Pulcher asked a few more questions, and then interviewed two of the other boys. He learned nothing he hadn’t already known. The six youngsters had planned a reasonably competent kidnapping, and talked about it where they could be heard, and if there was any hope of getting them off it did not make itself visible to their court-appointed attorney.
Pulcher left the jail abruptly and went up the street to see Charley Dickon.
The committeeman was watching a three-way wrestling match on a flickery old TV set. “How’d it go, Milo,” he greeted the lawyer, keeping his eyes on the wrestling.
Pulcher said, “I’m not going to get them off, Charley.”
“Oh? Too bad.” Dickon looked away from the set for the first time. “Why not?”
“They admitted the whole thing. Handwriting made the Hopgood boy on the ransom note. They all had fingerprints and cell-types all over the place. And besides, they talked too much.”
Dickon said with a spark of interest, “What about Tim Lasser’s son?”
“Sorry.” The committeeman looked thoughtful. “I can’t help it, Charley,” the lawyer protested. The kids hadn’t been even routinely careful. When they planned to kidnap the son of the mayor they had talked it over, quite loudly, in a juke joint. The waitress habitually taped everything that went on in her booths. Pulcher suspected a thriving blackmail business, but that didn’t change the fact that there was enough on tape to show premeditation. They had picked the mayor’s son up at school. He had come with them perfectly willingly-the girl, Madeleine Gaultry, had been a babysitter for him. The boy was only three years old, but he couldn’t miss an easy identification like that. And there was more: the ransom note had been sent special delivery, and young Foltis had asked the post-office clerk to put the postage on instead of using the automatic meter. The clerk remembered the pimply face very well indeed.
The committeeman sat politely while Pulcher explained, though it was obvious that most of his attention was on the snowy TV screen. “Well, Milo, that’s the way it goes. Anyway, you got a fast three hundred, hey? And that reminds me.”
Pulcher’s guard went up.
“Here,” said the committeeman, rummaging through his desk. He brought out a couple of pale green tickets. “You ought to get out and meet some more people. The Party’s having its annual Chester A. Arthur Day Dinner next week. Bring your girl.”
“I don’t have a girl.”
“Oh, you’ll find one. Fifteen dollars per,” explained the committeeman, handing over the tickets. Pulcher sighed and paid. Well, that was what kept the wheels oiled. And Dickon had suggested his name to Judge Pegrim. Thirty dollars out of three hundred still left him a better week’s pay than he had had since the Icicle Works folded.
The committeeman carefully folded the bills into his pocket, Pulcher watching gloomily. Dickon was looking prosperous, all right. There was easily a couple of thousand in that wad. Pulcher supposed that Dickon had been caught along with everybody else on the planet when the Icicle Works folded. Nearly everybody owned stock in it, and certainly Charley Dickon, whose politician brain got him a piece of nearly every major enterprise on Altair Nine-a big clump of stock in the Tourist Agency, a sizable share of the Mining Syndicate -certainly he would have had at least a few thousand in the Icicle Works. But it hadn’t hurt him much. He said, “None of my business, but why don’t you take that girl?”
“Madeleine Gaultry? She’s in jail.”
“Get her out. Here.” He tossed over a bondsman’s card. Pulcher pocketed it with a scowl. That would cost another forty bucks anyway, he estimated; the bondsman would naturally be one of Dickon’s club members.
Pulcher noticed that Dickon was looking strangely puzzled. “What’s the matter?”
“Like I say, it’s none of my business. But I don’t get it. You and the girl have a fight?”
“Fight? I don’t even know her.”
“She said you did.”
“Me? No. I don’t know any Madeleine Gaultry- Wait a minute! Is that her married name? Did she used to be at the Icicle Works?”
Dickon nodded. “Didn’t you see her?”
“I didn’t get to the women’s wing. I-” Pulcher stood up, oddly flustered. “Say, I’d better run along, Chancy. This bondsman, he’s open now? Well-” He stopped babbling and left.
Madeleine Gaultry! Only her name had been Madeleine Cossett. It was funny that she should turn up now-in jail and, Pulcher abruptly realized, likely to stay there indefinitely. But he put that thought out of his mind; first he wanted to see her.
The snow was turning lavender now.
Pink snow, green snow, lavender snow-any color of the pastel rainbow. It was nothing unusual. That was what had made Altair Nine worth colonizing in the first place.
Now, of course, it was only a way of getting your feet wet.
Pulcher waited impatiently at the turnkey’s office while he shambled over to the women’s wing and, slowly, returned with the girl. They looked at each other. She didn’t speak. Pulcher opened his mouth, closed it, and silently took her by the elbow. He steered her out of the jail and hailed a cab. That was an extravagance, but he didn’t care.
Madeleine shrank into a corner of the cab, looking at him out of blue eyes that were large and shadowed. She wasn’t hostile, she wasn’t afraid. She was only remote.
“Hungry?” She nodded. Pulcher gave the cab driver the name of a restaurant. Another extravagance, but he didn’t mind the prospect of cutting down on lunches for a few weeks. He had had enough practice at it.
A year before this girl had been the prettiest secretary in the pool at the Icicle Works. He dated her half a dozen times. There was a company rule against it, but the first time it was a kind of schoolboy’s prank, breaking the headmaster’s regulations, and the other times it was a driving need. Then- Then came the Gumpert Process.
That was the killer, the Gumpert Process. Whoever Gumpert was. All anybody at the Icicle Works knew was that someone named Gumpert (back on Earth, one rumor said; another said he was a colonist in the Sirian system) had come up with a cheap, practical method of synthesizing the rainbow antibiotic molds that floated free in Altair Nine’s air, coloring its precipitation and, more important, providing a priceless export commodity. A whole Galaxy had depended on those rainbow molds, shipped in frozen suspensions to every inhabited planet by Altamycin, Inc.-the proper name for what everyone on Altair Nine called the Icicle Works.
When the Gumpert Process came along, suddenly the demand vanished.
Worse, the jobs vanished. Pulcher had been on the corporation’s legal staff, with an office of his own and a faint hint of a vice-presidency, some day. He was out. The stenos in the pool, all but two or three of the five hundred who once had got out the correspondence and the bills, they were out. The shipping clerks in the warehouse were out, the pumphands at the settling tanks were out, the freezer attendants were out. Everyone was out. The plant closed down. There were more than fifty tons of frozen antibiotics in storage and, though there might still be a faint trickle of orders from old-fashioned diehards around the Galaxy (backwoods country doctors who didn’t believe in the new-fangled synthetics, experimenters who wanted to run comparative tests), the shipments already en route would much more than satisfy them. Fifty tons? Once the Icicle Works had shipped three hundred tons a day-physical transport, electronic rockets that took years to cover the distance between stars. The boom was over. And of course, on a one-industry planet, everything else was over too.