Trojan Orbit

by Mack Reynolds

  “What is my business?”

  “Cooling off the winchells, Sol. And that’s all your business. That should have been clear to you from the first.”

  Sol Ryan, absent his charisma, strode in fury to the other’s desk and pounded the flat of his right palm on it. “Damn you, Moore,” he shrilled. “I’m not a child. I knew the families would take their cut from the contracts, as a result of their investments. It didn’t seem overly important. If they didn’t, the older, established aerospace corporations would have. It’s all part of contracting, or so I told myself. And the families are in legitimate enterprise now. But this! The whole project, the whole dream, has been subverted, betrayed!”

  The other said disgustedly, “You never knew what the whole dream was, Sol. You got to believing your own bullshit.”

  The glare intensified. “I’ll expose the whole, perverted story!”

  Moore shook his head. “Forget about it, Sol. Don’t worry. You’ll be taken care of. But meanwhile…” He looked at Joe Evola, who had recovered from the cavalier manner in which the indignant figurehead of the L5 Project had sent him staggering. The gun had disappeared back into his clothing. “Joe,” Moore said, “have one of the boys take Doctor Ryan back to his living quarters. Have two or three men put in with him. Sol is, from now on, incommunicado. He’s devoting himself to some special research or something. Ron can figure the press releases out. Nobody sees him without my okay. Nobody but me. Got it?”

  “Sure, Al,” Joe said, advancing toward the shocked scientist. “Come on, Sol.” He took the other by the arm.

  Ryan flung him off. “Are you mad?” he demanded of Moore, his breath coming so hard he was panting.

  Bruce Carter said ironically, “Nice to see you, Dr. Ryan. It brings to mind something you told me the first time we met. Which in turn brings to mind a short verse I remember from school days. It involves three unanswerable questions. The title was, Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?”

  Ryan, looking as though he was in half-shock, stared at him. “That’s from the Roman poet Juvenal,” he got out, as though not quite able to comprehend what was going on, certainly not this meaningless diversion. “It means, Who’s to Watch Over the Watchers?”

  “That’s right,” Carter said, his voice still ironic. “You told me that you of New Kingston University were watching over the L5 Project, whips in hand, to prevent hanky-panky. The verse goes.

  “Who’s to watch over the watchers,

  Those who would carry the lashes?

  What was the tune that Joshua played?

  Who hauls the janitor’s ashes?”

  Annette chuckled softly, “Comrade, comrade,” she murmured. “Touché.” She sank into a chair on the other side of Rick Venner.

  Bruce said musingly, now looking at Moore, “So far as the second question is concerned, it’s hard to say just who is going to be given the credit for wearing Joshua’s robes and calling the tune that crumbles the walls of the L5 Corporation. But crumble they will. This particular Jericho is past due for a fall.”

  Al Moore ignored him and said to Joe Evola, “Get Sol out of here; he looks sick.”

  Indeed he did. The eyes of Sol Ryan were not a well man’s now. He had seemed to collapse inwardly. He said, in a queer, detached voice, “Yes, yes. I’ve got to think about this. Have got to…” His sentence dribbled away, as though he wasn’t quite sure what it was he had to do.

  Joe took him firmly by the arm and led him through the door into the outer office. In moments, the sergeant had returned and assumed his former stance. He’d obviously turned the task over to a subordinate.

  Al Moore had his eyes fixed on the relaxed Annette Casey, as though not quite sure what to make of her.

  She said easily, “Drinking this early in the day? How about one for me, Ron?” She brought her easygoing attention to Al Moore. “Somebody’s got to keep up the front, Uncle Al. Run interference between Sol and the hundred and one jokers who are always trying to get to him.”

  He still scrutinized her.

  She sighed and said, “You should’ve let me further into this sooner. Ryan was obviously a puppet, behind that boyish enthusiasm, charming everybody and his cousin. But there has to be somebody pulling the strings. And whoever’s doing it ought to know what’s going on on the stage.”

  “Bitch,” Pete Kapitz muttered.

  Al Moore nodded finally. “Wizard,” he said. “You continue on the job. You’re still Doctor Solomon Ryan’s secretary.”

  Ron Rich brought her a tall glass. “Scotch and water?” he said.

