"A cash deal?" he clanked. His eyeballs click-clicked this way and that to see if anybody else in the place was watching. I knew he was wondering how much cash he could skim off for himself.
"You are posting," I said, "gold for eleven credits the pound today."
"Special," he said. "Only .001 percent impure."
"I think," I said, "you have some for ten?"
"Come into this tank," he said quickly.
He did some rapid clanking on an old calculating machine. It was very complex. How much did he have to steal off the stockpile and add to my order in order to arrive at ten credits a pound. Then how much more did he have to steal and add in order to pocket how much for himself.
But my calculation was not obscure at all. I was going to hold on to one thousand credits to spend. I was not going to return any advanced pay – as I couldn't spend it where I was going. I had nine thousand credits to buy with. I wanted nine hundred pounds of gold.
With many clicks and cracks of his face, he finally had it worked out. It really didn't cost the company all that much. Lead was a third of a credit a pound. Converting it down to gold, which is lighter on the atomic scale, delivered enormous power generation and paid for the processing. The main cost to the power company was in packaging and wholesaling to such companies as Reliable Ready-Pack and it in turn had overheads and commissions. The only reason gold stayed up as high as it did was because the power combines preferred to do lighter element atomic conversion, due to electrical demands. The metals themselves tended to be secondary. So skimming off a few ingots was nothing he would be tagged for. It would go down as "ordinary business wear and tear."
"That welds the deal," he said.
"One more thing," I said. "I want heavy ingot packing cases, nine of them, one hundred pounds to the case."
"That's extra," he said.
"What's the name of that company just south of you?" I said.
"That welds the deal," he said.
With a bunch of "Hey, Ip" and "You there," he got the laborers at it. They found nine battered-up but lock-able ingot cases in the trash heap.
I took one of the fifty-pound ingots off the pile. Gold is deceptive. It looks small but it's heavy.It almost broke my arm. I poked at it with a fingernail and then put my teeth into a corner of it. Nice and soft. Pure gold. Gleaming, lovely! Gold is so pretty!
Into the cases it went, eighteen fifty-pound bars of it. The metal man falsified the inventory log. Out to the front loading platform went the dolly.
I counted nine thousand credits out of the sack and into his pincer-grip fingers. I got my personal receipt. We clanked hands.
The deal was finished. The laborers left. And the dolly sat fifty feet away from the airbus. But an airbus can't get up to the loading platform and still open its doors. I called Ske. I pointed.
He started to lift one of the boxes and then stopped to give me an awful look. I gestured impatiently.
It was warm and it was dusty. Nevertheless, a sweating Ske soon had nine boxes sitting on the floor of the airbus.
I lifted a lordly finger. "To the Apparatus hangar, my man." And he got in and the airbus rose lumberingly, staggering into the sky.
Ske was snarling to himself and the airbus was lurching about. This was silly since the load it carried was only a hair above the full-rated passenger load.
The bouncing around made it a bit hard to do, but I got out the spare Zanco labels and began to affix them, one to the case. They were the immersion type labeclass="underline" when you put them on, they sink into the material of the case and nothing can remove them. The labels said: DANGER HEALTH HAZARD RADIOACTIVE CELLOLOGICAL ELEMENTS THE ZANCO COMPANY IS NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR SERIOUS BURNS OR DEATH RESULTING FROM OPENING THIS CASE Bright red. Delightful! They would glow even in the dark!
And as the somewhat dusty airbus lurched through the sky, I did some glowing of my own.
Nine hundred pounds of gold was ten thousand, eight hundred ounces, Troy.
On Blito-P3, the current average price of gold was a minimum of six hundred dollars American an ounce, to say nothing of what it brought on the black market or in Hong Kong.
This meant that one Soltan Gris would have six million, four hundred and eighty thousand personal dollars American to play around with. This was so ample I didn't even bother to adjust it for gravity differences. What was a million, more or less?
That would buy an awful lot of Turkish dancing girls.
It would also buy, if I was pushed to use it, an awful lot of Hells for Heller. I giggled because the words are similar in English.
Not only a clever Gris, not only a rich Gris, but a lofty, millionaire, tycoon, fat-cat Gris was not just unbeatable. He was inexorable!
"This ain't no truck!" snarled Ske, narrowly averting a nose-dive crash.
I ignored him. Power, power, who saith it doth not have a sweet taste? I was spending it in English already. And in my imagination, Heller, a ragged, shabby and starving, panhandling bum, approached on the street and begged me for a quarter and I pulled the sleeve of my tailored jacket out of his bony, clutching fingers and slammed the door of my limousine in his tear-streaked face.
Chapter 2
At the Apparatus hangar everything was well. Ske crunched down on the landing target, went into ground mode and rolled off to the side.
From where I sat, I could see Tug Onecontinuing to boil. The back fin was finished. They were doing something to the whole outside hull. In addition to other crews on other jobs, over a hundred contractor men, in bright yellow cover suits were working with bright yellow spray which instantly went black when it hit the plating.
I knew what this was: Heller was redoing the original Fleet absorbo-coat. You could see the difference between the old coating and the new. The old coating was a tiny bit gray; the new coating was so black it was almost not there. Absorbo-coat takes all incoming waves and simply drinks them up; absolutely noenergy gets reflected, visible or invisible. Not the most searching beams or screens can get a bounce off of it. The vessel becomes completely undetectable unless it blocks off a light behind it like a star. It will defeat any modern surveillance system.
I smiled when I thought of going to all that work just to baffle the primitive detection systems of Blito-P3. Even a shabby, old, chipped Apparatus vessel could do it. And then I felt less cheerfuclass="underline" all this absorption would multiply the dangers of Tug Oneblowing up. She would shed nothing!Screaming through space, picking up fields and light . . . I looked away quickly to get my mind off it.
Ah, something more cheerful! The Blixo!The Blixowas just clearing in! My luck was really holding!
One of the several Blito-P3 run freighters, the Blixowas no better or worse. These are small freighters, only about two hundred and fifty feet long. They are rather skinny and light. But they carry good tonnage, certainly all the tonnage that could be utilized. And they would carry fifty or sixty passengers in addition to a twenty spacer crew. Their warp drives push them about six weeks one way, sometimes more, sometimes less. Uncomfortable and shabby, they can slip in and out easily and they are no more dangerous than any other freighter. The best part of them is, they look ordinary: nobody remarks about them coming in and out of Voltar – just some of the thousands every week.
I motioned to Ske and he ground-drove over – a half a mile was too far to walk in my exalted state.
She had settled into her gantry within the last half hour and the huge trundle dolly had finished taking her into the hangar and lowering her to the floor. It was now pulling back out.