The Man Who Staked the Stars Part 3

Somewhere in a city, a phone rang. It rang unheard, for it was locked into a safe in a tiny rented office with some unusual mechanisms attached. The ringing was stopped abruptly and a recorded voice answered, "Yeah?"

Bryce took a dial phone from the night table where it had been sitting innocently like a toy he had bought for some child. "Hi Al," he said cheerfully to the automatic mechanism at the other end. "Listen, I think I've got a new phrase for that transition theme. How's this?" He put the receiver against the back of the toy and dialed the toy dial.

It responded to each letter and number with a ringing note of different pitch that played a short unmelodious tune.

The pitch notes went over the line and entered the mechanism, making the contacts within it that dialed the number he had dialed on the toy phone.

"How's that?" Bryce said cheerfully.

The recorded voice said, "Sounds good. I'll see what I can do with it." Somewhere far away and unheard another phone had begun to ring.

"Want to speak to George?"

"Sure."

A phone rang in a pay booth somewhere in a great city railroad station, and someone browsing at a magazine stand or sitting on a suitcase apparently waiting for a train strolled casually to answer it.

"h.e.l.lo?" said a noncommittal voice, prepared to claim that he was merely a stranger answering the phone because it was ringing in public.

"h.e.l.lo George, how's everything going?" Bryce asked. Those words were his trade mark, the pa.s.swords that identified him to everyone as the Voice who gave Tips. Among the monster organization which had grown from the proven reliability of those tips, the voice was known as "h.e.l.lo George." h.e.l.lo George's tips were always good, so they had come to be followed as blindly as tips from G.o.d, even when they were not understood. Certainty was one thing men in the fencing and drug smuggling business most sorely lacked.

They communicated only by phone. They transmitted their wares by leaving them in public lockers and mailing the key. They never saw each other's faces or heard each other's names, but even the use of a key could be a trap that would bring a circle of narcotics agents of INC around the unfortunate who attempted to open the locker.

Far away over the bulge of the Earth between, a man sat in a phone booth waiting for his tip. "Pretty well. No complaints. How's with you, any news?"

"I think you'd better cut connections with Union Transport. They're getting pretty sloppy. I think they might spill something."

"Wadja say?" asked the man at the other end cautiously, "I didn't get you."

"Better stop using UT for shipping," Bryce repeated, wording his sentence carefully. "They aren't careful enough anymore. You don't want them to break an inc case wide open, do you?" INC was the International Narcotics Control agency of the F. N. But the conversation would have sounded like an innocent discussion of shipping difficulties to any chance listener on the telephone lines.

The flat tones were plaintive and aggrieved. "But we're expecting a load of stuff Friday. Our buyers are expecting it." Stuff was drug, and expecting was a mild word for the need of drug addicts! "And we've got a lotta loads of miscellaneous items to go out." The contact was a small man in the organization but he evidently knew just how "hot"

fenced goods could be. "That can't wait!"

He had planned this. "Maybe they are all right for shipments this week. I'll chew them out to be careful, check up and call back Friday.

Meanwhile break with them."

"Tell them a few things from me, the--" the distant voice added a surprising string of derogatory adjectives. "Friday when?"

"Friday about--about six." The double "about" confirmed the signal for a telephone appointment that was general for all contact numbers.

"Friday about six, Okay." There was a faint click that meant he had hung up and the phone in the safe was open for more dialings on his toy dial.

Bryce hung up, leaned back on his bed and pushed a b.u.t.ton that turned on the radio to a semicla.s.sical program. Soothing music came into the room and slow waves of colored light moved across the ceiling. He tuned to a book player, and chose a heavy economics study from the current seller list of t.i.tles which appeared on the ceiling. The daily moon ship was scheduled to blast off at five thirty, its optimum at this week's position of the Moon. By this time tomorrow night, he and all the other members of the Board would be out of reach of any easy observation or a.n.a.lysis by their hired psychological mind-hunter.

With a slight chilling of the skin he remembered the cop-psychos the gangs had warned him about in his scrambling and desperate childhood, and what they were supposed to do to you when they caught you in a third offense.

He had been born into an ex-European quarter in a Chinese city, a descendant of something prideful and forgotten called an Empire Builder, and grew with the mixed gangs of children of all colors who roamed the back streets at night, looting and stealing and breaking.

Population control was almost impossible in a land where the only social security against starvation in old age was sons, and social security was impossible in a land so corrupted by the desperation of famines, so little able to spare the necessary taxes. The nation was too huge to be fed from outside, and so had been left by the FN to stew in its own misery until its people solved their basic problem.

