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III

The Council of the Polesotechnic League met in Lunograd to consider the Mirkheim situation. Hastily convened, it did not include a representative of every member. Several heads of independent businesses could not be reached in time or could not leave their work on notice that short. However, between them the Home Companies and the Seven In Space almost made up a quorum, and speakers for enough of the unallied organizations arrived, or were already on hand, to complete it.

After the first twenty-four hours of deadlock, Nicholas van Rijn invited two delegates to his suite in the Hotel Universe. They accepted, which they would scarcely have done for any other independent. Van Rijn's enterprise was sufficiently large and spread its tentacles sufficiently wide to make him powerful. Many observers found it hard to believe that, even with modern data and logic systems, one man could stay on top of it without having to incorporate like the giants. He was the natural leader of those outfits which had entered into no close-knitting agreements such as bound together the Seven In Space or the five Home Companies.

For their parts, Bayard Story seemed to be the guiding genius of the first group and Hanny Lennart of the second.

It was close to Lunar midnight. From the main room of the suite, the view through a transparency was awesome. Buildings stood well apart and were not high. They must stay below the forcefields which kept air in this bubble and the ozone layer beneath. But between them were parks wherein the low gravity let trees soar and arch like the fountains, amidst fiercely colored great blossoms. Lamps, on posts formed to resemble vines, glowed everywhere. They did not haze view of the stark crater floor beyond the fields, of Plato's ringwall shouldering in cliffs and steeps over the near horizon, or of the sky. Against infinite darkness, stars shone in their myriads, keen, jewel-hued, unwinking; the Milky Way was a quicksilver river; Earth's heart-snaring loveliness hung blue and white in the south. Confronting that sight, the opulence of the chamber seemed tawdry.

Lennart and Story arrived together. Van Rijn skipped across the floor to let them in. He had left unused the unit that could have supplied Terrestrial weight. "Ho, ho, you been confabulating before you come here, nie?" he bawled as the door opened. "No, don't deny, don't tell lies to a poor old lonely fat man who got one foot in the gravy. Come drink his liquor instead."

Story swept a glance across him and said genially, "For as far back as I've heard about you, Freeman van Rijn, and that's farther than I could wish, people tell how you've been lamenting your age and feebleness. I'd give long odds that you still have twenty years or more of devilment left."

"Ja, I look healthy, me, built like a brick wedding cake. But low gee helps more than you think, you two what could be my son and daughter except I always had better taste in women. How I long for to retire, forsake the bumps and inanities of this wicked world, wash my soul clean of sin till it squeaks."

"In order to make room for new and bigger sins?"

"Please stop that nonsense," Lennart interrupted. "This is supposed to be a serious discussion."

"If you insist, Freelady," Story said. "Myself, I feel ready for a little fun. Might as well take it, too. The Council is an exercise in futility. I wonder why I bothered to come."

The others regarded him narrowly for a moment, as if they also wondered. They had never met him before this occasion; they had only known—as a result of routine information gathering—that for the past ten years his name had been on the list of directors of Galactic Developments, in that corporation's headquarters on Germania. Evidently he was so rich and influential that he could kill publicity about himself and operate almost invisibly.

He was a rather handsome man, medium-sized, slender, his features regular in a tanned rectangular face, eyes blue-gray, hair and mustache smooth brown with a sprinkling of white. An elastic gait indicated that he used his muscles a good deal, perhaps under intermittently severe conditions. His soft speech held a trace of non-Terrestrial accent, though it was too far eroded by time to be identifiable. An expensive slacksuit in subdued greens fitted him as if grown from his body. Beside him, dark-clad Lennart looked dowdy and haggard. Beside either of them, van Rijn was outrageous in his favorite clothes of snuff-stained ruffled blouse and a sarong wrapped around his Jovian equator.

"Eat, drink, smoke," the host urged, waving at a well-stocked portable bar, trays of intricate canapés, boxes of cigars and cigarettes. He himself held a churchwarden pipe which had seen years of service and grown fouler for each day of them. "I wanted we should talk here, not on a circuit with seals, so we could relax, act honest, not have to resent what anybody maybe says."

Story nodded and took Scotch whisky in the civilized manner, neat with a water chaser. Van Rijn refilled a tumbler of Genever gin, adding a dash of what he called angst en onrust bitters. They settled down in loungers. Lennart sat upright on a sofa opposite, accepting nothing.

