Wheels Within Wheels Read online

  WHEELS WITHIN WHEELS

  F Paul Wilson

  For John W. Campbell, Jr.,

  of course

  In the light of what we know today, it is difficult to imagine how the Restructurist movement engendered any popular support at all. But it did. Whole sectors at one time declared themselves “Restructurist” and agitated for what they called reform legislation.

  But “reform” was a gross misnomer: the Restructurist hierarchy was composed of first-order reactionaries, economic royalists who were avowed enemies of the free market. Their political philosophy had been thrown out by the LaNague revolution and the Federation charter kept it out. But they hung on, cloaking their ambitions in feigned social concern, mouthing humanitarian slogans as they maneuvered to exert control over interstellar trade.

  from Stars for Sale:

  An Economic History of Occupied Space

  by Emmerz Fent

  Contents

  PROLOGUE

  Old Pete

  Junior

  Jo

  Junior

  Old Pete

  Junior

  Jo

  deBloise

  Easly

  Jo

  deBloise

  Easly

  Tella

  Jo

  deBloise

  Jo

  Epilogue

  PROLOGUE

  THE ROOM WAS A SPECIAL ONE, situated in the far corner of a building on the outskirts of the Federation complex. The Continuing Fund for the Restructuring of the Federation had leased it more than twenty standard years before and had footed the bill for all the extensive and expensive renovations.

  The windows had been removed and the openings filled in and sealed. The wall spaces had been filled with a heavy mixture of synthestone and lined with a micromesh grid which, when activated, would distort not only the vibrations in the walls themselves but any electronic transmissions down to but not including the subspace level as well. The grid encapsulized the room and door, ensuring that an external amplifier attempting to monitor voices within the room would pick up only an indecipherable garble of sounds and no more. A psi-shield had been added as a final touch. Nothing within, short of a subspace transmitter, could beam a message out, and even the most compact s-s set in existence couldn’t hide here.

  Especially here. The walls, floor, and ceiling were completely bare and the lamps were self-powered floor models. All the furniture was made of the transparent crystal polymer that had been so popular two decades before. No hiding place in the room for any sort of monitoring device and any attempt to insert one into the Wall would disrupt the micromesh and set off a malfunction signal. It was the “safe room” reserved for special meetings of the upper echelon of the Restructurist movement. Elson deBloise had called for such a meeting today.

  Douglas Habel entered first. He was the grand old man of the movement, now in semi-retirement. He avoided the head seat with some effort – that belonged to Elson now – and situated himself along the far side of the conference table.

  Philo Barth came in soon after. Paunchy, ribald, a seemingly supercilious individual, he was firmly entrenched as a Federation representative from his sector.

  “’Lo, Doug,” he said, and fell heavily into a chair. He and Habel discussed in low, casual tones the upcoming hiatus during which all the representatives would return to their respective homeworlds.

  Doyl Catera entered next, a scowl on his face. He was young, an up-and-coming bright star in the Restructurist firmament, but his moods were mercurial… and he despised the “safe room.” Nodding to the other two, he threw himself into a chair and waited in moody silence.

  Before long, Elson deBloise made his entrance, carefully timed for last. He had a heavy build, dark brown hair graying just the right amount at the temples, and a presence that reeked of self-assurance.

  DeBloise slid the door shut behind him and pressed a button at its center which would mesh it with the grid woven around the rest of the room. Without hesitation, he then took the seat at the head of the table and extracted a small noteplate from his pocket.

  “Well,” he said affably, “we all know why we’re here, I guess.”

  “Not why we’re here, no,” Catera said with biting precision.

  DeBloise maintained a friendly tone. “Doug, Philo, and I are well aware of your objections to the security precautions in this room, Doyl, but we feel they’re necessary evils.”

  “Especially at this point of the game, Doyl,” Habel said. “We’re on Fed Central and this planet is run by the pro-charter forces. And while I must admit that during my long career they have, as a group, respected our security, there are others outside the political community who have no such scruples. I have reliable information that someone has been keeping close watch on our movements lately, especially yours, Els. I don’t know who’s behind the surveillance as yet, but at this stage of our plan, I must emphasize that we cannot be too careful. Is that clear, Doyl?”

  “All right.” Catera’s tone was resigned. “I’ll go along with the security charade for now. Let’s get on with our business and get it over with.”

  “I’m all for that,” Barth muttered. “The subject is money, I believe.”

  “Isn’t it always?” deBloise replied.

  He had remained carefully aloof from the preceding exchange, maintaining a pose of lofty equanimity. He despised Catera for his reckless maverick tendencies and, although he rarely admitted it even to himself, for his potential threat to deBloise’s position as standard bearer of the movement. But nearly three decades in active political life had taught him to hide his personal feelings well.

  “The sector treasurers are raising a bit of a fuss about the amount,” Barth said. “They can’t imagine what kind of project could possibly require such a sum.”

