In the alley, Everett caught up with them. He took in their clothes without enthusiasm. “You’re going to stick out like sore thumbs in those outfits,” he said sourly. “I hope to hell some Security man doesn’t spot us and tag along after, just for the hell of it.”
“We’ll have to take the risk,” Pete said. “Besides, if anybody tries to stop us, there’d better be at least four of them and they’d better be armed. Gentlemen, the chips are now down.”
Once again, the window washer, carrying his maintenance satchel of tools, pretended to be no part of their group. He walked along twenty or thirty feet before them, seemingly minding his own business. They continued after him, supposedly still absorbed in their discussion.
Bruce had expected to be taken somewhere out of the town limits of Lagrange City, to one of the more isolated buildings spotted throughout the Island One cylinder. Such buildings could be seen from the window of his room, some of them located on the same strip of livable surface as the town itself, some on the alternating strips above. They were, he assumed, individual homes of those who preferred to live outside the town, agricultural buildings and other structures devoted to building or maintaining the island.
But evidently, Adam Bloch and his friends preferred the anonymity of the larger settlement. It was easier to stay hidden. The building in which the underground head was sequestered was only three short blocks from the hotel itself. However, the four were not fated to reach their destination without interruption.
As the three supposedly arguing, Earthside-garbed pedestrians strode along the narrow street, a voice called out to them.
“Rick. Hey, Rick!”
They came to an unhappy halt. Tony Black, Rick Venner’s housemate, came up. He had been heading in the opposite direction. The furtive black marketeer eyed the three questioningly.
“Where you going?” Black said. His eyes went up and down Pete Kapitz and Bruce Carter.
Rick said, “Oh, just taking a stroll with these gentlemen.”
“Well, Fred Davis, your supervisor, is looking for you. He wants you to take another crack at going out into space today.”
Rick’s mind raced. He said, “Look, Tony. I’m, ah, busy. Tell him I’ll see him later.”
Tony Black blinked at him. He said, with a touch of indignation, “You can’t do that. He’s your supervisor. You’re still on the payroll as an electrical engineer. Until he decides you’re simply not suited for working outside, he’s boss and what he says goes.”
Cris Everett returned. He said, “What in the hell’s going on?”
Tony Black’s eyes narrowed. He took them all in, all over again.
Everett said quickly, “This funker is bad news. Supposedly, he’s a black marketeer, but most of us suspect he’s a Security plant. He gets away with too much, too easily.”
“Holy smog, Rick. What’s the matter with these guys?” Black blurted.
“Things begin to add up,” Rick said, his voice less than friendly. “The Penman never told me I was to have a contact up here. You turned up too fast and got me under your wing where you could keep an eye on me.” He looked at Pete and Bruce. “We’d better bring him along.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” Black blurted.
Pete Kapitz pushed back the flap of his jacket just enough so that the other could see the pistol in his belt. “Come along,” he said coldly. “We’ll decide what to do with you later.”
The other’s lips went white. Obviously, courage wasn’t a forte of Tony Black’s. “Come along where?” he got out, tremor in his voice.
“Just come along, and you’ll see, won’t you?” Bruce said with pseudopleasantness.
The black marketeer’s eyes darted up and down the street, but he seemed to find nothing reassuring. What was he hoping for, a Security officer?
Rick took him by the arm. “Let’s go,” he said to Everett.
The window washer resumed his status as guide and within minutes they had reached a larger and taller building than was usual in Lagrange City, other than public ones. It was five stories in height and covered an area greater than most of its neighboring structures.
Cris explained, even as they went through the common entry. “Some of the contract workers teamed together and got their land allotment in one piece. Each floor is a separate flat. And each flat has four people, usually all men, but sometimes a man and wife, or a man and a mopsy shacked up. Sometimes a couple of guys and a girl. There’s not enough women up here to go around. Not by a damned sight.”
The flat they were heading for was on the second floor. They trooped up the stairs and Cris did a fancy knock at the door, obviously a planned signal.