"Well," she said. "What do you have in mind?"

"We should see if we can compromise, or if not that, map out our areas of disagreement. Right?" Story supplied.

"Also horse-trade information," van Rijn said.

"That can be a mighty valuable commodity, especially when it's in short supply," Story observed.

"I hope you realize neither of us can make promises, Freeman van Rijn." Lennart clipped off each word. "We are simply executives of our corporations." She herself was a vice president of Global Cybernetics. "And in fact, neither the Home Companies nor the Seven form a monolith. They are only tied together by certain business agreements."

The recital of what a schoolboy should know did not insult van Rijn. "Plus interlocking directorates," he added blandly, taking up a tiny sandwich of smoked eel upon cold scrambled egg. "Besides, each of you got more voice in things than you let on, ja, you can bellow like wounded blast furnaces any time you want. And those business agreements, what they mean is the Seven is one cartel and the Home Companies another, and got plenty of political flunkies in high places."

"Not us in the Commonwealth," Story said. "That's become your plutocracy, Freelady Lennart, not ours."

Her thin cheeks flushed. "You can say that truly of your poor little puppet states on their poor little planets," she retorted. "As for the Commonwealth, we've now had fifty years of progressive reforms to strengthen democracy."

"By damn," van Rijn muttered, "maybe you really believe that."

"I hope we aren't here to rehearse stale partisan politics," Story said.

"Me too," van Rijn answered. "That is what it will amount to, what the Council will do if we leave it to itself. Members will take their positions and then not be able to get off because they have spread so much manure around. They will quarrel till plaster falls from the sky. And nothing else will happen . . . unless a few leaders agree to let it happen. That is what I want us to wowpow about."

"The issues are simple," Lennart declared. She repeated what she had said more than once at the conference table. "Mirkheim is too valuable, too strategic a resource, to be allowed to fall into the claws of beings that have demonstrated their hostility. I include certain human beings. The Commonwealth has a just title to sovereignty over it, inasmuch as the original discoverers represented no government whereas the Rigassi expedition was composed of our citizens. The Commonwealth likewise has a duty to mankind, to civilization itself, to safeguard that planet. The Home Companies support this. It's a patriotic obligation, and I am frankly surprised that persons of your education don't recognize it."

"My education was in the school of hard knockers," van Rijn replied. "Yours too, I suspect, Freeman Story, ha? You and me should understand each other."

"I understand why you change the subject," Lennart flung forth. "A discussion of morals would embarrass you."

"Well, speaking of morals, and immorals too," van Rijn said, "what about those original discoverers of Mirkheim, ha? What rights you think they have?"

"That can be decided in the courts, after Mirkheim is secured."

"Ja, ja, in courts whose judges you buy and sell like shares of stock. I hear a background noise already, you whetting your lawyers. That was why the Supermetals Company worked in secret."

Story raised his brows. "Do you expect us to believe, Freeman, that you aided and abetted them for a decade out of an abstract sense of justice?"

"What makes you suppose I was in any plot, a plain old peddler of belly comfort like me?"

"It's not been made public, but Rigassi learned from the workers at Mirkheim that a member of the Polesotechnic League had been helping in their cover-up, ever since he tracked the planet down. They didn't say who he was; they were simply, rather pathetically, trying to seem stronger than they are—"

Lennart drew a sharp breath. "How do you know that?" she exclaimed.

Story grinned. He was not about to reveal whatever espionage system his bloc maintained. He continued addressing van Rijn: "In retrospect, the man has to have been you. And a gorgeous job you did. Especially those hints you let drop, those clues you let be found, indicating an entire civilization more advanced than ours was producing the supermetals. Expeditions going solemnly out in search . . . Surely the most magnificent hoax in history." After a moment: "Do you mind telling us why you did it?"

"Well, you would call me a liar if I said I thought it was the right thing, and could be I would myself." Van Rijn swallowed a confection of Limburger cheese and onion on pumpernickel, tamped his pipe with a horny forefinger, and drank smoke. "I admit, partly I got talked into it by somebody I care about," he went on, between blowing rings. "And partly, for independents like me, is best if supermetals be on a free market. I don't want either of your cartels having the power that a Mirkheim monopoly in your hands would give. The original outfit, it is more reasonable."

