“Have you any idea what it would cost to start an operation like that, before we could even begin getting out sunstones in paying quantities?”
“Yes. I’ve been digging sunstones as long as anybody knew there were sunstones. But this is a good thing, Ben, and if you have a good thing you can always finance it.”
“It would protect the Fuzzies’ rights, and they’d benefit enormously. But the initial expense…”
“Well, lease the mineral rights to somebody who could finance it. The Government would get a royalty, the Fuzzies would benefit, the Reservation would be kept intact.”
“But who? Who would be able to lease it?”
He knew, even as he asked the question. The Charterless Zarathustra Company; they could operate that mine. Why, that mine would be something on the odd-jobs level, compared to what they’d done on the Big Blackwater Swamp. Lease them the entire mineral rights for the Reservation; that would keep everybody else out.
But it would put the Company back where they’d been before the Pendarvis Decisions; it would give them back their sunstone monopoly; it would… Why, it was unthinkable!
Unthinkable, hell. He was thinking about it now, wasn’t he?
VICTOR GREGO CRUSHED out his cigarette and leaned back in his relaxer-chair, closing his eyes. From the Fuzzy-room, he could hear muted voices, and the frequent popping of shots. Diamond was enjoying a screen-play. He was very good about keeping the volume turned down, so as not to bother Pappy Vic, but he’d get some weird ideas about life among the Hagga from some of those shows. Well, the good Hagga always licked the bad Hagga in the end, that was one thing.
He went back to thinking about bad Hagga, four of them in particular. Ivan Bowlby, Spike Heenan, Raul Laporte, Leo Thaxter.
Mallorysport was full of bad Hagga, on the lower echelons, but those four were the General Staff. Bowlby was the entertainment business. Beside the telecast show which Diamond was watching at the moment, that included prize-fights, nightclubs, prostitution and, without doubt, dope. Maybe he’d like to get Fuzzies as attractions at his night-spots, and through that part of his business he could make contacts with well to do people who wanted Fuzzies, couldn’t adopt them, and would pay fancy prices for them. If there really were a black market, he’d be in it.
Spike Hennan was gambling; crap-games, numbers racket, bookmaking. On sport-betting, his lines and Bowlby’s would cross with mutual profit. Laporte was racketeering, extortion, plain old-fashioned country-style crime. And stolen goods, of course, and, while there’d been money in it, illicit gem-buying.
Leo Thaxter was the biggest, and the most respectably fronted, of the four. L. Thaxter, Loan Broker Private Financier. He loaned money publicly at a righteously legal seven percent; he also loaned, at much higher rates, to all the shylocks in town, who, in turn, loaned it at six-for-five to people who could not borrow elsewhere, including suckers who went broke in Spike Hennan’s crap-games, and he used Raul Laporte’s hoodlums to do his collecting.
And, notoriously but unprovably, behind them stood Hugo Ingermann, Mallorysport’s unconvicted underworld generalissimo.
Maybe they were just before proving it, now. Leslie Coombes’s investigators had established that all four of them, and especially Thaxter, were the dummy owners behind whom Ingermann controlled most of the land the company had unwisely sold eight years ago, the section north of Mallorysport that was now dotted with abandoned factories and commercial buildings. And it was pretty well established that those four had been the John Doe, Richard Roe, et alii, who had been represented in court by Ingermann just after the Pendarvis Decisions.
Strains of music were now coming from the Fuzzy-room; the melodrama was evidently over. He opened his eyes, lit another cigarette, and began going over what he knew about Ingermann’s four chief henchmen. Thaxter; he’d come to Zarathustra a few years before Ingermann. Small-time racketeer, at first, and then he’d tried to organize labor unions, but labor unions organized by outsiders had been frowned upon by the company, and he’d been shown the wisdom of stopping that. Then he’d organized an independent planters’ marketing cooperative, and from that he’d gotten into shylocking. There’d been some woman with him, at first, wife or reasonable facsimile. Maybe she was still around; have Coombes look into that. She might be willing to talk.
Diamond strolled in from the Fuzzy-room.
“Pappy Vic! Make talk with Diamond, plis. “
LIEUTENANT FITZ MORTLAKE, acting-in-charge of company detective bureau for the 1800-2400 shift, yawned. Twenty more minutes; less than that if Bert Eggers got in early to relieve him. He riffled through the stack of complaint sheet copies on the desk and put a paperweight on them. In the squadroom outside the mechanical noises of card-machines and teleprinters and the occasional howl of a sixty-speed audiovisual transmission were being replaced by human sounds, voices and laughter and the scraping of chairs, as the midnight-to-six shift began filtering in. He was wondering whether to go home and read till he became sleepy, or drift around the bars to see if he could pick up a girl, when Bert Eggers pushed past a couple of sergeants at the door and entered.
“Hi, Fitz; how’s it going?”
“Oh, quiet. We found out where Jayser hid that stuff; we have all of it, now. And Millman and Nogahara caught those kids who were stealing engine parts out of Warehouse Ten. We have them in detention; we haven’t questioned them yet.”
“We’ll take care of that. They work for the Company?”
“Two of them do. The third is just a kid, seventeen. Juvenile Court can have him. We think they were selling the stuff to Honest Hymie.”
“Uhuh. I’ll suspect anybody they all call Honest Anybody or anything,” Eggers said, sitting down as he vacated the chair.
He took off his coat, pulled his shoulder holster and pistol from the bottom drawer and put it on, resuming the coat. He gathered up his lighter and tobacco pouch, and then discovered that his pipe was missing, and hunted the desk-top for it, unearthing it from under some teleprinted photographs.
“What are these?” Eggers asked, looking at them.
“Herckerd and Novaes, false alarm number ’steen thousand. A couple of woods-tramps who turned up on Epsilon.”
Eggers made a sour face. “Those damn Fuzzies have made more work for us,” he began. “And now, my kids are after me to get them one. So’s my wife. You know what? Fuzzies are a status-symbol, now. If you don’t have a Fuzzy, you might as well move to Junktown with the rest of the bums.”
“I don’t have a Fuzzy, and I haven’t moved to Junktown yet.”
“You don’t have kids in high school.”
“No, thank God!”
“Bet he doesn’t have finance-company trouble, either,” one of the sergeants in the doorway said.
Bert was going to make some retort to that. Before he could, another voice spoke up:
“Yeeek! “