  “You all stuck to the agreed-upon pitch, I hope,” deBloise said with an eye toward Catera.

  Catera held his gaze. “Of course. We told them it was for a penetrating investigation into the way the LaNague Charter is failing many of the Federation planets. It was stretching the truth to the limits of endurance, but I suppose we can ultimately defend our sales pitch if the plan goes awry.”

  “Have no fear of that,” deBloise assured him. “But the money – are the treasuries going to come through with what we need?”

  Barth nodded. “They’ll come through, but reluctantly. If it hadn’t been for Doug’s little speech, they’d still be holding out.”

  Habel beamed. He had recorded a short, stirring message for the representatives to carry with them to the sector committees. In it he had exhorted all committed Restructurists to rise to the challenge of the day; to free the monies that would allow the Restructurist leadership to gather the necessary information to open the eyes of the Federation Assembly and turn it around.

  “It was a good speech, even if I say so myself.”

  “It was,” deBloise agreed, “and it seems to have worked, which is of primary importance. Now we can finally set the plan into motion.”

  “I still have my reservations, Elson,” Catera said, and the other occupants in the room held their breath. Catera’s sector was one of the richest and they were counting on it for a large share of the money. If he held back...

  “How could you possibly object to the plan, Doyl?” Habel said with all the fatherliness he could muster.

  “It’s a moral question, actually. Do we have the right to play political games with a technological innovation of this magnitude? It has the capacity to revolutionize interstellar travel and could eventually make all planets neighbors.”

  “We’re not playing games, Doyl,” deBloise replied with passion. “What we intend to do will move us closer to the goals of t
he movement. An opportunity like this presents itself once in a lifetime – once in a millennium! If properly handled, it can bring all our efforts to fruition. And if we don’t seize it now and use it to our advantage, then we don’t deserve to call ourselves Restructurists!”

  “But I’ve been to Dil. I’ve–”

  DeBloise held up a hand. “We’ve agreed to mention no names at any time. We all know who you’re talking about and we all know where he lives.”

  “Then you all know that he’s an unstable personality! His device could be lost to us forever!”

  “Don’t worry about that,” Barth said. “When we’re in power he’ll have to give it up. No individual quirks will stand in our way – we’ll see to that.”

  Catera frowned and shook his head. “I still don’t like it.”

  “You’d better like it!” deBloise hissed. He was on his feet and speaking through clenched teeth. Whether there was genuine concern on Catera’s part or just the start of a power play, deBloise could not be sure. But he intended to get a commitment here and now. “The movement is a little over a hundred years old now and we’ve made considerable gains in that time. It started as a handful of discontented representatives and now entire sectors think of themselves as Restructurist. But we’ve become stagnant and we all know it. Oh, we make grand gestures and sweeping generalizations in public, but our point of view seems to have peaked. Some of our analysts even see the start of a downswing on the marginally committed planets.”

  He paused to let this sink in.

  “Our speeches no longer cause even a ripple in the Assembly and we introduce amendments to the charter that are knocked down time after time. Our constituents are going to start wondering if we really know what we’re doing and it may not be too long before we find others sitting in our seats in the Assembly unless we do something now!”

  A prolonged silence followed as Catera gazed at his shoes through the transparent tabletop. Finally: “I’ll see to it that the funds I control are deposited in the account tomorrow.”

  “Thank you, Doyl,” deBloise replied in a conciliatory tone as he seated himself again. “How much can we count on?”

  Catera shrugged. “Don’t know exactly. It’s in mixed currencies, of course. I think the total will come to about half a million Federation credits after conversion.”

  “Excellent! Philo?”

  And they went on totaling the contributions, unaware that the entire meeting was being recorded.

  The course of public events is often shaped by seemingly unlikely individuals occupying seemingly marginal positions. As for the present state of Occupied Space, a good part of the credit or blame – depending on your philosophical viewpoint – probably belongs to the members of a single family, the name of which is no doubt unfamiliar to you unless you’re involved in interstellar trade. The family name? Finch.

  from Stars for Sale:

  An Economic History of Occupied Space

  by Emmerz Fent

  Old Pete

  “AH, HOW I’D LOVE to wring that man’s neck!” Old Pete said to the air.

  He lay stretched out on the sand listening to the recording as Ragna’s G2 primary beat down on him from a distance of approximately 156 million kilometers. He was eighty-one years old but neither looked nor felt it. His legs were scrawny, true – “chicken legs,” he called them – and the skin was loose at his neck and wrinkled around his eyes, with the frontal areas of his scalp sporting nowhere near the amount of hair they had of old; but when he walked he moved briskly and lightly with swinging arms and a straight spine.

  He loved the sun. Loved to sit in it, bake in it, broil in it. His graying hair had been bleached white by that sun and his skin was a tough, dark brown that accentuated the brown of his eyes. Minute collections of pale, flaky skin dotted his extended forehead. Actinic keratosis, a doctor had told him… or something like that. From too much sun, especially through Ragna’s relatively thin ozone layer. Can lead to skin cancer, the doctor had said. Be smart. Use this lotion. It’ll dissolve the keratoses. And start using this sunscreen lotion daily. Either that or stay in the shade.

