EMPIRE (8 page)

His brokers, well paid, were close-mouthed. They bought and sold. That was all.

Seated in his office, Ben Wrail was busy watching two television screens before him. One showed the board in the New York exchange. In the other was the image of Gregory Manning, hunched in a chair in Page’s mountain laboratory back on Earth. And before Greg likewise were two screens, one showing the New York exchange board, the other trained on Ben Wrail’s office.

“That Tourist stuff looks good,” said Greg. “Why not buy a block of it? I happen to know that Chambers owns a few shares. He’ll be dabbling in it.”

Ben Wrail grinned. “It’s made a couple of points, hasn’t it? It’s selling here for 60 right now. In 45 minutes it’ll be quoted at 62.”

He picked up a telephone. “Buy all you can of Tourist,” he said. “Right away. I’ll tell you when to sell. Get rid of whatever you have in Titan Copper at 10:30.”

“Better let go of your holdings of Ranthoor Dome,” suggested Greg. “It’s beginning to slip.”

“I’ll watch it,” promised Ben. “It may revive.”

They lapsed into silence, watching the board in New York.

“You know, Greg,” said Ben finally, “I really didn’t believe all this was true until I saw those credit certificates materialize on my desk.”

“Simple,” grunted Greg. “This thing we’ve got can take anything any place. I could reach out there, grab you up and have you down here in a split second.”

Ben sucked his breath in between his teeth. “I’m not doubting anything any more. You sent me half a billion two days ago. It’s more than doubled now.”

He picked up the phone again and spoke to his broker on the other end.

“Unload Ranthoor Dome when she reaches 79.”

* * * *

The
real furor came on the Ranthoor floor when Wrail cornered Titan Copper. Striking swiftly, he purchased the stock in huge blocks. The shares rocketed as the exchanges throughout the System were thrown into an uproar. Under the cover of the excitement he proceeded to corner Spacesuits Ltd. Spacesuits zoomed.

For two days the main exchanges on four worlds were in a frenzy as traders watched the shares climb swiftly. Operators representing Interplanetary Power made offerings. No takers were reported. The shares climbed.

Within one hour, however, the entire Wrail holdings in both stocks were dumped on the market. The Interplanetary Power traders, frantic over the prospect of losing control of the two important issues, bought heavily. The price plummeted.

Spencer Chambers lost three billion or more on the deal. Overnight Ben Wrail had become a billionaire many times over. Greg Manning added to his own fortune.

“We have enough,” said Greg. “We’ve given Chambers what he had coming to him. Let’s call it off.”

“Glad to,” agreed Ben. “It was just too damned easy.”

“Be seeing you, Ben.”

“I’ll get down to Earth some day. Come see me when you have a minute. Drop in for an evening.”

“That’s an invitation,” said Greg. “It’s easy with this three-dimension stuff.”

He reached out a hand, snapped a control. The screens in Wrail’s office went dead.

Wrail reached for a cigar, lit it carefully. He leaned back in his chair, put his feet on the desk.

“By Heaven,” he said satisfiedly, “I’ve never enjoyed anything so much in all my life.”

A giant
cylindrical hull of finest beryl steel, the ship loomed in the screen. A mighty ship, braced into absolute rigidity by monster cross beams of shining steel. Glowing under the blazing lamps that lighted the scene, it towered into the shadows of the factory, dwarfing the scurrying workmen who swarmed over it.

“She’s a beauty,” said Russ, puffing at his pipe.

Greg nodded agreement. “They’re working on her day and night to get her finished. We may need it some day and need it in a hurry. If Chambers really gets that machine of his to rolling, space will be the only place big enough to hide in.”

He chuckled, a grim chuckle, deep in his throat.

“But we won’t have to hide long. Just until we get organized and then will come the time when we’ll call for the showdown. Chambers will have to spread his cards.”

Russ snapped the television switch and the screen went blank. The laboratory suddenly was a place of queer lights and shadows, bulging with grotesque machines, with sprawling apparatus, a place that hinted darkly of vast power and mighty forces.

The scientist sat up in his chair. “We’ve come a long way, Greg. A long, long way. We have the greatest power man has ever known; we have an almost incomprehensible space drive; we have three-dimensional television.”

“And,” said Greg dryly, “we took Chambers to the cleaners on the market.”

They sat in silence. Greg smelled the smoke from Russ’s pipe, mixed with the taint of lubricant and the faint lingering scent of ionized air.

“We mustn’t underrate Chambers, however,” he declared. “The man made one mistake. He underrated us. We can’t repeat his mistake. He is dangerous all the time. He will stop at nothing. Not even murder.”

“He’s going easy now,” said Russ. “He’s hoping Craven can find something that will either equal our stuff or beat it. But Craven isn’t having any luck. He’s still driving himself on the radiation theory, but he doesn’t seem to make much headway.”

“If he got it, just what would it mean?”

“Plenty. With that he could turn all radiations in space to work. The cosmics, heat, light, everything. Space is full of radiation.”

“If it hadn’t been for Wilson,” Greg said, his voice a snarl, “we wouldn’t have to be worrying about Chambers. Chambers wouldn’t know until we were ready to let him know.”

“Wilson!” ejaculated Russ, suddenly leaning forward. “I had forgotten about Wilson. What do you say we try to find him?”

* * * *

Harry Wilson
sat at his table in the Martian Club and watched the exotic Martian dance, performed by near-nude girls. Smoke trailed up lazily from his drooping cigarette as he watched through squinted eyes. There was something about the dance that got under Wilson’s skin.

The music rose, then fell to whispering undertones and suddenly, unexpectedly, crashed and stopped. The girls were running from the floor. A wave of smooth, polite applause rippled around the tables.

