“Send in Coustakis,” he hears himself say, and his words give him the answer. That one. He will again watch his own destruction. Surely there is no further need to subject him to this particular reenactment. He has been through it at least seven times; he is losing count. An endless spiralling track of torment.
Coustakis is bald, blue-eyed, sharp-nosed, with the desperate look of a man who is near the end of his first go-round and is not yet sure that he will be granted a second. Skein guesses that he is about seventy. The man is unlikable: he dresses coarsely, moves in aggressive blurting little strides, and shows in every gesture and glance that he seethes with envy of the opulence with which Skein surrounds himself. Skein feels no need to like his clients, though. Only to respect. And Coustakis is brilliant; he commands respect.
Skein says, “My staff and I have studied your proposal in great detail. It’s a cunning scheme.”
“You’ll help me?”
“There are risks for me,” Skein points out. “Nissenson has a powerful ego. So do you. I could get hurt. The whole concept of synergy involves risk for the Communicator. My fees are calculated accordingly.”
“Nobody expects a Communicator to be cheap,” Coustakis mutters.
“I’m not. But I think you’ll be able to afford me. The question is whether I can afford you.”
“You’re very cryptic, Mr. Skein. Like all oracles.”
Skein smiles. “I’m not an oracle, I’m afraid. Merely a conduit through whom connections are made. I can’t foresee the future.”
“You can evaluate probabilities.”
“Only concerning my own welfare. And I’m capable of arriving at an incorrect evaluation.”
Coustakis fidgets. “Will you help me or won’t you?”
“The fee,” Skein says, “is half a million down, plus an equity position of fifteen percent in the corporation you’ll establish with the contacts I provide.”
Coustakis gnaws at his lower lip. “So much?”
“Bear in mind that I’ve got to split my fee with Nissenson. Consultants like him aren’t cheap.”
“Even so. Ten percent.”
“Excuse me, Mr. Coustakis. I really thought we were past the point of negotiation in this transaction. It’s going to be a busy day for me, and so—” Skein passes his hand over a black rectangle on his desk and a section of the floor silently opens, uncovering the dropshaft access. He nods toward it. The carpet reveals the colors of Coustakis’s mental processes: black for anger, green for greed, red for anxiety, yellow for fear, blue for temptation, all mixed together in the hashed pattern betraying the calculations now going on in his mind. Coustakis will yield. Nevertheless Skein proceeds with the charade of standing, gesturing toward the exit, trying to usher his visitor out. “All right,” Coustakis says explosively, “fifteen percent!”
Skein instructs his desk to extrude a contract cube. He says, “Place your hand here, please,” and as Coustakis touches the cube he presses his own palm against its opposite face. At once the cube’s sleek crystalline surface darkens and roughens as the double sensory output bombards it. Skein says, “Repeat after me. I, Nicholas Coustakis, whose handprint and vibration pattern are being imprinted in this contract as I speak—”
“I, Nicholas Coustakis, whose handprint and vibration pattern are being imprinted in this contract as I speak—”
“—do knowingly and willingly assign to John Skein Enterprises, as payment for professional services to be rendered, an equity interest in Coustakis Transport Ltd or any successor corporation amounting to—”
“—do knowingly and willingly assign—”
They drone on in turns through a description of Coustakis’s corporation and the irrevocable nature of Skein’s part ownership in it. Then Skein files the contract cube and says, “If you’ll phone your bank and put your thumb on the cash part of the transaction, I’ll make contact with Nissenson and you can get started.”
“Half a million?”
“Half a million.”
“You know I don’t have that kind of money.”
“Let’s not waste time, Mr. Coustakis. You have assets. Pledge them as collateral. Credit is easily obtained.”
Scowling, Coustakis applies for the loan, gets it, transfers the funds to Skein’s account. The process takes eight minutes; Skein uses the time to review Coustakis’s ego profile. It displeases Skein to have to exert such sordid economic pressure; but the service he offers does, after all, expose him to dangers, and he must cushion the risk by high guarantees, in case some mishap should put him out of business.
“Now we can proceed,” Skein says, when the transaction is done.
Coustakis has almost invented a system for the economical instantaneous transportation of matter. It will not, unfortunately, ever be useful for living things, since the process involves the destruction of the material being shipped and its virtually simultaneous reconstitution elsewhere. The fragile entity that is the soul cannot withstand the withering blast of Coustakis’s transmitter’s electron beam. But there is tremendous potential in the freight business; the Coustakis transmitter will be able to send cabbages to Mars, computers to Pluto, and, given the proper linkage facilities, it should be able to reach the inhabited extrasolar planets.
However, Coustakis has not yet perfected his system. For five years he has been stymied by one impassable problem: keeping the beam tight enough between transmitter and receiver. Beamspread has led to chaos in his experiments; marginal straying results in the loss of transmitted information, so that that which is being sent invariably arrives incomplete. Coustakis has depleted his resources in the unsuccessful search for a solution, and thus has been forced to the desperate and costly step of calling in a Communicator.
For a price, Skein will place him in contact with someone who can solve his problem. Skein has a network of consultants on several worlds, experts in technology and finance and philology and nearly everything else. Using his own mind as the focal nexus, Skein will open telepathic communion between Coustakis and a consultant.
“Get Nissenson into a receptive state,” he orders his desk.
Coustakis, blinking rapidly, obviously uneasy, says, “First let me get it clear. This man will see everything that’s in my mind? He’ll get access to my secrets?”
“No. No. I filter the communion with great care. Nothing will pass from your mind to his except the nature of the problem you want him to tackle. Nothing will come back from his mind to yours except the answer.”
“And if he doesn’t have the answer?”
“He will.”
Skein gives no refunds in the event of failure, but he has never had a failure. He does not accept jobs that he feels will be inherently impossible to handle. Either Nissenson will see the solution Coustakis has been overlooking, or else he will make some suggestion that will nudge Coustakis toward finding the solution himself. The telepathic communion is the vital element. Mere talking would never get anywhere. Coustakis and Nissenson could stare at blueprints together for months, pound computers side by side for years, debate the difficulty with each other for decades, and still they might not hit on the answer. But the communion creates a synergy of minds that is more than a doubling of the available brainpower. A union of perceptions, a heightening, that always produces that mystic flash of insight, that leap of the intellect.