Almost.
Ten minutes into the journey, Seth was sitting by Mike's side, breathing heavily through his mouth. His fat face had a brooding look. "We get special dinner?"
"You bet we do." Mike had been peering into the rearview sensors, and nothing was coming after them. "The dinner that I promised you, at Cap City. And then we'll be on our way home, back to your family."
Seth was silent for another moment. Then he shook his head. "No. You go back. Not me."
"But your home—your family." Mike gave him five minutes of his best arguments, and at the end of it Seth shook his head again.
"No. After special dinner, I fly back Mundsen Labs. That the best place I live—best games."
"Best games"—that was Seth's expression of the fact that the Chills in the Mundsen Labs were the world's tops in micro-circuits. To him, it was no more than a game, one that he played better than anyone. Unfortunately, none of that made any difference to Mike's mission.
"Seth, you don't understand." Mike felt like a swine, but he couldn't give Seth a choice. "You have to go home. The people at the Mundsen Labs did something bad when they took you away from home. We can't let them do what they did, and get away with it."
"Something bad, but not for me. Like it there," Seth said. "Take me back, Mike. After dinner, or right now."
"I can't, Seth." Mike held their course north. Poor guy, he thought. He had to learn the hard way what the world was like.
Seth did not speak, but he looked at Mike sorrowfully. Then he slouched down in his chair, shook his big head, and stuck his hands in his pockets. Mike felt like a real villain. Seth had helped so much. But there was a job to do.
After another minute or so the controls of the car suddenly became soggy and unresponsive. Mike no longer had full control. He tried to stay calm and keep on course. No good. They were holding altitude, but banking in a wide arc, turning steadily. In another few seconds they would be heading back the way they had come.
"Damn." Mike dropped the useless control stick. "It's happened again. They've taken over. Seth, I thought you said you'd made it so—"
He stopped. Seth was sitting back in his seat, bent over a little square of ceramic. A tiny scriber was in his hand, and he was moving it precisely over the surface. He noticed Mike looking, and did a little sideways wiggle with the tool. The aircar rolled right, then returned.
"Are you doing that? It's impossible. How, for the sake of Daddy-O, can you control an aircar with that little bit of plastic?"
Seth looked at Mike slyly. "Easy. Capacitance control. We have special dinner, then I go back. Right? Or we go back now."
Trader Rule: Try as hard as you can, but know when you've lost. Mike cursed his own stupidity. Why had he ever, for one moment, thought of Seth Paramine as just an idiot? Genius was genius, no matter how it showed itself. And genius could run rings around nongeniuses—like Mike—whenever it chose to.
"All right. You can go back after the dinner."
"Trader's Promise?"
Now how the devil had Seth learned about that?
Mike thought for another few moments. He had no choice. He nodded. "Trader's Promise."
Seth moved a finger, the car began to turn, and soon they were once more heading for Cap City.
Then Seth surprised Mike one more time. He looked across with those strange, miles-away eyes and reached over to pat Mike's hand. "You all right. I trust you, Mike. You come see me again."
Mike gripped his hand in return. It was the nearest thing to a true benediction that he ever expected to achieve in life.
CHAPTER 16
The long curved corridor was familiar this time. Mike pressed the monitor as soon as it was in reach, and the massive black door opened.
Max Dalzell was in, sitting at his desk. He waved Mike over to the visitor's chair. "I heard you were back," he said. Then he took a look at Mike's face and reached into his desk drawer. "Here. You need a bite from the tortoise."
He handed across a small plastic phial of testudo spirit, twisting the top as he did so. There was a long, high-pitched hiss and the bottle cooled twenty degrees in Mike's hand.
"New gimmick," Dalzell said. "Joule-Thomson effect. The Greasers say they're fond of technology, but they tend to apply it only to their own sybaritic ends."
Mike took his first cautious sip of the icy liquid and waited for the column of torchbearers to walk down his throat to his stomach.
"That will help," Dalzell said. "Cheer up. It's not the end of the world."
"I'd like to think you're right."
"You made a successful negotiation for the gaming robots."
"No—you did that. They'll accept the agreement you wrote—without any changes."
Dalzell grinned. "But you'll get the credit. And you came as close as an eyelash to pulling Paramine out of there. You just had some bad luck."
