the tricky part. DeBloise and his circle were pouring enormous amounts of money into the warp gate and pushing Haas to market it prematurely – before the final improvements which would have made it a truly revolutionary product. No intelligent investor would do such a thing; it was financial suicide. And since deBloise is anything but a fool, I could interpret the situation only one way: the Restructurists wanted the gate to be a tremendous commercial failure.

  “Why would they want to do that? It baffled me until two things clicked: Haas’s statement about military contracts and Old Pete’s joking reference to the Tarks. That’s when I knew what deBloise was up to.”

  “I think I’m beginning to see,” said Old Pete with a slow smile.

  “I’m not!” Larry snapped. “What have Tarks and warp gates got to do with the Federation charter?”

  “The Tarks are on their way to becoming a big problem,” Jo explained. “There are numerous areas of conflict between Terran and Tarkan interests, and the list lengthens each year. Keeping that in mind, and considering the potential military uses of the gate in a wartime situation, you can see what a perfect lever it could be against the emergency clause.

  “Let me give you the scenario as I believe it was planned. DeBloise and the other Restructurists involved were going to push the gate onto the market prematurely and wait for the inevitable: Star Ways would drop the price on its warp unit and suck off most of Haas’s potential customers. When the Haas company collapsed, SW would make a nice offer to lease production rights to the gate – an offer that would make Haas richer than he’d ever dreamed. But Denver Haas, like a spoiled child, would take his ball and go home.

  “That’s when the deBloise circle would leap into action. They’d rush before the various defense committees and claim that continued sale and development of the warp gate was an essential preparation against the inevitable day when the Federation clashes violently with the Tarkan Empire.

  They’d claim that unregulated competition was depriving the Federation of the gate and would demand invocation of the emergency clause in order to intervene against SW and save the gate.

  “It would be difficult to oppose them if they managed to generate enough fear. Not only would they be screaming ‘security,’ but they’d be painting the emotional picture of a huge conglomerate destroying a tiny company and the entire Federation suffering as a result of it. I’m sure they’d have got some sort of economic control out of it.”

  “And that would have been the beginning of the end,” Old Pete said.

  “Right. So I took aim at the one variable they figured to be a constant – Star Ways. Conglomerates are less susceptible to changes in the market, but they’re by no means immune. With Andy Tella’s help, I was able to put a few dents in two of SW’s major subsidiaries. There’s no way it can wage a successful price war against Haas now.”

  “That’s all fine and good,” Larry mused, “but without you the gate would have been lost. That doesn’t say much for the free market.”

  “It says that the market deplores stupidity!” Old Pete replied in a loud voice. “It would be damn stupid for anyone to push the gate onto the market before the final refinements were perfected. Anyone with the idea of profiting from an investment would have waited. You forget – deBloise wanted the gate to flop; his profit was to be political, not financial.

  “But enough of this talk. It’s all worked out for the best. The Federation charter is safe, the warp gate will be on the market when we need it, and a certain murderer has received a long-delayed sentence. I think we should celebrate!”

  “Not yet,” Jo said, her facial muscles tightening and her eyes going crystalline. “Not until I’ve personally seen Elson deBloise thrown out of the Federation.”

  “You’re not going without me!” Old Pete said.

  Epilogue

  THEY ARRIVED AT FED CENTRAL just in time. The ethics committee had not delayed a moment after receiving Proska’s package of damning proof. Its members confronted deBloise with the evidence that he was directly responsible for the murder of another man in order to further his own political career.

  DeBloise, of course, denied everything, calling it a plot instigated by the various anti-Restructurist factions within the Federation. The ethics committee was unmoved and decided that the evidence would be presented to the entire General Council at its next session. DeBloise asked, and was granted, permission to address the Council before the charges and evidence were presented.

  Jo and Old Pete arrived in time to catch the tail end of his speech:

  “…that this is not government! We have tried to demonstrate this fact to you, but all in vain. We have tried for years, for centuries, to open your eyes, but you refuse to see. You refuse to see the chaos of the non-system of non-government in which you dwell. We have tried to bring order to this near-anarchy but you have repeatedly refused it.

  “And now…”

  He let those two words hang in the air. He was using his considerable oratory talents to the fullest, knowing his performance was being recorded, knowing it would be played and replayed on vid news all over Occupied Space.

  “And now you have stooped to smearing my reputation! Do you really believe that the other progressive members of this body would accept the trumped-up charges against me as true? They are not fools! They recognize a cynical plot when they see one! We have caucused for days, we of the Restructurist movement, and after much soul searching and heated debate, after innumerable subspace messages to the planets we represent, a decision has been reached.”

  Again, he paused for full effect, then:

  “The worlds that stand shoulder-to-shoulder in the Restructurist movement have decided that they can no longer be a party to this insane chaos you call a Federation!

 
“Be it known,” he said into the rising tumult from the floor, “that we are seceding from the Federation – seceding from anarchy into order. Travel in the trade lanes through our sectors is here now restricted to ships of those companies that seek and receive prior approval from the new Restructurist Union. Unauthorized craft infringing upon our territories will be seized. We shall fire on sight at any craft bearing the emblem of the LaNague Federation. From this day on, we govern our own!”

  With a dramatic swirl of his cape, Elson deBloise descended from the podium and strode down the central aisle of the General Council assembly hail. As he moved, other Restructurists, Philo Barth and Doyl Catera among them, rose and followed him. The rest of the Council watched in stunned silence.

  Jo and Old Pete were standing by the main door to the assembly hall as deBloise passed. He glanced at Jo as he strode by but paid her no more attention than he did any other spectator. With the collapse of Teblinko and Star Drive on the stock exchange, his scheme to use the Haas gate against the Federation charter was voided; and with the delivery of Proska’s blackmail package to the ethics committee, his personal freedom, as well as his public career, were about to suffer a similar fate. A Restructurist-Federation split was the only way to salvage anything.

  And so he passed within a half-meter of Josephine Finch, never realizing that this tame-looking female had blasted all his plans, all his lifetime dreams of power to ruins. She was just another tourist and his glance flicked away as he went by.

  A vid reporter was scrambling around the antechamber to the assembly hall looking for reactions to this startling, historic announcement. He spied Jo and Old Pete and approached at a trot.

  “Pardon me,” he said breathlessly, “but I’d like to know what you think about the Restructurist secession.” He pointed the vid recorder plate at Old Pete. “Do you think there’s a chance of war?”