F Paul Wilson - LaNague 02 (9 page)

           
Andy Tella
cleared his throat and straightened up in his chair. “Since you’re both here to
learn of the mysterious doings on Dil, I’ll get right to them – and believe me,
they make some story.”

           
Easly
nodded in agreement as he ignited the end of a torpedo-shaped cigar, but said
nothing. Clouds of blue-white smoke encircled his head for a brief instant
before being drawn away by the ventilation system.

           
 
“First step,” Tella began, “was to go to the
Fed patent office, use a few contacts, and find out if there’s been much
activity in the way of new patents from Dil. Answer: yes. A spatial engineer by
the name of Denver Haas has recently developed something he calls a ‘warp gate’
and is ready to go into production. I managed to get a quick look at his file,
made a copy of it, naturally” – the briefest of smiles here – “and Larry and I
went over it.”

           
Easly
picked up the story here. “You must understand, of course, that neither Andy
nor I have much of a grounding in physics and those papers were pretty damn
technical. We couldn’t go around asking experts to decipher them for us because
we weren’t supposed to have a copy. So we bought some teaching trodes and came
up with a rough idea of what this ‘warp gate’ is.”

           
 
“Let’s lay some groundwork first,” Tella said,
and turned to Jo and Old Pete. “Do you know how the warp unit on the average
interstellar ship works?”

           
Jo
shrugged. “It creates some kind of field that allows the ship to leave real
space and enter subspace where it can take exaggerated advantage of the normal
curvature of space.”

           
 
“Very nicely put,” Tella said with an
approving nod. “I’ve been studying this stuff for the past week and I never
could have capsulized it so well. But you’ve got just about everything there.
The warp drive lets you travel under the curve of space; the higher the degree
of warp, the longer the jump. That ‘some kind of field’ is important here, because
it determines the degree of warp. Warp fields are a poor imitation of the field
around a black hole; Haas has gone a step further. He has managed to link a
pair of quantum black holes and generate one helluva warp field between them.”

           
 
“I knew it!” Old Pete slapped the table. “When
I heard fifty years ago that they’d found a way to lock up quantum holes in a
stasis field, I said someday somebody’s going to find a commercial use for
those things! And sure enough, somebody has!”

           
Jo was
pensive. “So he’s turned things around, eh? Instead of generating the warp from
inside the ship, he generates it externally and lets the ship pass through –
for a fee, I assume.”

           
 
“I suppose so,” Tella replied. “Either that or
a company buys a gate and uses it exclusively for its own craft. They’re going
to be hellishly expensive, though. Finding quantum holes isn’t too hard, but
locking them up in a stasis field small enough to make the holes useful and
large enough to prevent anything from accidentally entering their event
horizons is pretty tricky. But that’s not the whole story. Wait’ll you hear
this: Denver Haas is rumored to be working on modifications that will
theoretically allow his warp gate to operate inside a planet’s gravity well!”

           
Stunned
silence at Old Pete and Jo’s end of the table.

           
The major
drawback to the current on-board warp unit was its inability to generate a
stable warp field in the presence of any appreciable gravitational influence,
whether stellar or planetary. This necessitated the use of peristellar drive
tubes to travel past the point of critical influence for a given planet
circling a given star. And this type of travel, despite the use of a
proton-proton drive in tubes lined with Leason crystals, was maddeningly slow.
But if all that could be eliminated, if all you had to do was shuttle up to the
ship, board, and then flash through an orbiting warp gate…

           
 
“If that’s truly possible,” Old Pete said in
an awe-tinged voice, “then humankind will be able to begin its golden age as an
interstellar race.”

           
Easly and
Tella glanced at each other and the latter said, “I never looked at it that
way, but–”

           
“But
nothing!” the old man retorted. “The first interstellar trips took decades; the
perfection of the warp field made them a matter of days, weeks, or months,
depending on where you were coming from and where you were going. We are now
talking about hours! Hours between the stars! Think of what that will mean for
trade!”

           
“The thing
is, Mr. Paxton,” Easly said patiently, “that this guy Haas hasn’t perfected
those modifications yet.”

           
“He must
have if he’s going into production as Andy said.”

           
Easly shook
his head. “He’s going to market with a prototype that can only operate beyond
the critical point in the gravity well.”

           
For the
second time that evening, there was dead silence at that particular pokochess
table. Jo finally broke it.

           
“You must
be mistaken, Larry.”

           
“I assure
you I’m not.”

           
“But it
simply doesn’t make sense. He’ll be trying to market a rather expensive device
that offers no real advantage over the onboard warp unit.”

           
“Oh, it has
advantages,” Easly replied. “The gates generate an extremely high-degree warp,
high enough so a ship can travel from gate to gate in a single jump. No more
jumping in and out of warp, checking co-ordinates, then jumping again. You just
follow a subspace beam from one gate to another.”

           
“Not
enough!” Jo said. “The big expense in interstellar travel is time, and the Haas
gate that takes days to get to saves no time. The warp jumps are inconvenient,
but they add little appreciable time to the trip. If Haas can eliminate the
trip out past – and back from – the critical point in the gravity well, he’ll
have revolutionized interstellar travel; if not, then he’s only invented an
expensive toy.”

           
“Expensive
to his backers, you mean,” Old Pete added.

           
“That,
too,” Jo agreed with a nod. “
Star Ways
will see to it that he doesn’t sell too many gates.”

           
“How can
they do that?” Tella asked. “And why?”

