Six Million Solid Gold Belter Buckles

Illustration by Kelly Freas

“You’ve lost all my money!”

I seriously doubted that—Jessica Maynerd was almost certainly the wealthiest woman in Clarkeville, the eighth largest city in the Asteroid Belt—but it still wasn’t the kind of accusation that a highly ethical stockbroker like myself likes to hear from a client first thing in the morning. My instinctive reaction was to grind my teeth and utter a sharp little scream. Instead, I pushed my features into a portrait of puzzled concern and leaned closer to the eighty-seven-year-old face that glared so malignantly from my deskphone. “I don’t understand, Granddame Maynerd,” I murmured, using the flowery Cerean honorific for ladies of a certain age and status that rhymes with random. “All your stocks are doing very—”

“It isn’t my stocks I’m concerned about, Jonathan White! It’s the six million buckles I’ve lost on those titanium futures you talked me into buying, you and that shifty-eyed boss of yours!”

I fell back in my chair, aghast at so monstrous a lie on the lips of one so old and venerable. She was the one who had insisted on throwing a million buckles into the bottomless black hole that was the commodities market! I—Jonathan Welbrook White, Ethical Broker & Bourseman—had done everything short of falling to my knees in trying to dissuade her from such criminal folly!

I stared open-mouthed at the daughter of the founder of Clarkeville—while a glistening tear actually rolled down from her gimlet eye and across a wrinkled cheek. “Have you seen the price of titanium futures today?” she whimpered in a piteous voice. “And now I’ll have to sell all my other stocks just in order to—”

“Just a moment,” I interrupted, rapidly punching keys on my console. As usual when I was upset, I punched a little too vigorously and bounced a good half meter out of my seat before I caught myself. Cerean gravity is only .04 Standard, I reminded myself, but Newton’s law of action and reaction is universal.

I grimaced apologetically and told my fingers to relax. A few seconds later the figures on the brightly colored screen flickered, churned sick-eningly, and went dark—along with all the lights in the office. I muttered a silent curse: the Clarkeville Department of Citizens Service had been promising to bring our new power station on line for two years now, and we were still having constant power failures, particularly after the further disruptions caused by last March’s ceresquake at Harvey’s Hollow. Worse, our own emergency standby power hadn’t been working the way it was supposed to. This morning, however, power returned within a few seconds and I turned back to the data on the screen. I studied it with a cold, clammy feeling of acute dismay.

At least a part of what Granddame Maynerd had said was absolutely true: the price of titanium, and particularly that of its futures, had fallen out of bed with a thud that ought to have been audible across the Solar System. Had, in fact, been doing so for the past six weeks while I had been busy trading mundane stocks and bonds for those of my clients who were too sensible to cast away their patrimonies in the mindless speculation of commodities trading.

So what could I, an ethical stockbroker, now reasonably do?

I spread my hands in a gesture of baffled sympathy. “As you say, Granddame Maynerd, titanium doesn’t look so good right now. But you remember that I did warn you about the risk involved—”

“Nonsense! You said nothing of the sort! All I remember is you and that bullying manager of yours browbeating me into—”

“But… but—”

“—Into putting all my money in titanium futures! Not only that, I distinctly told you to go short, and here you are deliberately going long! If you’d gone short like I told you, I’ve have made millions of buckles. Instead, I’ve lost six million! Six million solid gold Belter buckles, Jonathan White, the only stable currency in the whole Solar System! If your company doesn’t refund all my money—with interest!—and rescind the whole transaction, I’m going to sue you personally, Jonathan White, and I’m going to sue that troglodyte manager of yours, J. Davis Alexander, and I’m going to sue that fly-by-night firm of yours, Hartman, Bemis & Choupette, whoever they may be! Goodbye, young man. The next communication you have from me will be from my lawyers! And from the Procurator General!”

The deskphone went blank. I stared at it equally blankly for what seemed like a long while. Finally I told my secretary to handle all business for the indefinite future, checked to make sure that it was actually powered up, rose to my feet, squared my shoulders, and marched off to see my troglodytic boss, the aptly described J. Davis Alexander.

My natal world of Ceres has a surface area of 3,302,461 square kilometers, just about the size of the Terran political unit called the Indian Union. Its population of 9,736,486 men, women, and others as of 9:35 a.m. July 16, 2278, wasn’t much for an entire world. On the other hand it’s not bad for a hunk of carbonaceous chondrite rock with no atmosphere and no oceans whose first permanent settlement was established not quite a hundred years ago.

