Gladiator-At-Law

by Frederik Pohl

  He got a grip on himself as Coett, behind him mused, “So this is the young lady Arnold horse-traded you, eh? Your principal, Counselor?” *

  “Maybe,” said Mundin. •

  “Oh, come Qff it, Mundin,” Coett said shrewdly. He tamed to Norma. “My dear,” he offered expansively, “can I drop you anyplace? You too, of course, Counselor.”

  “Listen, Mundin,” Nelson urged, “get him to tell you about old Crowther——”

  “Damn it,” raged Hubble,- “if you vultures will step aside——”

  Mundin said, “I’ll lay it on the line, gentlemen. Miss Lavin and I have to stop in the waiting room to pick up an—uh—a young lady. In five minutes we will be at the front entrance. We’ll go along with all three of you, or with any two of you. You fight it out among yourselves.”

  He swept Norma out to the visitors* room. Lana was perched on the receptionist’s desk, looking hostile, but not as hostile as the receptionist. Mundin asked her, “What happened to Bligh?” ;

  “Outside,” Lana said. “He said he’d already had a bellyful of Field Days, whatever he meant by that. This your girl?”

  “Yes,” said Mundin, “this is my girl.” The three of them collared Norvie Bligh, sitting in the sun outside, and started

  toward the ranks of parked cars and halftracks. They were met by an amicable committee of three.

  “All settled, Mundin,” Hubble said happily. “Coett and Nelson are coming with us.”

  “Good,” Mundin said. “Where do we go to talk?”

  Hubble said joyously, “Oh, my place. It’s all settled. You’ll like it—simple, quiet, but comfortable.”

  They made quite a procession: Two cars and a halftrack. They didn’t stop for anything, neither the Itty-Bitty checkpoint nor the customs shed.

  “We’ll go through Fifth Avenue,” Hubble said.

  “Oh, nol” Coett and Nelson groaned.

  “I like it,” the younger man said.

  They rolled slowly through the condemned Old City, empty and dead. Mundin gasped at the sight of a car other than theirs; it buzzed across their path at 34th and Fifth, under the towering shadow of the Empire State Building. He craned his neck after they passed it and exclaimed, “There’s somebody getting out. Going into the Empire State!”

  “Why not?” grunted Hubble over the intercom. He was riding with Nelson and Coett, because none of the three trusted any of the others alone with Mundin and Norma for the ride.

  “I’d always understand it was as empty as the rest of the Old City,” the lawyer said with dignity.

  “They keep it lit up at night, don’t they? Well, that calls for maintenance. The man was an electrician.”

  Mundin was not a very good lawyer, but he was good enough to be quite sure that Hubble was lying to him.

  Chapter Sixteen

  lana was tugging at Mundin’s shoulder. “I want to go home,” she said.

  Mundin said peevishly, “Sure, sure.” Norma, exhausted, had fallen asleep on his arm, and his circulation had been cut off ten miles back. The girl was a solid, chunky weight—but, he was thinking, curiously pleasant

  “I mean now.” Lana insisted. “I got a duty to tbe Wabbits.”

  “I’d kind of like to go home too,” Norvie Bligb chimed in.

  Mundin flexed his arms, considering. Lana and Bligh had done what they had bargained for. He said:

  “All right. If I have the driver let you off at the bus depot in Old Yonkers, can you make it from there?” They nodded, and he leaned forward to tap on the window.

  At Old Yonkers their car stopped outside an InterCity depot. The car behind skidded to a stop beside them. Hubble, Nelson, and Coett peered out anxiously. “Anything wrong?” Hubble yelled through a window.

  Mundin shook his head, let Lana and Norvie out, and permitted his driver to start up again.

  And twenty minutes later they reached Hubble’s home.

  Quiet and comfortable it was. Simple it was not. It Azras a Charles Addams monster in a fabulous private park in Westchester. They rolled up its driveway and parked next to what appeared to be a 1928 Rolls-Royce limousine.

  Bliss Hubble was already at the door of then: car, holding it open for them. “My wife,” he explained, indicating the limousine. “She makes a fetish of period decoration. Today it’s Hoover, I see; last week it was Neo-Roman. Can’t say I care for it, but one has one’s obligations.”

