F Paul Wilson - LaNague 02 (12 page)

           
“What about
eating lunch inside with everybody else?” Junior asked, trying desperately to
mute his elation.

           
“I don’t
care if they hang from the rafters by their toes and eat lunch! Just bring ‘em
back!”

           
“Then
they’ll be there tomorrow.” He stuck out his hand. “No hard feelings, I hope.”

           
Jeffers
grasped the hand firmly. “No, and I can’t figure out why. If you’d been a
different sort of guy, I’d’ve closed up before I gave in. But you, Finch… I
don’t know what it is, but somehow I don’t mind losing to you.”

           
“Lose? What
did you lose?”

           
Jeffers
brow furrowed, then he smiled. “You know, you’re right!” He started to laugh
and Junior joined him. There was mirth to the sound, but also the tone of
immense tension released and dissipating.

           
Heber
leaned over his desk and clapped both men on the shoulder. “This is wonderful!”
he kept saying. “This is wonderful!” Then he, too, joined in the laughter.

           
“Let’s go
down to my place for something to drink,” Jeffers said finally. “I think I need
a good drunk!”

           
“Good
idea,” Junior said. “Only I’m buying.”

           
“Coming,
Marv?” Jeffers asked.

           
“Right
behind you.” Heber glanced at the government man, who had been noticeably
silent. “Care to join us?”

           
Tayes shook
his head abruptly and snapped his attaché case shut. “No, thank you. I’ve got
to get back to the capital immediately.” He rose and hurried off into the dusk.

           
The other
three headed for the store. Walking between the lanky Heber and the mountainous
Jeffers, Junior Finch felt like a man reborn. For perhaps the first time in his
adult life, he truly felt like a Finch.

           
“AH! SO
IT’S YOU. I’ve been expecting your call. I knew you’d need me.”

           
“Never mind
that! Can you… remedy the situation as you said in my office? With no evidence
of…  anything?”

           
“Yes.”

           
“Can you do
it tonight?”

           
“Where?”

           
“Danzer, of
course!”

           
“Yes, that
can be arranged. But first there’s the matter of compensation for my efforts.”

           
“That’s no
problem. If you can remedy the situation in the proper way, you will be amply
compensated.”

           
“Very well.
I’ll leave immediately. One thing first, however – I must be absolutely sure of
this: we are talking about this Junior Finch character, are we not?”

           
“I thought
that would be obvious. Tell me… just what is it you’re going to do?”

           
“You’ll
know by tomorrow morning.”

           
MANY HOURS
AND MANY QUARTS of local squeezings later, the party was interrupted by the
opening of the front door to the store. A small, sallow man with a receding
hairline stepped inside and looked at the three celebrants.

           
“Private
party!” Jeffers roared. “Store’s closed. Come back tomorrow.”

           
“Very
well,” the little man said with a faint smile.

           
Junior
noted that the stranger’s gaze seemed to rest on him for a moment and he
shuddered. He couldn’t identify what it was exactly, considering his
near-stuporous condition, but there was something cold and very unpleasant in that
man’s dark eyes. He left without another word, however, and Junior went back to
drinking.

           
“Gentlemen,”
Junior said, struggling to his feet an hour later, “I’m calling it a night.”

           
“Siddown!”
Jeffers said. “There’s plenny left.”

           
Junior
regarded him with genuine fondness. Throughout the entire episode he had been
unable to work up any real dislike for Jeffers. The big man was naturally
straightforward and honest… just that one blind spot in his character.

           
“No, Bill.
I’m going back to the office to sleep this off. I’m really tight and I’m not
used to it. See you both tomorrow.”

           
Heber and
Jeffers waved good-by and continued drinking.

           
AT DAWN THE
NEXT MORNING, a farmer pulled up outside Jeffers’ store and was heading for the
door when he noticed something in the shadows of the alley next to the
building. He walked over to investigate. Junior Finch lay in the dust, a Vanek
ceremonial dagger neatly inserted in his heart.

           
By late
afternoon most of the planet had been informed of the incident and Heber found
himself besieged by an army of reporters in his office. Hot, muggy, with no air
to be had in that little room, he felt sick and wished everyone would lust go
away. He’d grown very fond of that young man in the few weeks he’d known him,
and now he was dead.

           
“The
medical report has just come in,” he said in a trembling voice that suddenly
quieted the babble-filled office, “and it clears the man you were all very
quick to suspect.” He paused and spoke with studied deliberateness: “The time
of death has been fixed and I can vouch for Mr. Jeffers at that time. Is that
quite clear?” There was a murmured response, a reluctant acceptance of the
fact.

