“Even at that,” Helton said, “it’s usually all over by the time they get there. Most often, the only thing left for troops to do is put some muscle behind the reorganized government and make sure it’s going to honor the old trade agreements that made the place worth commercial traffic to begin with.”
Christiana looked shocked, and just a little bit frightened by what they had said. “Th—that couldn’t happen on Zarathustra, could it?”
The Rev shrugged. “The Federation depends on every planet to do its own policing. A charter company or colony world is only as tough as the fist on the end of its own arm. I don’t suppose things could really fall apart on Zarathustra.” He gestured toward the moon in the observation screen. “The Navy’s right close at hand, there, on Xerxes—or Darius—whatever—but things could get pretty wild and woolly under the right set of circumstances. You know— push come to shove and all that…”
“Which, I suspect, is why our friend here is arriving— after just enough time has passed for word to get to Terra and for someone to be assigned to the job—to audit weapons systems and readiness levels. Am I right, Gunnie?”
Helton smiled.
Chapter Five
While the passengers of the City of Asgard prepared for the last leg to Zarathustra—or Xerxes—it was early morning on Beta Continent and coffee-break time in Mallorysport.
Up Cold Creek Canyon from the Snake River, the K0 sun of Zarathustra slanted orangish light across the growing settlement which the latest maps called Holloway Station. A year ago the place had been a quiet one-man camp from which Jack Holloway prospected for sunstones and lived a peaceably solitary life.
There wasn’t much stirring at this hour of the morning, but later on the place would be bustling with activity. Jack Holloway still lived here, but not in the privacy and seclusion he would have preferred. The place was now the administrative center for the Native Affairs Commission.
For the first several weeks, the Commission had been operated out of Holloway’s own bungalow from a jumble of cardboard-boxes-turned-filing-cabinets, extra tables, and steno equipment scattered around the living room—and confusion. Now it took up a half-dozen big prefab huts and was straining at the seams of those.
The headquarters and barracks for the Zarathustran Native Protection Force was across the creek. It was home base for the police force which protected the Fuzzies and maintained surveillance of their territory against Terran intrusion. That alone accounted for over two hundred men, if you counted the Marines loaned to the ZNPF by Commodore Napier.
Besides that cluster of buildings there was the bungalow where Gerd and Ruth van Riebeek lived and the big laboratory and infirmary where they conducted studies of Fuzzy biology and psychology, a Reception Center, a Fuzzy School for learning Lingua Terra, and other such structures as might be of use or interest to a Fuzzy.
This conglomeration, the scientific corner of Holloway Station, was referred to informally as Fuzzy Institute.
Add to all this the constant comings and goings by officials of the new Colonial Government, people from the Company headquarters in Mallorysport. Constabulary officers, the Adoptions Bureau that had been set up for Fuzzies who wanted to live with human people and love them, and everyone else who had business involving Fuzzies—to say nothing of a couple hundred curious and playful Fuzzies— and Holloway Station was the kind of place that might need traffic cops before long.
Major George Lunt was puzzled.
That’s why he was in his office so early this particular morning. When George Lunt was puzzled about something, he had to turn his detective’s mind loose on it one bite at a time, and he couldn’t do that with a dozen people pestering him about two dozen things at once.
He hoped he would have a handle on it by the time the day watch started coming in to go on duty at 0800. After that there would be the whole tedious business of inspecting the watch in ranks and sitting in on the watch briefing; not that he needed to—the watch commander was perfectly competent—but as Commandant of the ZNPF he was sort of expected to do it on occasion. It was good for morale.
George reached out with his left hand and blanked the shade on his window, then pulled out a section of printout from the stack of survey logs in front of him and bent down his head to study the rash of squiggly lines which the computer had superimposed on the strip map of a section of northern Beta Continent, the Fuzzy Reservation.
There it is. again, he thought… plain as can be.
He slewed the stacks of paper around and matched up the registry marks on two parallel strips of geography. That’s nuts, he said to himself. If all the various kinds of titanium compounds on Zarathustra were put together in one spot, it still wouldn’t cause these readings—I think.
George leaned back in his chair and rubbed his eyes. Two possibilities seemed to him equally likely to account for the odd data recorded in the survey printout of north Beta: malfunction of the scanner or recorder, or sloppy procedure on the part of Paine’s Marines. George thought it would be better all around if he could kiss off Paine’s Marines. George Lunt was uneasy about commanding men over whom he did not have direct control. He hadn’t been a major long enough to have a clear handle on delegating duty and staff work to others.
The third alternative was too preposterous—that there really was a big concentration of titanium compounds on north Beta. Why, you could practically take all the titanium in the entire crust of Zarathustra and put it in your hip pocket. And here this damned readout was telling him there was a big slug of it up there, in several different forms.
Well, he’d ask Jack Holloway about it. Jack knew a good deal about geology—had to to be a successful sunstone prospector. Gerd van Riebeek could tell him more, too. Gerd was a zoologist—used to work for the Chartered Zarathustra Company—so he knew a lot about paleontology from working with fossils and rock layers.