Even Clarkeville, only the fourth largest city on the asteroid, has a population of almost 300,000 people. But what’s aggravating about it is that out of all these millions and millions of people on Ceres one of them has to be J. Davis Alexander. Even more aggravating is that of all the possible occupations said J. Davis Alexander could have chosen to match his talents and personality—I have in mind zoo attendant or sinkhole inspector—he chose instead to work his way up to the top of the local stockbroking branch of Hartman, Bemis & Choupette.

Now his baleful eye fixed me from across the broad expanse of his green malachite desk while he cracked the hairy knuckles of one hairy hand after the other. Except for the surface of those baleful eyes, J. Davis Alexander was hairy all over, in addition to which he was without doubt the shortest, stoutest human being in the entire Asteroid Belt. His parents, I believe, had, for religious reasons, systematically refused to take their gravity pills. Or maybe it was J. Davis Alexander himself who refused to take them.

Whatever the cause of his strange shape, if Clarkeville had actually had a zoo, instead of a single duck pond, its board of directors would have been hard put to decide whether my boss should be employed as an attendant or as an exhibit; most probably with the wolverines, that being the beast that most closely matched his winning personality.

Instead, contrary to the simplest notions of elementary justice, J. Davis Alexander had a fine corner office with a view of the duck pond in Westlake Park, a six-figure annual income, and an adoring wife at least half a meter his superior in height.

J. Davis Alexander popped a final knuckle, pursed his fleshy lips, and tugged at one end of his handlebar moustache. I knew from long experience what he was going to say, to wit: “White, you’re fired.”

To my astonishment, however, he merely said, in that voice that sounds like gravel rattling around inside a maladjusted concrete mixer, “What’s all this nonsense from this Maynerd woman, White? I’ve just had one of her lawyers trying to get through to me. I’ve put him off till I talked to you.”

“There’s not much to say,” I shrugged. “As you know, she’s one of our biggest clients in terms of net value. Very rich, very conservative. She’s been with us for at least forty years. I inherited her account when old Wigglesworth retired. Everything in her portfolio’s in blue chips and triple-A bonds, nothing she could ever conceivably lose a nickel on. No one here’s making a centavo on her: she hardly buys or sells anything from one decade to the next.”

“So what’s with the titanium futures?”

The glare I directed at J. Davis Alexander was in the same league as his own for high-intensity balefulness: he knew perfectly well what was with Granddame Maynerd and the titanium futures. Nevertheless, just for the record, I explained. “A year or so ago she started getting cold calls on her vu-mail from a broker named Wivvel at the Three Blind Mice over on Pallas, about how much money he could make for her in futures trading.”

J. Davis Alexander rolled his eyes in indignation and righteous disgust: the Three Blind Mice—actual name Bleine, Blinder & Miesen—are our principal rivals throughout the Belt in the field of ethical stockbroking. Incorporated on Pallas, a Libertarian’s paradise where regulation of the securities markets is close to nonexistent, the Three Blind Mice frequently give new and inventive dimensions to the word ethical. “Bohuslav Wivvel?” muttered J. Davis Alexander incredulously. “Bo Wiv-vel? I thought he’d been enjoined for life from ever working in the securities field again after that Ganymede Bubble fraud.”

“Only on Ceres and Vesta; on Pallas he was snapped up as soon as he got out of Confinement Rock. Old lady Maynerd never actually talked to him, of course, but she did listen to all of his vu-mail. And after a while she started calling me to ask about titanium futures, that being what this Wivvel creature was trying to get her to put her money into. Naturally 1 told her in a polite way that she was absolutely crazy. Finally, last March 26th, she ordered me to go long on ten million buckles worth of futures for delivery next December. That was when I said we had to see you in order to open a commodities account.”

“See me?” J. Davis Alexander’s habitual scowl deepened and he tugged fretfully at the unruly beard that spilled across his rotund breast. “I certainly don’t recall—”

“As bureau manager you don’t recall that anyone wanting to open a commodities account for even a hundred buckles has to sign a 9,000-word waiver, disclaimer, and general quitclaim in the actual physical presence of the bureau manager?” I snarled. “Stating that she recognizes the inherent risks of speculating in commodities and that she specifically holds Hartman, Bemis & Choupette free of—”

“Yes, yes, perhaps I do,” muttered J. Davis Alexander sulkily. “Tiresome old bat, as I recall. I distinctly recall trying to talk her out of getting involved in such risky investments at her age.”

Tactfully, I said nothing. J. Davis Alexander had been as eager as the unspeakable Bo Wivvel and the Three Blind Mice to see how much money our agency could siphon off from the Clarke-Maynerd fortune by judicious churning of the futures market. Ashamed to meet my eye, he swiveled around in his overstuffed chair to contemplate his million-buckle view of Westlake Park.