Wilson sighed and reached for his wine glass. He crushed the cigarette into a tray and sipped his wine. He glanced around the room, scanning the bobbing, painted faces of the night — the great, the near-great, the near-enough-to-touch-the-great. Brokers and businessmen, artists and writers and actors. There were others, too, queer night-life shadows that no one knew much about, or that one heard too much about . . . the playboys and the ladies of family and fortune, correctly attired men, gorgeously, sleekly attired women.

And — Harry Wilson. The waiters called him Mr. Wilson. He heard people whispering about him asking who he was. His soul soaked it in and cried for more. Good food, good drinks, the pastels of the walls, the soft lights and weird, exotic music. The cold but colorful correctness of it all.

Just two months ago he had stood outside the club, a stranger in the city, a mechanic from a little out-of-the-way laboratory, a man who was paid a pittance for his skill. He had stood outside and watched his employers walk up the steps and through the magic doors. He had watched in bitterness. . . .

But now!

The orchestra was striking up a tune. A blonde nodded at him from a near-by table. Solemnly, with the buzz of wine in his brain and its hotness in his blood, he returned the nod.

Someone was speaking to him, calling him by name. He looked around, but there was no one looking at him now. And once again, through that flow of music, through the hum of conversation, through the buzzing of his own brain, came the voice, cold and sharp as steel:

“Harry Wilson!”

It sent a shudder through him. He reached for the wine glass again, but his hand stopped half-way to the stem, paused and trembled at what he saw.
For
there was a gray vagueness in front of him, a sort of shimmer of nothingness, and out of that shimmer materialized a pencil.

As he watched, in stricken terror, the point of the pencil dropped to the tablecloth and slowly, precisely, it started to move. He stared, hypnotized, unbelieving, with the fingers of madness probing at his brain. The pencil wrote:

Wilson, you sold me out.

The man at the table tried to speak, tried to shriek, but his tongue and throat were dry and only harsh breath rattled in his mouth.

The pencil moved on mercilessly:

But you will pay. No matter where you go, I will find you. You cannot hide from me.

The pencil slowly lifted its point from the table and suddenly was gone, as if it had never been. Wilson, eyes wide and filled with terrible fear, stared at the black words on the cloth.

Wilson, you sold me out. But you will pay. No matter where you go, I will find you. You cannot hide from me.

The music pulsated in the room, the hum of conversation ran like an undertone, but Wilson did not hear. His entire consciousness was centered on the writing, the letters and the words that filled his soul with dread.

Something seemed to snap within him. The cold wind of terror reached out and struck at him. He staggered from the chair. His hand swept the wine glass from the table and it shattered into chiming shards.

“They can’t do this to me!” he shrieked.

There was a silence in the room a silence of terrible accusation. Everyone was staring at him. Eyebrows raised.

A waiter
was at his elbow. “Do you feel ill, sir?”

And then, on unsteady feet, he was being led away. Behind him he heard the music once again, heard the rising hum of voices.

Someone set his hat on his head, was holding his coat. The cold air of the night struck his face and the doors sighed closed behind him.

“I’d take it easy going down the step, sir,” counseled the doorman.

An aero-taxi driver held open the door of the cab and saluted.

“Where to, sir?”

Wilson stumbled in and stammered out his address. The taxi droned into the traffic lane.

Hands twitching, Wilson fumbled with the key, took minutes to open the door into his apartment. Finally the lock clicked and he pushed open the door. His questing finger found the wall switch. Light flooded the room.

Wilson heaved a sigh of relief. He felt safe here. This place belonged to him. It was his home, his retreat. . . .

A low laugh, hardly more than a chuckle, sounded behind him. He whirled and for a moment, blinking in the light, he saw nothing. Then something stirred by one of the windows, gray and vague, like a sheet of moving fog.

As he watched, shrinking back against the wall, the grayness deepened, took the form of a man. And out of that mistiness a face was etched, a face that had no single line of humor in it, a bleak face with the fire of anger in the eyes.

“Manning!” shrieked Wilson. “Manning!” He wheeled and sprinted for the door, but the gray figure moved, too . . . incredibly fast, as if it were wind-blown vapor, and barred his path to the door.

“Why are you running away?” Manning’s voice mocked. “Certainly you aren’t afraid of me.”

“Look,” Wilson whimpered, “I didn’t think of what it meant. I just was tired of working the way Page made me work. Tired of the little salary I got. I wanted money. I was hungry for money.”

“So you sold us out,” said Manning.

“No,” cried Wilson, “I didn’t think of it that way. I didn’t stop to think.”

“Think now, then,” said Manning gravely. “Think of this. No matter where you are, no matter where you go, no matter what you do, I’ll always be watching you, I’ll never let you rest. I’ll never give you a minute’s peace.”

“Please,” pleaded Wilson. “Please, go away and leave me. I’ll give you back the money . . . there’s some of it left.”

“You sold out for twenty thousand,” said Manning. “You could have gotten twenty million. Chambers would have paid that much to know what you could tell him, because it was worth twenty billion.”

Wilson’s breath was coming in panting gasps. He dropped his coat and backed away. The back of his knees collided with a chair and he folded up, sat down heavily, still staring at the gray mistiness that was a man.

“Think of that, Wilson,” Manning went on sneeringly. “You could have been a millionaire. Maybe even a billionaire. You could have had all the fine things these other people have. But you only got twenty thousand.”

“What can I do?” begged Wilson.

The misty face split in a sardonic grin.

“I don’t believe there’s anything left for you to do.”

Before Wilson’s eyes the face dissolved, lost its lines, seemed to melt away. Only streaming, swirling mist, then a slight refraction in the air and then nothing.

Slowly Wilson rose to his feet, reached for the bottle of whiskey on the table. His hand shook so that the liquor splashed. When he raised the glass to his mouth, his still-shaking hand poured half the drink over his white shirt front.