Norstrilia

FOE MONEY SAD MONEY

When Rod finally awakened, it was to feel his shoulder tightly bound and his arm throbbing. He had fought waking up because the pain had increased as his mind moved toward consciousness, but the pain and the murmur of voices caused him to come all the way to the hard bright surface of consciousness.

The murmur of voices?

There was no place on all Old North Australia where voices murmured. People sat around and spieked to each other and hiered the answers without the clatter of vocal cords. Telepathy made for brilliant and quick conversation, the participants darting their thoughts this way and that, soaring with their shields so as to produce the effect of a confidential whisper.

But here there were voices. Voices. Many voices. Not possible.

And the smell was wrong. The air was wet — luxuriously, extravagantly wet, like a miser trying to catch a rainstorm in his cabin!

It was almost, like the van of the Garden of Death.

Just as he woke, he recognized Lavinia singing an odd little song. It was one which Rod knew, because it had a sharp catchy, poignant little melody to it which sounded like nothing on this world. She was singing, and it sounded like one of the weird sadnesses which his people had brought from their horrible group experience on the abandoned planet of Paradise VII:

His eyes opened and it was indeed Lavinia whom he saw at the edge of vision. This was no house. It was a box, a hospital, a prison, a ship, a cave or a fort. The furnishings were machined and luxurious. The light was artificial and almost the color of peaches. A strange hum in the background sounded like alien engines dispensing power for purposes which Norstrilian law never permitted to private persons. The Lord Redlady leaned over Rod; the fantastic man broke into song himself, chanting—

When he saw the obvious signs of Rod’s perplexity, he burst into a laugh,

“That’s the oldest song you ever heard, my boy. It’s prespace and it used to be called ‘general quarters’ when ships like big iron houses floated on the waters of Earth and fought each other. We’ve been waiting for you to wake up.”

“Water,” said Rod, “please give me water. Why are you talking?”

“Water!” cried the Lord Redlady to someone behind him. His sharp thin face was alight with excitement as he turned back to Rod, “And were talking because I have my buzzer on. If people want to talk to each other, they jolly well better use their voices in this ship.”

“Ship?” said Rod, reaching for the mug of cold, cold water which a hand had reached out to him.

“This is my ship, Mister and Owner Rod McBan to the hundred and fifty-first! An Earth ship. I pulled it out of orbit and grounded it with the permission of the Commonwealth. They don’t know you’re on it, yet. They can’t find out right now because my Humanoid-robot Brainwave Dephasing Device is on. Nobody can think in or out through that, and anybody who tries telepathy on this boat is going to get himself a headache here.”

“Why you?” said Rod. “What for?”

“In due time,” said the Lord Redlady. “Let me introduce you first. You know these people.” He waved at a group.

Lavinia sat with his hands, Bill and Hopper, with its workwoman Eleanor, with his Aunt Doris. They looked odd, sitting on the low, soft, luxurious Earth furniture. They were all sipping some Earth drink of a color which Rod had never seen before. Their expressions were diverse: Bill looked truculent, Hopper looked greedy, Aunt Doris looked utterly embarrassed, and Lavinia looked as though she were enjoying herself.

“And then here…” said the Lord Redlady.

The man he pointed to might not have been a man. He was the Norstrilian type all right, but he was a giant, of the kind which were always killed in the Garden of Death.

“At your service,” said the giant, who was almost three meters tall and who had to watch his head, lest it hit the ceiling, “I am Donald Dumfrie Hordern Anthony Garwood Gaines Wentworth to the fourteenth generation, Mister and Owner McBan. A military surgeon, at your service, sir!”

“But this is private. Surgeons aren’t allowed to work for anybody but government.”

“I am on loan to the Earth Government,” said Wentworth, the giant, his face in a broad grin.

“And I,” said the Lord Redlady, “am both the Instrumentality and the Earth Government for diplomatic purposes. I borrowed him. He’s under Earth rules. You will be well in two or three hours.”

The doctor, Wentworth, looked at his hand as though he saw a chronograph there:

“Two hours and seventeen minutes more.”

“Let it be,” said the Lord Redlady, “here’s our last guest.”

A short, angry man stood up and came over. He glared out at Rod and held forth an angry hand.

“John Fisher to the hundredth. You know me.”

“Do I?” said Rod, not impolitely. He was just dazed.

“Station of the Good Fresh Joey,” said Fisher.

“I haven’t been there,” said Rod, “but I’ve heard of it.”

“You needn’t have,” snapped the angry Fisher. “I met you at your grandfather’s.”

“Oh, yes, Mister and Owner Fisher,” said Rod, not really remembering anything at all, but wondering why the short, red-faced man was so angry with him.

“You don’t know who I am?” said Fisher. “I handle the books and the credits for the government.”

“Wonderful work,” said Rod. “I’m sure it’s complicated. Could I have something to eat?”