This morning it was far from inspiring: the city’s waste management engineers had been on strike for three weeks and for lack of any better place the local citizenry had been dumping their rotting garbage bags in the park. Towering mounds of lumpy brown bags now obscured the edges of the duck pond and threatened the carousel. A family of baby ducks was learning to fly in our barely noticeable gravity by jumping off the mounds, flailing desperately through the air, and finally falling with enormous splashes into the barely cohesive water. Bright shards of water pinwheeled slowly through the air.

The chair swiveled around again: J. Davis Alexander’s face had cleared. He had just remembered that the waiver signed by Granddame Maynerd was an absolute safeguard against the firm’s assuming any liability in the case of investment losses. “Ha!” he grunted triumphantly, stabbing a pudgy finger at the controls of his concealed console. “White, why do you persist in wasting my time like this? Just let me pull up a copy of that waiver so that we can wave it at—” He broke off to glare at his screen. “That’s funny, I can’t find it. I know she signed it, right on that deskpad that’s right there in front of you…”

I glanced down at the glowing white surface of the built-in deskpad in the otherwise shiny green top of his malachite desk. Yes, that was where I had watched Jessica Maynerd sign her name to the ironclad waiver that stood between us and a trillion-buckle lawsuit.

Only… only our accounts department now seemed to have no record at all of the waiver.

Nor did Granddame Maynerd’s personal file.

Nor did Central Registry at City Hall.

J. Davis Alexander removed his stubby fingers from the interface and began to shout instructions at the computer.

Then orders.

Finally threats.

Twenty minutes later he looked at me with eyes that were more haunted than baleful. “I… I remember now,” he croaked in a hoarse whisper. “That was the day the city power went off all afternoon because of that damned ceresquake over at Harvey’s Hollow, the same day we were installing the new information backup system and overhauling the standby power system. It must… it must—” he stared helplessly at his immaculate paperless desk as if now, a lull half-century after a piece of paper had last crossed a desk at Hartman, Bemis & Choupette, he might find it miraculously covered with sheaf upon sheaf of thick paper contracts and trade confirmations. “It must have somehow messed up the information system so that the waiver wasn’t recorded.”

Now J. Davis Alexander finally spoke the familiar words I had been waiting for: “White, you’re fired!”

The next day I went to work as usual. Just because it looked as if sometime in the near future I might be excavating nickel-iron ore from Confinement Rock the old-fashioned way, with a sledgehammer and shovel, there was nothing to be unduly gloomy about: at least I’d have the distinct pleasure of watching J. Davis Alexander wielding his own hammer next to mine.

No sooner had I conjured up this pleasing image than his infinitely less pleasing head of all too solid flesh and bone popped around the corner of my cubicle. “White! What on Ceres are you doing here? You were fired, remember? Now—”

“I’m playing around with the computer,” I said shortly. “I know she signed it while the power was on. Somewhere in here there has to be a record of—”

“Ha! I told you after that power failure to make sure all the records had been restored!” J. Davis Alexander’s nostrils distended. “White, you’re fired!”

I nodded wearily. “I know. But the law says that you have to give me thirty days’ notice, with full payment.”

“I do? The law says that?”

“Yes.”

“Oh. Well, in that case, you can spend your time turning your accounts over to my nephew, Horton—he’ll be joining the firm to take over your job.”

I managed a hollow chuckle. “Firm? What firm? When the court hears in tearful detail how we browbeat the eighty-seven-year-old daughter of the founder of Clarkeville into losing six million buckles in titanium futures, and then awards her a billion buckles in punitive damages, there won’t be a firm!”

“Ah. I hadn’t thought of that.” J. Davis Alexander’s hairy head vanished with the same abruptness with which it had appeared.

Twenty minutes later my secretary beeped to tell me it had just received a vu-mail. “Who is it?” I muttered without looking up from my fruitless wanderings through the dark soul of the world’s information system.

“A Mr. Bohuslav Wivvel, calling from Pallas.”

My eyebrows shot up. “Real time?”

“No, Mr. White. Pallas is currently 1.27 AU’s ahead of Cerean orbit. The real-time differential is ten minutes and thirty-six seconds.”

“Of course. Very well, put him on.”

The upper half of the infamous Bo Wivvel appeared on my deskphone. He seemed prosaic enough for a bucket-shop swindler who had recently spent three years shoveling ore on Confinement Rock. He was as long and lean as most Belters, had an elaborate tattoo on his right cheek, apparently of a hummingbird sniffing at a flower, a long gold earring dangling from his left ear, and a muted checkerboard pattern on his eyelids. All in all, a typical enough example of a conservative young stockbroker on the way up. His recorded image smiled at me warmly from 190 million kilometers away.