           
“Now, about
the knife. It’s utterly ridiculous, of course, to suspect the Vanek. Disregard
the fact that there were no human fingerprints or skin cells on the weapon…
that can be easily managed with a lightweight glove. For even if the Vanek were
capable of such an act, Junior Finch would have been the last person on
Jebinose they would have harmed. So, we must look for a Terran murderer. It
seems to me–”

           
The crowd
of reporters parted as a young Vanek pushed his way through. Heber recognized
Rmrl.

           
“We have
come for the knife, bendreth.”

           
“I’m sorry,
my friend, but I must keep it for a while… evidence, you know.”

           
Rmrl
paused, then: “We have come for the body, too. It is to be buried with our
ancestors.”

           
“I suppose
that can be arranged when the remains are returned from the capital. There’s no
one else on the planet to claim it and nobody knows where he came from.” As the
Vanek turned to go, Heber asked, “Do you have any idea who stole the knife,
Rmrl?”

           
“Stole? It
was not stolen.”

           
“Then how
was it used against him?”

           
The Vanek’s
face twisted into a grimace that could only be interpreted as grief. “We killed
him, bendreth!”

           
“I refuse
to believe that!” Heber gasped as pandemonium broke loose in the little room.

           
“It is
true.”

           
“But what
possible reason could you give for such an act?”

           
“It is
written on the Great Wheel,” Rmrl blurted, and pushed his way out.

           
It took
Heber a while to restore order to the office, but when it was finally quiet
enough for him to speak: “I refuse for a moment to believe that a Vanek plunged
a dagger into Junior Finch’s heart! They loved that man. No, there’s a Terran
at work here and he’s holding something over the Vanek to make them take the
blame.” He came out from behind his desk, suddenly looking very old and tired.
“Now all of you please get out of here. I’ve had enough of this for one day.”

           
The
reporters filed out slowly, wondering where to go next. One hung back until
only he and Heber were in the doorway. He was young and had said little during
the afternoon.

           
“But I
thought Vanek never lie,” he whispered.

           
Heber’s
expression was a mixture of emotional pain and bafflement, with a touch of fear
on the edges.

           
“They
don’t,” he said, and closed the door.

           
JUNIOR WAS
BURIED by the Vanek the next day with full rites and honors, a ceremony
previously accorded to only the wisest and most beloved of their own race.

           
Marvin
Heber and a number of operatives from the capital made a thorough investigation
of the incident but could find no evidence that would lead them to the killer.

           
And as is
so often the case, Junior Finch was mourned and praised by many, understood by
only a few. His ghost was tearfully, skillfully, and ruthlessly invoked to
obtain enough votes to pass the Vanek Equality Act, the very piece of
legislation his efforts had proved unnecessary.

           
THE TRIP TO
DIL took two jumps and six standard days, and really wasn’t too bad physically.
Emotionally, however, it was wearing. Old Pete was her only company and Jo
found it impossible to generate any warmth for the man. She had done her best
to get out of the trip – had even hoped that Haas would refuse to see them. No
such luck. He was delighted to give them an appointment.

           
The
shipboard time did, however, give her a chance to study her old nemesis, and
she found him more puzzling than ever. He was maneuvering her toward something.
Pretending to allow her to take the lead, he was actually calling all the
plays. But what was the final destination?

           
And what
was his stake in all this? He was out of the company and probably running out
of years. Why was he out between the stars with her now?

           
The pieces
didn’t fit into a picture that made any sense to her. Everything Old Pete had
done had been for her benefit. Why then did she feel she couldn’t trust him?
Why did she always feel he was hiding something? And he was. Despite countless
protestations to the contrary, she knew he was guarding something from her.

           
Her
father’s autopsy report was another thing that bothered her. It was incomplete:
a whole section was blank. Nothing of any pertinence was missing – the cause of
death, a myocardial laceration by a Vanek ceremonial knife, was incontestable –
but the blank area gnawed at her. Old Pete had obtained the report but couldn’t
explain the lapse. Jo would find out sooner or later, though. It wasn’t her way
to let things ride. Just as it hadn’t been her way to sit back and passively
collect the annuity from her father’s IBA stock.

           
Jo couldn’t
remember exactly when she decided to put a Finch back into IBA – somewhere in
her mid-teens, she guessed – but it soon grew to be an obsession with her. She
studied the history of the company, its solid successes, its more notorious
gambles. She grew to be an authority on its workings, maneuverings, and
strategies.