The Lord Redlady interrupted: “Would you like French pheasant with Chinesian sauce steeped in the thieves’ wine from Viola Siderea? It would only cost you six thousand tons of refined gold, orbited near Earth, if I ordered it sent to you by special courier.”

For some inexplicable reason the entire room howled with laughter. The men put their glasses down so as not to spill them. Hopper seized the opportunity to refill his own glass. Aunt Doris looked hilarious and secretly proud, as though she herself had laid a diamond egg or done some equal marvel. Only Lavinia, though laughing, managed to look sympathetically at Rod to make sure that he did not feel mocked. The Lord Redlady laughed as loudly as the rest and even the short, angry John Fisher allowed himself a wan smile, while holding out his hand for a refill on his drink. An animal, a little one which looked very much like an extremely small person, lifted up the bottle and filled his glass for him; Rod suspected that it was a “monkey” from Old Old Earth, from the stories he had heard.

Rod didn’t even say, “What’s the joke?” though he realized plainly that he was himself in the middle of it. He just smiled weakly back at them, feeling the hunger grow within him.

“My robot is cooking you an Earth dish. French toast with maple syrup. You could live ten thousand years on this planet and never get it. Rod, don’t you know why we’re laughing? Don’t you know what you’ve done?”

“The Onseck tried to kill me, I think,” said Rod. Lavinia clapped her hand to her mouth, but it was too late.

“So that’s who it was,” said the doctor, Wentworth, with a voice as gigantic as himself.

“But you wouldn’t laugh at me for that—” Rod started to say. Then he stopped himself. An awful thought had come to him. “You mean, it really worked? That stuff with my family’s old computer.”

The laughter broke out again. It was kind laughter, but it was always the laughter of a peasant people, driven by boredom, who greet the unfamiliar with attack or with laughter.

“You did it,” said Hopper. “You’ve brought a billion worlds.”

John Fisher snapped at him, “Let’s not exaggerate. He’s gotten about one point six stroon years. You couldn’t buy any billion worlds for that. In the first place, there aren’t a billion settled worlds, not even a million. In the second place, there aren’t many worlds for sale. I doubt that he could buy thirty or forty.” The little animal, prompted by some imperceptible sign from the Lord Redlady, went out of the room and returned with a tray. The odor from the tray made all the people in the room sniff appreciatively. The food was unfamiliar, but it combined pungency and sweetness. The monkey fitted the tray into an artfully concealed slot at the head of Rod’s couch, took off an imaginary monkey cap, saluted, and went back to his own basket behind the Lord Redlady’s chair.

The Lord Redlady nodded, “Go ahead and eat, boy. It’s on me.”

Rod sat up. His shirt was still blood-caked and he realized that it was almost worn out.

“That’s an odd sight, I must say,” said the huge doctor Wentworth. “There’s the richest man in many worlds, and he hasn’t the price of a new pair of overalls.”

“What’s odd about that? We’ve always charged an import fee of twenty million percent of the orbit price of goods,” snapped angry John Fisher. “Have you ever realized what other people have swung into orbit around our sun, just waiting for us to change our minds so they could sell us half the rubbish in the universe. This planet would be knee-deep in junk if we ever dropped our tariff. I’m surprised at you, doctor, forgetting the fundamental rules of Old North Australia!”

“He’s not complaining,” said Aunt Doris, whom the drink had made loquacious. “He’s just thinking. We all think.”

“Of course we all think. Or daydream. Some of us leave and go off-planet to be rich people on other worlds. A few of us even manage to get back here on severe probation when we realize what the offworlds are like. I’m just saying,” said the doctor, “that Rod’s situation would be very funny to everybody except us Norstrilians. We’re all rich with the stroon imports, but we’ve kept ourselves poor in order to survive.”

“Who’s poor?” snapped the fieldhand Hopper, apparently touched at a sensitive point. “I can match you with megacredits, doc, any time you care to gamble. Or I’ll meet you with throwing knives, if you want them better. I’m as good as the next man!”

“That’s exactly what I mean,” said John Fisher. “Hopper here can argue with anybody on the planet. We’re still equals, we’re still free, we’re not the victims of our own wealth — that’s Norstrilia for you!”

Rod looked up from his food and said, “Mister and Owner Secretary Fisher, you talk awfully well for somebody who is not a freak like me. How do you do it?”

Fisher started looking angry again, though he was not really angry: “Do you think that financial records can be dictated telepathically? I’m spending centuries out of my life, just dictating into my blasted microphone. Yesterday I spent most of the day dictating the mess which you have made of the Commonwealth’s money for the next eight years. And you know what I’m going to do at the next meeting of the Commonwealth Council?”

“What,” said Rod.

“I’m going to move the condemnation of that computer of yours. It’s too good to be in private hands.”