Adam Bloch himself answered and was surprised by seeing five persons, rather than two. He took in Rick suspiciously and stared at Tony Black.
Cris said quickly, “Let us in. We’ll tell you all about it.”
Almost reluctantly, the older man stepped back and the newcomers filed into the living room. Rick noted that it was at least double the size of that in the house he’d been invited to share with Black. Larger, but just as barren of color and comfort. As usual, the furniture was all metallic and unpainted. There were no rugs or carpeting on the floor, no art on the walls or elsewhere.
Bruce, Pete, and Rick all looked about warily.
Adam Bloch said, “There’s no one else here. They’re all at work this time of day. Now, what’s this all about?”
Pete Kapitz pointed to the corner of the room farthest from either door to the hall or the large windows that extended from floor to ceiling in lieu of one wall. He said to Tony Black, “You sit down over there and don’t bother to make a move or utter a peep.”
“What’re you going to do with me?” the frightened man said. “That’s one of the things you never know,” the IABI man told him. “Now shut up.”
Adam Bloch said, in resignation, “I suppose that we should all sit down.” He looked at Cris. “I’ve just heard bad news.”
“That’s the only kind of news there is lately,” the window washer told him, taking a seat as had the others.
The teacher said, his voice low, “There was an accident in the space tug taking Helene, Fred, and Manuel to the Luna base. According to the news reports, three of the passengers were killed. It didn’t report the names of the three.”
“It didn’t have to,” Cris muttered.
“This is really piling up,” Bruce said. “There’s no doubt about it now. Like Pete said, “The bets are all down. We’ve got to have a showdown with Moore and the others.”
“Wait a minute,” Pete said. He indicated Tony Black with a tilt of his head. “How about lover boy, here? Do we want him sitting in on the conference?”
Bruce looked at the black-market man doubtfully. “What can we do with him? We can’t let him loose, that’s for sure. He’d blab to the first Security man he could reach.”
“Knock him over the head,” Rick said cheerfully. “We can’t afford the manpower to guard him and the way these buildings are constructed without locks and keys, there’s no way to confine him.”
Their prisoner’s eyes bulged and his face went gray. Tony Black was far from a hero.
He got out, “Look…look…you don’t have to worry about me.”
“We’re not worrying about you, Tony,” Rick said cheerfully. “We’re just wondering whether or not to knock you over the head. And it occurs to me that now’s as good a time as any for you to do some talking. You just might know something of interest.”
“What’s going on here?” Adam Bloch said. He looked at Rick. “Who’re you? And what’s this sneak doing here? It’s almost certain that he’s connected with Security.”
“We can get to me a little later,” Rick said. “What’s that about you doing chores for Al Moore, Tony?”
“Yeah, sure, sure, I’ll talk,” Black babbled. “You don’t have to worry about me. Sure, I work for Moroni. He’s got men infiltrated everywhere. Knows everything’s going on.”
“Who’s this Moroni?” Bruce Carter said.
“Alfredo Moroni. Al Moore. He’s top man in the island for the Corporation, the Syndicate. They run everything from down below. But here at Lagrange Five, he’s the capo.”
“I’ll be damned,” Pete Kapitz said. “Some things are beginning to clear up. What’s Mark Donald’s real name?”
“Marco Donnello. His old man’s Alphonse Donnello. You’re a cop. You’ve heard of him.”
“The New Orleans family, eh? I thought he was long dead and the family dissolved.”
Bruce said suddenly, “Look, what’s Dr. Ryan’s real name?”
“I don’t know, but that mopsy secretary of his, Doc Casey, is a Costello.”
Bruce muttered bitterly. “Black Irish! Shit.”
Pete Kapitz said to the frightened Security informer, “What kind of weapons does Al Moore, uh, Moroni, have at his disposal?”
“Oh, you know how it is. Just about everything. Rifles, riot guns, tommy guns, grenades, smoke bombs, gas bombs.” The other was cooperating wholeheartedly.