George Lunt yawned and stretched. While his arms were extended, he snapped open the shade on his office window once more, then pushed back the chair and got to his feet.
Chapter Six
Major Lunt wasn’t the only person, at that hour, to be slaving over puzzling entries on hard-copy printouts and trying to interpret their meaning and importance.
Three time-zones to the east, in Mallorysport, it was mid-morning. Hugo Ingermann—attorney-at-law—sat alone in his office, absently massaging his smooth, round, pink cheeks, and studied the printout pages before him on the large desk. The commercial manifests—cargo and passenger—of the City of Asgard had been broadcast to the port on Darius and the capital at Mallorysport as soon as the ship dropped into normal space. Cargo and passengers were known to those who planned to receive them—persons who expected goods or passengers, the customs inspectors, brokers for commercial shipments, lading and freight contractors, and other interested parties. Preparations could then be speedily made to receive that which occupied the decks and holds of the vessel before it actually docked.
Very efficient.
Hugo Ingermann was in the category of “other interested parties.” As the moving and guiding force behind all activities illegal or even slightly shady in Mallorysport, Ingermann was interested in everything and everybody that might be on an incoming hypership from Terra.
This was not to say that Hugo Ingermann would turn honest business from his door. During the seven years or so that he had maintained his busy law practice in Mallorysport he had represented at least eight clients who were completely honest and respectable persons. He owned some land north of the capital city. And he was a partner in several perfectly legal businesses—to say nothing of being a major shareholder in a dozen more.
Ever alert to the opportunities which abound on a colony planet, Ingermann was also the architect and principal adviser of several loosely and informally organized conglomerates in Mallorysport.
Ivan Bowlby’s entertainment enterprises—telecast productions, prize-fights, nightclubs formed the visible surface of his activities. Out of si
ght—prostitution, murder for hire, the black-market, and a little dope business here and there.
Spike Heenan’s specialty was gambling: crap games, numbers, bookmaking, and fixing sports events. His respectable front—in which Hugo Ingermann was a partner—was a company which leased vending machines and electronic games.
Raul Laporte’s talents leaned toward racketeering, extortion, plain old-fashioned country-style crime, and stolen goods. He had expertly developed a system of fences for illegal sunstone buying when the Company had been the only legal buyer for them. Rather than let that part of his operation lay fallow since the Pendarvis Decisions, Laporte had sketched out a plan to expand into straight robbery of sunstone prospectors right at the diggings—cut out the middleman—just as soon as he could find time to organize the operation personally.
The most respectably-fronted of Ingermann’s proteges was Leo Thaxter, Loan Broker and Financier—also shylock, smuggler, bag-man, and protection racketeer. He used Laporte’s strongarm employees for collections.
When Thaxter came to Zarathustra ten years earlier, he had fooled around with some small-time rackets, set up some crooked labor unions and a couple of marketing cooperatives to put the squeeze on planters. Nothing really big, though, until he fell under the tutelage of Ingermann some four or five years later—who had showed him how to make good money by laundering bad money and investing the profits in six-for-five loans to people who couldn’t borrow anywhere else.
His sister, Rose Thaxter, had married Conrad Evins, who later became the chief gem-buyer for the CZC. At the height of the Fuzzy craze, the three of them had kidnapped some Fuzzies and trained them to get into the Company gem vault through the ventilation system. Ambitious enterprise that; the vault contained upwards of one hundred million sols worth of sunstones.
They almost got away with it. Two minor henchmen, Phil Novaes and Moses Herckerd, had been caught inside Company House with the loot. Herckerd managed to get well-ventilated by a Company policeman with a submachine gun. Novaes lived to stand trial on charges of enslavement, with Mr. and Mrs. Evins, and the three of them received the mandatory sentence for that crime—death administered by a pistol shot in the back of the head; no discretion of the court allowed.
Ingermann angrily jerked out a fresh printout. The fools, he thought. If only the idiots had consulted me, I could have showed them the weak spots in their plan.
As it was, he had just barely managed getting Thaxter off, and had actually been arrested himself when the police started rounding up everyone connected with Thaxter.
The whole matter had been a great source of aggravation for Attorney General Gustavus Adolphus Brannhard, who “knew” they were all guilty, but didn’t quite have enough on them to take it to court.
The hincty bastard tried to put me under veridication for questioning to have me disbarred. Ingermann became enraged every time he thought of the incident. Patience will put the whole goody, goody lot of them in my hands, sooner or later; then I’ll squeeze the juice out of their pious guts.
What irritated Ingermann was not that the caper had gone wrong, not that four people had been caught, not that he himself had come close to veridicated questioning about his enterprises, a thing that would have meant ruin and jail; but that the whole scheme had gone sour before he could get hold of the sunstones. He would have considered it a profitable bargain to trade the lives of four of his own people for— say—a double handful of sunstones.
Ingermann shook his head sadly and went back to perusing the printout sheets.
