Wheels Within Wheels Page 7

  The conversation ranged over various topics without direction until Jo brought it around to one of the trouble spots in her mind.

  “Did IBA do any investigating into my father’s death?”

  Old Pete nodded slowly. “Yes. On two occasions. Neither came up with anything useful. It seems that the head man around the town – I think his name was Heber, or Hever, or something like that – anyway, he seemed to have a genuine regard for Junior and made sure that our people had access to everything they needed for the investigation. He had done a pretty thorough job himself before word even got back to IBA that Junior was dead.”

  “Those aliens murdered him then?”

  “That’s what all the evidence says. I still can’t quite believe it, though. They’ve got a special marker for his grave and the vid recording of his funeral that was brought back–”

  “I know. I’ve seen it.”

  “Then you know that they thought of him practically as a demigod. It makes no sense.”

  “But you left his body there. Why? Not that I have any morbid need to see my father’s remains interred on Ragna; I’m just curious as to why you didn’t bring them back.”

  Old Pete shrugged. “Because his body belonged in that Vanek graveyard more than anywhere else.”

  Jo made no reply. She made a mental note to look up the copy of her father’s autopsy report, then her thoughts slipped back to the day her aunt told her that her daddy wouldn’t be coming back; that he’d had an accident on a faraway planet and had died. She remembered trying to hold back the anguish and fear and loss by smothering it with denial, but that didn’t work. It was true, she knew. Jo cried then, harder and longer than she had ever cried before. Her aunt held her for a long time, now and then joining her in tears. She was never that close to her aunt again. She could not really remember over crying again since then, either.

  Bringing herself back to the present with a start, she rose to her feet. “Time to go. I’ll drive.”

  As the flitter rose from the IBA roof, Old Pete sought to keep the conversation away from Junior.

  “I happened to see some of the figures on the currency exchange you started. Not exactly what IBA was intended for, but very impressive.”

  “Quite the contrary,” she said, relishing the chance to correct him. “It’s a natural outgrowth of the company’s activities. In the course of investigating new markets for clients, we have to keep tabs on the political and economic climates. The monetary policies of local governments are of prime importance, as you well know, so we began indexing rates of inflation, growth of the money supplies, et cetera, for each trade sector. I used some of that data to do a little personal currency speculation a few years ago and did quite well. If a novice like me could make a nice percentage with IBA’s index, I figured a currency expert working full time on it could open a new service to our clients. So we hired a couple and we’re doing all right.”

  “You keep much of your own money in that fund?”

  Jo shook her head. “I only participate on occasions when I can make a short term gain. If they tell me the Nolevetol krona is overvalued, I’ll sell them short; if the Derby pound is undervalued, I’ll buy a few bundles and wait. Otherwise my money sits in a vault as Tolivian certificates of deposit.”

  Old Pete nodded approval and said no more. His savings had also been converted to Tolivian CDs long ago. The banks of Tolive were considered an anachronism in many financial circles because they insisted on backing their currency 100 per cent with precious metals. The only coins the issued were 0.999 fine gold or silver, and a “certificate of deposit” meant just that: a given amount of gold or silver was on deposit at that particular bank and was payable on demand. The nominal government of Tolive had only one law concerning monetary policy: all currency must be fully backed by a precious metal; any deviation from that policy was considered fraud and punishable by public flogging.

  Old Pete liked the idea of hard money, always had. So did Jo. Apparently she had more in common with him than she cared to admit–

  –or with Junior. He was more used to her appearance now. At first sight of her last week, even with her hair darkened toward black, Jo had looked so much like Junior that he had been struck dumb for a moment. But the similarities went beyond mere physical appearance. There was an ambiance about her that reeked of Junior. Anyone who had known the man well would see it in her. He had, of course, expected that, but not to such a degree.

  The differences were equally startling.

  So like Junior, he thought, and yet so unlike him. I really shouldn’t be surprised. After all, their developmental environments were so different. And don’t forget the opposing sexual orientation.

