The Complete LaNague Page 21

  Mora still looked dubious. She pulled her husband away from the flitter.

  “It'll work,” LaNague told her, glancing back over his shoulder as he moved and watching Broohnin, whose eyes were fixed again on the white trigger mechanism.

  “What if there's someone in the vault?” Mora asked when they were out of earshot.

  “There won't be,” LaNague assured her. “The workday is over down there. Everybody's gone.”

  “No guards?”

  “A few.”

  “How do you know where they'll be when you activate the Barsky device? What if one of them gets sucked into the field?”

  “Mora,” LaNague said, trying to keep his tone even, “we've only got one device and it has to be activated soon… tonight.”

  “Why? Why can't we wait until we're sure no one's going to get killed down there?”

  “Because the money in that vault is tagged for destruction. And when they burn it, they're going to burn the Barsky box along with it. We only have one Barsky box.”

  “Then let's wait until later… just to be sure.”

  “We'll never be sure!” Impatience had passed into exasperation. “We can't see inside the vault, so we can't be sure it's unoccupied. And the device has to be activated between 15.27 and 15.28 tonight or not at all, because proper alignment won't occur again for another three days!”

  “Is it so important then? Do you have to get this money out? Why not just forget about it this time.”

  LaNague shook his head. “I need one more Robin Hood episode to keep his reputation up and his name before the public eye. And with all currency shipments so heavily guarded now, this is the only way I can make one last big strike.”

  Mora's voice rose to a shout. “But somebody could be in that vault!” The others by the flitter turned to look at her.

  “Then that's too bad,” LaNague said, keeping his own voice low. “But there's nothing I can do about it.” He turned and strode back toward the flitter. It had happened as he knew it would – Mora was interfering in his work. It hadn't taken her long to get involved. For a while it had actually seemed that she would keep to herself and stay out of his way. But no – that would have been too much to ask! The more he thought about it, the more it enraged him. What right did she –?

  He was half the distance to the flitter when he realized that there was a sick cold sphere centered in the heat of his anger, and it was screaming for him to stop. Reluctantly – very reluctantly – he listened. Perhaps there was another way after all.

  As he approached Broohnin and the Flinters, he said, “I want you to take the other flitter and strafe the entrance to the mint.”

  “With hand blasters?” Broohnin asked, startled.

  LaNague nodded. “You're not out to cause damage, but to create a diversion to pull the inside guards toward the entrance and away from the vaults. One pass is all you should need, then head for Primus as fast as you can. By the time they can mobilize pursuit, you should be lost in the dolee sector.”

  “Count me out,” Broohnin said. “That's crazy!”

  LaNague put on what he felt was his nastiest sneer. “That figures,” he said in a goading tone. “You rant and rave about how everything in my plan is too soft and too gentle, but when we give you a chance for some action, you balk. I should have known. I'll ask the Doc. Maybe he'll–”

  Broohnin grabbed LaNague's arm. “No you don't! You don't replace me with a teacher.” He turned to the Flinters. “Let's go.”

  As the flitter rose and made a wide circle to the far side of the mint, LaNague felt an arm slip around his back. “Thank you,” Mora said.

  “We'll see if this works,” he said, not looking at her.

  “It will.”

  “It had better.” He felt utterly cold toward Mora. Perhaps she had been right, but that did not lessen his resentment of her interference.

  The flitter with Broohnin and the Flinters was out of sight now on the other side of the mint, gaining momentum at full throttle. Suddenly, it flashed into view, a silver dot careening over the barracks straight toward the squat target structure. Alarms were already going off down there, LaNague knew, sending Imperial Guardsmen to their defense positions, and the mint guards into the corridors as the vaults within began to cycle closed automatically. There were small flashes briefly brightening the entranceway to the mint, and then the flitter was gone, racing toward Primus City and anonymity.

  LaNague checked the time – it was 15.26. He pressed the trigger in the center of the white disk, arming it. The timer would do the rest.

  When the precise nanosecond for firing arrived, the timer pulsed the trigger, which in turn sent a signal to the Barsky box in the vault, activating it. The money in the vault, along with small amounts of synthestone from the walls and floors, abruptly disappeared. The package traveled 1.37 nanoseconds into the past and appeared in the air over Primus City at the exact locus the treasury vault was destined to occupy 1.37 nanoseconds from then.

  “…ALTHOUGH OFFICIALS are more tight-lipped than usual, it does appear that the ‘money monsoon’ that occurred earlier this evening consisted of obsolete currency stolen from the vaults of the mint itself. From what we can determine, the mint was briefly harassed by a lone flitter in the early evening hours; guards reported that the money was in the vault before the incident, and discovered to be missing when the vaults were reopened approximately an hour after the flitter had escaped. The particular vault in question is thirty meters underground. The walls were not breached and no tunnel has been found. The rain of one-mark notes carried no white calling cards this time, but there is no doubt in anyone's mind that Robin Hood has struck again. The Bureau of the Treasury has promised a full and thorough investigation of the matter…”

  “MONEY, MONEY, MONEY!” Mora was saying as they sat in the apartment, watching Radmon Sayers on the vid. “That's all you seem to care about in this revolution. There's more to a government – good or bad – than money!”