“You can’t do that!” shrieked Aunt Doris, somewhat mellowed by the Earth beverages she was drinking, “it’s MacArthur and McBan family property.”

“You can keep the temple,” said Fisher with a snort, “but no bloody family is going to outguess the whole planet again. Do you know that boy sitting there has four megacredits on Earth at this moment?”

Bill hiccupped, “I got more than that myself.”

Fisher snarled at him, “On Earth? FOE money?”

A silence hit the room.

“FOE money. Four megacredits? He can buy Old Australia and ship it out here to us?” Bill sobered fast.

Said Lavinia mildly, “What’s foe money?”

“Do you know, Mister and Owner McBan?” said Fisher, in a peremptory tone. “You had better know, because you have more of it than any man has ever had before.”

“I don’t want to talk about money,” said Rod. “I want to find out what the Onseck is up to.

“Don’t worry about him!” laughed the Lord Redlady, prancing to his feet and pointing at himself with a dramatic forefinger. “As the representative of Earth, I filed six hundred and eighty-five lawsuits against him simultaneously, in the name of your Earth debtors, who fear that some harm might befall you…”

“Do they really?” said Rod. “Already?”

“Of course not. All they know is your name and the fact that you bought them out. But they would worry if they did know, so as your agent I tied up the Hon. Sec. Houghton Syme with more law cases than this planet has ever seen before.”

The big doctor chuckled, “Dashed clever of you, my Lord and Mister! You know us Norstrilians pretty well, I must say. If we charge a man with murder, we’re so freedom-minded that he has time to commit a few more before being tried for the first one. But civil suits! Hot sheep! He’ll never get out of those, as long as he lives.”

“Is he onsecking any more?” said Rod.

“What do you mean?” asked Fisher.

“Does he still have his job — Onseck.”

“Oh, yes,” said Fisher, “but we put him on two hundred years’ leave and he has only about a hundred and twenty years to live, poor fellow. Most of that time he will be defending himself in civil suits.”

Rod finally exhaled. He had finished the food. The small polished room with its machined elegance, the wet air, the bray of voices all over the place — these made him feel dreamlike. Here grown men were standing, talking as though he really did own Old Earth. They were concerned with his affairs, not because he was Roderick Frederick Ronald Arnold William MacArthur McBan the hundred-and-fifty-first, but because he was Rod, a boy among them who had stumbled upon danger and fortune. He looked around the room. The conversations had accidentally stopped. They were looking at him, and he saw in their faces something which he had not seen before. What was it? It was not love. It was a rapt attentiveness, combined with a sort of pleasurable and indulgent interest. He then realized what the looks signified. They were giving him the adoration which they usually reserved only for cricket players, tennis players, and great track performers — like that fabulous Hopkins Harvey fellow who had gone offworld and had won a wrestling match with a “heavy man” from Wereld Schemering. He was not just Rod any more. He was their boy.

As their boy, he smiled at them vaguely and felt like crying.

The breathlessness broke when the large doctor, Mister and Owner Wentworth, threw in the stark comment, “Time to tell him, Mister and Owner Fisher. He won’t have his property long if we don’t get moving. No, nor his life either.”

Lavinia jumped up and cried out, “You can’t kill Rod-”

Doctor Wentworth stopped her, “Sit down. We’re not going to kill him. And you there, stop acting foolish! We’re his friends here.”

Rod followed the line of the doctor’s glance and saw that Hopper had snaked his hand back to the big knife he wore in his belt. He was getting ready to fight anyone who attacked Rod.

“Sit, sit down, all of you, please!” said the Lord Redlady, speaking somewhat fussily with his singsong Earth accent. “I’m host here. Sit down. Nobody’s killing Rod tonight. Doctor, you take my table. Sit down yourself. You will stop threatening my ceiling or your head. You, Ma’am and Owner,” said he to Aunt Doris, “move over there to that other chair. Now we can all see the doctor.”

“Can’t we wait?” asked Rod. “I need to sleep. Are you going to ask me to make decisions now? I’m not up to decisions, not after what I’ve just been through. All night with the computer. The long walk. The bird from the Onseck—”

“You’ll have no decisions to make if you don’t make them tonight,” said the doctor firmly and pleasantly. “You’ll be a dead man.”

“Who’s going to kill me?” asked Rod.

“Anybody who wants money. Or wants power. Or who would like unlimited life. Or who needs these things to get something else. Revenge. A woman. An obsession. A drug. You’re not just a person now, Rod. You’re Norstrilia incarnate. You’re Mr. Money himself! Don’t ask who’d kill you! Ask who wouldn’t! We wouldn’t… I think. But don’t tempt us.”

“How much money have I got?” said Rod.

Angry John Fisher cut in: “So much that the computers are clotted up, just counting it. About one and a half stroon years. Perhaps three hundred years of Old Earth’s total income. You sent more Instant Messages last night than the Commonwealth government itself has sent in the last twelve years. These messages are expensive. One kilocredit in FOE money.”