  As his thoughts began to wander into forbidden ground, he was called back to the present by the sound of Jo’s voice.

  “There it is,” she said, and banked the flitter to the right. “By the way, if you like filet of chispen, they’ve got a restaurant in the casino that does a superb job on it.”

  The casino glowed below them like a luminescent fish of prey lurking on an inky sea bottom. Alighting from the flitter onto the roof, they were greeted by an elaborately costumed doorman to whom Jo was obviously a familiar figure. He bowed them through the arched entrance.

  The casino consisted of five large rooms arranged in a circular fashion. The elevators from the roof deposited you in the hub and from there you were given free choice as to the manner in which you wished to lose money. Jo headed directly for the pokochess parlor. This was her favorite game, a game of chance and skill in which each player was “dealt” a king, three pawns, and five more pieces randomly chosen from the twelve remaining possibilities. The two players could bet as each new piece was dealt and were allowed to raise the ante whenever a piece was taken during the course of the game.

  Pokochess was not too popular with the casino because the house could make a profit only when a guest played one of the house professionals. But the game was the current rage on Ragna and a pokochess parlor in the casino proved to be a good draw. Patrons could use the house tables for a small hourly fee.

  Jo stopped at the entrance to the pokochess section and ran her gaze over the room. It came to rest on a nondescript man in his middle thirties sitting alone at a table in a far corner. A shorter, darker man had just left his side and was headed in the direction of the bar.

  “There he is,” Jo said, a smile lighting her face. She started forward but Old Pete grabbed her elbow.

  “That’s the man you have working for you?” he asked in a startled tone.

  “Yes – Larry Easly. Why?”

  Old Pete broke into a laugh. “Because that fellow moving away from him has been working for me – and he’s Easly’s partner!”

  “Really?” They started to make their way toward the corner where Easly sat. “Small galaxy, isn’t it?”

  Old Pete nodded. “Wheels within wheels, bendreth.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Oh, just an old, old expression that means pretty much what you want it to mean.” He threw her a sidelong glance. “You mean you never heard it before?”

  “Doesn’t sound familiar… where’d it originate?”

  “Never mind.” He didn’t want to bring that up again.

  Easly spotted them then, rose from his seat, and came forward. He and Jo clasped hands briefly, formally, but their eyes locked and held on after the hands had parted. Had he wished it, Larry Easly could have been a distinguished-looking man, but the nature of his work demanded that he downplay any striking features. So he made certain that his posture and the cut of his clothes hid his muscular build, that his complexion and the cut of his dark blond hair invited anonymity.

  Easly’s hazel eyes had a certain squinting quality, almost as if the light hurt them. But Old Pete noted that they were constantly roving under cover of that squint, missing nothing.

  Larry Easly extended his hand. “We meet at last, Mr. Paxton.”

  “I knew we woul
d eventually,” Old Pete said, “but this is quite a surprise.”

  Andrew Tella returned then with a drink-laden waiter in tow. After shaking hands with Old Pete and being introduced to Jo, he handed out drinks – scotch to the former, a glass of cold Moselle to the latter – and they all sat down around a pokochess table.

  “You can’t be as surprised as Andy and I were when we discovered we’d both been requested to investigate the same thing,” Easly said with a trace of a smile. His features were soft, gentle-looking, not at all what Old Pete had expected. “But we guessed what had happened and, since Andy got the assignment first, he had the honor of completing it.”

  Andy Tella cleared his throat and straightened up in his chair. “Since you’re both here to learn of the mysterious doings on Dil, I’ll get right to them – and believe me, they make some story.”

  Easly nodded in agreement as he ignited the end of a torpedo-shaped cigar, but said nothing. Clouds of blue-white smoke encircled his head for a brief instant before being drawn away by the ventilation system.