           
After
tracking down all the printed and unprinted stories of Joe Finch’s Earthside
and outworld exploits, Jo became infatuated with her grandfather. She was only
seven when his flitter crashed, and had vague memories of a very tall man who
always had a present or two concealed on his person. And the more she learned
about him, the more he grew in stature. By the time she was ready to make her
move on IBA, Joe Finch was a giant in her mind.

           
Old Pete
was another matter, however. She knew that IBA had used his theories as a base
and probably would not have existed at all without him. He was an integral part
of the company’s history. She admired him for that, but no amount of admiration
could offset the deep conviction that he was responsible for her father’s
absence. She would need his help, however, if IBA was to have a Finch in charge
again.

           
Surprisingly,
Old Pete had gone along with her. After a long conversation during which he
quizzed her on the theoretical and practical aspects of IBA’s operations, and
was suitably impressed, he not only returned her father’s stock to her, but
gave her proxy power over his own to use as she saw fit when she faced the
board of directors. The gesture seemed as out of character then as it did now,
but Jo hadn’t argued.

           
The board
of directors: seven hard-nosed, tough-minded business professionals; over two
centuries of experience in the constant give-and-take of the interstellar
markets seated around a conference table, smiling politely and condescendingly
as she rose to address them.

           
The mood
around the table was tinged with amusement when she began, but had undergone a
startling metamorphosis by the time she finished. The smiles were gone,
replaced by expressions of anger, shock, and resentment.

           
Never would
she forget that day. She had been frightened and shaking before beginning her
speech, and bathed in perspiration at its finish. Five of the directors
tendered their resignations on the spot in an obvious attempt to frighten her
into backing down. She called their bluff, and within three weeks the two
remaining directors had joined the others. The official reason for the
resignations of all seven directors was that the handwriting was on the wall:

           
IBA was on
its way to becoming a family company again and this would mean the institution
of despotic control over the board. This, being contrary to their concept of
the position of the board of directors in the company hierarchy, left them no
alternative but to resign.

           
Privately,
they told their friends that they had no intentions of taking orders from a
green kid. Especially a green female kid.

           
That had
been the deciding factor, Jo knew: her sex. Those men would not work for a
woman. It was a matter of pride for them, but the problem went deeper. They had
no confidence in a woman’s ability to run a company of IBA’s complexity.

           
Strangely
enough, Old Pete did not seem to share that view, probably because he was an
Earthie. And Earthies, despite all their crowding, their decadence, their
bureaucracy-strangled lives, considered males and females equal. In the
colonial days, outworlders had held that view, too. Men and women had made the
trip out to the stars as equals, had made landfall as equals, and had started
the colonies as equals. After a while, however, things changed… especially on
the splinter worlds. With little or no contact with the mother planet, the
level of technology slipped and the embryo initiators and fetal maintenance
units were often among the first pieces of hardware to fall into disrepair.

           
Children –
lots of them – were a vital necessity to the settlements if they were going to
survive past the second or third generation, so the colonists returned to the
old-fashioned kind of fetal maintenance unit, and the technicians, navigators,
and engineers who happened to be female were soon relegated to the roles of
baby-bearers and nest-keepers.

           
Now,
centuries later, after the colonies had come into their own as the outworlds,
banding together under the Metep Imperium at first, and now under the
Federation banner, the attitude remained: a woman’s place was in the home.

           
Jo couldn’t
– wouldn’t – accept that. But her rejection of the prevailing attitudes toward
women was not a conscious struggle, nor a crusade. She carried no banners and
nailed no theses to the door. After taking over IBA, she was approached by
numerous groups pushing for male-female parity but she eschewed them all –
partly because she didn’t have time and partly because she couldn’t really
grasp the problem. As far as she could see, women wound up in secondary roles
because they accepted them. It would have been easy for her to live off the
proceeds of her stock in IBA, but she hadn’t been able to accept that. She felt
she had a right to lead the company and lead it she would. If anyone objected,
he’d better have a good reason or get out of the way.

           
Jo had
often been called shortsighted and selfish for this, but her invariable reply
was, Excuse me, I’ve got work to do.

           
In
interstellar trade circles, it was almost unthinkable that a woman should head
a major corporation. It had never really occurred to Jo that a woman should not
do so. And that was the major difference between Josephine Finch and her
contemporaries: others spent their time shouting about woman’s equality to man;
Jo spent hers proving it.

           
Word came
back that the ship was about to enter orbit, so Jo and Old Pete got their
things together and prepared to make the transfer to the shuttle. Dil’s name
was not well known among the inhabited worlds; it was an industrious little
planet but had little in the way of natural beauty and no political notoriety.

