Six Million Solid Gold Belter Buckles
by Hayford Peirce
Illustration by Kelly Freas
“You’ve lost all my money!”
I seriously doubted that—Jessica Maynerd was almost certainly the wealthiest woman in Clarkeville, the eighth largest city in the Asteroid Belt—but it still wasn’t the kind of accusation that a highly ethical stockbroker like myself likes to hear from a client first thing in the morning. My instinctive reaction was to grind my teeth and utter a sharp little scream. Instead, I pushed my features into a portrait of puzzled concern and leaned closer to the eighty-seven-year-old face that glared so malignantly from my deskphone. “I don’t understand, Granddame Maynerd,” I murmured, using the flowery Cerean honorific for ladies of a certain age and status that rhymes with random. “All your stocks are doing very—”
“It isn’t my stocks I’m concerned about, Jonathan White! It’s the six million buckles I’ve lost on those titanium futures you talked me into buying, you and that shifty-eyed boss of yours!”
I fell back in my chair, aghast at so monstrous a lie on the lips of one so old and venerable. She was the one who had insisted on throwing a million buckles into the bottomless black hole that was the commodities market! I—Jonathan Welbrook White, Ethical Broker & Bourseman—had done everything short of falling to my knees in trying to dissuade her from such criminal folly!
I stared open-mouthed at the daughter of the founder of Clarkeville—while a glistening tear actually rolled down from her gimlet eye and across a wrinkled cheek. “Have you seen the price of titanium futures today?” she whimpered in a piteous voice. “And now I’ll have to sell all my other stocks just in order to—”
“Just a moment,” I interrupted, rapidly punching keys on my console. As usual when I was upset, I punched a little too vigorously and bounced a good half meter out of my seat before I caught myself. Cerean gravity is only .04 Standard, I reminded myself, but Newton’s law of action and reaction is universal.
I grimaced apologetically and told my fingers to relax. A few seconds later the figures on the brightly colored screen flickered, churned sick-eningly, and went dark—along with all the lights in the office. I muttered a silent curse: the Clarkeville Department of Citizens Service had been promising to bring our new power station on line for two years now, and we were still having constant power failures, particularly after the further disruptions caused by last March’s ceresquake at Harvey’s Hollow. Worse, our own emergency standby power hadn’t been working the way it was supposed to. This morning, however, power returned within a few seconds and I turned back to the data on the screen. I studied it with a cold, clammy feeling of acute dismay.
At least a part of what Granddame Maynerd had said was absolutely true: the price of titanium, and particularly that of its futures, had fallen out of bed with a thud that ought to have been audible across the Solar System. Had, in fact, been doing so for the past six weeks while I had been busy trading mundane stocks and bonds for those of my clients who were too sensible to cast away their patrimonies in the mindless speculation of commodities trading.
So what could I, an ethical stockbroker, now reasonably do?
I spread my hands in a gesture of baffled sympathy. “As you say, Granddame Maynerd, titanium doesn’t look so good right now. But you remember that I did warn you about the risk involved—”
“Nonsense! You said nothing of the sort! All I remember is you and that bullying manager of yours browbeating me into—”
“But… but—”
“—Into putting all my money in titanium futures! Not only that, I distinctly told you to go short, and here you are deliberately going long! If you’d gone short like I told you, I’ve have made millions of buckles. Instead, I’ve lost six million! Six million solid gold Belter buckles, Jonathan White, the only stable currency in the whole Solar System! If your company doesn’t refund all my money—with interest!—and rescind the whole transaction, I’m going to sue you personally, Jonathan White, and I’m going to sue that troglodyte manager of yours, J. Davis Alexander, and I’m going to sue that fly-by-night firm of yours, Hartman, Bemis & Choupette, whoever they may be! Goodbye, young man. The next communication you have from me will be from my lawyers! And from the Procurator General!”
The deskphone went blank. I stared at it equally blankly for what seemed like a long while. Finally I told my secretary to handle all business for the indefinite future, checked to make sure that it was actually powered up, rose to my feet, squared my shoulders, and marched off to see my troglodytic boss, the aptly described J. Davis Alexander.
My natal world of Ceres has a surface area of 3,302,461 square kilometers, just about the size of the Terran political unit called the Indian Union. Its population of 9,736,486 men, women, and others as of 9:35 a.m. July 16, 2278, wasn’t much for an entire world. On the other hand it’s not bad for a hunk of carbonaceous chondrite rock with no atmosphere and no oceans whose first permanent settlement was established not quite a hundred years ago.
Even Clarkeville, only the fourth largest city on the asteroid, has a population of almost 300,000 people. But what’s aggravating about it is that out of all these millions and millions of people on Ceres one of them has to be J. Davis Alexander. Even more aggravating is that of all the possible occupations said J. Davis Alexander could have chosen to match his talents and personality—I have in mind zoo attendant or sinkhole inspector—he chose instead to work his way up to the top of the local stockbroking branch of Hartman, Bemis & Choupette.
Now his baleful eye fixed me from across the broad expanse of his green malachite desk while he cracked the hairy knuckles of one hairy hand after the other. Except for the surface of those baleful eyes, J. Davis Alexander was hairy all over, in addition to which he was without doubt the shortest, stoutest human being in the entire Asteroid Belt. His parents, I believe, had, for religious reasons, systematically refused to take their gravity pills. Or maybe it was J. Davis Alexander himself who refused to take them.
Whatever the cause of his strange shape, if Clarkeville had actually had a zoo, instead of a single duck pond, its board of directors would have been hard put to decide whether my boss should be employed as an attendant or as an exhibit; most probably with the wolverines, that being the beast that most closely matched his winning personality.
Instead, contrary to the simplest notions of elementary justice, J. Davis Alexander had a fine corner office with a view of the duck pond in Westlake Park, a six-figure annual income, and an adoring wife at least half a meter his superior in height.
J. Davis Alexander popped a final knuckle, pursed his fleshy lips, and tugged at one end of his handlebar moustache. I knew from long experience what he was going to say, to wit: “White, you’re fired.”
To my astonishment, however, he merely said, in that voice that sounds like gravel rattling around inside a maladjusted concrete mixer, “What’s all this nonsense from this Maynerd woman, White? I’ve just had one of her lawyers trying to get through to me. I’ve put him off till I talked to you.”
“There’s not much to say,” I shrugged. “As you know, she’s one of our biggest clients in terms of net value. Very rich, very conservative. She’s been with us for at least forty years. I inherited her account when old Wigglesworth retired. Everything in her portfolio’s in blue chips and triple-A bonds, nothing she could ever conceivably lose a nickel on. No one here’s making a centavo on her: she hardly buys or sells anything from one decade to the next.”