  “Thanks, Ron.” She took it and settled back into her chair, her eyes going from one to the other of the room’s occupants. “What in the hell’s going on?” she said.

  Al Moore, thrown off by the scene with Ryan, scowled and took another pull at his own drink. His eyes, now alcohol-dull, narrowed and he brought himself back to his earlier nasty frame of mind. He said, “Our chum-pals here were trying to throw some monkey wrenches in the works. I was putting them straight on a few things.”

  “Such as the real plan behind the space colonization plan,” Bruce Carter said. In actuality, he was surprised at his own coolness. He had few illusions about his chances in the immediate future. But somehow he was finding himself able to continue his role as freelance writer as though expecting nothing untoward was going to happen, or could happen.

  Moore surveyed him contemptuously. “Yeah, and you might as well sit in on this, tesora mio,” he said to Annette. “Some of it’s probably new to you, as well. I was about to point out to Carter and friends that there’s as much to be made in the collapse of an empire as there is in the building.”

  “I think that Rhett Butler made the point in Gone With the Wind,” Adam Bloch said. “But he was talking about the American South and the carpetbaggers who savaged it. What are you talking about, Mr. Moore?”

  Al Moore’s grin was slack now as he said, glass in hand, “I’m talking about sin cities. You know what a sin city is, Mister Bloch? Or a sin country, for that matter?”

  Bruce said, “Panama City, Tangier, Macao, Hong Kong, Singapore, Istanbul, Port Said. When the old freelancer travel writers couldn’t come up with anything else to write about for the men’s magazines, they’d dream up a sin city. In a sin city, anything goes. Wide-open gambling, prostitution, narcotics, pornographic shows, black market, smuggling, homosexuality, every sin you can afford. Mostly, it was a lot of crud. I suppose that Tangier was the nearest thing to a real sin city that ever came along, shortly after the Second World War.”

  “Give the snoop a prize,” Moore chuckled. He let his eyes go from Bloch to Carter to Kapitz. “But that’s the final plan. Island One becomes the biggest sin city of all time. It’ll make Babylon look like Boys Town.”

  Even Rick Venner, who to this point had kept his quiet peace, stared at him now.

  “Use your heads,” Moore said contemptuously. “It’s a natural. After we’ve spent a few more billions of the sucker money the Corporation’s been hauling in, the interior of Island One’ll be all prettied up. More hotels, a lot of swank, private homes and condominiums, even some small resort towns. And then, say in about six months, we deliberately bust the bubble. We dump our holdings in the Lagrange Five Corporation and, at the same time, we leak some of the true facts about the Project, that it’s come a cropper. Overnight, the whole thing falls apart; everybody probably blaming everybody else. Chaos. The L5 Corporation goes bankrupt. And with nobody to foreclose. Nobody wants the pieces. The whole project isn’t working and it’s not going to work. It’s worthless.”

  All except Mark Donald, Ron Rich, and Joe Evola were staring in fascination at him.

  “So from nowhere,” he grinned sarcastically, “comes up another, newly organized corporation. They say they’ll buy it lock, stock, and all the barrels. They plan to abandon the Luna base, the attempt to build SPSs, the manufacturing facilities, the ore smelters, and the rest of the dream that turned into a nightmare, and make Is
land One into a space resort. Everybody thinks they’re crazy. So they pick up the whole thing for peanuts.”

  “That would be drivel-happy,” Pete Kapitz snorted. “What in God’s name would you do with a resort a quarter-million miles from the nearest tourist?”

  Moore turned his nasty grin to the IABI man. “We’d turn it into the sin city to end all sin cities. Everything goes. Everything ever dreamed up before for far-out, freewheeling towns, and a lot more not conceived of previously. No place on Earth ever had it so good. Switzerland had some far-out banking, but nothing like Island One. Switzerland was surrounded by Germany, Italy, France; if she’d gone too far she was always faced with the possibility of invasion. Macao and Hong Kong were right in the laps of the Chinese and always threatened with takeover. Tangier belonged to Morocco, and when it looked as though it was too good a thing, financially, the Sultan stepped in and took over. Of course, he soon saw he’d killed the goose that laid the golden eggs and let the International Zone be revived, but it was never quite the same. Oh, believe me, Earthside sin cities had handicaps we won’t have here in space.”

