“Ah, I see!” Zack said. “And when he dumped-”
“-they dumped. From there it was a cascade effect. Everybody who was holding Imperial marks wanted to get rid of them. But nobody wanted to buy them. The Imperial mark is now worth one fortieth of its value yesterday, and would probably be less than a hundredth if trading had not been suspended. It's still overpriced.”
“Brilliant!” Doc Zack was shaking his head in admiration. “Absolutely brilliant!”
“What's so brilliant?” Broohnin said from his reclining position on the floor. For a change, he had been listening intently to the conversation. “Is this the spectacular move you've promised us? So what? What's it done for us?”
Zack held up a hand as LaNague started to reply. “Let me answer him. I think I see the whole picture now, but correct me if I'm wrong.” He turned to Broohnin. “What our friend from Tolive has done, Den, is turn every inhabitant of Throne into a potential revolutionary. All the people who have come to the conclusion that the Imperium is inimical to their own interests and the interests of future generations of out-worlders have been constrained to go on supporting the Imperium because their incomes, either wholly or in part, have depended on the Imperium. That is no longer a consideration. The money the Imperium has been buying their loyalty with has now been reduced to its true value: nothing. The velvet coverings are off; the cold steel of the chains is now evident.”
“But is that fair?” Mora said. She and the Flinters had been silent until now. “It's like cutting off a flitter's power in midair. People are going to be hurt.”
“It would have happened with or without us,” LaNague told her brusquely. “If not now, then later. Boedekker has only allowed me to say when; he didn't really change the eventual outcome.”
“And don't forget,” Zack said more gently, “that the people getting hurt bear a great deal of the blame. They've allowed this to go on for decades. The people of Throne are especially guilty-they've allowed the Imperium to make too many decisions for them, run too much of their lives, buy them off with more and more worthless fiat money. Now the bill's come due. And they've got to pay.”
“Right,” LaNague said. “This could not have happened if out-worlders had refused to allow the Imperium to debase the Imperial mark. If the mark had had something real backing it up-if it had represented a given amount of precious metal or another commodity, and had been redeemable for that, if it had been something more than fancy printed keerni paper, then there would have been no crash, no matter how many Imperial marks Eric Boedekker bought and dumped on the Interstellar Currency Exchange.”
“Why not?” Broohnin said.
“Because they would have real value, intrinsic value. And that's not subject to much speculation. People have been speculating in the mark for years now, watching for fluctuations in exchange rates, taking a little profit here and there, but knowing all the time that it really had no intrinsic value, only what had been decided on by the money lenders and traders.”
“But what does Boedekker get out of all this?” Zack asked. “He doesn't seem like the type to give up his fortune just to ruin the Imperial mark.”
“He gets revenge,” LaNague said, and explained about Liza Kirowicz. “With no direct descendant to hand his fortune to, he lost all desire to keep adding to it. And don't worry-I'm sure he's got plenty of credit left in his Earth accounts, plus I'm sure he probably sold a good number of marks short before the crash.”
“But I still don't see where all the Robin Hood business ties in,” Broohnin said, combing his fingers through the coiled blackness of his beard. “One doesn't lead to the other.”
“There's an indirect connection,” LaNague replied. “We'll let the people of Throne find out what's really happened to them, and then we'll offer them a choice: Metep or Robin Hood.”
“WHAT ARE WE going to do?” Metep VII wandered in a reverberating semicircle around the east end of the conference table, alternately wringing his hands and rubbing them together. His perfect face framed eyes that were red-rimmed and hunted-looking. “I'm ruined! I'm not only broke, I'm now destined to go down in history as the Metep who killed the mark! What are we going to do?”
“I don't know,” Haworth said softly from his seat. Metep stopped his pacing and stared at him, as did everyone else in the room. It was the first time they could remember Daro Haworth without a contingency plan.
“You don't know?” Metep said, stumbling toward him, panic flattening and spreading his facial features. “How can you say that? You're supposed to know!”
Haworth held Metep's gaze. “I never imagined anything like this happening. Neither did anyone else here.” His eyes scanned the room, finding no sympathy, but no protest either. “It was a future possibility, a probability within a decade if we found no new markets for out-world goods. But no one could have predicted this. No one!”
“The Earthies did it,” Krager said. “They're trying to take over the out-worlds again.”
Haworth glanced at the elderly head of the Treasury and nodded. “Yes, I think that's the approach we'll have to take. We'll blame it on Earth. Should work…after all, the Exchange is based on Earth. We can say the Imperial mark has been the victim of a vicious manipulation in a cynical, calculated attempt by Sol System to reassert control over us. Yes. That will help get the anger flowing in some direction other than ours.”
“All right,” Cumberland said, shifting his bulk uneasily in his chair.
“That's the official posture. But what really happened? I think that's important to know. Did Earth do this to us?”
Haworth's head shake was emphatic. “No. First of all, the out-worlds have fallen into debt to Earth over the past few years, and the credit has always been tallied in marks-which means that our debt to them today is only 2 or 3 per cent of what it was yesterday. Earth lost badly on the crash. And second, I don't think anyone in the Sol System government has the ingenuity to dream up something like this, or the courage to carry it through.”
“You think it was just a freak occurrence?”
“I'm not sure what I think. It's all so far beyond the worst nightmare I've ever had…” Haworth's voice trailed off.
“In the meantime,” Krager said sarcastically, “while you sit there in a blue funk, what about the out-worlds-Throne in particular? All credit has been withdrawn from us. There's been no formal announcement, but the Imperium is now considered bankrupt throughout Occupied Space.”
“The first thing to do is get more marks into circulation,” Haworth said. “Immediately. Push the duplicators to the limit. Big denominations. We've got to keep some sort of commerce going.”
“Prices will soar!” Krager said.
“Prices are soaring as we talk. Anyone holding any sort of useful commodity now isn't going to part with it for Imperial marks unless he's offered a lot of them, or unless he's offered something equally valuable in trade. So unless you want Throne back on a barter economy by week's end, you'd better start pouring out the currency.”
“The agrarian worlds are practically on barter now,” Cumberland said. “They'll want no part-”
“Let the agrarian worlds fall into the Galactic Core for all I care!” Haworth shouted, showing emotion for the first time since the meeting had begun. “They're useless to us now. There's only one planet we have to worry about, and that's Throne. Forget all the other out-worlds. They can't reach us, and the sooner we put them out of our minds and concentrate our salvage efforts on Throne, the better we'll be! Let the farmers out there go on scratching their dirt. They can't hurt us. But the people here on Throne, and in Primus City especially…they can cause us real trouble.”