The small gray man was sitting there, speechless. He was trying to realize he was solvent. He had not thought to recover more than ten trillion in a forced sale. He sat up and grabbed a pen to sign the receipt.
Lord Voraz stopped his hand. “That's all very well,” he said in a worried voice. “But there are two other matters.” He turned to Jonnie. “Can you forgive us for trying to treat you as a hired hand, Sir Lord Jonnie? It is quite true that we cannot operate at all without transshipment rigs and consoles. We are cut off. We used to ship all bank business on the Psychlo rigs, using our own bank boxes. They charged us heavily but to deliver a dispatch by spaceship can cost fifty thousand credits and takes ages! Are you going to help us in this?”
“That's all Jonnie's," said MacAdam. “We at the bank don't own any part of it. Jonnie, we can make you a loan at low interest and help you set up a manufacturing plant. A separate company that you own. How about it?”
Chapter 2
Jonnie roused himself. He had been so intent upon finance that he had to consciously force himself to think about technical matters.
It would be dangerous to Earth to have these consoles scattered through sixteen universes– thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands of rigs in not always friendly or well-meaning hands, run by other races.
You could do a lot of things with a console. You could transport people, send dispatch boxes, ship ores, ship finished goods, send food. But you could also send bombs as he himself had proven so fatally to the Psychlos, and as would have been the end of the Tolneps.
He had not thought much about the problem. Many other things had been very urgent. Yes, one console out there, much less half a million, could be very dangerous to this planet. “Give me a moment,” he said.
Mr. Tsung also had his uses for the moment and brought them some tea and a tray of bites-between-meals. It was nearing lunchtime. It also, as he had wisely noted, gave Jonnie a needed moment to think.
The Psychlos had had Psychlo operators. It didn't make much difference about the platform and rig.
The same security measures could be used in the console itself. Possibly even improved a bit.
If he put a camera in the armored front of the case that would shoot a picture of every cargo....
Aha! Metal analysis detectors. If they were built into the platform itself, they could analyze a cargo from all sides, above and below, and if that were connected to a circuit no one could get at in the console and if that circuit had a metal tracer... Yes. If anything in a cargo matched forbidden traces like uranium or this ultimate bomb heavy element, the match of the circuit would separate a relay and the console would not fire...
It was a trifle difficult to think with all these faces staring at him, waiting. He didn't have to be told the fate of the banks depended upon it. And they hadn't mentioned a thing which could queer the whole deal.
If he got with Allen and MacKendrick and worked out disease...they said it had an aura. Anyway, there were disease viruses and bacterial traces and he could work those in, whether disease had an aura or not, and if anything on the platform matched, they would trigger that relay and the console wouldn't fire.
He could rig it so if any of such items were put on platforms for Earth, he could tie in the coordinates of Earth so that the console would blow up.
Then if a sign were put on every console in plain view like, “Any attempt to fire contraband cargo with this console will render it inoperative....” No list of things or else somebody might try to mask the trace. And if one added, “Any attempt to use this console in an act of war against Earth will cause it to explode....” Maybe even put out that the console could read evil intentions....
Yes, he could build a foolproof console.
And if the console seemed to be finally assembled in a place which was not known, by people who could not be found...
He could make the construction areas very heavily defended. He would let only a very trusted, unbribable few do the final assembly.... Start a school for extraterrestrial operators who knew only how to operate it....
“I think I can do that,” he told them.
They all brightened up. Mr. Tsung took the tray away.
“However,” said Jonnie, “the rigs will be a bit expensive.”
Unimportant.
“And I will not sell them. I will only lease them. Every five years a console will have to be exchanged for a new one.” That would keep going an Earth that had no real income, and it would permit an inspection of views of cargos that had been shipped. “Some extraterrestrial firm will have to be brought in to make components and cases. Otherwise it will take too long to build one.”
“You can provide consoles?” asked Lord Voraz.
“He said he could,” said the baron. "lf Jonnie says he is going to do something, watch it! He will!”
“All right,” said Lord Voraz. “That brings us now to the most serious block of all.” He pointed in the direction of the big conference room. “Those emissaries!”
Voraz looked very gloomy. “You are almost in the intergalactic banking business now and will be if this resolution is signed. You had better understand that it is very tricky business handling such as those!
“As you noted,” he continued, “right now they have countries in riot. Their economies are in rags. But they are of such a nature that they will just sit there square in the middle of their prejudices, cling to their most arrogant opinions, and ignore everything else.
“Right this minute, I have better reason than you to know, they are absolutely counting on war to save their economies and their states. They think that war powers and war hysteria will distract the people and secure their own positions. It is their only formula.
“This bank lived in the shadow of the powerful even if hated Psychlos. They are gone. You, and even the Gredides, are small planets. You have no great military force. To be blunt, those lords will not respect you.
“I read the ripples in the water with Lord Schleim. He supposed the bank was no longer the power it had been. He thought he could violate a conference. He failed. But that kind of thinking couldn't have existed a mere thirteen months ago. Others among those haughty lords will get the same ideas sooner or later.”
He pointed to the papers. “You have here more than one million, two hundred thousand habitable, useful worlds. It is very tasty bait for very big fish.
“Since these lords are bent on war to save their regimes, they will find a pretext not to respect the ownership of Intergalactic, Earth, or the bank.
They will raid these planets. They will quarrel over them. They will throw good sense and order to the winds and waves. The harder they are driven at home by economic chaos, the more they will seek a pretext to take outlaw actions.”
Jonnie was listening to him. He had wondered for some time now when they would get around to this point. It was the key problem. And if it were left unhandled, all the doors they were trying to open would jam shut in their faces.
“Since I have been here,” said Lord Voraz, “not one of those elegant aristocrats has failed to draw me aside and try to discuss his nation's chances for a war loan. Of course, we seldom make war loans. All we do is issue the bonds for them and let them sell them to each other. There's no real money in war loans. With economics this shaky, the chances of their being paid back are poor. Wars are not as popular with the people who fight them as with the lords who run them and profit by them! Revolutions could occur and revolutionaries are notorious as bad risks.