  Adam Bloch said in disgust, “Don’t be ridiculous. If Island One has proved a failure under the Lagrange Five Corporation, with all the billions plowed into it, how can you possibly make it a financial success?”

  The other said evenly, “Because we’re going to dump all the things that fouled it up. No more moon base, no more ten thousand colonists and workers having to be fed, housed, and clothed. No more multi-billion-dollar freighters bringing up heavy machinery and raw materials. We’ll keep on just enough workers to run Island One and we won’t be working on a lot of expensive experiments. We’ll just be maintaining this space colony as nicely as we can for those who can afford it, and fuck everything else. All the basic expense has already been met. The island is here. We have the space shuttles and passenger freighters necessary to bring up our paying customers and the supplies we’ll need.”

  Adam Bloch said, “The problem of the closed ecosystem still hasn’t been solved, Moore.”

  The other looked scornfully at him, taking another pull at the whiskey. “It won’t have to be. Oh, we’ll continue some hydroponics growing of fruits and vegetables, and breed chickens, turkeys, rabbits, and pigs, but largely we’ll bring everything up from Earthside. It’ll be expensive, but the expensive sins we have in mind will pay for it.”

  Bruce Carter said, shaking his head impatiently, “You’re completely around the corner, Moore. Suppose that it did go through, the way you have in mind, and you got your hands on the whole project practically for free. Having some no-restriction banking, all-out gambling, sexual perversions, and narcotics aren’t going to begin to pay your overhead.”

  Moore grinned. “There’s a lot more to it than that, snooper. For instance, there’ll be no extradition from Island One. No Earthside laws will apply. Anybody who wants to, uh, retire here and has the funds, has a perfectly safe refuge. South American politicians escaping with their country’s treasury, or small-time crooks like Rocks, here, who’ve taken a big score.” He nodded in the direction of Rick Venner.

  “But that’s just the beginning. We’ll have a course, a stock market to end them all, where everything’ll go. There’ll be no taxes—income taxes, corporation taxes, any taxes. And there’ll be other items. In this super-resort, we’ll have a space hospital for those ultra-rich with heart troubles, or whatever, where low gravity, or even free fall, makes the difference between living and dying. And there won’t be any medical restrictions. If you want to clone yourself, or transplant chimpanzee balls into your scrotum, great. And we’ll probably lease out the Construction Shack for scientific research; any kind of research, just so they pay the bills. We’ll milk it all ways from Tuesday and, most of all, the families—the Syndicate, as you call it—will have a perfectly safe base of operations for all our Earthside interests. They ran us out of Sicily in the old days, they lowered the boom on us in the States, Castro ran us out of Cuba, and when we settled some of our operations in the Bahamas, both the British and the States put pressure on us there. But not here in Island One. This’ll be the ultimate refuge. We’ll be under nobody’s jurisdiction but our own.”

  Annette said admiringly, “It’s a pretty picture, Uncle Al. What happens to the colonists and contract workers who have all those stock bonuses coming to them? Won’t they put up a howl?”

  “Indeed,” Adam Bloch muttered.

  Moore laughed. “Let ’em howl. We’ll send all but the best of them back to Earth. That stock is LFC stock and, like I said, the LFC will be bankrupt.”

  Bruce Carter nodded his head. “It’s a story worth writing up,” he said.

  Rick Venner laughed softly. “I’m afraid you’ll never get around to it, chum-pal.”

  Al Moore looked at him as though fully realizing for the first time that the other was present. He scowled and said, “What the hell are you doing here?”

  Joe Evola said, “We picked him up with Bloch and the others, Al. He and Kapitz were heeled.”

  Rick said mildly to the security head, “You gave me the shooter to carry out the contract on Kapitz.”

  The other was still scowling at him. “Sure, but what were you doing with Kapitz and Carter?”

  Rick shrugged. “I met them on the way up from Earth. In view of the job you had set up, I thought it’d be a good idea to get them used to the idea of me being around.”

  “Why, you funker,” Cris Everett snarled.

  “Quiet,” Joe Evola growled at him.