“I asked a long time ago what this foe money was,” said Lavinia, “and nobody has got around to telling me.”

The Lord Redlady took the middle of the floor. He stood there with a stance which none of the Old North Australians had ever seen before. It was actually the posture of a master of ceremonies opening the evening at a large night club, but to people who had never seen those particular gestures, his movements were eerie, self-explanatory and queerly beautiful.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, using a phrase which most of them had only heard in books, “I will serve drinks while the others speak. I will ask each in turn. Doctor, will you be good enough to wait while the Financial Secretary speaks?”

“I should think,” said the doctor irritably, “that the lad would be wanting to think over his choice. Does he want me to cut him in two, here, tonight, or doesn’t he? I should think that would take priority, wouldn’t you?”

“Ladies and gentlemen,” said the Lord Redlady, “the Mister and Doctor Wentworth has a very good point indeed. But there is no sense in asking Rod about being cut in two unless he knows why. Mister Financial Secretary, will you tell us all what happened last night?”

John Fisher stood up. He was so chubby that it did not matter. His brown, suspicious, intelligent eyes looked over the lot of them.

“There are as many kinds of money as there are worlds with people on them. We here on Norstrilia don’t carry the tokens around, but in some places they have bits of paper or metal which they use to keep count. We talk our money into the central computers which even out all our transactions for us. Now what would happen if I wanted a pair of shoes?”

Nobody answered. He didn’t expect them to.

“I would,” he went on, “go to a shop, look in the screen at the shoes which the offworld merchants keep in orbit, would pick out the shoes I wanted. What’s a good price for a pair of shoes in orbit?”

Hopper was getting tired of these rhetorical questions so he answered promptly,

“Six bob.”

“That’s right. Six minicredits.”

“But that’s orbit money. You’re leaving out the tariff,” said Hopper.

“Exactly. And what’s the tariff?” asked John Fisher, snapping.

Hopper snapped back, “Two hundred thousand times, what you bloody fools always make it in the Commonwealth Council.”

“Hopper, can you buy shoes?” said Fisher.

“Of course I can!” The station hand looked belligerent again but the Lord Redlady was filling his glass. He sniffed the aroma, calmed down and said, “All right, what’s your point?”

“The point is that the money in orbit is SAD money — s for secure, A, for and, D, for delivered. That’s any kind of good money with backing behind it. Stroon is the best backing there is, but gold is all right, rare metals, fine manufacturers, and so on. That’s just the money off the planet, in the hands of the recipient. Now how many times would a ship have to hop to get to Old Earth itself?”

“Fifty or sixty,” said Aunt Doris unexpectedly. “Even I know that.”

“And how many ships get through?” “They all do,” said she. “Oh, no,” cried several of the men in unison. “About one ship is lost every sixty or eighty trips, depending on the solar weather, on the skills of the pinlighters and the go-captains, on the landing accidents. Did any of you ever see a really old captain?”

“Yes,” said Hopper with gloomy humor, “a dead one in his coffin.”

“So if you have something you want to get to Earth, you have to pay your share of the costly ships, your share of the go-captain’s wages and the fees of his staff, your share of the insurance for their families. Do you know what it could cost to get this chair back to Earth?” said Fisher.

“Three hundred times the cost of the chair,” said Doctor Wentworth.

“Mighty close. It’s two hundred and eighty seven times.”

“How do you know so much mucking much?” said Bill, speaking up. “And why waste our time with all this crutting glubb?”

“Watch your language, man,” said John Fisher. “There are some mucking ladies present. I’m telling you this because we have to get Rod off to Earth tonight, if he wants to be alive and rich—”

“That’s what you say!” cried Bill. “Let him go to his house. We can load up on little bombs and hold up against anybody who could get through the Norstrilian defenses. What are we paying these mucking taxes for, if it’s not for the likes of you to make sure we’re safe? Shut up, man, and let’s take the boy home. Come along, Hopper.”

The Lord Redlady leaped to the middle of his own floor. He was no prancing Earthman putting on a show. He was the old Instrumentality itself, surviving with raw weapons and raw brains. In his hand he held a something which none of them could see clearly.

“Murder,” he said, “will be done this moment if anybody moves. I will commit it. I will, people. Move, and try me. And if I do commit murder, I will arrest myself, hold a trial, and acquit myself. I have strange powers, people. Don’t make me use them. Don’t even make me show them.” The shimmering thing in his hand disappeared. “Mister and Doctor Wentworth, you are under my command, by loan. Other people, you are my guests. Be warned. Don’t touch the boy. This is Earth territory, this cabin we’re in.” He stood a little to one side and looked at them brightly out of his strange Earth eyes.

Hopper deliberately spat on the floor. “I suppose I would be a puddle of mucking glue if I helped old Bill?”