  Old Pete did neither. If the keratotic areas took a malignant turn, well, they had a lotion for that, too. Until then he’d enjoy his sun to the fullest.

  And it was his sun. At least the part of it that shone down upon this particular island. The Kel sea stretched away in all directions to an unbroken horizon where it merged with the lighter blue of the sky. The island, an oblong patch of sand and rock about a kilometer long and half that distance across, supported a single house, some scattered scruffy trees, and little else. But it belonged to Peter Paxton and to him alone. He had purchased it shortly after leaving IBA and rarely left it. A luxury flitter was moored on the roof of the house for those occasions when he did.

  So he lay supine on the beach, seeing red as the sun transilluminated his eyelids, and listened to a recording of other men’s voices. His right hand held a printed transcript but he preferred to hear the original. The nuances of inflection and tone not reproducible on paper were as important to him as the content of the words themselves.

  Nor did he need the transcript to tell him who was speaking at any particular moment. He’d never met the men on the recording but was as familiar with their voices as he was with his own. Old Pete had been keeping tabs on the Restructurist hierarchy at sporadic intervals for a number of years now, but his surveillance had increased in intensity with the news not too long ago that something special and oh-so-secret was afoot in the inner circle. He was determined to find out what it was.

  As the recording came to a close, he sat up with a grunt.

  “Poor Doyl Catera – almost got himself in trouble there for a moment. His sense of ethics made a serious attempt to break through to the surface. Almost made it, too. Then deBloise brought up elections and the threat of being replaced in the Assembly – the things that really matter to a politico – and ethics went plunging into the pit again. Ah, well,” he sighed. “To be expected, I suppose.”

  The visitor to the island sat impassively on the other side of the player. Old Pete looked at him.

  “What do you make of all this, Andy?” he asked.

  Andrew Tella shrugged. He was short, dark, and still carried himself in a manner that hinted at his former years of rigid training in the Federation Defense Force. He didn’t want to express an opinion. He was an operative. His job was to gather information and he did his job well. His client, Old Pete, had just mentioned ethics and Tella did not like to discuss ethics. Not that the subject itself made him uncomfortable, it was just that his code of ethics was somewhat different from most other people’s. He had no compunction about prying into matters others wanted to keep secret. Events occurred, facts existed. They belonged to those who could discover them and ferret them out. That was the part that kept him in this business: the process of discovery.

  And even that became a humdrum affair at times… finding out what a client’s wife or business associates or competitors were planning or doing.

  Then someone like this Peter Paxton came along and it was a whole new game. A man with no political connections who wanted to know the secret goings on of some of the biggest names in Federation politics. Here was a challenge, and a profitable one to boot.

  Receiving no reply, Old Pete went on. “You did a good job. Actually got a recording device into their security conference room. How’d you manage that?”

  “It wasn’t all that difficult,” Tella replied with a self-satisfied grin. “They have all these elaborate security precautions – the distorter grid, the guard, that trite transparent furniture. But they don’t scan the people coming into the room. I simply planted a recorder in the heel of Catera’s left shoe the night before the meeting and retrieved it two days later. You just heard the results.”

  Old Pete laughed and looked toward the horizon. “I’d give anything to stick this under deBloise’s nose and play it for him. But unfortunately that’s
out of the question. I’ve got to let them go blithely on their way thinking it’s all still a big secret.” He paused. “You know, that’s the second time we’ve heard them mention Dil. I think it’s about time you took a little trip to that planet to see if you can find out what’s so important to them there.”

  “That might not be the most practical approach,” Tella replied. “I could waste a lot of time on Dil before I learned a thing. The Federation Office of Patents and Copyrights would be a better starting point. We are, after all, looking for what was called a ‘technological innovation,’ and only a raving madman would fail to register something like that before marketing it. And I happen to have a few contacts in that office.”

  “I suppose that’s true,” Pete agreed with a nod. “Tell me: you ever do any industrial espionage?”

  Tella hesitated, then: “A few times, when I was starting out. That’s where I got my contacts at the Office of P&C. Never was very good at it, though.”

  Old Pete raised an eyebrow at this and Tella caught it.

  “I don’t consider myself a thief,” he said defensively. “I dig up information that other people would rather keep hidden but I do not steal the products of another man’s mind. That’s why I joined up with Larry. He feels the same way.”

  Old Pete lifted his hands an amused look on his face. “Did I question your ethics?”

  “Your expression did.”

  “You’re too touchy. I knew all about you and Larry Easly before I hired you. Research, you know. I was looking for undercover operatives who took their work and their reputations seriously and you two fit the bill. Now get to Fed Central or Dil or wherever you feel you’ve got to go and find out what you can about this device deBloise and his rats are meddling with.”