It flickered—a face took shape on it. Crandall barely restrained a cry of delight. He did have a friend in this city from pre-convict days. Good old dependable, plodding, Irv. His old partner.
And then, just as he was about to shout an enthusiastic had greeting, he locked it inside his mouth. Too many things had happened today. And there was something about expression on Irv’s face …
“Listen, Nick,” Iry said heavily at last. “I just want to ask you one question.”
“What’s that, Irv?” Crandall kept himself rock-steady.
“How long have you known? When did you find out?”
Crandall ran through several possible answers in his mind, finally selecting one. “A long time now, Irv. I just wasn’t in a position to do anything about it.”
Irv nodded. “That’s you. Well listen, I’m not going to plead with you. I know that after seven years of what you’ve gone through, pleading isn’t going to do me any good. But, believe me or not, I didn’t start dipping into the till very much until my wife got sick. My personal funds were exhausted. I couldn’t borrow any more, and you were too busy with your own domestic troubles to be bothered. Then, when business started to get better I wanted to prevent a sudden large discrepancy on the books.”
“So I continued milking the business, not for hospital expenses any more and not to deceive you, Nick—really!—but just so you wouldn’t find out how much I’d taken from it before. When you came to me and said you were completely discouraged and wanted out—well, there I’ll admit I was a louse. I should have told you. But after all, we hadn’t been doing too well as partners and I saw a chance to get the whole business in my name and on its feet, so I—I—”
“So you bought me out for three hundred and twenty credits,” Crandall finished for him. “How much is the firm worth now, Irv?”
The other man averted his, eyes. “Close to a million. But listen, Nick, business has been terrific this past year in the wholesale line. I didn’t cheat you out of all that! Listen, Nick—”
Crandall blew a snort of grim amusement through his nostrils. “What is it, Irv?”
Iry drew out a clean tissue and wiped his forehead. “Nick,” he said, leaning forward and trying hard to smile winningly. “Listen to me, Nick! You forget about it, you stop hunting me down, and I’ve got a proposition for you. I need a man with your technical know-how in top management. I’ll give you a twenty per cent interest in the business, Nick—no, make it twenty-five per cent. Look, I’ll go as high as thirty per cent—thirty-five per cent—”
“Do you think that would make up for those seven years?”
Irv waved trembling, conciliatory hands. “No, of course not, Nick. Nothing would. But listen, Nick. I’ll make it forty-five per—”
Crandall shut him off. He sat for a while, then got up and walked around the room . He stopped and examined his blasters, the one he’d purchased earlier and the one he’d gotten from Dan. He took out his prison discharge and read it through carefully. Then he shoved it back into the tunic pocket.
He notified the switchboard that he wanted a long-distance Earthside call put through.
“Yes, sir. But there’s a gentleman to see you, sir. A Mr. Otto Henck.”
“Send him up. And put the call in on my screen as soon as it goes through, please, Miss.”
A few moments later, Blotto Otto entered his room. He was drunk, but carried it, as he always did, remarkably well.
“What do you think, Nick? What the hell do you—”
“Sh-h-h,” Crandall warned him. “My call’s coming in.”
The Tibetan operator said, “Go ahead, New York,” and Frederick Stoddard Stephanson appeared on the screen. The man had aged more than any of the others Crandall had seen tonight. Although you never could tell with Stephanson: he always looked older when he was working out a complex deal.
Stephanson didn’t say anything; he merely pursed his lips at Crandall and waited. Behind him and around him was a TV Spectacular’s idea of a hunting lodge.
“All right, Freddy,” Crandall said. “What I have to say won’t take long. You might as well call off your dogs and stop taking chances trying to kill and/or injure me. As of this moment, I don’t even have a grudge against you.”
“You don’t even have a grudge—” Stephanson regained his rigid self-control. “Why not?”
“Because—oh, because a lot of things. Because killing you just wouldn’t be seven hellish years of satisfaction, now that I’m face to face with it. And because you didn’t do any more to me than practically everybody else has done—from the cradle, for all I know. Because I’ve decided I’m a natural born sucker: that’s just the way I’m constructed. All you did was take your kind of advantage of my kind of construction.”
Stephanson leaned forward, peered intently, then relaxed and crossed his arms. “You’re actually telling the truth!”
“Of course I’m telling the truth! You see these?” He held up the two blasters. “I’m getting rid of these tonight. From now on, I’ll be unarmed. I don’t want to have the least thing to do with weighing human life in the balance.”
The other man ran an index nail under a thumb nail thoughtfully a couple of times. “I’ll tell you what,” he said. “If you mean what you say—and I think you do— maybe we can work out something. An arrangement, say, to pay you a bit —We’ll see.”
“When you don’t have to?” Crandall was astonished. “But why didn’t you make me an offer before this?”
“Because I don’t like to be forced to do anything. Up to now, I was fighting force with more force.”
Crandall considered the point. “I don’t get it. But maybe that’s the way you’re constructed. Well, we’ll see, as you said.”
When he rose to face Henek, the little man was still shaking his head slowly, dazedly, intent only on his own problem. “What do you think, Nick? Elsa went on a sightseeing jaunt to the Moon last month. The line to her oxygen helmet got clogged, see, and she died of suffocation before they could do anything about it. Isn’t that a hell of thing, Nick? One month before I finish my sentence—she couldn’t wait one lousy little month! I bet she died laughing at me!”
Crandall put his arm around him. “Let’s go out for a walk, Blotto Otto. We both need the exercise.”
Funny how the capacity for murder affected people, he thought. There was Polly’s way—and Dan’s. There was old Irv bargaining frantically but still shrewdly for his life. Mr. Edward Ballaskia—and that girl in the restaurant. And there was Freddy Stephanson, the only intended victim—and the only one who wouldn’t beg.
He wouldn’t beg, but he might be willing to hand out largesse. Could Crandall accept what amounted to charity from Stephanson? He shrugged. Who knew what he or anyone else could or could not do?
“What do we do now, Nick?” Blotto Otto was demanding petulantly once they got outside the hotel. “That’s what I want to know—what do we do?”
“Well, I’m going to do this,” Crandall told him, taking a blaster in each hand. “Just this.” He threw the gleaming weapons, right hand, left hand, at the transparent window walls that ran around the luxurious lobby of the Ritz-Capricorn. They struck
thunk and then thunk again. The windows crashed down in long, pointed daggers. The people in the lobby swung around with their mouths open.
A policeman ran up, his badge jingling against his metallic uniform. He seized Crandall.
“I saw you! I saw you do that! You’ll get thirty days for it!”
“Hm,” said Crandall. “Thirty days?’ He pulled his prison discharge out of his pocket and handed it to the policeman. “I tell you what we’ll do, officer— Just punch the proper number of holes in this document or tear off what seems to you a proportionately sized coupon. Either or both. Handle it any way you like.”