  “First step,” Tella began, “was to go to the Fed patent office, use a few contacts, and find out if there’s been much activity in the way of new patents from Dil. Answer: yes. A spatial engineer by the name of Denver Haas has recently developed something he calls a ‘warp gate’ and is ready to go into production. I managed to get a quick look at his file, made a copy of it, naturally” – the briefest of smiles here – “and Larry and I went over it.”

  Easly picked up the story here. “You must understand, of course, that neither Andy nor I have much of a grounding in physics and those papers were pretty damn technical. We couldn’t go around asking experts to decipher them for us because we weren’t supposed to have a copy. So we bought some teaching trodes and came up with a rough idea of what this ‘warp gate’ is.”

  “Let’s lay some groundwork first,” Tella said, and turned to Jo and Old Pete. “Do you know how the warp unit on the average interstellar ship works?”

  Jo shrugged. “It creates some kind of field that allows the ship to leave real space and enter subspace where it can take exaggerated advantage of the normal curvature of space.”

  “Very nicely put,” Tella said with an approving nod. “I’ve been studying this stuff for the past week and I never could have capsulized it so well. But you’ve got just about everything there. The warp drive lets you travel under the curve of space; the higher the degree of warp, the longer the jump. That ‘some kind of field’ is important here, because it determines the degree of warp. Warp fields are a poor imitation of the field around a black hole; Haas has gone a step further. He has managed to link a pair of quantum black holes and generate one helluva warp field between them.”

  “I knew it!” Old Pete slapped the table. “When I heard fifty years ago that they’d found a way to lock up quantum holes in a stasis field, I said someday somebody’s going to find a commercial use for those things! And sure enough, somebody has!”

  Jo was pensive. “So he’s turned things around, eh? Instead of generating the warp from inside the ship, he generates it externally and lets the ship pass through – for a fee, I assume.”

  “I suppose so,” Tella replied. “Either that or a company buys a gate and uses it exclusively for its own craft. They’re going to be hellishly expensive, though. Finding quantum holes isn’t too hard, but locking them up in a stasis field small enough to make the holes useful and large enough to prevent anything from accidentally entering their event horizons is pretty tricky. But that’s not the whole story. Wait’ll you hear this: Denver Haas is rumored to be working on modifications that will theoretically allow his warp gate to operate inside a planet’s gravity well!”

  Stunned silence at Old Pete and Jo’s end of the table.

  The major drawback to the current on-board warp unit was its inability to generate a stable warp field in the presence of any appreciable gravitational influence, whether stellar or planetary. This necessitated the use of peristellar drive tubes to travel past the point of critical influence for a given planet circling a given star. And this type of travel, despite the use of a proton-proton drive in tubes lined with Leason crystals, was maddeningly slow. But if all that could be eliminated, if all you had to do was shuttle up to the ship, board, and then flash through an orbiting warp gate…

  “If that’s truly possible,” Old Pete said in an awe-tinged voice, “then humankind will be able to begin its golden age as an interstellar race.”

  Easly and Tella glanced at each other and the latter said, “I never looked at it that way, but–”

  “But nothing!” the old man retorted. “The first interstellar trips took decades; the perfection of the warp field made them a matter of days, weeks, or months, depending on where you were coming from and where you were going. We are now talking about hours! Hours between the stars! Think of what that will mean for trade!”

  “The thing is, Mr. Paxton,” Easly said patiently, “that this guy Haas hasn’t perfected those modifications yet.”

  “He must have if he’s going into production as Andy said.”

  Easly shook his head. “He’s going to market with a prototype that can only operate beyond the critical point in the gravity well.”

  For the second time that evening, there was dead silence at that particular pokochess table. Jo finally broke it.

  “You must be mistaken, Larry.”

  “I assure you I’m not.”

  “But it simply doesn’t make sense. He’ll be trying to market a rather expensive device that offers no real advantage over the onboard warp unit.”