           
Jo signaled
the waiter for another round of drinks before answering. “
Star
Ways
is known as the biggest corporation in human
history, right? It’s a conglomerate with subsidiaries in every sector of Terran
space. Everybody knows that. But what is the basis for its growth to its
present size?”

           
Comprehension
suddenly dawned in Tella’s face. “Of course! The on-board warp unit!”

           
“Right. The
warp gate is an eventual threat to the product that forms the economic basis
for the conglomerate. Star Ways is not going to let anything hurt its warp unit
sales if it can help it. It will cut prices to the bone until Haas has to
fold.”

           
“The Haas
warp gate,” Old Pete summarized, “is doomed if it goes to market in its present
form. It might have a chance if there were no competition from the conventional
warp unit sector – some of the trade fleets might decide to invest in gates as
their present onboard units depreciated – but it would be a very slow seller.
If someone asked me whether or not to venture any money on Mr. Haas, my answer
would be a definite no!”

           
He halted
discreetly as the waiter arrived with the fresh drinks, and resumed when the
four of them were alone again.

           
“But the
question still remains: what’s the connection between Haas and deBloise?
There’s no doubt in my mind now that Doyl Catera was talking shout the warp
gate when he referred to a technological innovation that could make all planets
neighbors. But why is it so important to the Restructurists? What do they hope
to get out of it?”

           
“Well,”
Easly said after carefully weighing and assessing the facts and opinions that
had crisscrossed the table since they had seated themselves, “certainly not a
return on their investment.”

           
“You mean
deBloise and his crew are backing Haas?” Old Pete sputtered, almost choking on
a sip of scotch.

           
“One
hundred percent. But apparently they don’t want anyone to know. They’ve gone to
an awful lot of trouble – three or four dummy investment groups, I’m told – to
keep their names out of it. Haas probably doesn’t even know they’re involved.
They’ve done an excellent job, according to my informant; no one could ever
prove conclusively that there was a connection between Denver Haas and the
Restructurist big shots… and my informant says he’ll deny any knowledge of the
whole affair if I try to use him as a source.”

           
“Sounds
sinister,” Joe mused with a glance at Old Pete. “Your conspiracy theory sounds
more and more plausible every minute. But the rationale behind the whole thing
completely eludes me at the moment.”

           
“I may not
know the means,” Old Pete offered, “but I know the end: the end of the free market.”

           
Jo wrinkled
up her nose in a frankly skeptical grimace.

           
“You look
like you just got a whiff of week-old chispen innards,” Old Pete said.

           
“It’s just
that it’s such an absurd idea. I mean, how can you have commerce without a free
market?”

           
“It can be
done. It’s not easy, but it can be done. Traders can always find a way. They’re
the most resourceful members of the species. If a government tries to destroy a
free market, as it is often wont to do, by controlling the supply of certain
commodities or restricting the free movement of goods, traders and buyers will
always manage to get together some way. If the free market is declared void by
the government, they make their own. Only then it’s known as a ‘black’ market.”

           
Old Pete
paused as he noted the puzzled expressions around him. “I forgot. Your economic
education in the outworlds is still very naïve. You lack my advantage of
growing up on Earth. I’m all too familiar with things such as excise taxes,
trade bureaus, commerce commissions, sales taxes–”

           
“Sales
taxes! What are they?” Tella asked with an amused smile.

           
“That’s a
new one on you, is it? You’ve heard of the income tax, of course. Most
outworlds have it in some form or another. That’s the way the politicos get
your money as it enters your pocket. And when they’ve taxed that to the limit
the populace will tolerate, they go to work on finding ways to get a piece of
what’s left of your money as it comes out of your pocket. That’s called a sales
tax: you pay a tribute to the current regime every time you buy something.”

           
Jo shook
her head in disbelief. “I find it incredible that any population would put up
with such abuse. There’d be rioting in the streets here on Ragna if anyone
tried to foist that kind of nonsense on us!”

           
“Don’t
count on it. As that famous Earth philosopher Muniz put it a long time ago:
‘The masses are asses.’ And while I don’t subscribe to such a cynical, elitist
point of view, I fear he may have been right. I never cease to be amazed at
what people will put up with if it’s presented to them in a pretty package.
These tax schemes are always preceded by a propaganda blitz or by a financial
crisis that has been either manufactured or caused by the bureaucracy itself.
The ‘public good’ is stressed and before you know it, the public has allowed
someone else to slip his hand into its pocket. As time goes on, little by
little the state manages to funnel more and more money through its myriad
bureaus and eventually the politicians are running the entire economy.”

           
Jo was
still dubious. “Who in his or her right mind would allow politicians to make
economic policy? Most of them are small-town lawyers who got involved in
planetary politics and wound up in the Federation Assembly. They’ve had a year
or so of economic theory in their undergraduate education, usually from a
single source, and that’s the extent of their qualifications in the field of
economics. How can they possibly have the gall to want to plan the course of an
economy that affects the lives of billions of people?”

           
“They not
only have the gall for it; they will claw and scramble over each other in a mad
rush to see who can do more of it.”

           
“Okay.
Granted, such men exist and some of them are probably in the Federation
Assembly. But I’m sure they’re outnumbered.”

           
“I’m going
to tell you Paxton’s First Law,” Old Pete said, raising his index finger:
“Never trust anyone who runs for office.”

           
“Maybe it’s
time someone paid a visit to Mr. Haas and got some first-hand information,”
Easly suggested, getting back to business.