“Something like it,” said the Lord Redlady. “Want to try?” The things that were hard to see were now in each of his hands. His eyes darted between Bill and Hopper.

“Shut up, Hopper. We’ll take Rod if he tell us to go. But if he doesn’t — it crudding well doesn’t matter. Eh, Mister and Owner McBan?”

Rod looked around for his grandfather, dead long ago: then he knew they were looking at him instead. Torn between sleepiness and anxiety he answered,

“I don’t want to go now, fellows. Thank you for standing by. Go on, Mister Secretary, with the foe money and the sad money.”

The weapons disappeared from the Lord Redlady’s hands.

“I don’t like Earth weapons,” said Hopper, speaking very loudly and plainly to no one at all, “and I don’t like Earth people. They’re duty. There’s nothing in them that’s good honest crook.”

“Have a drink, lads,” said the Lord Redlady with a democratic heartiness which was so false that the workwoman Eleanor, silent all the evening, let out one wild caw of a laugh, like a kookaburra beginning to whoop in a tree. He looked at her sharply, picked up his serving jug, and nodded to the Financial Secretary, John Fisher, that he should resume speaking.

Fisher was flustered. He obviously did not like this Earth practice of quick threats and weapons indoors, but the Lord Redlady — disgraced and remote from Old Earth as he was — was nevertheless the accredited diplomat of the Instrumentality, and even Old North Australia did not push the Instrumentality too far. There were things supposed about worlds which had done so.

Soberly and huffily he went on, “There’s not much to it. If the money is discounted thirty-three and one third percent per trip and if it takes fifty-five trips to get to Old Earth, it takes a heap of money to pay up in orbit right here before you have a minicredit on Earth. Sometimes the odds are better. Your Commonwealth government waits for months and years to get a really favorable rate of exchange and of course we send our freight by armed sail-ships, which don’t go below the surface of space at all. They just take hundreds of thousands of years to get there, while our cruisers dart in and out around them, just to make sure that nobody robs them in transit. There are things about Norstrilian robots which none of you know, and which not even the Instrumentality knows—” he darted a quick look at the Lord Redlady, who said nothing to this, and went on, “Which makes it well worth while not to muck around with one of our perishing ships. We don’t get robbed much. And we have other things that are even worse than Mother Hitton and her littul kittons. But the money and the stroon which finally reaches Old Earth itself is FOE money. F,O,E. F is for free, O is for on, E is for Earth. F,O,E — free on Earth. That’s the best kind of money there is, right on Old Earth itself. And Earth has the final exchange computer. Or had it.”

“Had it?” said the Lord Redlady.

“It broke down last night. Rod broke it. Overload.”

“Impossible!” cried Redlady. “I’ll check.”

He went to the wall, pulled down a desk. A console, incredibly miniature, gleamed out at them. In less than three seconds it glowed. Redlady spoke into it, his voice as clear and cold as the ice they had all heard about:

“Priority. Instrumentality. Short of War. Instant. Instant. Redlady calling. Earthport.”

“Confirmed,” said a Norstrilian voice, “confirmed and charged.”

“Earthport,” said the console in a whistling whisper which filled the room.

“Redlady — instrumentality — official — centputer — all-right — question — cargo — approved — question — out.”

“Centputer — all — right — cargo — approved — out,” said the whisper and fell silent.

The people in the room had seen an immense fortune squandered. Even by Norstrilian standards, the faster-than-light messages were things which a family might not use twice in a thousand years. They looked at Redlady as though he were an evil-worker with strange powers. Earth’s prompt answer to the skinny man made them all remember that though Old North Australia produced the wealth, Earth still distributed much of it, and that the supergovernment of the Instrumentality reached into far places where no Norstrilian would even wish to venture.

The Lord Redlady spoke mildly, “The central computer seems to be going again, if your government wishes to consult it. The ‘cargo’ is this boy here.”

“You’ve told Earth about me?” said Rod.

“Why not? We want to get you there alive.”

“But message security — ?” said the doctor.

“I have references which no outside mind will know,” said the Lord Redlady. “Finish up, Mister Financial Secretary. Tell the young man what he has on Earth.”

“Your computer outcomputed the government,” said John Fisher to the hundredth, “and it mortgaged all your lands, all your sheep, all your trading rights, all your family treasures, the right to the MacArthur name, the right to the McBan name, and itself. Then it bought futures. Of course, it didn’t do it. You did, Rod McBan.”

Startled into full awakeness, Rod found his right hand up at his mouth, so surprised was he. “I did?”

