The Lord Redlady creased his brow. “Never thought of it. I suppose it must have a limit. But I never thought of it. We do have accountants, though.”
“See,” said Bill. “Even the Instrumentality would hate to lose money. Take the doctor’s bid, Redlady. Take him up on it, Fisher.” His use of their surnames was an extreme incivility, but the two men were convinced.
“I’ll do it,” said Redlady. “It’s awfully close to writing insurance, which we are not chartered to do. I’ll write it in as his emergency clause.”
“I’ll take it,” said John Fisher. “It’s got to be a thousand years until another Norstrilian Financial Secretary pays money for a ticket like this, but it’s worth it. To him. I’ll square it in his accounts. To our planet.”
“I’ll witness it,” said the doctor. “No, you won’t,” said Bill savagely. “The boy has one friend here. That’s me. Let me do it” They stared at him, all three.
He stared back.
He broke. “Sirs and Misters, please let me be the witness.”
The Lord Redlady nodded and opened the console. He and John Fisher spoke the contract into it. At the end Bill shouted his full name as witness.
The two women brought Rod McBan, mother-naked, into the room. He was immaculately clean and he stared ahead as though he were in an endless dream.
“That’s the operating room,” said the Lord Redlady. “I’ll spray us all with antiseptic, if you don’t mind.”
“Of course,” said the doctor. “You must.” “You’re going to cut him up and boil him down — here and now?” cried Aunt Doris.
“Here and now,” said the Lord Redlady, “if the doctor approves. The sooner he goes the better chance he has of coming through the whole thing alive.”
“I consent,” said the doctor. “I approve.”
He started to take Rod by the hand, leading him toward the room with the long coffin and the small box. At some sign from Redlady, the walls had opened up to show a complete surgical theater.
“Wait a moment,” said the Lord Redlady. “Take your colleague.”
“Of course,” said the doctor.
The monkey had jumped out of his basket when he heard his name mentioned.
Together, the giant and the monkey led Rod into the little gleaming room. They closed the door behind them.
The ones who were left behind sat down nervously.
“Mister and Owner Redlady,” said Bill, “since I’m staying, could I have some more of that drink?”
“Of course, Sir and Mister,” said the Lord Redlady, not having any idea of what Bill’s title might be.
There were no screams from Rod, no thuds, no protest. There was the cloying sweet horror of unknown medicines creeping through the airvents. The two women said nothing as the group of people sat around. Eleanor, wrapped in an enormous towel, came and sat with them. In the second hour of the operations on Rod, Lavinia began sobbing.
She couldn’t help it.
TRAPS, FORTUNES AND WATCHERS
We all know that no communications systems are leak-proof. Even inside the far-reaching communications patterns of the Instrumentality, there were soft spots, rotten points, garrulous men. The MacArthur-McBan computer, sheltered in the Palace of the Governor of Night, had had time to work out abstract economics and weather patterns, but the computer had not tasted human love or human wickedness. All the messages concerning Rod’s speculation in the forward santaclara crop and stroon export had been sent in the clear. It was no wonder that on many worlds, people saw Rod as a chance, an opportunity, a victim, a benefactor, or an enemy. For all know the old poem:
It applied in this case too. People ran hot and cold with the news.
Commissioner Teadrinker tapped his teeth with a pencil.
Four megacredits FOE money already and more, much more to come.
Teadrinker lived in a fever of perpetual humiliation. He had chosen it. It was called “the honorable disgrace” and it applied to ex-Lords of the Instrumentality who choose long life instead of service and honor. He was a thousandmorer, meaning that he had traded his career, his reputation, and his authority for a long life of one thousand or more years. (The Instrumentality had learned, long ago, that the best way to protect its members from temptation was to tempt them itself. By offering “honorable disgrace” and low, secure jobs within the Instrumentality to those Lords who might be tempted to trade long life for their secrets, it kept its own potential defectors. Teadrinker was one of these.)
He saw the news and he was a skilled wise man. He could not do anything to the Instrumentality with money, but money worked wonders on Earth. He could buy a modicum of honor. Perhaps he could even have the records falsified and get married again. He flushed slightly, even after hundreds of years, when he remembered his first wife blazing at him when she saw his petition for long life and honorable disgrace: “Go ahead and live, you fool. Live and watch me die without you, inside the decent four hundred years which everybody else has if they work for it and want it. Watch your children die, watch your friends die, watch all your hobbies and ideas get out of date. Go along, you horrible little man, and let me die like a human being!”
A few megacredits could help that.
Teadrinker was in charge of incoming visitors. His underman, the cattle-derived B’dank, was custodian of the scavenger spiders — half-tame one-ton insects which stood by for emergency work if the services of the tower failed. He wouldn’t need to have this Norstrilian merchant very long. Just long enough for a recorded order and a short murder.
Perhaps not. If the Instrumentality caught him, it would be dream-punishments, things worse than Shayol itself.
Perhaps yes. If he succeeded, he would escape a near immortality of boredom and could have a few decades of juicy fun instead.
He tapped his teeth again.
“Do nothing, Teadrinker,” he said to himself, “but think, think, think. Those spiders look as though they might have possibilities.”
“Put two converted police cruisers in orbit around the Sun. Mark them for charter or sale, so that we won’t run into the police.
“Put an agent into every liner which is Earthbound within the time stated.
“Remember, we don’t want the man. Just his luggage. He’s sure to be carrying a half-ton or so of stroon. With that kind of fortune, he could pay off all the debts we gathered with that Bozart business. Funny we never heard from Bozart. Nothing.
“Put three senior thieves in Earthport itself. Make sure that they have fake stroon, diluted down to about one-thousandth, so that they can work the luggage switch if they have the chance.
“I know all this costs money, but you have to spend money to get it. Agreed, gentlemen of the larcenical arts?”
There was a chorus of agreement around the table, except for one old, wise thief who said,
“You know my views.”
“Yes,” said the chairman, with toneless polite hatred, “we know your views. Rob corpses. Clean out wrecks. Become human hyenas instead of human wolves.”