"I had a lot of luck on the mission—both kinds. And I had something else."
Mike saw Max Dalzell's expression change. The man was uncannily perceptive.
"What are you getting at?"
"I'm not sure I know. I'm not as experienced as many Traders, and I'll be the first to admit it. But I have a feel for the way a mission is supposed to work. On the plane coming back here, I realized that this one went sour right from the beginning. I started to make a list, and then I linked in to Daddy-O."
"I know. I saw your report as it came into the data bank."
"You saw some of it. I put the rest into a closed file." Mike drained the bottle of testudo and sighed. "First data point: I didn't realize it until I met them, but the Chills are real stay-at-homes. They love it on the ice cap, and they hardly ever leave it for anything."
"The occasional flight to F'waygo. That's as far as most of them go."
"It's one hell of a long way from there to northern Yankeeland. So that gave me my first question: The Cap Federation heard about Seth Paramine, we know that. How did they hear about him? Well, they must have been told. Not too surprising, if you think about it—all the groups try to have agents in the others' territories. And that explained something else that baffled me. That 'wall of fire' defense for the Mundsen Labs isn't a useful idea out on the ice cap. In fact, it's useless. Anybody with a chillsuit on could walk right through it in perfect safety. But if the Chills knew about Paramine's fear of flame, it would be the perfect way of making sure he didn't try to leave. Even if he wandered out on his own, he'd have run back terrified. Again, it pointed to somebody feeding secret Yankee information to the Chills."
Max Dalzell puffed out his lips and handed Mike another bottle of testudo. "Plausible. But there could be five other explanations. Maybe the Chills cracked a Yankee communication line—they're the hotshots at electronics."
"That idea occurred to me, too. Or a Trader line. If they could break a Yankee comm-code, they'd just as easily crack one of ours. And that made me think of something else. One reason I got into trouble with the Chills was that I didn't have a Mentor contact to give me advice. Why no Mentor? I checked. Do you know who made that decision here?"
Max Dalzell was like a stone carving. Then his eyes flickered once, down to the desk and back up.
"And I know, too," Mike said. "This trip to the Chills taught me something else. For the first time in my life, I realized that most Trader Rules can be interpreted two ways. Like this one: 'If you don't have confidence in yourself, no one else will.' Sounds great, and a trainee needs it to build up self-image. But it has another consequence. When one of us is chosen for a particular mission, we never ask, 'Why me?' We assume it's for our brains and charm and courage. We never dream that we may have been selected for a completely different reason: that we were picked because we were sure to fail. Take a Trader whose self-confidence is low, someone who just staggered out of a total collapse of spirit and nerve. Chances are good that he'll fail, whatever you give him."
Dalzell gave a rumbling cough, deep in his chest. "I told you the odds that Daddy-O gave against success b
efore you left."
"You did. You told me the odds against my success. I had one chance in a hundred. But you didn't tell me that the odds Daddy-O gave for an experienced woman Trader were better than forty percent. The Chills had requested a female negotiator for this case; they expected an experienced woman. They were given a man with only four missions under his belt, one who just came out of rehab. That was almost the end for me, right there. So why was I sent? Normally, the choice of Trader for a mission is made by Daddy-O. There's only one rank of person who can overrule that—a Master Trader."
"Daddy-O agreed with me."
Mike scarcely seemed to hear him. "But who would want to send the wrong Trader? It had to be someone who knew the Chills intimately, well enough to have reached a private arrangement with them. Someone who had heard about Seth Paramine through private Yankee channels, and told the Chills about him; someone who could set up a Trader mission to rescue Paramine, but make sure it was going to fail."
Mike had finished the second bottle of testudo, and it was having its effect. He looked at the iron face of the man in front of him and thought of all the times that he had longed to meet Big Max in person. Now he wished that it had never happened.
"So you know what I put in the closed file to Daddy-O. Not proof. I don't have proof. But if I'm right, Daddy-O will get that. Computers never stop looking. And unless I give the counterinstruction, the computer search will begin in an hour. I came here for one reason: so you can tell me that I'm wrong, and then I can cancel the instruction."
Dalzell took another phial of testudo from his desk and tossed it down his throat like water. He sighed. "I can't do that. Because you're not wrong. And I can't do this, either." He raised his other hand from beneath the level of the desk and showed the weapon he was holding. "Not on you, Mike. You were just doing your job. Even if I did, it wouldn't stop Daddy-O, would it?"