“Then you bought futures in stroon, but you offered them for sale. You held back the sales, shifting titles and changing prices, so that not even the central computer knew what you were doing. You bought almost all of the eighth year from now, most of the seventh year from now, and some of the sixth. You mortgaged each purchase as you went along, in order to buy more. Then you suddenly tore the market wide open by offering fantastic bargains, trading the six-year rights for seventh-year and eighth-year. Your computer made such lavish use of Instant Messages to Earth that the Commonwealth defense office had people buzzing around in the middle of the night. By the time they figured out what might happen, it had happened. You registered a monopoly of two year’s export, far beyond the predicted amount. The government rushed for a weather recomputation, but while they were doing that you were registering your holdings on Earth and remortgaging them in FOE money. With the FOE money you began to buy up all the imports around Old North Australia, and when the government finally declared an emergency, you had secured final title to one and a half stroon years and to more megacredits, FOE money megacredits, than the Earth computers could handle. You’re the richest man that ever was. Or ever will be. We changed all the rules this morning and I myself signed a new treaty with the Earth authorities, ratified by the Instrumentality. Meanwhile, you’re the richest of the rich men who ever lived on this world and you’re also rich enough to buy all of Old Earth. In fact, you have put in a reservation to buy it, unless the Instrumentality outbids you.”

“Why should we?” said the Lord Redlady. “Let him have it. We’ll watch what he does with the Earth after he buys it, and if it is something bad, we will kill him.”

“You’d kill me, Lord Redlady?” said Rod. “I thought you were saving me?”

“Both,” said the doctor, standing up. “The Commonwealth government has not tried to take your property away from you, though they have their doubts as to what you will do with Earth if you do buy it. They are not going to let you stay on this planet and endanger it by being the richiest kidnap victim who ever lived. Tomorrow they will strip you of your property, unless you want to take a chance on running for it. Earth government is the same way. If you can figure out your own defences, you can come on in. Of course, the police will protect you, but would that be enough? I’m a doctor, and I’m here to ship you out if you want to go.”

“And I’m an officer of government, and I will arrest you if you do not go,” said John Fisher.

“And I represent the Instrumentality, which does not declare its policy to anyone, least of all to outsiders. But it is my personal policy,” said the Lord Redlady, holding out his hands and twisting his thumbs in a meaningless, grotesque, but somehow very threatening way, “to see that this boy gets a safe trip to Earth and a fair deal when he comes back here!”

“You’ll protect him all the way!” cried Lavinia, looking very happy.

“All the way. As far as I can. As long as I live.”

“That’s pretty long,” muttered Hopper, “conceited little pommy cockahoop!”

“Watch your language, Hopper,” said the Lord Redlady. “Rod?”

“Yes, sir?”

“Your answer?” The Lord Redlady was peremptory.

“I’m going,” said Rod.

“What on Earth do you want?” said the Lord Redlady ceremoniously.

“A genuine Cape triangle.”

“A what?” cried the Lord Redlady.

“A Cape triangle. A postage stamp.”

“What’s postage?” said the Lord Redlady, really puzzled.

“Payments on messages.”

“But you do that with thumbprints or eyeprints!”

“No,” said Rod, “I mean paper ones.”

“Paper messages?” said the Lord Redlady, looking as though someone had mentioned grass battleships, hairless sheep, solid cast-iron women, or something else equally improbable; “Paper messages?” he repeated, and then he laughed quite charmingly. “Oh!” he said, with a tone of secret discovery, “You mean antiquities… ”

“Of course,” said Rod. “Even before Space itself.”

“Earth has a lot of antiquities, and I am sure you will be welcome to study them or to collect them. That will be perfectly all right. Just don’t do any of the wrong things, or you will be in real trouble.”

“What are the wrong things?” said Rod.

“Buying real people, or trying to. Shipping religion from one planet to another. Smuggling underpeople.”

“What’s religion?” said Rod.

“Later, later,” said the Lord Redlady. “You’ll learn everything later. Doctor, you take over.”

Wentworth stood very carefully so that his head did not touch the ceiling. He had to bend his neck a little. “We have two boxes, Rod.”

When he spoke, the door whirred in its tracks and showed them a small room beyond. There was a large box like a coffin and a very small box, like the kind that women have around the house to keep a single party-going bonnet in.

“There will be criminals, and wild governments, and conspirators, and adventurers, and just plain good people gone wrong at the thought of your wealth — there will be all these waiting for you to kidnap you or rob or even kill you—”

“Why kill me — ?”

“To impersonate you and try to get your money,” said the doctor. “Now look. This is your big choice. If you take the big box, we can put you in a sail-ship convoy and you will get there in several hundred or thousand years. But you will get there, ninety-nine point ninety-nine percent. Or we can send the big box on the regular planoforming ships, and somebody will steal you. Or we scun you down and put you in the little box.”

“That little box?” cried Rod.

“Scunned. You’ve scunned sheep, haven’t you?”

“I’ve heard of it. But a man, no. Dehydrate my body, pickle my head, and freeze the whole mucking mess?” cried Rod.

“That’s it. Too bloody right!” cried the doctor cheerfully. “That’ll give you a real chance of getting there alive.”