  “Not much. In any government, dictatorial or representational, the politicos spend 95 per cent of their time taking money from one place and shuttling it to another. They extort money from the citizenry and then go about the tasks of passing bills to appropriate to this group, grant to that group, build here, renovate there.”

  “But legislation for freedom, rights–”

  “That's all decided at the outset, when the government is formed. That's when there's the most freedom; from then on it's a continuous process of whittling down the individual's franchise and increasing the state's. There are exceptions, of course, but they're rare enough to qualify as aberrations. Look back in the Imperium; one, perhaps two, pieces of legislation a year are involved purely with extension or abridgment – usually the latter – of freedom. What the public never realizes is that it really loses its freedom in the countless appropriations passed every day to create or continue the countless committees and bureaus that monitor human activities, to make countless rules to protect us from ourselves. And they all require funding.”

  “Money again.”

  “Correct. Keep a government poor and you'll keep it off your back. Without the necessary funds, it can't afford to harass you. Give it lots of money and it will find ways to spend it, invariably to your eventual detriment. Let it control the money supply and all the stops are out: it will soon control you! I shouldn't have to tell you this.”

  “But what of culture?” Mora spread her fingers in a gesture of frustration. “Whatever culture the out-worlds were beginning to develop is dying now. What are you going to do about that? How does that fit into your plan? How're you going to tie that into economics?”

  “I'm not even going to try. I don't want an out-world culture. That connotes homogenization, something the Imperium has been attempting to do. If everyone is the same, it's much easier for a central government to make rules for its subjects. I don't want one out-world culture – I want many. I want human beings to stretch themselves to the limit in every
direction. I don't want anyone telling anyone else how to live, how to think, what to wear. I want diversity. It's the only way we'll keep from stagnating as a race. It almost happened to us on Earth. If we had remained on that one little planet, we'd be a sorry lot by now, if any humans at all still existed. But you can't have diversity in a controlled society. If you control the economy, you control lives; you have to bring everyone down to the lowest common denominator. You have to weed out the oddballs, stifle the innovators. Do that on all the out-worlds and pretty soon you'll have your ‘out-world culture.’ But would you want to participate?”

  Mora hesitated before answering, and in the interval the vidphone chimed. LaNague took the call in the next room. He recognized Seph Wolverton's face as it filled the screen.

  “News from the probe fleet,” he said without salutation. “Contact made halfway to the Perseus arm. Hostile. Very hostile from the report.”

  LaNague felt his stomach lurch. “Who knows?”

  “Nobody except you, me, and the man who decoded the subspace call, and he's with us.”

  LaNague sighed with minimal relief. It was a bad situation, but it could have been much worse. “All right. Send a message back as prearranged. He's to return directly to Throne, with no further contact until he's in the star system, and even then he's only to identify his craft and answer no questions until he is picked up by an orbital shuttle and brought down for debriefing. See that the probe's message is erased from the comm computer. No one is to know the contents of that message. Clear?”

  Wolverton nodded. “Clear.”

  LaNague cut the connection and turned to see Mora staring at him from the doorway.

  “Peter, what's the matter? I've never seen you so upset.”

  “The probes have made contact with a hostile alien culture out toward the Perseus arm.”

  “So?”

  “If word of this gets to Metep and Haworth and the others, they'll have the one lever they need to keep themselves in power and maybe even save their skins: war.”

  “You're not serious!”

  “Of course I am. Look through history – it's a tried and true method for economically beleaguered regimes to save themselves. It works. Hostile aliens would push humans together out of fear.”

  “But hostile aliens are not a war.”

  LaNague smiled grimly. “That could be arranged. Again: not the first time it's happened. All Metep and the Council of Five would have to do is send a ‘trade envoy’ with a half-dozen cargo ships out toward the Perseus arm, ostensibly to open peaceful relations. If these aliens are as aggressive as the contact probe pilot seems to think, they'll either try to take possession of whatever enters their sphere of influence, or will feel directly threatened by the approach of human craft – either way, there's bound to be bloodshed. And that's all you need. ‘The monsters are coming! They ambushed unarmed cargo ships in interstellar space. Guard your wives and children.’ All of a sudden we've got to put aside our petty differences, close ranks, and defend humanity. The Imperium may be rotten and teetering, but it's the only government we've got right now, so let's not switch horses in midstream… And so on.” He shut off the torrent of words with visible effort.

  Mora stared at her husband. “I've never seen you so bitter, Peter. What's happened to you these past three years?”

  “A lot, I suppose.” He sighed. “Sometimes I wonder if I'm still me. But it's opposition to the men who are the Imperium – and after all, the Imperium doesn't have a life of its own; it's just people – that lets you see that there's not much beneath their reach. They'll go to any lengths, including interstellar war, just to save their careers and their places in history. The lives lost, the trauma to future generations, the chaos that would follow… they wouldn't care. It would all fall on the shoulders of the next generation. They'd be out of it by then.”

  He lapsed briefly into silence, and finally came to a decision.

