His mind came back to the unpleasant interview before him. Speaking of greedy people, and a greedy industry! It seemed to Hank that he was doing nothing but dealing with a succession of greedy men and greedy companies these days, instead of what he really wanted to do: study the Benedict Thresholds and how they actually operated. But there he was, and Jonathan Tarbox was waiting most impatiently.
At the Los Angeles Station gate he showed his card, took a chamber ticket from the attendant and rode up the moving incline to the station platform, row upon row of small metal cubicles visible down the brightly lit corridor. He found the door with 23 in fluorescent green over it, pressed the ID plate with his palm and heard three short clicks as the steel door swung open.
The chamber was tiny, hardly big enough for the chair and straps. A blinder-mask grinned at him from the wall; he drew it across his eyes, tightened the straps around his waist (totally functionless, Robert had told him, but it gave a sense of security to the timid) and settled back in the chair. Though he had crossed day after day for years, he couldn’t escape the sudden claustrophobic reaction, the sudden momentary sense of bottomless emptiness that coursed through him at the instant of the passage. He had talked to Ed and Gail about it, the last time they had been out to the Coast, between their behavior-laboratory projects; Gail had claimed the strange sensation never went away. He waited until the soft music from the chamber speaker had relaxed him for a moment, then snapped the activator switch and felt his muscles tense…
It lasted only a fraction of a second, but beads of sweat stood out on his forehead as the chamber door swung open. He pulled off the blindfold, unstrapped, and walked out onto the passenger platform of the Ironstone Threshhold Station.
Ironstone, planet Mars.
Moments later a surface car was whisking him through the odd, spindly city of glass and marble and concrete to the Administration Building, and he turned his mind again to an angry little man with red hair waiting in his office, and to a puddle of molten and congealed iron lying 850 miles away, somewhere out on the Martian desert.
—2—
Hank Merry had almost forgotten what an offensive little man Jonathan Tarbox was, by any scale of judgment. Short, fat, pompous, arrogant, belligerent, loud-mouthed, insulting, with a paunch that quivered indignation and a carrot-top of red hair that stood out wildly in all directions—Hank took a grip on himself and forced a smile to his lips as he walked into his office. Tarbox was smoking a huge yellow cigar, obviously made of Venusian swamp moss, scientifically proven to be non-stimulating, non-depressing, non-habit-forming, non-carcinogenic and perfectly delightful for the smoker, but something less than delightful to the non-smoker in the same room, since it smelled like burning horsehair. Hank suppressed a sudden violent urge to sneeze and motioned the little man into his inner office.
“Nice of you to come so quickly,” Tarbox said with exaggerated sarcasm. “Only a two-hour wait, a mere nothing. It must be nice to be the Big Boss of things, so you can come and go as you please.”
Hank offered the little man a seat. You are being needled, he thought, and if you respond with anger you will be handing this little vulture his game without any contest. “All right, Jon, something’s gone sour. What’s the trouble?”
“Trouble!” Tarbox exclaimed. “Trouble! You’re lucky I don’t have the law on you! Invasion of civil rights, personal and corporation damages, illegal use of a Threshold station for personal gain—”
“All that in one day? And I’ve hardly gotten out of bed.”
The man’s face turned red with anger. “Go ahead. Laugh. You won’t laugh long. I had to come all the way from Boston to Los Angeles—by airliner, mind you—to get a Threshold chamber at all! Just because you wouldn’t return my calls on Earth. And then you have me tailed all the way across the country into the bargain.”
Hank frowned. “Somebody tailing you? That’s news. Do you need to be tailed?”
“You can joke all you like,” the little man raged, jabbing at Hank with his cigar. “But you seem to forget that I represent Interplanetary Oil, Incorporated. And Interplanetary Oil, Incorporated doesn’t like to have its agents shadowed like common criminals.”
Merry shifted his weight impatiently. “If somebody was tailing you, that’s your headache.
I didn’t assign any shadow.”
“Then the government did.”
“I’m not the government,” Hank said. “I’m just Threshold Commissioner for Ironstone Station, that’s all. But if you’ve got government men tailing you, I’d suggest you start watching your p’s and q’s. The government doesn’t care too much for smart operators and their sharp ways.”
Tarbox looked up malevolently. “But as Commissioner at Ironstone, your job is to handle problems and shoot trouble for companies working out of Ironstone and elsewhere on Mars. Right?”
“You seem to know,” Hank said.
“Well, Interplanetary Oil is having trouble. Lots of trouble, and all of it in your range of activity, since the Threshold is to blame.”
Merry sat silent for a moment. Then: “Really? What do you mean, exactly?”
“You know what I mean,” Tarbox said. “There’s oil on Mars, lots of it. You and I had a little scrap four years ago when Interplanetary was trying to sign a few oil leases with the government.”
Hank nodded. “I remember. You have some legal angles that would have given you drilling rights to 85 per cent of the planet’s surface if I hadn’t screamed and pounded the table and made somebody listen to me. Fortunately, somebody did; you only got 25 per cent and a tight throttle on how much drilling you could do, and when.”
Jonathan Tarbox grinned unpleasantly. “Yes, but we drilled all the same, and we struck.
We’ve got hundreds of thousands of barrels of prime Martian crude sitting waiting for transport through to Earth. Enough oil to make up for the last ten years’ famine.
Interplanetary never thinks small. We were thinking big and planning big, getting ready for big production. All we needed was a pipeline, and again we had to fight the government—and you—before we could get it licensed.”
The pipeline. That also Hank remembered. A neat scheme, with no legal precedents whatever. Why barrel up oil, they had argued, and then cart the barrels to a Threshold Station, ship them through one at a time and cart them away? Why not just build a pipeline into a permanently leased Threshold chamber, start pumping oil in, throw the switch to perpetual “Go!” and have another pipe Earthside to catch the stuff and carry to straight to the refinery? A splendid argument; not even a question of overload, because the chamber would never be carrying more than the maximum load limit at any given time.
Hank had fought the scheme tooth and nail, not knowing exactly why he opposed it except that there was something about it that seemed to be carrying a good thing too far, somehow. The Joint Conference lawyers had wriggled and twisted and stalled as long as they could and finally, reluctantly said yes, mostly because they couldn’t come up with any one specific reason to say no. Of course, there was the revenue from renting the chamber, too, which wasn’t to be ignored. “Okay,” Hank said. “So you and I differed. You won. You got the deal negotiated. So why all the screaming now?”