“Good morning, dear colleague,” he chirped. “Bohuslav Wivvel here. I just thought I’d give you a call to thank you for everything you’ve done in helping Granddame Maynerd decide to move her main account over to my office. Without your fine work on her titanium futures I’m sure she would never have considered such a move.” His smile broadened. “Ah, that reminds me. I convinced her that she could safely leave her present little commodities account in your own capable hands: after all, the courts will want it as evidence.” He swooped his head in an elaborate, mocking bow. “So nice talking to you, dear colleague.”

I cut the deskphone in the middle of his gale of cackling laughter. Then I sat staring at the screen, wondering how many additional years it would cost me on Confinement Rock if I jettisoned Bohuslav Wivvel through the main Pallas airlock.

I was interrupted in my reverie by a squishing sensation around my toes. I looked down to see that my sandaled feet had vanished beneath the murky water swirling across my cubicle floor. I leapt to my feet with a cry of rage—and, of course, bumped my head painfully against the ceiling. I cursed and waited while I drifted slowly back into the churning maelstrom.

Something had obviously gone wrong with the Clarkeville sewage and recycling system: it seemed to have mistaken the offices of Hartman, Bemis & Choupette for the Pleasanton bean fields twenty kilometers away and was now pumping its daily irrigation quota into the cubicles of inoffensive third-story stockbrokers.

Enough was enough.

I decided to go for a drink.

“What I don’t understand,” said Isabel above the usual din of the Cafe des Mondes, “is all this stuff about futures, and going long and going short and making a fortune or losing a fortune in the time it takes to turn around and why it’s too dangerous for mere mortals like me to play around with.”

“It’s easy to understand,” I said. “Look, you know how you can sell a stock short in a regular stock account—”

“No, I’ve never understood that either.” Isabel held up a hand. “And please don’t tell me. All I want to know about is this futures business that’s got you so upset.”

I looked at her with pursed lips for a moment, then raised my tall beaded glass of nicely chilled Pernod to said lips. Isabel was infinitely pleasanter to look at than the piled-up bags of smelly garbage that now blocked our view of the cafe’s normally agreeable perspective of Westlake Park. She’s about my age, twenty-eight or twenty-nine if it matters, nearly as tall as I am, but far rounder and smoother in places of interest to practicing heterosexuals like myself.

Three or four years ago Isabel and I had planned to get married and have a couple of children, but Psych Service had turned us down. Isabel’s latent attraction to other women, they said, made the chances of the two of us having a successful twenty-three year marriage something less than 25 percent. That assessment had come as a vast surprise to Isabel, who had always considered herself as straight as a mathematician’s line, but who could argue with Psych Service? And if you want to have children on Ceres you have to guarantee that there’ll be a stable family environment until the child reaches his or her twenty-second birthday.

So no wedding bells for Jonathan and Isabel. Instead she married a lovely girl named Jin Tshei and they lived more or less happily ever after. A little while after the marriage I was invited to contribute the necessary genetic material for the creation of an adorable little girl. Now I dropped by for pleasant weekends with Isabel and Jin Tshei and three-year-old Valérie-France two or three times a month.

And the two of us still had occasional drinks together at an outside table at the Cafe des Mondes while empty saucers piled up before us and schmaltzy accordion music played softly in the background. She has a high-powered job in the assessor’s office of City Hall and normally never wants to talk about the mundane ins and outs of the brokerage business. Now, however, she did.

I gestured at the lifelike waiter in the old-fashioned black suit and white apron for another round. “If you want to understand how an old lady moneybags can lose six million buckles in futures you have to understand two things. The first is margin.”

“Margin?”

“Margin. When a solid financial citizen like yourself buys 100 shares of Magnus Mining at 75 buckles a share, you debit your account for 7,500 buckles and pay it over to whoever’s selling you the shares, along with an itty-bitty commission for your friendly stockbroker. You in turn receive a certificate proving you own the stock.”

“All right,” said Isabel tartly. “Even though my two degrees happen to be in resources allocation management and not financial flimflammery, I think I can grasp that subtle concept.”

I actually managed a faint grin. The Pernod was definitely making the world seem a little brighter. “Now it gets a trifle harder. If you wanted to, you could have opened a margin account. That would have let you buy 200 shares of Magnus Mining for the same 7,500 buckles. You would have put up your own 7,500, and the brokerage firm would have lent you the other 7,500. But instead of delivering the 200 shares to you, the brokerage house would have kept them as security against its loan of 7,500 buckles. And every month you would have to pay interest on the loan. Clear?”

Isabel frowned. “I think so. I’d buy shares on margin because I’d hope the price per share would go up enough so that when I sold them I’ve made enough profit to pay off the additional interest I had to pay.”