“But who’ll put me together. I’d need my own doctor — ?” His voice quavered at the unnaturalness of the risk, not at the mere chanciness and danger of it.

“Here,” said the Lord Redlady, “is your doctor, already trained.”—

“I am at your service,” said the little Earth-animal, the “monkey,” with a small bow to the assembled company. “My name is A’gentur and I have been conditioned as a physician, a surgeon and a barber.”

The women had gasped. Hopper and Bill stared at the little animal in horror.

“You’re an underperson!” yelled Hopper. “We’ve never let the crutting things loose on Norstrilia.”

“I’m not an underperson. I’m an animal. Conditioned to—” The monkey jumped. Hopper’s heavy knife twanged like a musical instrument as it clung to the softer steel of the wall. Hopper’s other hand held a long thin knife, ready to reach Redlady’s heart.

The left hand of the Lord Redlady flashed straight forward. Something in his hand glowed silently, terribly. There was a hiss in the air.

Where Hopper had been, a cloud of oily thick smoke, stinking of burning meat, coiled slowly toward the, ventilators. Hopper’s clothing and personal belongings, including one false tooth, lay on the chair in which he had been sitting. They were undamaged. His drink stood on the floor beside the chair, forever to remain unfinished.

The doctor’s eyes gleamed as he stared strangely at Redlady:

“Noted and reported to the Old North Australian Navy.”

’I’ll report it too,” said the Lord Redlady, “…as the use of weapons on diplomatic grounds.”

“Never mind,” said John Fisher to the hundredth, not angry at all, but jusf pale and looking a little ill. Violence did not frighten him, but decision did. “Let’s get on with it. Which box, big or little, boy?”

The workwoman Eleanor stood up. She had said nothing but now she dominated the scene. “Take him in there, girls,” she said, “and wash him like you would for the Garden of Death. I’ll wash myself in there. You see,” she added, “I’ve always wanted to see the blue skies on Earth, and wanted to swim in a house that ran around on the big big waters. I’ll take your big box, Rod, and if I get through alive, you will owe me some treats on Earth. You take the little box, Roddy, take the little box. And that little tiny doctor with the fur on him. Rod, I trust him.”

Rod stood up.

Everybody was looking at him and at Eleanor.

“You agree?” said the Lord Redlady.

He nodded.

“You agree to be scunned and put in the little box for instant shipment to Earth?”

He nodded again.

“You will pay all the extra expenses?”

He nodded again.

The doctor said,

“You authorize me to cut you up and reduce you down, in the hope that you may be reconstituted on Earth?”

Rod nodded to him, too.

“Shaking your head isn’t enough,” said the doctor. “You have to agree for the record.”

“I agree,” said Rod quietly.

Aunt Doris and Lavinia came forward to lead him into the dressing room and shower room. Just as they reached for his arms, the doctor patted Rod on the back with a quick strange motion. Rod jumped a little.

“Deep hypnotic,” said the doctor. “You can manage his body all right, but the next words he utters will be said, luck willing, on Old Earth itself.”

The women were wide-eyed but they led Rod forward to be cleaned for the operations and the voyage.

The doctor turned to the Lord Redlady and to John Fisher, the financial secretary.

“A good night’s work,” he said. “Pity about that man, though.”

Bill sat still, frozen with grief in his chair, staring at Hopper’s empty clothing in the chair next to him.

The console tinkled, “Twelve hours, Greenwich mean time. No adverse weather reports from the channel coast or from Meeya Meefla or Earthport building. All’s well!”

The Lord Redlady served drinks to the misters. He did not even offer one to Bill. It would have been no use, at this point.

From beyond the door, where they were cleaning the body, clothes and hair of the deeply hypnotized Rod, Lavinia and Aunt Doris unconsciously reverted to the ceremony of the Garden of Death and lifted their voices in a sort of plainsong chant:

The three men listened for a few moments, attentively. From the other washroom there came the sounds of the workwoman Eleanor, washing herself, alone and unattended, for a long voyage and a possible death.

The Lord Redlady heaved a sigh, “Have a drink, Bill. Hopper brought it on himself.”

Bill refused to speak to them but he held forth his glass.

The Lord Redlady filled that and the others. He turned to John Fisher to the hundredth and said:

“You’re shipping him?”

“Who?”

“The boy.”

“I thought so.”

“Better not,” said the Lord Redlady.

“You mean — danger?”

“That’s only half the word for it,” said the Lord Redlady. “You can’t possibly plan to offload him at Earthport. Put him into a good medical station. There’s an old one, still good, on Mars, if they haven’t closed it down. I know Earth. Half the people of Earth will be waiting to greet him and the other half will be waiting to rob him.”

“You represent the Earth government, Sir and Commissioner,” said John Fisher, “that’s a rum way to talk about your own people.”