  “Oh, it has advantages,” Easly replied. “The gates generate an extremely high-degree warp, high enough so a ship can travel from gate to gate in a single jump. No more jumping in and out of warp, checking co-ordinates, then jumping again. You just follow a subspace beam from one gate to another.”

  “Not enough!” Jo said. “The big expense in interstellar travel is time, and the Haas gate that takes days to get to saves no time. The warp jumps are inconvenient, but they add little appreciable time to the trip. If Haas can eliminate the trip out past – and back from – the critical point in the gravity well, he’ll have revolutionized interstellar travel; if not, then he’s only invented an expensive toy.”

  “Expensive to his backers, you mean,” Old Pete added.

  “That, too,” Jo agreed with a nod. “Star Ways will see to it that he doesn’t sell too many gates.”

  “How can they do that?” Tella asked. “And why?”

  Jo signaled the waiter for another round of drinks before answering. “Star Ways is known as the biggest corporation in human history, right? It’s a conglomerate with subsidiaries in every sector of Terran space. Everybody knows that. But what is the basis for its growth to its present size?”

  Comprehension suddenly dawned in Tella’s face. “Of course! The on-board warp unit!”

  “Right. The warp gate is an eventual threat to the product that forms the economic basis for the conglomerate. Star Ways is not going to let anything hurt its warp unit sales if it can help it. It will cut prices to the bone until Haas has to fold.”

  “The Haas warp gate,” Old Pete summarized, “is doomed if it goes to market in its present form. It might have a chance if there were no competition from the conventional warp unit sector – some of the trade fleets might decide to invest in gates as their present onboard units depreciated – but it would be a very slow seller. If someone asked me whether or not to venture any money on Mr. Haas, my answer would be a definite no!”

  He halted discreetly as the waiter arrived with the fresh drinks, and resumed when the four of them were alone again.

  “But the question still remains: what’s the connection between Haas and deBloise? There’s no doubt in my mind now that Doyl Catera was talking shout the warp gate when he referred to a technological innovation that could make all planets neighbors. But why is it so important to the Restructurists? What do they ho
pe to get out of it?”

  “Well,” Easly said after carefully weighing and assessing the facts and opinions that had crisscrossed the table since they had seated themselves, “certainly not a return on their investment.”

  “You mean deBloise and his crew are backing Haas?” Old Pete sputtered, almost choking on a sip of scotch.

  “One hundred percent. But apparently they don’t want anyone to know. They’ve gone to an awful lot of trouble – three or four dummy investment groups, I’m told – to keep their names out of it. Haas probably doesn’t even know they’re involved. They’ve done an excellent job, according to my informant; no one could ever prove conclusively that there was a connection between Denver Haas and the Restructurist big shots… and my informant says he’ll deny any knowledge of the whole affair if I try to use him as a source.”

  “Sounds sinister,” Joe mused with a glance at Old Pete. “Your conspiracy theory sounds more and more plausible every minute. But the rationale behind the whole thing completely eludes me at the moment.”

  “I may not know the means,” Old Pete offered, “but I know the end: the end of the free market.”

  Jo wrinkled up her nose in a frankly skeptical grimace.

  “You look like you just got a whiff of week-old chispen innards,” Old Pete said.

  “It’s just that it’s such an absurd idea. I mean, how can you have commerce without a free market?”

  “It can be done. It’s not easy, but it can be done. Traders can always find a way. They’re the most resourceful members of the species. If a government tries to destroy a free market, as it is often wont to do, by controlling the supply of certain commodities or restricting the free movement of goods, traders and buyers will always manage to get together some way. If the free market is declared void by the government, they make their own. Only then it’s known as a ‘black’ market.”

  Old Pete paused as he noted the puzzled expressions around him. “I forgot. Your economic education in the outworlds is still very naïve. You lack my advantage of growing up on Earth. I’m all too familiar with things such as excise taxes, trade bureaus, commerce commissions, sales taxes–”