“Right. And because you owned 200 shares instead of 100 you’d have had twice the profit for essentially the same amount of investment. That’s why people like to play around with margin accounts. But with stocks, which are pretty closely regulated, at least here on Ceres, you can only buy stocks on 50 percent margin. In other words, for every buckle you borrow from the brokerage house, you have to put up one of your own.”

“All right, that seems clear enough. But what has margin got to do with futures and why the Procurator General will try to stick you in Confinement Rock?”

I snorted angrily. “Because with commodity futures you don’t have to put up 50 percent margin, you only have to put up 10 percent! That means you can buy a million buckles worth of pork belly futures by only putting down a hundred thousand buckles of your own. So if the price of pork bellies goes up, you can make ten times as much money as if you hadn’t bought on margin. Which means that everyone who wants to make a quick buckle is playing around with commodities.”

Isabel looked at me plaintively. “But you still haven’t told me what a future is.”

I looked up at the green and white stripes of the cafe’s picturesque but completely unnecessary awning—after all, we were sitting at least sixty meters beneath the surface. “Look,” I said, “I’ll tell you exactly what old lady Maynerd did to land me in the soup: that’ll explain what futures are. In this case, titanium futures.”

“I know what titanium is: something they mine and ship to Earth. The last time I looked through our assessment records there were thirty or forty asteroids registered with City Hall that we’d leased titanium mining rights to.”

“Right. Some of the processed ore is refined and used here in the Belt to build our own spaceships and for other high-temp applications, but most of it is shipped to Earth. And that’s where futures come in. Titanium is like any other crop or ore or commodity—potatoes, pork bellies, gold, silver, wheat, anything at all that goes up and down in price depending on the supply and the demand. When there’s lots of titanium the price goes down, when there’s lots of demand the price goes up.”

“Yes, I think even the mayor of our fair city could follow that.”

“Good. Now, anyone at all can go out and buy a ton of titanium. If you wanted it for delivery today, you’d pay today’s price. But suppose you wanted it delivered to you nine months from today, about the time it takes a pod of processed ore to get from here to Earth—how would you know what it would be worth then?”

Isabel stared down at the bubbles in her Campari-soda. “I don’t know. How would I know?”

“You wouldn’t—you’d guess. You’d say to yourself, just like that hyena Bo Wivvel kept saying by vu-mail to old lady Maynerd, there are seven new fusion plants under construction in China, on Earth. They’re going to need lots and lots of titanium for the titanium-ceramic fusion chambers.

“You’d also say to yourself that there’s lots of titanium on Earth’s Moon, but recently there’s been a big legal squabble about which country or group actually owns the largest production area. There’s been sabotage, there’s been litigation, and production on the Moon has almost come to a halt.

“And you’d also say to yourself that the three main Belter companies that mine titanium have recently been working marginal asteroids that haven’t panned out as well as they hoped. So production is down, both here and on the Moon.

“So finally you’d say to yourself, and I quote, ‘Nine months from now I’ll bet that the price of titanium as delivered on Earth is going to be at least twice what I can buy it for today. Therefore, in order to make a nice little profit for myself, I’ll go long on titanium futures.’ ”

“Long meaning…?”

“Meaning that you—or Granddame Maynerd—has agreed to buy X number of tons of titanium ore for delivery precisely nine months from today at an agreed upon price that will not change no matter what the actual price is nine months from now. We say that the person who sells the ore at that price nine months in the future has gone short.”

“But how does old lady Maynerd—”

“Make a fortune by going long? Because she’ll never actually take delivery of that ore nine months from now—when, remember, she thinks the price is going to be more than what she paid for it today. Instead, she’ll sell it to someone on Earth for a big fat profit without ever having seen it. And she’ll be making an even bigger profit because she’s been able to buy her futures on 90 percent margin. Which means that by putting up nothing but a million buckles, which is precisely what old lady Maynerd did, she was able to buy futures for ten million buckles worth of ore. So that in nine months, when she sold the ten million for thirteen or fourteen million, she would have made three or four million in profit with an investment of only one million.”

Isabel stared at me as if I were a genie who had just escaped from a bottle. “But if it’s as simple as that, why doesn’t everyone do it and get rich?”

I uttered a harsh, guttural sound. “Because there can be certain minor pitfalls in futures trading, as Granddame Maynerd has just found out. Just after she bought her own futures on March 26th, for instance, a little company over on Vesta called Bio-Eats developed a brand new variety of virophage for dissolving the molecular bonds in the carbonaceous rock in which you find titanium ore. It was such a great new virophage for isolating titanium that the yield of titanium per kilo of rock almost doubled. That means that all the asteroids with marginal traces of titanium can now be mined at a substantial profit. Which means there’s already a lot more titanium being shipped to Earth than anyone would have thought possible before BioEats’s announcement. Which means that the price of titanium began to drop as soon as the news came out.”