Now, here was an interesting item. Three first-class passengers from Terra. The passage voucher number of one of them had an “R” suffix. Restricted entry; data not available except to official inquirers, and then on a “need to know” basis only. No way to match the number up to a name at this end of the trip. Payment vouchers were like boarding passes or baggage tickets. Passengers presented their vouchers to the chief steward upon entering the ship and he recorded the number on his manifest. After that it was a matter of head-counting and tally-keeping. Three boardings first-class for Zarathustra; and if three got off at Zarathustra all was in order. Anything more detailed was a violation of the Privacy Act.
An “R” suffix indicated the possible presence of a Federation official or government employee of fairly high rank among those three first-class passengers.
Interesting.
The chief steward who recorded the voucher numbers might remember which passenger showed him the “R” voucher, but that steward had long-since switched over to an inbound ship at some intermediate port.
There was a way, of course, to dig out the information from the other end, on Terra, but it would take a year just to get the inquiry back to his source and receive a reply. Easier, really, to just knock them in the head one at a time here in Mallorysport and steal their ticket copies—if they hadn’t already been tossed in the trash converter.
It might not amount to anything, but Ingermann made a stenomemophone note of it, anyway. If any one of these three people began to take an interest in things within his sphere of influence, it might warrant some further digging.
Chapter Seven
When Major Lunt returned to his office, there was a slender gentleman sitting at his desk—with his feet propped up on it—and puffing on the short pipe that had yellowed the corners of his white moustache.
At the sound of boots scraping behind him, he bounded to his feet and turned. “Hi, George,” he said.
“Good morning, Jack. What’s up?”
Holloway leaned on the corner of the desk. “Well, I need to get something worked up on paper for the mining reserve that we’re leasing to the Zarathustra Company up there in the Fuzzy Reservation.”
When they were just getting this thing together, Holloway hadn’t thought of himself as the Commissioner of Native Affairs, and he hadn’t thought of the ZNPF as his private police force, although it was. There was a job to be done looking out for the Fuzzies’ interests and it was too important to entrust to anyone else. In the early days he and George Lunt had shared a makeshift hut and called it an office, communicating by shouting back and forth from their desks. Now they had to hike through a hundred-twenty-foot stretch of desks and office machines and roboclerks and human secretaries to get to each other’s offices.
“When I put this deal together in my head,” Jack said, “Ben Rainsford was very busy being the new Governor General and very busy hating Victor Grego and the CZC as the unscrupulous enemy. Now that I’ve finally got them doing business with each other, the royalties we’ll get from the Company for mining that rich patch of sunstones Gerd and I found in Fuzzy territory just might be enough to keep everything afloat until after the constitutional elections. The government can’t levy taxes till then. In the meantime, I want to get the mining operation underway.”
“Might be more than we can chew, Jack,” George said. “I’m stretched pretty thin, now. We’ll have to monitor that operation mighty close; make sure nobody goes sneaking off on his own inside the Reservation. Have to keep track of everything going in or out, watch that they don’t bother any of the Fuzzies—that sort of thing.”
“I know, George,” Holloway said.
“Have to patrol the borders—tight electronic surveillance—be certain no one goes in or out except at our check-points. Take more men than I’ve got right now just to do that.”
“I know, George,” Holloway repeated. “Start working something up for me in the way of what you’ll need, both men and equipment, if we have crews up there cracking— say—three hundred tons of flint a month.”
“Jack—we can’t afford it!”
Holloway nodded. “We can’t, but the Company can. The CZC is going to reimburse us for what we spend policing their leasehold.”
Major Lunt chuckled. “I see. Do they know it yet?”
“No,” Holloway said, “but Grego will see the wisdom of it once it’s explained to him. In the long run, it’s a toss-up as to whether it
’s cheaper for the Company Police do the job or for the Company to hire us to do it. Besides, I won’t grant the lease unless our own people are specified to do the law enforcement.”
“Grego knows a good thing when he sees it. His bottom line won’t be much different at the end of the year. This deal will be good for the Company, good for the Fuzzies, and good for the Government—all the way around.”
“Okay,” George agreed. “I’ll get something together that you can take to Grego—maybe not down to the last paper clip, but in general terms of how much it’s going to cost.”
“Good,” Holloway said. “Grego won’t say yes or no right away. Hell take the breakdown to his own Company Police Chief first—have Harry Steefer look over the figures to see whether we’re gouging the Company.”
He turned to leave, then added a question. “Today, George?”
Lunt nodded. “I imagine so.”
“Hokay, bizzo,” Holloway said, lapsing into Lingua Fuzzy. “How about bringing it over to the house—right around cocktail time. That way we can talk it over without being interrupted by more than four or five screen calls.”
After Mr. Commissioner Holloway had left, George sat down at his desk and sighed; not in aversion to this new task, but in the realization that he was mentally waving goodbye to any immediate chance of getting rid of Lieutenant Paine and his Marines.
I’ve got to get Ahmed back over here, he thought. It’s very good public relations to have Captain Ahmed Khadra. Chief of Detectives, ZNPF, acting as the Mallorysport liaison with the Company Police, and the Constabulary, and the Mallorysport P.D., and all that, but I’ve got to have a strong Exec over here if we’re going into another expansion phase. He’ll just have to set the date with Sandra, get hitched, and bring her over here permanently.
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