  “I'm going to send Boedekker his signal. It's a little earlier in the game than I had planned, but I really don't have much choice. I want things in pieces by the time that pilot gets back. And even then, I must see to it that no one connected with the Imperium learns about the aliens in the Perseus arm.”

  “It's almost Year Day,” Mora said softly.

  “For Tolivians, yes. The Year of the Dragon begins in a few days. I suppose it will be a Dragon year for Throners, too… they'll be feeling his fiery breath soon. Very soon.”

  The Year of the Dragon

  XVIII

  …no government, so called, can reasonably be trusted for a moment, or reasonably supposed to have honest purposes in view, any longer than it depends wholly on voluntary support.

  from NO TREASON

  by Lysander Spooner

  “Good evening, this is Radmon Sayers. It does not seem possible that there could be anyone watching right now who is not already aware of the catastrophic events that have rocked the length and breadth of Occupied Space today. But just in case someone has been unconscious since the early hours of the morning, I will recap:

  “The Imperial mark has crashed. After holding fairly steady for years at an exchange rate of two marks per Solar credit, the Imperial mark began a steady decline at 5.7 hours Throne time. As most of you know, the Interstellar Currency Exchange never closes, but all trading in Imperial marks was suspended at 17.2 hours Throne time this evening when it hit a terrifying low of eighty marks per Solar credit. There is no telling how far its official trade value would have fallen had not trade been suspended.

  “The precipitating factors in the selling panic have not yet been pin-pointed. All that is known at this time is that virtually every brokerage firm involved with the Exchange received calls this morning from multiple clients, all with sizable accounts in Imperial marks, informing them to sell every mark they possessed, no matter what the going rate happened to be. And so billions of marks were dumped on the market at once. The brokers say that their clients were quite insistent: they wanted no further Imperial marks in their portfolio and were willing to take losses to divest themselves of them. The Exchange authorities have promised a prompt and thorough investigation into the possibility that a conspiracy has been afoot to manipulate the exchange rate for profit. So far, however, no one has been found who has made a windfall profit from the crash.

  “In an extemporaneous speech on the vid networks, Metep VII assured the people of Throne and all the other out-worlds that there is nothing to fear. That all we can do is keep calm and have faith in ourselves and in our continued independence from Earth. ‘We've had hard times before and have weathered them,’ Metep said. ‘We shall weather them again… ’”

  “WAS ERIC BOEDEKKER BEHIND ALL THIS?” Doc Zack asked as LaNague darkened the holovid and Sayers’ face faded from the globe. The inner circle was seated around the vid set in LaNague's apartment.

  “Yes. He's been selling everything he owns for the past three years or so, and converting the credit to marks. Thousands of accounts under thousands of names were started during that period, with instructions to the brokers to buy Imperial marks every time their value dipped.”

  “And thereby creating an artificial floor on their value,” Zack said.

  “Exactly.”

  “But for all Eric Boedekker's legendary wealth,” Zack said, “I don't see how even he could buy enough Imperial marks to cause today's crash. I mean, there were hundreds of billions of marks sold today, and as many more waiting to be disposed of as soon as trading on them opens again. He's rich, but nobody's that rich.”

  “He had help, although the people involved didn't know they were helping him. You see, Boedekker made sure to call public attention every time he sold off one of his major assets. His financial peers thought he was crazy, but they kept a close eye on him. He had pulled off some major coups in the past and they wanted to know exactly what he was doing with all that accumulated credit. And they found out. You can't keep too many things secret down there on Earth, and the ones who
really wanted to know found out that he was quietly, anonymously, buying up Imperial marks whenever he could. So they started buying up marks, too… just to be safe. Maybe Boedekker knew something they didn't; maybe something was cooking in the out-worlds that would bring the Imperial mark up to trading parity with the Solar credit. I sent him the ‘sell’ signal last week and he's been getting ready ever since.”

  “Ah, I see!” Zack said. “And when he dumped–”

  “–they dumped. From there it was a cascade effect. Everybody who was holding Imperial marks wanted to get rid of them. But nobody wanted to buy them. The Imperial mark is now worth one fortieth of its value yesterday, and would probably be less than a hundredth if trading had not been suspended. It's still overpriced.”

  “Brilliant!” Doc Zack was shaking his head in admiration. “Absolutely brilliant!”

  “What's so brilliant?” Broohnin said from his reclining position on the floor. For a change, he had been listening intently to the conversation. “Is this the spectacular move you've promised us? So what? What's it done for us?”

  Zack held up a hand as LaNague started to reply. “Let me answer him. I think I see the whole picture now, but correct me if I'm wrong.” He turned to Broohnin. “What our friend from Tolive has done, Den, is turn every inhabitant of Throne into a potential revolutionary. All the people who have come to the conclusion that the Imperium is inimical to their own interests and the interests of future generations of out-worlders have been constrained to go on supporting the Imperium because their incomes, either wholly or in part, have depended on the Imperium. That is no longer a consideration. The money the Imperium has been buying their loyalty with has now been reduced to its true value: nothing. The velvet coverings are off; the cold steel of the chains is now evident.”

  “But is that fair?” Mora said. She and the Flinters had been silent until now. “It's like cutting off a flitter's power in midair. People are going to be hurt.”