“Oh my,” said Isabel, looking thoughtful.

“Yes. Then all the squabbling parties on the Moon unexpectedly got together and patched up their differences and resumed full-scale production. The price of titanium went down some more. Then China announced that they were only going to build two power plants instead of seven. The price collapsed.”

“Which means…?”

“That the shipments of ore that will be in orbit around Earth nine months from the day Granddame Maynerd bought her futures are almost halfway there. On the day her contract expires, December 26th, she is going to have to fulfill its terms and turn over the rest of the ten million buckles she agreed to pay.”

“But that does mean she’ll be the actual owner of X tons of titanium, doesn’t it? So what has she actually lost?”

“She’ll be the owner of X tons of titanium all right, but the titanium is in Earth orbit and she’s here on Ceres. You tell me: is she going to ship it back to Ceres and store it in her living room until the price goes up again?”

Isabel rubbed the side of her nose. “I suppose not. That means she’ll have to sell it on Earth at whatever price she can get?”

“Right. And right now, if she sold it today, she would receive exactly 3.72 million buckles. Which means that on an initial investment of one million buckles she has cleverly managed to lose a total of 6,280,000 buckles. Not bad for four months’ work, even if she did have Bo Wivvel advising her every step of the way.”

“Well, if she thinks Bo Wivvel is so smart, why didn’t she lose all her money using his firm instead of yours?” demanded Isabel indignantly.

“Good old-fashioned loyalty. She said she wanted to stick with the firm she’d been doing business with for forty-four years.”

“So that you’ll go to jail instead of this awful Wivvel person!”

“We always knew that life was unfair.” I swallowed the last of my Pernod. “Your turn to buy the next round. But I wouldn’t go to jail if I could only get that damn computer to—”

“Sorry,” interrupted Isabel, “you’ll have to buy for both of us—I’m broke.”

I stared at her. “Broke? How can you be broke? Payday was only two days ago, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, but I wasn’t paid, none of us upper echelon types were. City Hall is broke too, in fact all of Clarkeville is broke, or so close to it as makes no difference. We’re trying to keep it out of the news, but I doubt if we’ll be able to much longer.”

“Broke?” I repeated. “How can City Hall be broke? Don’t I pay enough—”

“Taxes? No, you don’t. You pay some, but not nearly enough. The population’s growing faster than we can find new revenues. For one thing, the city’s royalties from mining licenses have fallen off, not just on titanium but on all of the other ores, even nickel-iron. And that damn ceresquake is proving to be about six times more destructive than we thought at the time: we’re still discovering new problems with indirect damage caused by the quake—today’s floods in your office and that missing waiver of old lady Maynerd’s are perfect examples. And none of the insurance companies on Earth are paying off the way they’re supposed to. We’re owed billions of buckles, but just when we’ll get them nobody knows. Our credit rating is so low that we can’t sell any paper anywhere in the Solar System except at 27 percent interest.” Isabel gestured at the mountains of garbage that befouled Westlake Park. “You know that the recyclers are on strike; next week the transportation workers walk out if they aren’t given a raise. After that it’ll be the engineers at the power station.” She leaned forward and lowered her voice. “According to my own calculations, the city is going to run out of money in precisely twenty-three days. And in twenty-four days the emergency loan we got from Pallas—arranged through your pals the Three Blind Mice, by the way—has to be paid off.”

I shook my head in a daze that wasn’t entirely due to Pernod. “I didn’t know there was an emergency loan.”

“We’ve kept it a secret, that’s how bad things are. But pretty soon we’re going to have to pay it off. Only we can’t.” Isabel shook her glossy black bangs dismissively and forced a semblance of a smile. “So buy me another drink, Johnnie boy, and we’ll drink to twenty-three days from now when I’ll really be out of a job. Or maybe instead you can give me a stock market tip that’ll make a billion buckles for all of us—including City Hall.”

I scratched my chin and stared off at the mounds of garbage bags, and finally leaned forward and lowered my own voice to a fine conspiratorial whisper. “Kidding aside, Isabel, just how desperate is City Hall?”

“Kidding aside, dear friend, we’d throw our grandmothers into the city power plants for reaction mass. And your grandmother too, if we could get the old lady to stand still.”

I scratched my chin some more. “Hmmm. Maybe I have got an idea. Can you get us a ship to take us out to one of the mining asteroids?”

“Which one?”

“Doesn’t really matter. Whichever one is closest, I suppose. As long as it’s one that sends at least some of its ore directly to Earth.”

Isabel shrugged. “Well, I suppose so—what’s one more unpaid bill run up by City Hall? Now how about that last drink? Valérie-France will be waiting for her dinner.”

