I introduced Norrey to him, and to Tokugawa as an afterthought.
The most powerful man in space was short, gray, and scrutable. In deference to the custom of the day he wore traditional Japanese dress, but I was willing to bet that his English was better than his Japanese. He started when I lit up a joint, and Tom had to show him how to turn up the breeze and deploy the smoke filter. Norrey’s body language said she didn’t like him, and I trust her barometer even more than my own; she lacks my cynicism. I cut him off in the middle of a speech about Shara and the Stardance that must have used up four ghostwriters.
“The answer is ‘no.’ ”
He looked as though he had never heard the expression before. “—I—”
“Listen, Toke old boy, I read the papers. You and Skyfac Inc. and Lunindustries Inc. want to become our patrons. You’re inviting us to move right in and start dancing, offering to underwrite the whole bloody venture. And none of this has anything to do with the fact that antitrust legislation was filed against you this week, right?”
“Mister Armstead, I’m merely expressing my gratitude that you and Shara Drummond chose to bring your high art to Skyfac in the first place, and my fervent hope that you and her sister will continue to feel free to make use of—”
“Where I come from we use that stuff for methane power.” I took a lingering drag while he sputtered. “You know damn well how Shara came to Skyfac, and you sit in the chair of the man who killed her. He killed her by making her spend so many of her offstage hours in low or no gee, because that was the only way he could get it up. You ought to be bright enough to know that the day Norrey or I or any member of our company dances a step on Skyfac property, a red man with horns, a tail, and a pitchfork is going to come up to you and admit that it just froze over.” The joint was beginning to hit me. “As far as I’m concerned, Christmas came this year on the day that Carrington went out for a walk and forgot to come back, and I will be gone to hell before I’ll live under his roof again, or make money for his heirs and assigns. Do we understand each other?” Norrey was holding my hand tightly, and when I glanced over she was grinning at me.
Tokugawa sighed and gave up. “McGillicuddy, give them the contract.”
Pokerfaced, Tom produced a stiff folded parchment and passed it to us. I scanned it, and my eyebrows rose. “Tom,” I said blandly, “is this honest?”
He never even glanced at his boss. “Yep.”
“Not even a percentage of the gross? Oh my.” I looked at Tokugawa. “A free lunch. It must be my good looks.” I tore the contract in half.
“Mister Armstead,” he began hotly, and I was glad that Norrey interrupted him this time. I was getting to like it too much.
“Mr. Tokugawa, if you’ll stop trying to convince us that you’re a patron of the arts, I think we can get along. We’ll let you donate some technical advice and assistance, and we’ll let you sell us materials and air and water at cost. We’ll even give back some of the skilled labor we hire away from you when we’re done with them. Not you, Tom—we want you to be our full-time business manager, if you’re willing.”
He didn’t hesitate a second, and his grin was beautiful. “Ms. Drummond, I accept.”
“Norrey. Furthermore,” she went on to Tokugawa, “we’ll make a point of telling everybody we know how nice you’ve been, any time the subject comes up. But we are going to own and operate our own studio, and it may suit us to put it on the far side of Terra, and we will be independents. Not Skyfac’s in-house dance troupe: independents. Eventually we hope to see Skyfac itself settle into the role of the benevolent old rich uncle who lives up the road. But we don’t expect to need you for longer than you need us, so there will be no contract. Have we a meeting of the minds?”
I nearly applauded out loud. I’m pretty sure he’d never had a personal executive secretary hired right out from under his nose before. His grandfather might have committed seppuku; he in his phony kimono must have been seething. But Norrey had played things just right, grudgingly offering him equals-status if he cared to claim it—and he needed us.
Perhaps you don’t understand just how badly he needed us. Skyfac was the first new multinational in years, and it had immediately begun hurting the others where they lived. Not only could it undersell any industry requiring vacuum, strain-free environment, controlled radiation, or wide-range temperature or energy density gradients—and quite a few profitable industries do—but it could also sell things that simply could not be made on Earth, even expensively. Things like perfect bearings, perfect lenses, strange new crystals—none of which will form in a gravity well. All the raw materials came from space, unlimited free solar energy powered the factories, and delivery was cheap (a delivery module doesn’t have to be a spaceship; all it has to do is fall correctly).
It wasn’t long before the various nationals and multi-nationals who had not been invited into the original Skyfac consortium began to feel the pinch. The week before, antitrust actions had been filed in the US, USSR, China, France, and Canada, and protests had been lodged in the United Nations, the first steps in what would turn out to be the legal battle of the century. Skyfac’s single most precious asset was its monopoly of space—Tokugawa was running scared enough to need any good press he could get.
And the week before that, the tape of the Stardance had been released. The first shock wave was still running around the world; we were the best press Tokugawa was ever likely to get.
“You’ll cooperate with our PR people?” was all he asked.
“As long as you don’t try to quote me as ‘heartbroken’ by Carrington’s death,” I said agreeably. I really had to hand it to him: he almost smiled then.
“How about ‘saddened’?” he suggested delicately. We settled on “shocked.”
We left Tom in our cabin with four full briefcases of paperwork to sort out, and went to see Harry Stein.
We found him where I expected to, in a secluded corner of the metals shop, behind a desk with stacks of pamphlets, journals and papers that would have been improbable in a full gee. He and a Tensor lamp were hunched over an incredibly ancient typewriter. One massive roll fed clean paper into it, another took up the copy. I noted with approval that the manuscript’s radius was two or three centimeters thicker than when last I’d seen it. “Say hey, Harry. Finishing up chapter one?”
He looked up, blinked. “Hey, Charlie. Good to see you.” For him it was an emotional greeting. “You must be her sister.”
Norrey nodded gravely. “Hi, Harry. I’m glad to meet you. I hear those candles in Liberation were your idea.” Harry shrugged. “She was okay.”
“Yes,” Norrey agreed. Unconsciously, instinctively, she was taking on his economical word usage—as Shara had before her.
“I,” I said, “will drink to that proposition.”
Harry eyed the thermos on my belt, and raised an eyebrow in query.
“Not booze,” I assured him, unclipping it. “On the wagon. Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee, fresh from Japan. Real cream. Brought it for you.” Damn it, I was doing it too.
Harry actually smiled. He produced three mugs from a nearby coffeemaker unit (personally adapted for low gee), and held them while I poured. The aroma diffused easily in low gee; it was exquisite. “To Shara Drummond,” Harry said, and we drank together. Then we shared a minute of warm silence.
Harry was a fifty-year-old ex-fullback who had kept himself in shape. He was so massive and formidably packed that you could have known him a long time without ever suspecting his intelligence, let alone his genius—unless you had happened to watch him work. He spoke mostly with his hands. He hated writing, but put in two methodical hours a day on The Book. By the time I asked him why, he trusted me enough to answer. “Somebody’s gotta write a book on space construction,” he said. Certainly no one could have been better qualified. Harry literally made the first weld on Skyfac, and had bossed virtually all construction since. There was another guy who had as much experience, once, but he died (his “suit sold out,” as the spacemen say: lost its integrity). Harry’s writing was astonishingly lucid for such a phlegmatic man (perhaps because he did it with his fingers), and I knew even then that The Book was going to make him rich. It didn’t worry me; Harry will never get rich enough to retire.