           
Not too far
from Dil’s main spaceport was the warehouse Denver Haas called home, a large
ramshackle affair with a high fence around the perimeter. The most vital and
innovative aspects of his warp gate were now protected by Federation patents,
but Haas was involved in further refinements and so security remained tight. Jo
and Old Pete had to be cleared twice before they were allowed to enter the
building.

           
Haas was
obviously not out to impress anyone. The inside of the building was as dingy as
the outside, and a lone, harried receptionist-secretary occupied the single
desk within the cluttered foyer.

           
Jo handed
the girl a clearance pass. “Josephine Finch and Peter Paxton to see Mr. Haas.”

           
The girl
took the pass without looking up, checked the appointments and nodded. Pressing
a button, she said, “Finch and Paxton are here.”

           
“Send them
in!” replied a gruff voice.

           
The girl
pointed to a nondescript door with a simple “Haas” printed on it. Jo knocked
and entered with Old Pete trailing a few steps behind.

           
The office
was an incredible clutter of filing cabinets, diagrams, blueprints, microstats,
and miscellaneous notes and drawings on scraps of paper. Denver Haas, a stubby,
feverish little man, was bent over his desk, reading and making notes, looking
like a gnome king ensconced among his treasures. He glanced up as he heard the
door close.

           
“Ah, Miss
Finch and Mr. Paxton,” he said, smiling tightly. “You’ve come. This is quite an
honor, even if it is a waste of time for the three of us.”

           
Only one
empty chair sat before the desk. Haas rose, gathered some papers off another
chair in a corner and threw them on the floor. Pushing the chair around to the
front of the desk, he said to Jo, “Sit here,” and indicated the other seat for
Old Pete.

           
They did as
they were bid and waited for the little man to regain his own seat. He was
older than Jo had imagined, with gnarled hands, an unruly shock of graying
hair, and, of all things, a beard. With all the permanent depilation techniques
available, facial hair was an unusual sight.

           
“Well, just
what is it you wanted to see me about?” he demanded abruptly. “As if I didn’t
know.”

           
“Your warp
gate,” Jo stated with her customary directness.

           
“I thought
that was it,” Haas muttered, and shook his head. “I’ve paid a small fortune for
what I was assured was the best available security, and here you walk in and
talk about my warp gate like you just had it for lunch!”

           
“Word of
something like that gets around,” Jo assured him, “especially since this isn’t
exactly a one-man operation.”

           
Haas’s head
snapped around. “What do you mean by that? This is my creation! Mine! From the
first diagram to the working model – mine!”

           
“And
financed entirely by you, of course.”

           
“What do
you know about my financing?” Haas asked in clipped tones.

           
“Not much.
But outside financing causes outside talk, and I keep myself informed on any
talk about innovative devices.”

           
“I’ll bet
you do.”

           
“It’s my
job. And because it’s my job, I’ve traveled all the way from Ragna to try and
convince you that you need IBA. Your device has good potential, but we can make
sure you get the most out of it.”

           
“‘Good
potential,’ you say?” he said mockingly with what he probably thought was a sly
smile. “It has excellent – it has astounding potential! So what makes you think
I need any help at all from IBA?”

           
“Because
you’re going to market too soon.”

           
“That is a
matter of opinion, Miss Finch.”

           
“It’s fact,
I’m afraid. Your gate has the potential for use inside a planet’s gravity well,
but you haven’t perfected that aspect yet, and it’s that–”

           
Haas
slammed his fist down on his desk and shot to his feet. “How do you know all
this! How can you! It’s all secret! No one’s supposed to know!”

           
A thought
drifted through Jo’s mind, like a small winged thing banking off an updraft:
What a naïve little man. But she refused to allow herself to be drawn from the
matter at hand.

           
“When are
you planning to introduce the gate on the market, Mr. Haas? Within one standard
year, am I correct?”

           
Haas
nodded, amazed that this young woman could know so much about his affairs.

           
“And when
will the intra-gravity well capability be perfected?”

           
Haas seated
himself again. “Five standards or so,” he said hoarsely.

           
“Well,
then. My advice is to wait. It will be extremely difficult to generate much
interest in the gate as it stands. You must remember that every interstellar
freighter currently in use is equipped with its own on-board warper. These
ships have absolutely no use for a warp gate stationed at the critical point in
the gravity well; it does little for them that they can’t do themselves. The
big companies might purchase a few for high traffic use along the major trade
lanes, but the smaller companies are going to be hard-pressed to meet what I
assume will be a very steep price. In brief, Mr. Hass: without the
intra-gravity well capability, your warp gate will never get off the ground.”