The Man Who Staked the Stars/Chapter III

III
n his luxurious hotel room Bryce checked his watch. Eight o'clock. A telephone call was scheduled for some time in the half hour. He filed the question of who was behind the night's attack and picked up the phone. The dial system was in automatic contact with any city in the world. He dialed.

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.

“Hello?” said a noncommittal voice, prepared to claim that he was merely a stranger answering the phone because it was ringing in public.

“Hello George, how's everything going?” Bryce asked. Those words were his trade mark, the passwords 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 “Hello George.” Hello George's tips were always good, so they had come to be followed as blindly as tips from God, 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 button that turned on the radio to a semiclassical 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 titles 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 analysis 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 circumstances 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 entity, 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.

n 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 Manoba 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.

he 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.

Through the softening filter of the airtight glass the view of distant crater walls and the airsealed towers of Moonbase City shone in etched magnificence, but he gave it only a glance. It was always the same. There was no weather on the Moon and no variety of view.

“Good morning,” he smiled, passing a bellboy in the luxurious, deep colored halls.

“Good morning, Mister Carter,” the boy answered rapidly with an eager nervous smile.

Bryce had caught the management up sharply on several small lapses, and they all knew him now. He strode on, pleased. Efficiency… No one gave him a second glance or noticed him in the tube trains, but he was not irritated by it. Someday they would. Someday the whole world would know his face as well as they knew their own. He promised that to them silently and then settled down to concentrate on some constructive planning before reaching the office. He was not going to waste his time gawking at ads or listening to the music like the others.

“Mister Carter?” said a hesitant voice behind him as he was reaching for the handle of the office doors.

“What is it?” he asked crisply, turning, but as he saw who had spoken he knew exactly what it would be.

“Pardon me Mister Carter, but—” It was a spaceman, a skinny wreck of a man in clothes that hung on him. A junky, a drug addict. Bryce knew the signs. He had spent all his money and gone without food for his drug, and now he had remembered from Belt talk that Bryce Carter was a soft touch for a loan. “Never mind,” Bryce snarled, reaching for the door again.

He assisted the smuggling of the stuff but that did not mean that he had to admire the fools who took it. The man was muttering something about a loan when the door shut and cut off his words. The loan would be spent on more junk. If he had wanted food he could have signed into a state hospital to take the Cure, and be imprisoned and fed until the hunger for his drug had passed and released him. The Cure was a brief hell, but it was fair payment for having had his fun, and if the addict had any guts he would face it. Any time he was ready to pay the price of exit he could go back to being a man.

Bryce strode through the offices irritably. It did not matter if Earthlings chose to waste their time in artificial ecstasy, but it was different to see a good Belt spaceman let himself go.

The receptionist looked up with fright in her eyes as he passed and gave him a special good-morning, with a smile that was tremulous and very eager to please. He still had her in the stage of new employment where she was kept afraid of losing her new job with a bad reference. It was best to put them all over the hurdles at first.

He gave her a condescending smile as he went through into the inner offices. “Good morning.” She was shaky enough. A few well faked cold rages against minor errors had done well. From now on she would need only smiles to give the utmost in loyalty and hard work. What had Machiavelli said? “Make them fear your wrath, and they will be grateful for your forebearance.”

He did not bother to speak to Kesby when he passed his open office door. Kesby didn't need smiles or praise, he worked loyally just for the rare curt acknowledgement that he had done well. Three years of managing had made him a good lieutenant, completely faithful. When Bryce quit Union Transport Kesby would follow him.