“As Madame An has most certainly told you, I am Norman Sanders. I already know who you all are, and I’ve gone over what you accomplished and I’m impressed. I’m not much of a man of action, and I draw most of my courage from good whiskey, but that’s why I’m looking to hire people. That’s what a producer does, you know. He’s kind of an entrepreneur. He finds a project, gets control of it, then he puts it into action by hiring the best people for the job and giving them the best tools he can within a budget that will be adequate but realistic. For that, he gets a share of the payoff, sometimes the biggest share. It’s not fair, maybe, but if he does his job right he’s doing something others can’t do. I realize that this isn’t cyberspace, we’re not talking about jacking in customers in a safe and secure place to experience the thrills of whatever we dream up, but the basics are the same anyway. I didn’t come here looking for any of you, but synchronicity seems to have put me here looking for just such people at the time when those people show up here. I have a project. If it comes off, it’ll make me one of the richest people in creation and one of the most powerful. I won’t mince words on that. Your shares will be tiny for assuming the risk and doing the labor, but they’ll still be enough so that you’ll never have to work again and can do pretty much what you want forever. Interested?”
“We’re here, aren’t we?” Jerry Nagel responded.
“Let me start at the beginning. I’m a collector. Antiques, mostly, but historical stuff, and stuff that inspires or stimulates. I go to a lot of auctions, or send representatives there who know my tastes, and I wind up with a lot of stuff. Some of it is junk, some of it is truly wonderful, and some of it is blind speculation. I went to one where they were auctioning off the personal effects of Dr. Oscar McGraw. Anybody ever hear of him?”
Most had not, but Randi Queson knew the name. “He was a brilliant physicist. Said to be on a par with Einstein, Newton, that league. Is that the one you mean?”
“The very one.”
“I thought he held a research professorship on Marchellus.”
“He did, but he passed away about six months ago. It was a tragedy to science, maybe, but the guy was like almost two hundred and fifty years old and had every kind of rejuvenation process and youth serum you can name. They say he was sharp to the end. Looked like a prune, confined to a wheelchair, but he taught a class the day he died.
“Anyway,” Sanders continued, “the doctor was superfamous, had been since he was a kid. He’d lived a long time, knew or met everybody famous in our end of the universe, and had accumulated every honor and prize there was. I figured the historical stuff alone would be amazing, and it was. He’d been alone for years, after his sixth wife died, and there were no heirs this side of the Great Silence, so he willed his papers to his university and a bunch of stuff to various libraries, and the rest he said to put up on the block and use the proceeds to endow scholarships in physics and mathematics for bright kids who needed them. There was a ton of stuff to go up, and lots of interested, well-heeled bidders, but I managed to get a lot, including some trunks and such that turned up in his attic. Lots of personal stuff, so they let it go. I had people go through it and catalog it, and I began to notice some interesting names I would never have associated with him. The one that really got to me was Dr. Karl Woodward.”
“The evangelist who disappeared a ways back?” Lucky Cross asked.
He seemed surprised that the knowledge had come from this quarter. “Yes, indeed. How do you know about him?”
“Oh, my mom used to be a real regular with him. Sent him money and stuff almost all the way to the end of her days. He was her kind of preacher. Cussed like a sailor, smoked, hated most other preachers. We used to get videos from him now and then. He was a real stem-winder.”
“He was indeed. He was also a doctor of astrophysics, and had been a classmate and university research partner with McGraw until something caused a big change in Woodward and he dropped out of science and got religion. Not sure of the story there, and McGraw never understood it, but they stayed friends, or so it appears from the notes. I have a ton of voice diary reminiscences by McGraw of old Doc Woodward, but it was their last meeting that suddenly got me to sit up and take notice. Woodward, it seems, had come across a stuck pirate band and a derelict old ship that pointed him directly to the Three Kings. How to get there, that is. Woodward wanted McGraw to run the physics and get it exact as possible. McGraw wanted to talk Woodward out of it. He didn’t; he did the figures and gave ’em to Woodward, who promptly took off in his tent-meeting spaceship and vanished, apparently forever. I have McGraw’s calculations. Everything else is still there, and it checks out. I’ve had it looked at. We even think we know why Woodward’s ship couldn’t have survived the trip, at least two ways. I think the problem’s solvable, and so do the brains I hired to look at it. I want you to go there and stake it out for me.”
There was absolutely no apparent reaction from any of the others there, unless you counted the unsuppressed belch Lucky Cross gave. Finally, Jerry Nagel said, “You have the figures from the smartest guy who’s ever lived in our lifetime, the stuff used by Woodward? And it didn’t work for Woodward? And you think that, decades later, those same figures that this smart guy with his supercomputers and whole university brain machine got not quite right can be made right by lesser brains? Who are you kidding? Things are getting worse every year, breaking down more and more. We’re on the skids, not the way up. You’re offering us a one-way trip to a sure death.”
Sanders shrugged. “I’m offering you a way out, a chance to make a bundle, get free of all debts and clear your reputations, and no strings. I’ve got money and position, but you can’t have too much, and I’ve always dreamed of owning my own studio, top to bottom, without regard to cost. Risk? Sure. Lots of it. A hundred times more than the usual salvage-type job, but you know that going in, something you didn’t last time. Right? Blank check on equipment, whatever you need. And nobody’s gonna follow you and try and collect one way or the other, I can guarantee that.”
An Li looked at her companions and sensed that they weren’t nearly as dead set against this as they were making out. You couldn’t tell about the Doc, particularly after what she’d been through, but maybe, just maybe, there was real interest there.
“Let me talk to my former crew in private for a few minutes,” she suggested to the producer. “Let me see if things can be worked out.”
Sanders shrugged. “Take some time. But my time is valuable, and there are a lot of other crews here that can be put together. My offer won’t be on the table indefinitely.”
“We’re just gonna step outside for a bit and talk,” An Li told him, ignoring the implied threat. “Then we’ll give you an answer.”
He nodded, and dismissed them with a near-regal nod, getting up from his chair and, with his two too-good-to-be-true companions, vanishing back into that bedroom or whatever it was.
“Li—” Queson began, but she waved her hand and shook her head to indicate that there was to be no talking here. They all got the message, and, as a group, trooped out and went down to the lobby area.
An Li led them to a particularly noisy part of the reception area and then said, “We were almost certainly bugged in there, probably still are, but between the ambient noise here and the small leaky communicator I have in my pocket we should be reasonably secure. If not, it’s better than nothing.” She looked at each one of them in turn, then asked, “So? What’re your thoughts?”