So, in an enlightened clean and wealthy world, Bryce Carter had grown up in a slum whose swarming viciousness was a matter of take, steal, kill, climb or die. Perhaps under those special circ.u.mstances police penal compulsion had to be brutally strong, stronger than the drive for life itself, as brutal as the lurid tales he had heard. Perhaps in other countries the methods were different, a hypno-converted man not a horror to his friends, but he had had no time to study and investigate if it were so, and the horror and hatred remained.

But there was no need to think about the psycho-hunter the Board had put on him for by the time the hunter could reach him UT would have fallen as a legal ent.i.ty, its corruption would be completely public, and the psychologist would be called off before discovering anything.

Bryce thought of the slight nervousness he had let show at the first words of the chairman's announcement. The only witness against him was himself. His control wasn't perfect. No one's was. But he was safe.

He concentrated on the opening pages of the Basic Principles of Economies.

In the darkened UT building which could be seen from his window a few lights still burned where the night shift dealt with emergencies.

In a small projection room on the fifty-fifth floor a man sat and looked at a film of the UT Board meeting of that day. He played only a certain small twenty minute interval, listening closely to the voices--"Gentlemen, your attention please--" Watching the faces--"Do the police know of this?" ... "Do you think if we offered this Man.o.ba the right kind of money...." "Will the gentleman who voted nay on the secret vote the first time speak up and explain...." "It is entirely likely that the conspirator is among us." On the screen showed the apparently bored faces and relaxed poses of men accustomed to the power game, habitually masking their feelings from each other, shifting their positions slightly sometimes, some smoking. "We've dealt with that, let's get on to the next business."

The watcher stopped the film and silently reset it. It began again with the chairman on the screen rapping the table lightly. "Gentlemen, your attention...."

In the darkened projection room the chairman sat to one side smoking and thinking while the psychologist played the film through for the fourth time.

The chairman was wondering just how seriously the watcher was taking Mr. Beldman's proposals about what he should do to the culprit, and whether he would raise his fee.

The telephone rang.

"Four thirty, Mr. Carter," said the voice of the night clerk in the receiver.

It was time to catch the five thirty Moon ship. He splashed cold water on his face and the back of his neck until he was awake, took a hot shower, dressed rapidly, and gave up his key at the desk at 4:45.

"A letter for you, Mister Carter," she smiled, handing it to him. From the wall speakers a mild but penetrating voice began repeating, "Bus line for s.p.a.ceport leaving in twelve minutes. All pa.s.sengers for Luna City, Moon Base, Asteroid Belt and points out, please go to the landing deck. Bus line for s.p.a.ceport leaving in twelve minutes--"

He opened the letter when he had settled down in a comfortable morris chair in the airbus. The letterhead said MAn.o.bA Group Psychotherapeutic Research and Conference Management.

One sheet of it was a half page contract in fine print, apparently a standard form with the name of Union Transport Corporation typed in the appropriate blanks. Above it was printed in clear English and large type for the benefit of those readers unaccustomed to contracts.

"WARNING. After you have signed this release you have no legal recourse or claim as an individual against any physical or mental injury or inconvenience you may claim to have sustained as a result of the activities of the contracted psychotherapist(s) in the course of group therapy. Your group is the responsible agent. It must make all claims and complaints as a unit, and may withdraw from the contract as a unit. Those who withdraw from the group withdraw from partic.i.p.ation in the contract."

Bryce smiled. Or in other words, if you didn't like it, you could quit your job and get out!

The other sheet he glanced at casually. It seemed to be an explanatory page to the effect that the Man.o.ba's work was strictly confidential and they were under no obligation to explain what they had done or were doing or give their ident.i.ties to any member of the corporation who had hired them. There was nothing resembling a sales talk about results, and the only thing approaching it was a stiff last sentence referring anyone who was curious about the results of such treatment to the National Certified a.n.a.lytical Statistics of Professional Standing in such and such bulletins of such and such years.

He signed the contract, smiling, and mailed it at a handy postal and telegraph window at the s.p.a.ceport before boarding the s.p.a.ceship.

The phone was ringing.

Bryce rolled over sleepily and picked it up. "Eight A.M. L.S. S.S.

Sir," said the soft voice of the desk clerk.

"Okay," he grunted, glancing at his watch and hanging up. It was two minutes after eight, but he didn't check her up on it. If he placed the voice rightly, it belonged to an exceptionally pretty brunette. He had not tried to date her yet, but she looked accessible, and Mona was becoming tiresome.

He turned the dial in the headboard that reversed the polarization of the window and rose reluctantly, stretching as sunlight flooded the room. It was daylight on Moonbase City. It had been daylight for a week, and it would be daylight still for another week.