The beltship was a four-person vehicle with bright red Department of Citizens Service markings. It was a luxury model the city must have bought while its credit was still good. Neither of us was required to be even an apprentice pilot in order to take it out by ourselves: we merely told it where we wanted to go and it did the rest.

Now, a little more than a million kilometers from Ceres, the two of us were drifting about in the cramped office of Xhosa Xanchu, chief engineer for Magnus Mining’s ore block #827/G384. The office was little more than a pressurized tank anchored to the ore block by an expansion bolt jammed into the surface of its 17-percent nickel-iron rock. Eventually, of course, when the biologically tailored virophage had finished chewing its way through what had once been solid rock, there’d be nothing left of this partial hunk of asteroid but a hundred thousand tons or so of closely compacted dust and sand floating through the cosmos. And the office would be floating right along with it.

“But,” said Xanchu, “naturally we don’t wait for the entire block of ore to be phaged. We activate the virophage on each of the five other sides of the block and just as soon as it starts breaking down the molecular bonds we move in with electrostatic precipitators to separate the nickel-iron dust from the rest of the junk. By the time it’s finished and all the rock beneath this office has been phaged, we’ve got about 20,000 tons of raw nickel-iron to one side and all the rest—about 107,000 tons we figure on this particular job—off on another.”

“And you just wrap up all this stuff in big plastic bags?” asked Isabel. “That’s all you do to it?”

“Sure. What else would you suggest? We double-wrap the nickel-iron, get a governmental seal and certification of purity on it, strap on a couple of low-thrust boosters and some beacons and start the pod on its way to the refinery—or to Earth.”

“What do you do with the rest of the rock?” I asked out of pure curiosity.

“Either leave it floating in its plastic wrapper or introduce another type of virophage into it to break it down again for any leftovers that might be worth mining—gold, silver, copper. Sometimes there’s a lot, sometimes there’s nothing.”

“And the reason you can’t use virophages for mining on Earth or on the Moon is that it’s too difficult to segregate the raw ore?”

“That’s right, there’s too much potential risk of the virophage getting out of hand. Even though the biochemists say they’ve spliced in a DNA timer gene that only allows the virophage to reproduce a set number of times, it’s still best to be careful. Out here in the Belt we can just shove a whole block out into empty space a million kilometers from nowhere—that’s why our mining costs are so low and how we can compete with Earth.”

I drifted over to one of the room’s small portholes and looked out at the star-filled blackness of the sky and at the tiny piece of barren rock to which we were temporarily anchored. This particular ore block, I’d already learned, was of standard commercial size, a fifty-meter cube that had been licensed from Clarkeville Mining Authority, then cut out of the mining face of the 600-meter-long mother-lode asteroid and towed the prescribed two kilometers away. Like everyone else in the Belt, I knew it was a capital offense to use a mining virophage any closer than that to any other celestial body, no matter how small. There hadn’t been any executions in my own lifetime, but in 2247, three years before I was born, sixteen people had been airlocked as retribution for the Parnegi-6 disaster that had reduced an entire inhabited asteroid to drifting molecules. Since then miners and biochemists had been very, very careful indeed with their pet bugs.

“And all this nickel-iron that goes to Earth,” I said, “this… this incredibly valuable cargo, just goes sealed up in this transparent wrapping like a great big bag of dirt?”

“Sure,” said the mining engineer, “in a pod, how else? Once it’s in Earth orbit, they wrap it up in their own heat-proof stuff before they send it down for splashdown. But none of that concerns us here.”

“No, I suppose not,” I murmured. “Come on, Isabel, I think we’ve seen enough.”

“You have?” muttered Xanchu, surprised at our short stay. “Say, you still haven’t told me what you’re doing here.”

“Not much,” I said, “just checking out an idea I had.”

There was a life-size, seminude statue of Abner C. Clarke, the founder of Clarkeville, in a heroic pose in the rotunda of City Hall. It was made of nine semi-precious elements mined in the nearby asteroids. The right arm that gestured so nobly starwards had been cast entirely of titanium. Six days after our return from ore block #827/G384, the news media carried numerous images of the Mayor of Clarkeville staring in bewilderment at a pile of titanium dust on the statue’s base, all that remained of Abner C. Clarke’s right arm. A leathery-faced onlooker who identified herself to the cameras as a former miner, was quoted as saying that it looked as if the arm had been eaten away by a virophage—except, she added, everyone knew that virophages only dissolved raw materials, never their relined product.