That was what he had argued for at the Council: that the Polesotechnic League exert the might it had when it was united, in an effort to have Mirkheim declared a stateless planet under the protection of the League, which Supermetals would join. He knew perfectly well that there was no chance of the resolution being adopted unless a lot of hard minds got changed. The Home Companies insisted that they would support the Commonwealth's cause; the Seven were for the entire League holding clear of any struggle, strictly neutral and prepared to negotiate with whatever party won.

He now pursued the matter. "Story, it does not make sense we should sit by and piddle on our thumbs. Freelady Lennart has right as far as she goes: if Babur takes Mirkheim, is the worst outcome for all of us. And Babur is perhaply better armed than the Commonwealth. It for sure has shorter lines of communication."

"Who brought affairs to this pass?" Lennart's tone grew shrill. "Who first began trading with the Baburites, sold them the technology that got them into space, for a filthy profit? The Seven!"

"We had dealings, yes," Story said mildly. "At the time, that kind of transaction was standard practice, you recall. Nobody objected. Subsequently—well, I admit our companies let trade fall to almost nothing because it was no longer paying very well, not because we foresaw Babur's arming. We didn't. Nobody did. Who would have? Just the research and development necessary—incredible they could do it in so few years.

"But." He made a lecturer's gesture. "But from our earlier experience, we know we can do business with the Baburites. The possibility that we'll have to buy our supermetals from them is no more frightening than the possibility we'll have to buy them from the Home Companies, which is what a Commonwealth takeover would amount to. We'll still have things to exchange that Babur needs."

"Would you not prefer buying at a cheaper price from the present owners, and from other companies that will also work Mirkheim and sell on the open market?" van Rijn asked.

"They won't necessarily be cheaper," Story said. "Oxygen breathers are too apt to be in direct competition with us." He bridged his fingers and looked across them first at Lennart, then at van Rijn. "To be blunt, I think most of the fear of Babur is nothing but a child's fear of the unfamiliar. You never took the trouble to learn about it, when it seemed to be only one more obscure planet off in the fringes of known space. But I happen to be a former xenologist, who specialized in subjovians. I've studied all records the Seven have of their dealings with it. I've been there myself in the past and talked with its leaders. So I tell you—and I'm here to tell the entire Council—Babur's no den of ogres. It's the home of a species as reasonable by their lights as we are by ours."

"Exactly," van Rijn growled. "God help reason, if we and they is the best it can do. But I had a little brush-up with the Baburites myself once. I also have lately been scanning what data on them can be got here in the Solar System. Their lights is very flickery."

"Their claim to Mirkheim is ridiculous," Lennart put in. "Nothing but a slogan for territorial aggression."

"Not in terms of their own dominant culture," Story said.

"Then it isn't a culture we can afford to let become strong. It makes no bones about intending to establish an empire. If that meant only Babur-type worlds, perhaps we could live with it. But as I read their statements and actions to date, they plan to seize hegemony over that entire volume of space. That cannot be tolerated."

"How will you stop it?"

"For a start, by taking appropriate action at Mirkheim. Quickly, decisively. Our intelligence indicates Babur will back down from a fait accompli."

"'Our' intelligence?" Story murmured. "How good are your connections to the Ministry of Defense?"

Van Rijn jetted thick blue clouds. "I think you just answered something I wasn't so sure about, Lennart," he said.

She stared. Apprehension crossed her features. "I didn't—I am only advocating, personally, you realize—"

"I got connections of my own. Not to nothing secret, like you seem to. But so simple a datum as clearances of civilian craft for deep space—suddenly for a while a lot of them got to wait—that kind of thing—ja, drop by drop by drop of fact I collect, till I got a full jigsaw puddle. Your way of talking, after these many years I have known you, Lennart, that says much too."

Van Rijn stood up, lightly in the low weight, like a rising moon which eclipsed the radiance of Earth. "Story," he said, "it will not be announced right away, but I bet you rubies to rhubarb the Commonwealth government has already dispatched a task force to Mirkheim. And I am not the least bit sure Babur will take that meekly-weakly." He turned to a little Martian sandroot statuette of St. Dismas that stood on the bar, his traveling companion of a lifetime. "Better get busy and pray for us," he told it.

 

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