  “And one has one’s wife,” said Norma Lavin, who appeared to be back to her normal self.

  “Oh, it’s very nice,” soothed Mundin. “So stately.”

  Mrs. Hubble greeted them with an unbelieving look. She turned to her husband with an “explain-f/jw-if-you-can” air.

  Hubble said hastily, “My dear, may I present Miss Lavin——”

  “Just Lavin,” Norma said coldly.

  “Of course. Lavin. And this is Mr. Mundin; I believe you know Harry and George. Mr. Mundin was good enough to compliment the way youVe fixed up the house.”

  “Indeed,” said Mrs. Hubble, ice forming on her gaze. “Please thank Mr. Mundin, and inform him that his taste is quite in agreement with that of our housekeeper—who is no longer with us, since I woke up this morning and found she had set the house for this unsightly, trashy piece of construction. Please mention to Mr. Mundin, too, that when she left— rapidly—she took with her all the key settings, and as a consequence I have been condemned to roam through these revolting rooms until my husband chose to come home with his keys so that I might change them into something more closely resembling a human habitation.” Hubble stiffened, thrust a hand into a pocket, brought out a set of keys. With them his wife swept off through the vast, bare rooms.

  “Sensitive,” Hubble muttered to his guests.

  Coett said eagerly, “We got a couple of things straight on the way over, Mundin. Now——”

  Hubble said severely, “Harry, I insist! I’m the host. Not another Word until we’ve had dinner.”

  He led’tae way through a majestic corridor, keeping carefully to the middle. At some unnoticed sign he said sharply, “Watch it!”

  The others obediently stood clear of the walls, which were coming into curious, shimmering motion. “My wife,” Hubble explained with a glassy smile. “You’d think a regular bubble-house wall would be enough, but nol Nothing will do but full three-D illusion throughout. The expense! The stumbling home in the dark! The waking up in the middle of the night because the four-poster is changing into a Hollywood bed! She’s a light sleeper, you see——”

  The walls had firmed up now; the old furniture was fully retracted, and new pieces had formed. Mrs. Hubble’s present preference seemed to be Early Wardroom—a satisfactory enough style for the flying bridge of a cruiser, but not really Mundin’s idea of how to decorate a home. He withheld comment

  The table talk was not sparkling; everyone was hungry. “Am I to understand,” Hubble probed gently, “that Miss— that Lavin, I mean, was actually abducted by Mr. Arnold?”

  “Doubt it very much,” said Norma, chewing. “He probably just looked unhappy and said something like, ‘Dear me, I wish something could be done about that stock.’ Some foot-kisser standing by set the wheels in motion. Arnold’s hands would be clean. Not his fault if people insist on exceeding their authority.”

  She took another forkful of wild rice. “They had me for about a week. My God, what confusion! I could go and I couldn’t go. I was free to leave any time I cared to, but temporarily they thought it would be better to keep the door

  locked. Sign your residuary legatee’s share of the stock to us and we’ll pay you a cool million. But we don’t want the stock, of course. It has only a certain small nuisance value. Now, lady, are you going to be reasonable or do we have to get tough? My dear girl, we wouldn’t dream of harming you!”

  She scowled. “Arnold came to see me once. He kept pretending that / was trying to sell to him. I don’t know, maybe that’s what somebody told him. All I know is, I feel as though someone hit me over the head wi
th a lighthouse.”

  A butler shambled hi. “Are you at home to Mr. Arnold, sir?” he whispered.

  “No!” crowed Hubble delightedly. “You hear that, Coett?”

  Nelson cut in, “Hold it a minute, Bliss. Are you sure you’re doing the right thing? Maybe if the three of us got together——” he looked quickly at Mundin. “That is, perhaps all of us could freeze out the Toledo bunch.”

  Coett said, “Tell him to go to blazes. Tell the butler to tell him, so we can all hear it First we settle things among “ourselves—then we figure who else we have to cut in, if anybody. But I don’t think we need anybody else.”

  “Tell him,” Hubble said gleefully to the butler. “Fellows, if you knew how long I’d waited—— Well, all right. Harry’s right, George. Figure it out. You’ve got eleven per cent under your thumb, counting proxies for the voting trust. I’ve got five and a half, solid. Harry has three of his own, and he influences—how many, Harry?”