Mike shook my head.
"Then can I ask a favor?" Dalzell leaned forward. "You may find it hard to believe, after what you've just said to me, but I love the Traders. It's been my whole life for thirty years. I don't want another thirty of disgrace, pointed at by everybody as a traitor." He lifted the weapon. "If I end it here and now—my way—would you cancel that order to the computer? Let my name be a proud one, and not a Trader curse?"
Mike's throat was dry. It shouldn't come to this—Max Dalzell, his idol, pleading to die with honor intact. "Why, Max? Why did you do it? You had everything, you were everything . . ."
Dalzell did not speak, and Mike could not. Dalzell finally nodded and stood up. "I'd like to do this alone. In my inner office. There's one private file of mine that I want to purge. Five minutes?"
"Of course. As long as you want."
Mike had stood up when the other man did, not knowing what to do next. Dalzell held out his hand, and Mike shook it. Then the Master Trader walked slowly around the big office, looking at the pictures and certificates that filled the walls. Finally he opened the steel door and passed through into the inner office.
Mike sat down again and buried his face in his hands, it was over. And now that it was over, he realized how desperately he had wanted Max Dalzell to prove that Mike was wrong, that he had misinterpreted everything. Max Dalzell, the greatest Trader of them all.
The minutes ticked on. Mike was waiting for that awful sound, the dull explosion made by human flesh when it is suddenly superheated to ten thousand degrees. It did not come. Ten minutes, fifteen minutes, and still no sound from the other office.
Mike gave in at fifteen. He found the inner door ajar, and it swung open to reveal a deserted room. Mike went over to the corner, to a square opening that led to a steep spiral staircase. He stuck his head inside. At the top he saw daylight filtered through frosted glass.
The data terminal in the corner was still on, with his own code word already blinking on it. He pressed the sequence for send mode and queried Travel Control.
The reply came in a few seconds. Dalzell's private airshell was in flight, heading south, DESTINATION: UNSPECIFIED, SPEED: MACH SEVEN. INTERCEPTION POTENTIAL: MESSAGES ONLY. (NOTE TO INQUIRER: THE SHELL OF A MASTER TRADER CANNOT BE RECALLED BY OUTSIDE INTERVENTION.)
Mike did not send a message. He didn't need to. While he was still staring at the screen the receive light came on and the file scrolled in:
TO MIKAL ASPARIAN—FOR WHOM I PREDICT A GREAT TRADER FUTURE:
AS YOU SAID, TRADER RULES CAN BE INTERPRETED IN MORE THAN ONE WAY. REMEMBER THIS ONE? DON'T TRY TO BE A HERO; THERE'S NO SHAME IN FLIGHT. I'M APPLYING IT IN A WAY YOU NEVER EXPECTED.
YOU WERE RIGHT ON ALMOST EVERYTHING, BUT YOU MISSED ONE KEY POINT. WHO WOULD SPEND THE REST OF HIS LIFE IN CAP CITY, BLEAK AND COLD, WHEN HE COULD HAVE THE DELIGHTS OF REE-O-DEE? I DID SOME WORK FOR THE CHILLS, BUT I WAS PERFECTLY HONEST WHEN I TOLD YOU I KNOW THE GREASERS FIFTY TIMES AS WELL. TELL DADDY-O NOT TO WASTE HIS ELECTRONS LOOKING FOR ME. I'VE HAD A LONG TIME TO PREPARE FOR THIS, AND I'LL BE WELL PROTECTED. WHY DID I DO IT, YOU ASKED. I SAW THE PAIN AND PUZZLEMENT ON YOUR FACE.
WHY. WHY, INDEED.
MIKE, I ENVY YOU. YOU'RE YOUNG, AND YOU'RE SEEING IT ALL FOR THE FIRST TIME. YOU'LL GET OVER THIS EXPERIENCE, AND YOU'LL BE FINE. BUT WHAT WILL YOU DO WHEN YOU HAVE SEEN IT ALL BEFORE. WHEN THERE IS NOTHING IN THE TRADERS' WORLD THAT IS NOVEL OR EXCITING. WHEN TRADING IS SO AUTOMATIC IT CAN BE DONE WITHOUT THINKING? CHILLS, CHIPS, HIVERS, YANKEES, GREASERS, STRINES, TRADERS—WHO CARES? I'VE SEEN THEM ALL, WITH EVERYTHING THEY CAN OFFER. I WAS BORED, MIKE. BORED BEYOND DEATH. JUST PRAY THAT IT NEVER HAPPENS TO YOU.
