“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.”