  “Nine,” said Coett shortly.

  “You see?” said Hubble. “That’s plenty. With these people’s twenty-five per cent, we——”

  Mundin came down heavily on Norma’s foot just as she was opening her mouth to ask how they had located the stock. He said rapidly, “Don’t you think we should save this till dinner’s over?”

  Hubble cast an eye around the table. “Why, dinner’s over now,” he said mildly. “Let’s have our coffee in the library.”

  Hubble stopped at the entrance to the library and did something with a switchbox before permitting the others to enter. “Have my own controls here,” he said pridefully. “Wife has most of the house, hah-hah, she can’t begrudge me one little nook of my own! Let’s see if we can’t get something more

  cheerful.” The “library”—there wasn’t a book or microfilm in sight—shimmered and flowed, and turned into something like a restoration of a nineteenth-century London club.

  Mundin tested one of the wing-back chairs suspiciously, but it was good. Norma was still staring at him thoughtfully; but she kept her mouth shut and he said cheerily, “Now, gentlemen, to work.”

  “Right,” said Harry Coett. “Before we get too deep, I want to know how we stand on one thing. I’m sure it’s just one of those crazy things that get started, but I heard somebody say something at the meeting. They mentioned Green, Charlesworth. Just for the record, have you got anything to do with them?”

  Green, Charlesworth. Ryan had mentioned them, Mundin recalled; they seemed to be something to worry about. Mundin said definitely, “We are not from Green, Charlesworth. We are from ourselves. Miss Lavin and her brother are the direct heirs of one of the founders of G;M.L. I—uh—happen to have a trifling amount of stock myself—besides being their attorney.”

  Coett nodded briskly. “Okay. Then it’s a plain and simple raid; and we’ve got the muscle to do it. I take it we are all agreed, then, that the first step is to throw the corporation into bankruptcy?”

  Mundin said in a strangled voice, “Hey!”

  Coett grinned. “I thought you were no expert,” he said amiably. “What did you expect, Mundin?”

  “Why,” Mundin floundered, “there’s—ah—your stock, and our stock, and—well, it seems clear-cut to me. Majority rules, doesn’t it?”

  He stopped. All hands were enjoying a good, though polite, laugh. Coett said, “Mr. Mundin, you have a lot to learn. Do you seriously think we could vote our stock outright under the existing rules?”

  “I don’t know,” Mundin said honestly.

  “You don’t,” Coett agreed. “You can’t rock the boat. The proxies won’t stand for it; a raid, yes, but handled right,”

  Norma Lavin commented, “I suppose he’s right, Mundin. They’ve stopped us so far, one way and another. The only real change is that now these people know we’re alive and think they can take us to the cleaners.”

  “Please,” said Hubble and Nelson unhappily.

  Coett, grinning, assured her “You are absolutely correct For the first time I begin to doubt that we can do it.”

  Mundin interrupted, “Why bankruptcy?”

  They all stared at him. Finally Hubble asked diffidently, “Ah—how would you do it, Mr. Mundin?”

  Mundin said, “Well, I’m no corporation lawyer, gentlemen —I leave that aspect of it to my colleague, Mr. Ryan, who is a member of the Big Bar. But it seems to me that our first step is, obviously, to form a stockholder’s committee and request an accounting from the present board. We can back it up, if you think it necessary, with a notification to the S.E.C. I know, naturally, that Arnold’s group will stall and attempt to compromise, probably offer us some kind of board representation far less than our holdings entitle us to. But that’s simple enough to handle; we simply enter protest and file suit in——”

  Hubble and Nelson said, “Risky.”

  Coett said, “It’ll never work. Look, youngster, that wont get us to first base, I remember when the Memphis crowd tried——”

  Mundin interrupted, “The who?”

  “The Memphis crowd. Arnold’s group. They took G.M.L. away from the Toledo bunch eighteen years ago through due process, the way you’re talking about But it took six years to do it, and if the Toledo bunch hadn’t been caught short in Rails they never would have made it And they’re still strong; you saw how Arnold had to put Wilcox on the board to placate them.”

  Mundin, who did not know what in hell the man was talking about, said desperately, “Can’t we at least try?”

