Margin of Profit
Poul Anderson
It was an anachronism to have a human receptionist in this hall of lucent plastic, among the machines that winked and talked between jade columns soaring up into vaulted dimness—but a remarkably pleasant one when she was as long-legged and red-headed a shin-blast as the girl behind the desk. Captain Torres drew to a crisp halt, and a gauntleted hand went to his gilt helmet. Traveling down sumptuous curves, his eye was jarred by the small needler at her waist.
“Good day, sir,” she smiled. “One moment, please, I’ll see if Freeman van Rijn is ready for you.” She switched on the intercom and a three-megavolt oath bounced out. “No, he’s still conferring on the vid. Won’t you be seated?”
Before she turned it off, Torres caught a few words: “By damn, he’ll give us the exclusive franchise or do without our business. Who do these little emperors think they are? All right, so he has a million soldiers under arms. You can tell him to take those soldiers, with field artillery and hobnailed boots, by damn, and—” Click.
Torres wrapped his cape about the deep-blue tunic and sat down, laying one polished boot across the other knee of his white culottes. He felt out of his depth, simultaneously overdressed and naked. The regalia of a Lodgemaster in the Federated Brotherhood of Spacemen was stiff with gold braid, medals, and jewelry, far removed from the gray coverall he wore on deck or the loungers of planet leave. Worse, the guards in the tower entrance, a kilometer below, had not only checked his credentials and retinal patterns, but had unloaded his sidearm.
Blast Nicholas van Rijn and the whole Polesotechnic League! Good saints, drop him on Pluto without his underwear!
Of course, a merchant prince did have to be wary of assassins—and most of them went to great lengths to avoid formal duels, though Van Rijn himself was supposed to be murderously fast with a handgun. Nevertheless, arming your receptionist was not a high-born thing to do.
Torres wondered, rather wistfully, if she was one of the old devil’s mistresses. Perhaps not; but with the trouble between the Company—no, the whole League—and the Brotherhood, she’d have no time for him, being doubtless bound by a contract of personal fealty. His gaze went to the League emblem on the wall, a golden sunburst afire with opals, surrounding an ancient-style rocketship of the Caravel model, and the motto: All the traffic will bear. That could be taken two ways, he reflected sourly. Beneath it was the trademark of Van Rijn’s own outfit, the Solar Spice & Liquors Company.
The girl turned on the intercom again and heard the vidophone being switched off; there followed a steady rumble of obscenities. “Go on in now, sir,” she said, and into the speaker: “Captain Rafael Torres, representing the Brotherhood.”
The spaceman straightened himself and went through the inner door. His lean dark face clamped into careful lines. It would be a new experience, meeting his ultimate boss; for ten years, as captain of a ship and Lodgemaster of the union local, he had not called anyone “sir.”
The office was big, with an entire side transparent, overlooking a precipitous vista of Batavia’s towers, green landscape, hot with tropical gardens, and the molten glitter of the Java Sea. The other walls were lined with the biggest referobot Torres had ever seen, with shelves of extraterrestrial curios, and—astonishingly—a thousand or more old-type folio books, exquisitely bound in tooled leather and looking well-worn. The room and the desk were littered, close to maximum entropy, and the ventilators could not quite dismiss a tobacco haze. The most noticeable object on the desk was a small image of St. Dismas, carved from sandroot in the Martian style. The precise and perfect patron for Nicholas van Rijn, thought Torres.
He clicked his heels and bowed till the helmet plume swept his nose. “Lodgemaster-Captain Torres speaking for the Brotherhood, sir.”
Van Rijn grunted. He was a huge man, two meters high, and the triple chin and swag belly did not make him appear soft. Rings glittered on the hairy hands and bracelets on the thick wrists, under snuff-soiled lace. Small gray eyes, set close to the great hook nose under a sloping forehead, blinked at the spaceman. He went back to filling his churchwarden, and said nothing until he had a good head of steam up.
“So, by damn,” he muttered then. “You speak for the whole louse-bound union, I hope.” The long handlebar mustaches and goatee waggled over a gorgeously embroidered waistcoat. Beneath it was only a sarong, columnar legs and bare splay feet.
Torres checked his temper. “Yes, sir. For all the locals in the Solar Federation, and every other lodge within ten light-years. We understood that you would represent the League.”
“Only tentatively. I will convey your demands to my colleagues, such of them as I can drag out of their offices and harems. Sit.”
Torres did not give the chair an opportunity to mold itself to him; he sat on the edge and said harshly: “It’s simple enough, sir. You already know our decision. We aren’t calling a real strike…yet. We just refuse to take any more ships through the Kossaluth of Borthu till the menace there has been stopped. If you insist that we do so, we will strike.”
“By damn, you cut your own throats,” replied Van Rijn with surprising mildness. “Not alone the loss of pay and commissions. No, but if Antares is not kept steady supplied, she loses taste maybe for cinnamon and London dry gin. Not to speak of products offered by other companies. Like if Jo-Boy Technical Services bring in no more indentured scientists, Antares builds her own academies. Hell and lawyers! In a few years, no more market at Antares and all fifteen planets. You lose, I lose, we all lose.”
“The answer is simple enough, sir. We just detour around the Kossaluth. I know that’ll take us through more hazardous regions, we’ll have more wrecks, but the brothers don’t mind that risk.”
“What?” Somehow, Van Rijn managed a basso scream. “Pest and cannon balls! Double the length of the voyage! Double the fuel bills, salaries, ship and cargo losses…halve the deliveries per year! We are ruined! Better we give up Antares at once!”
It was already an expensive route, Torres knew; whether or not the companies could actually afford the extra cost, he didn’t know, for by the standard treaty which Sol had also signed, the League’s books were its own secret. He waited out the dramatics, then said patiently:
“The Borthudian press gangs have been operating for two years now, sir. We’ve tried to fight them, and can’t. We didn’t make this decision overnight; if it had been up to the brothers at large, we’d have voted right at the start not to go through that hellhole. But the Lodgemasters held back, hoping something could be worked out. Apparently it can’t.”
“See here,” growled van Rijn. “I don’t like this losing of men and ships any better than you. Worse, maybe. A million credits a year or more it costs this company alone. But we can afford it. Only fifteen per cent of our ships are captured. We would lose more, detouring through the Gamma Mist or the Stonefields. Crewfolk should be men, not jellyfish.”
“Easy enough for you to say!” snapped Torres. “We’ll face meteors and dust clouds, rogue planets and hostile natives, warped space and hard radiation…but I’ve seen one of those pressed men. That’s what decided me. I’m not going to risk it happening to me, and neither is anyone else.”
“Ah, so?” Van Rijn leaned over the desk. “By damn, you tell me.”
“Met him on Arkan III, autonomous planet on the fringe of the Kossaluth, where we put in to deliver some tea. One of their ships was in, too, and you can bet your brain we went around in armed parties and were ready to shoot anyone who even looked like a crimp. I saw him, this man they’d kidnapped, going on some errand, spoke to him, we even tried to snatch him back so we could bring him to Earth for deconditioning—He fought us and got away. God! He wasn’t human any more, not inside. And still you could tell he wanted out, he wanted to break the conditioning, and he couldn’t, and he couldn’t go crazy either—”