Adam Bloch gaped at him. “But why?” he said, bewildered. “What would he need with such equipment in a place like Island One? What’s going on here?”
Bruce said, looking at Pete and Rick, “Suppose I tell it.”
They both nodded, and for the next ten minutes, the freelancer brought Adam Bloch up to date. At the end of that period, the teacher was aghast.
“I had no idea,” he got out.
“Neither did we,” Pete said in disgust.
Bruce got in plaintively, “The thing is, I still can’t figure out why. I’ve been all steamed up about space colonization for years. It’s in the cards. What in the hell’s gone wrong? Why isn’t it working?”
The teacher said, his forehead wrinkled, “I’m beginning to suspect deliberate sabotage. Though, actually, even that isn’t necessary to have brought us to our present position; the whole damn project has been handled as though by amateurs. It’s unworkable as now presented. Each month that goes by, Ron Rich…”
“Richetti,” Tony Black offered hopefully.
“…reports to Earth new successes, but the fact of the matter is, it’s unlikely that the L5 Project will ever get further along than it is now. In fact, unless new floods of funds continue to be raised on Earth, I suspect it will begin to regress.”
“But why?” Bruce said, exasperated.
The older man sighed and said, “I’ve been trying to get it over to you, the last two times we met. The original theory was that 98 percent of the raw materials needed to build Island One, and the larger islands to follow, would come from the moon. Even that isn’t realistic. The moon lacks some of the raw materials needed for such a project. It’s not just a matter of aluminum, titanium, iron, and the few others, including copper, lead, zinc, not to speak of carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen. But aside from the raw materials, practically everything has to be brought up from Earth. Ryan, in his book, seemed to think that we would manufacture our needs up here. But have you ever considered the needs of modern man? Do you realize that in every man’s home there are literally thousands of products of modern manufacture?”
“Thousands?” Rick said, doubt in his voice.
Adam turned his eyes to him. “Yes. Consider just a few. Toothpicks, toothbrushes, toothpaste, salt-and-pepper shakers, salt, pepper, toilet paper—did you think we were going to recycle our toilet paper?—Kleenex, medical supplies—from aspirin on up—flashlights, spare flashlight bulbs, batteries, ball-bearing pens, pencils, erasers, electric razors, shoes, hairpins, eye glasses, contact lenses…”
“Oh, no, come on,” Bruce protested. “There’s no reason why some, probably most of those, can’t be made up here.”
“Sure,” Adam nodded. “For instance, any competent mechanic, given a sliver of steel, could hand-make a sewing needle. But when you consider manufacturing sewing needles for ten thousand people in all their different sizes, including sewing machine needles, knitting needles, darning needles, and what not, it makes more sense to bring them up. Do you realize what would be involved in tooling up to make needles here in Island One?”
“But that’s just the beginning of what we have to bring up from Earth. The light bulbs. Not heavy, but bulky, so they use up one helluva lot of room in transport. Consider the number of different sizes of light bulbs and different types. They run from different-sized flashlights to the bulbs in refrigerators, to those for illumination about your home, to larger ones in industry or streetlights, to searchlights to…oh, hell, just consider the variety of light bulbs. Do you want to tool up for all of these out here in space for only ten thousand people?”
He cut it off in disgust. “What you’ve got to remember is that modern manufacturing is mass production. Nothing else makes sense. Suppose, for instance, that we decided to build our own computer printers here in space. The thousand or so that we need. Down Earthside, it might cost twenty-five dollars to manufacture one. But…”
“Hey, wait a minute,” Bruce said. “I’ve bought a few in my time, but never for twenty-five dollars.”