  Rick said easily, “You mentioned that under ordinary circumstances you might be able to use a man like me, Al. Used to thinking on my feet, and so forth. Wizard. The way things seem to be trending, it looks as though you’ll be able to.” He twisted his mouth. “I’m available.”

  Pete Kapitz grunted contempt, but looked as though he wasn’t overly surprised.

  Moore took the jewel thief in thoughtfully. “You might be right at that.”

  Rick said reasonably, “Why don’t we handle it more or less the way you originally had in mind? We’ll take Kapitz and Carter out in front of the hotel. I’ll let both of them have it. Great. You stage a dramatic arrest and I’m hauled off and supposedly thrown in the banger. The news is released to Earth. It makes a super headline story. The notorious Rocks Weil shoots a top IABI man and the famous writer, Bruce Carter, and the intrepid L5 security puts the arm on him. You want another six-month leeway to finish construction of the island here? Okay, that’ll raise some of the dust needed to hide what’s going on.”

  Moore thought about it. “Makes a lot of sense,” he slurred. “Whaddaya think, Mark?”

  All the others in the room were staring at Rick Venner, most of them in shocked horror. Bruce had his eyes closed, as though in resignation.

  Moore’s lieutenant said hesitantly, “I don’t know. We could handle it ourselves, Al.”

  Joe Evola said, “I can do the job, Al. I never did like this Kapitz bastard.”

  Rick laughed and said, “Tell you what I’ll do, Joe. I’ll match you for it.” He dug a hand into his trousers pocket.

  “What the hell are you talking about?” the dour security sergeant said to him.

  Rick came to his feet and brought forth a coin. “You call it, I’ll flip it. Call it right and the job’s yours. Otherwise, lend me your shooter.”

  Moore laughed tolerantly and poured another shot of whiskey. His eyes were dull.

  Joe Evola grunted, “Heads!”

  Rick flipped and let the coin fall to the floor. “Tails,” he said and held out his hand.

  Frowning unhappily, Joe Evola brought forth his stubby Gyrojet and grudgingly handed it over. Rick checked it automatically as he stepped back toward the center of the room. He deliberately flicked off the safety, brought the gun up to chest level, even as he turned, and fired point blank at Al Moore.

  The rest all came in split seconds. Rick Venner had been correct when he said he was no killer. He was al
so less than an adequate marksman. Even at this distance, he missed his aim, whatever portion of the anatomy of the security head he was firing at. The rocket slug, making its characteristic whip-snap sound as it broke the sound barrier, a few feet from the muzzle, slammed into Moore’s right shoulder, sending him spinning backward and out of his chair.

  A less than adequate shot Rick Venner might have been, but he was cool. He fired again and this time full into the falling man’s belly.

  Mark Donald had not achieved his position as bodyguard by accident. He blurred into action. His left hand flicked back his jacket, his right drew his weapon with a speed that Wyatt Earp would have envied. Venner’s need for a second round to finish his victim gave the Syndicate gunman the time to snap off his own shot unimpeded. And even as he fired, he was out of his chair and lurching toward his foe.

  Rick collapsed, the gun flying away from his hand and out across the floor. Mark Donald, cursing wildly, stood above the fallen Venner and fired twice more at almost point-blank range into Rick’s flailing body as Pete Kapitz and Joe Evola scrambled for the Gyrojet on the floor.

  Adam Bloch, Cris Everett and Ron Rich, no men of action, sat rooted to their seats; nor did Bruce Carter do any better. Annette Casey, however, stuck out a fashionably shod foot and neatly tripped the oncoming Joe. He slammed forward, his face smashing into the floor.

  Pete Kapitz, already lunging on all fours, swept up the gun, continued his momentum, and rolled. His fingers expertly fitted to the gun’s grip and trigger guard. Mark Donald, still raging above the fallen, shattered Rick Venner, spun, his gun seeking the new target.

  Cris Everett didn’t look like a hero, but proved to be one. His small body was out of its seat as he flung his arms around the security man, the firearm between them. The gun blasted twice and agony took over the little man’s face. But he hung on. Donald swore viciously and tried to wrestle out of the dying man’s desperate grasp to get his weapon back into play.