“They are not that way all the time,” laughed Redlady. “Just when they’re in heat. Sex hasn’t a chance to compare with money when it comes to the human race on Earth. They all think that they want power and freedom and six other impossible things. I’m not speaking for the Earth government when I say this. Just for myself.”

“If we don’t ship him, who will?” demanded Fisher.

“The Instrumentality.”

“The Instrumentality? You don’t conduct commerce. How can you?”

“We don’t conduct commerce, but we do meet emergencies. I can flag down a long-jump cruiser and he’ll be there months before anybody expects him.”

“Those are warships. You can’t use one for passengers!”

“Can’t I?” said the Lord Redlady, with a smile.

“The Instrumentality would — ?” said Fisher, with a puzzled smile. “The cost would be tremendous. How will you pay for it? It’d be hard to justify.”

“He will pay for it. Special donation from him for special service. One megacredit for the trip.”

The financial secretary whistled. “That’s a fearful price for a single trip. You’d want SAD money and not surface money, I suppose?”

“No. FOE money.”

“Hot buttered moonbeams, man! That’s a thousand times the most expensive trip that any person has ever had.”

The big doctor had been listening to the two of them. “Mister and Owner Fisher,” he said, “I recommend it.”

“You?” cried John Fisher angrily. “You’re a Norstrilian and you want to rob this poor boy?”

“Poor boy?” snorted the doctor. “It’s not that. The trip’s no good if he’s not alive. Our friend here is extravagant but his ideas are sound. I suggest one amendment.”

“What’s that?” said the Lord Redlady quickly.

“One and a half megacredits for the round trip. If he is well and alive and with the same personality, apart from natural causes. But note this. One kilocredit only if you deliver him on Earth dead.”

John Fisher rubbed his chin. His suspicious eyes looked down at Redlady, who had taken a seat and looked up at the doctor, whose head was still bumping the ceiling.

A voice behind him spoke.

“Take it, Mister Financial Secretary. The boy won’t use money if he’s dead. You can’t fight the Instrumentality, you can’t be reasonable with the Instrumentality, and you can’t buy the Instrumentality. With what they’ve been taking off us all these thousands of years, they’ve got more stroon than we do. Hidden away somewhere. You, there!” said Bill rudely to the Lord Redlady, “do you have any idea what the Instrumentality is worth?”

The Lord Redlady creased his brow. “Never thought of it. I suppose it must have a limit. But I never thought of it. We do have accountants, though.”

“See,” said Bill. “Even the Instrumentality would hate to lose money. Take the doctor’s bid, Redlady. Take him up on it, Fisher.” His use of their surnames was an extreme incivility, but the two men were convinced.

“I’ll do it,” said Redlady. “It’s awfully close to writing insurance, which we are not chartered to do. I’ll write it in as his emergency clause.”

“I’ll take it,” said John Fisher. “It’s got to be a thousand years until another Norstrilian Financial Secretary pays money for a ticket like this, but it’s worth it. To him. I’ll square it in his accounts. To our planet.”

“I’ll witness it,” said the doctor. “No, you won’t,” said Bill savagely. “The boy has one friend here. That’s me. Let me do it” They stared at him, all three.

He stared back.

He broke. “Sirs and Misters, please let me be the witness.”

The Lord Redlady nodded and opened the console. He and John Fisher spoke the contract into it. At the end Bill shouted his full name as witness.

The two women brought Rod McBan, mother-naked, into the room. He was immaculately clean and he stared ahead as though he were in an endless dream.

“That’s the operating room,” said the Lord Redlady. “I’ll spray us all with antiseptic, if you don’t mind.”

“Of course,” said the doctor. “You must.” “You’re going to cut him up and boil him down — here and now?” cried Aunt Doris.

“Here and now,” said the Lord Redlady, “if the doctor approves. The sooner he goes the better chance he has of coming through the whole thing alive.”

“I consent,” said the doctor. “I approve.”

He started to take Rod by the hand, leading him toward the room with the long coffin and the small box. At some sign from Redlady, the walls had opened up to show a complete surgical theater.

“Wait a moment,” said the Lord Redlady. “Take your colleague.”

“Of course,” said the doctor.

The monkey had jumped out of his basket when he heard his name mentioned.

Together, the giant and the monkey led Rod into the little gleaming room. They closed the door behind them.

The ones who were left behind sat down nervously.

“Mister and Owner Redlady,” said Bill, “since I’m staying, could I have some more of that drink?”

“Of course, Sir and Mister,” said the Lord Redlady, not having any idea of what Bill’s title might be.

There were no screams from Rod, no thuds, no protest. There was the cloying sweet horror of unknown medicines creeping through the airvents. The two women said nothing as the group of people sat around. Eleanor, wrapped in an enormous towel, came and sat with them. In the second hour of the operations on Rod, Lavinia began sobbing.

She couldn’t help it.