  “Waste of time! When Arnold took over, G.M.L. had assets of less than ten billion. We have before us an immensely larger mass of capital. It has inertia, Mundin. Inertia. You can’t move it with a feather; you need dynamite. It’s going to take time and it’s going to take money and it’s going to take hard work and brains to budge it. I’ll tell you how.”

  And he did. Mundin listened in growing bewilderment and-something that came close to horror. Bankruptcy! How did you put a corporation worth fourteen billion dollars, eminently solvent, unbelievably prosperous, into bankruptcy?

  He didn’t like the answers when he heard them. But, he

  told himself, you can’t make an omelette without breaking a few golden eggs.

  Coett, enjoying himself, was planning in broad, bright strokes: “All right, Bliss, you get your chaps on the petition for composition and arrangement; well spring that one ourselves, before they think of it and well want it ready. Then——” Mundin, grimly taking notes, stuck through it to the end. But he wasn’t enjoying the practice of corporate law nearly as much as he had always thought he would. He wished urgently for the presence of old Ryan. And a nice full tin of yen pox.

  It was nearly midnight Mundin had never felt so bone-weary hi his life; even Norma Lavin was slumped in her chair. Coett, Hubble and Nelson were bright-eyed and eager, skilled technicians doing the work they best knew how to do.

  But the work was done. Mundin, yawning, dragged himself to his feet He said tiredly, “So the first tiling for me to do is set up offices, eh?” ,

  There was a pause.

  Harry Coett sighed. He said, “Not quite the first thing, Mundin.”

  “What then?” Mundin peered at him.

  Coett said crisply, “Call it a matter of personal satisfaction. We’ve all heard rumors about young Lavin. I don’t sjiy they’re true; I don’t know if they’re true or not But if they’re true we don’t get off the ground.”

  Mundin blazed, not quite quickly enough: “See here, Coett——”

  Coett said quietly, “Hold it. WeVe all had a look at that paper of yours. It’s a power of attorney, all right, and I’ve no doubt that it’s as valid as it can be. But it isn’t a stock proxy, Mundin. It doesn’t mention G.M.L. stock in it anywhere, except in the affidavit at the end, and Don Lavin didn’t sign that himself.”

  “What do you want?” Mundin asked sullenly.

  Coett said, “Let me tell a fantastic story. Mind you, I dont say it’s true. But it’s interesting. There are two young people, like a brother and s
ister, for instance. One of them has some stock, but can’t use it. The other is—ah—temporarily out of circulation. Let’s suppose that a smart young lawyer gets hold

  of them. First thing he does, he walks in on a meeting and lets it be known that the stock exists. With that as a wedge, he pries the girl loose from wherever she is. With the girl, he sucks in three good, dumb Joes—like Hubble, Nelson, and me, for instance. With the dumb Joes in the palm of his hand, he squeezes recognition of the stock out of, for instance, Arnold. That’s pretty good work: He has the girl, and he has the stock. The question is, what do the dumb Joes have then?”

  God, thought Mundin, and I never believed in mind-reading. He said, “Am I supposed to take this fantasy seriously?”

  Coett shook his head. “Of course not, Mundin. Just, for the sake of the record, before we get too far involved in any of this, let’s see the stock. Tomorrow morning be time enough?”

  “Tomorrow morning will be fine,” Mundin said hollowly.

  Chapter Seventeen

  take the Port of New York.

  • Not the slagged-out, cinder-crusted waters that lap at the fringe of Belly Rave, but Old New York, when Belle Reve was fresh and the plaster had not yet cracked. The harbor is filled with ocean-going ships. (Remember ships?) Between Manhattan and the Jersey shore ferries ply. There are many of them in the mid-twentieth-century bustle, half a dozen lines and more; some old, some new, some fast, some slow… .

  There are two ferry lines owned by railroads. (Remember railroads?)

  One is a proud green fleet. Half a dozen thousand-tonners, steel-hulled, Newport-built. Radar charts their crossings, and the pilings in their slips stand straight and tall.

  The second fleet: Three rust-colored midgets, shambling blindly back and forth between snaggle-toothed berths.

  Consider the paradox: The weary red ferries belong to a rich and solvent railroad. The radar-eyed giants are chattels of a corporation which has been in the hands of the receivers for four decades and two years.