GOOD LUCK, AND LONG LIFE (BUT NOT TOO LONG)—MAX DALZELL. PS: THIS RECORD WILL NOT BE STORED ANYWHERE IN DADDY-O'S DATA BANKS.
The file closed and left Mike staring at an empty screen. After a couple of minutes he went back to Send mode and opened the connection to Daddy-O. He had to explain what he had done—that he had confirmed his suspicions about Dalzell, then been stupid and naive enough to let him escape.
But he hesitated. If Mike wanted to, he could purge the file where he had suggested that Max Dalzell was a traitor. The disappearance would be a mystery, but there would be nothing to connect it to Mike's return. And no record of this meeting.
Dalzell's final PS said it all: if Mike left the other's reputation intact, he could keep secret his own bungling.
It was a temptation. Mike could hide his blunders and start on a path that could lead to success and a position as Master Trader—and maybe, thirty years from now, to another high-speed flight to Ree-o-dee.
Mike thought about it for a few seconds. Then he sent the message that converted his conjecture about Max Dalzell to an open data file and asked Daddy-O to go ahead and investigate. The computer accepted his instructions without comment or criticism—those would come later, from others.
He had done it. He would tell everything, and drag the legend of Max Dalzell down into the gutter. Max Dalzell, the greatest of them all, the super-Trader with one fatal flaw.
Infallible Max.
But he was not infallible. He had been wrong on at least one other thing. "You'll be fine," he had said. "You're young." Mike stared at the messages on the terminal and knew he would never be young again.
* * *
"The record is in the file. Asparian completed the mission, Lyle. Just as I said he would."
"And he was destroyed by it, Daddy-O, just as I said he would be. I tried to persuade him to go to the Economic Community for a while. He refused. He wouldn't talk to Lucia, wouldn't even take a call from Jeanette. He's back in the rehab tank, sitting in a sensory deprivation chamber. Jack Lester says he can't get through to him either. Mike wants to see no one, hear no one, feel nothing." Connery's anger showed in his carefully neutral voice. "We've been breaking him, you know, step by step. His friends, his ideals, his ambitions; they've all gone. What's left?"
"Mikal remains. Not destroyed: hardened. He has known failure. He has made friends, as well as lost them. He has felt compassion, even for Max Dalzell. He has resisted temp
tation."
"Has anyone else ever been pushed around like this? If they have, I don't remember it. And what about your promise? Before he went to Cap City, you said it would be only two more missions."
"That has not changed. Unless we fail, the next mission will be the last one that I assign to Mikal Asparian."
"Can't we stop now? He has every attribute that you listed."
"One more mission, Lyle. Only one." Daddy-O's electronic voice sounded weary. "One more. And then—it will be over."
One way or another. But that element of the record was not transmitted to Lyle Connery. In half a century of data collection and analysis, Daddy-O had learned the loads that humans were able to bear.
The breaking point was close, for Lyle Connery and Mikal Asparian.
CHAPTER 17
Mike felt sure he was going to throw up, but he couldn't let himself do it. Not with a Chipponese kid watching and all ready to laugh.
She had come floating over upside down, then done some sort of quick roll so that she was staring into his face. "Are you all right?"
What a question!
"Sure." That sort of lie was learned back in the first training sessions.
"I know how you feel. Try to relax. First time up." She said that the way that Chips often did, so that it was impossible to tell if it were a question or a statement. She spoke excellent Trader, but with a tonal language like Chipponese the usual rules for pronunciation, such as a rising final inflection to indicate a question, didn't apply any more. She had carried them into her Trader speech pattern.
"We'll be docking in five minutes," she went on. At least she wasn't laughing. "There's nothing to be afraid of. I felt like this, too, the first time—I didn't go up myself until I was seventeen years old."
She looked about ten! Chip women didn't have much in the way of figures, and Mike had just learned that he couldn't tell how old they were. For all he knew, she could be his age.
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