“I didn’t say that was what they retailed for. I said it cost that to manufacture them. And when they come off the computerized, automated assembly lines, by the hundreds of thousands, I doubt if the cost is much more than that. Between production and consumer are one hell of a lot of distributors, retailers, salesmen, advertising people, and government taxes to take a rake-off. At any rate, suppose we built them ourselves out here. I doubt if a team of competent mechanics and technicians, working by hand and making each piece required, could put together a reliable printer for less than a hundred thousand dollars. Consider for a moment, just how many individual parts would be involved, each one that they’d have to tool. Oh, the hell with it. I won’t go into it any further. Suffice it to say that mass production of modern, manufactured needs doesn’t make sense. Ergo, practically everything comes up from Earth. Not only our food and clothing, our air and water, largely, but everything for all practical purposes that we use.”
“Well, what are you building up to?” Rick said, scowling at the teacher.
Bloch threw up his hands in a gesture of disgust. “It’s a vicious circle. To ever finish this island, to get the mass driver working and the catcher in space catching the raw materials it shoots up, to get the closed ecosystem going, to get the space smelter operating—if any of these things are ultimately possible—we need more highly trained workers. But if we bring them up, we then have to supply them. Which means that more and more of our transports have to be utilized for that purpose instead of bringing up the materials we need to continue the work. They’ve gotten as far as they have so far only by spending countless tens of billions. How much longer the suckers Earthside are going to pony up such amounts is debatable.”
Pete said, “Whether or not it’ll ever be possible to complete the L5 Project, the fact remains that the immediate thing is to bust Al Moore and his gang.”
“That’ll be a neat trick,” Rick muttered.
Pete sent his eyes over to him. “Not as tough as all that. For one thing, we’ve got the element of surprise. Obviously, if Moroni was surrounded with his whole two hundred Security men, all armed, we wouldn’t have a chance. But he’s not. We’ve got two guns. They’ll have to do. We’ll get together our force and, in a surprise raid, capture the broadcasting station and hold it long enough to get our message over to both the L5 workers and to Earth. By the time our Syndicate friends can get organized to overwhelm us, it’ll be too late.”
Rick said, “Not too late for Al to finish us off, though.”
The IABI man shook his head. “If we get our message out, he wouldn’t dare.”
Adam Bloch said, “What force were you talking about?”
Pete turned to him. “You’ll have to supply it. Say about twenty men. Not only should they be good, strong physical specimens, not afraid of a fight if it comes to that, but they should be in electronics. We can’t b
e sure that the technicians at the broadcasting station will come over to us when we break in, although some of them might. We’ll have to operate it ourselves.”
“Twenty men,” Bloch said, looking at Cris Everett.
Cris said thoughtfully, “That shouldn’t be too difficult. We don’t dare use our pocket communicators. Transceivers might be tapped. But I can go out and contact a couple personally and have each of them go out and contact two more apiece and those four will go find others. We can all rendezvous back here.”
Pete said, “Right. And have them arm themselves as best they can. Pieces of steel bars, baseball bats, or whatever, just so they’re small enough to hide in their coveralls until we break into the hotel.”
Bruce Carter said, “Well, if that’s the plan, you’d better get to it, Cris, before somebody smells trouble.”
Everybody nodded acceptance and the window washer left in a hurry.
Rick looked over at Tony Black. “We still have the problem of dream boy,” he said.
But Pete Kapitz was negative. “No. He’s no problem. I brought these up from Earthside.” He brought forth a pair of handcuffs. “They were supposed to be part of my cover. To be used when I’d caught the elusive Rocks Weil.”
“That’s going to be a question we’ll have to solve later,” Rick said wryly. “Even if this unlikely romp is a success.”
Pete said nothing to that. He looked over at Bloch. “Is there a strong pipe or something in the house that I can cuff him to? These shackles come from our Department of Dirty Tricks. They’re tuned to me so that nobody else can open them without a laser or some such.”
Before the teacher could reply, the door crashed inward. In it stood Sergeant Evola, a small submachine gun in his hands. He brought down the heavy boot with which he had forced entrance and for a moment stood there, legs spread, alert for reaction. Behind him crowded more Security men. His gun was centered on Pete Kapitz, but he took them all in one at a time and seemingly found no immediate cause for calling upon his firepower, or the support of his men.
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