Two days later, the hardware that automatically archived all communications to and from the offices of the Clarkeville Mining Authority recorded an ultra-narrow beam sent from the vicinity of a tiny asteroid some three and a half million kilometers from Ceres. The panicked voice on the beam identified itself as Shimon Rand, a licensed prospector and miner. He was, he said, merely testing a little bit of that latest kind of virophage for mining titanium when he discovered that not only was it tearing apart the molecular bonds of the asteroid’s carbonaceous rock, it was also turning to dust everything else it touched, including the landing gear and communications antenna of his beltship!

“Help!” pleaded the voice of Shimon Rand. ‘You’ve got to help me! I think it’s started to phage the hull of my—

At that point the communication broke off.

City Hall checked its records. A miner named Rand had just finished a stint with ExtraOres, a company that had recently begun mining titanium with the new virophage developed by BioEats. Rand had been fired for drunkenness and had not been heard of since.

The mayor of Clarkeville personally assured the directors of BioEats, ExtraOres, and the three other mining companies that had been shipping titanium to Earth for the past two months, that he would do everything possible to smother the story until additional information was available. And he swore that no one in City Hall would ever even think of mentioning a word of what had happened to anyone on Earth.

Somehow, however, rumors began to spread.

One commodity trader whispered to another that the self-destruct gene had gone bad, that any titanium cargo shipped to Earth after the introduction of the BioEats virophage was apt to be declared contaminated goods by the Terran authorities, thereby denying splashdown to the entire shipment. Which meant that rather than suffering from a glut of titanium, the market might well be prepared for a shortage.

The price of titanium futures began to rise.

Speculation mounted that the cutrate virophage developed by that second-rate, hole-in-the-rock company on Vesta might actually have jumped from an ore block back to some of the mother-lode asteroids themselves.

The price of titanium futures doubled.

The rumor leapt to Earth. Earth declared loudly and unequivocally that it refused to let any cargo of titanium of any date of provenance come within three million kilometers of Earth orbit for fear of possible contamination by mutated virophages. Any shipments currently en route would have to be tracked down, put in a path that would take them away from Earth, and then be closely inspected. After that, they would be decontaminated if possible or, more likely, consigned to destruction by being directed into the Sun.

The price of titanium futures tripled.

At this point I had a short, satisfying conversation with Granddame Maynerd, whom I no longer bothered to call by the honorific.

“Ms. Maynerd? You now have a paper profit of 2.3 million solid gold Belter buckles on your titanium futures. It is time to sell.”

“But I’m waiting for them to go hi—”

“It is time to sell.”

“But that nice Mr. Wivvel has me going short on the account I opened with him. I’ll make some money on your account but I’ll lose—”

“IT IS TIME TO SELL!”

Even over the deskphone, there must have been something about the glint in my eye and the baring of my teeth that convinced her. She gave the order to sell.

Half an hour later Earth announced a total embargo on all goods shipped from the Belt. The entire commodities market collapsed and the price of titanium delivered on Earth tripled yet again. I later heard that this was the moment Granddame Maynerd and Bo Wivvel were forced to cover their short positions in titanium futures by buying whatever they could find. Granddame Maynerd was said to have lost 14 million buckles in the process and Wivvel himself a more modest 756,000.

Granddame Maynerd is still one of the richest women in the Belt. Bo Wivvel is learning to refine nickel-iron ore in debtor’s prison. And Granddame Maynerd is suing the Three Blind Mice for everything they have.

There were, however, a couple of moderately happy endings to the story.

First, I got my job back with Hartman, Bemis & Choupette.

The other one Isabel and I discussed over Pernods and Campari-soda at the Cafe des Mondes. Isabel was treating with a portion of the five-figure bonus for “meritorious service” she had received on her last paycheck.

“They never did find Shimon Rand,” she said. “Or his beltship.”

“Must have got eaten up by that mutated virophage,” I suggested.

“A lot of people who lost a lot of money in the crash are saying that he never existed. And that the mutated virophage never existed either. They are very unhappy.”

“That’s the danger of listening to rumors and then trying to play the market: you can lose lots of money.”

“But they didn’t find anything wrong with any of the titanium shipped to Earth and now the price is right back where it was when old lady Maynerd wanted to throw you in prison.”

I sighed, then took a long swallow of Pernod to wash down my daily gravity pill. “I warned her to stay away from futures. But City Hall did all right on them, I believe?”

Isabel grinned. “Yes, I believe we made over two billion buckles, espe-cialy when we also shorted all the virophage stocks and all the mining stocks on the market. Then bought them all back just before they started coming back again. The city’s paid off all its debt, given raises to all its loyal workers, and even has some money left over to defend itself against the three thousand lawsuits that have been filed against it for unethical speculation.”

I raised my glass and clinked it against Isabel’s.

“See?” I murmured contently. “That’s what you get from dealing with an ethical stockbroker.”