Robert Heinlein - Variable Star

Hattori was a banker. Bankers know all about very large sums of money. Did I know anyone who was connected in some way with very large sums of money? Had I not, indeed, recently roundly pissed off some people of that description? If they took a notion to have some sort of heavy weight dropped on my scrotum in retaliation, might not a banker be their chosen instrument?

It was hard to sustain alarm. As far as I knew, I really was bulletproof, from a financial point of view: I had nothing to steal, no credit to ruin. If the Conrads wanted vengeance, they would just have to have me beaten or killed like civilized people.

Nonetheless by the time I reached Hattori’s cabin I was paranoid enough to be feeling just a bit belligerent. I was going to stop just outside his door and take a few deep breaths to calm down, but the door recognized me and opened before I had the chance.

I had expected his quarters to be impressive. They exceeded my expectations. They were tasteful, supremely comfortable despite a Zen simplicity, luxurious without ostentation. A Hawaiian slack-key guitar played at background level—Cyril Pahinui, I think. I was given an understanding chair, and offered a beverage impressive enough to denote respect, which I accepted.

Banker Hattori was a pleasant-looking cobber. I’d have guessed his ancestry at a combination of something like Hawaiian or Japanese and Scottish or German. He was short by Ganymedean standards, a little short even by Terran reckoning, but well proportioned and clearly in excellent physical shape. Back on Terra, he might have sailed, climbed mountains, run marathons, flown an ultralight. Now that those joys were lost to him for the next twenty years, he probably played a competitive but noncontact sport, and worked out. But he was not hard to take the way some jocks can be, did not challenge.

In person, his smile was as subtly off as it had been over the phone. The surprisingly few seconds he wasted on polite ritual and pleasantry gave me just enough time to figure out what was odd about it. He was clearly a man who smiled a lot, in his off hours—the placement and depth of the smile wrinkles at his mouth and eyes told you that—but he was unaccustomed to smiling like that at work .

In retrospect, it’s actually pretty impressive that he didn’t drag it out longer than he did, surround it with even more of a big drumroll buildup. I couldn’t have blamed him if he had. He must indeed not have gotten to impart news of that particular sort very often.

But he was a professional, and also I think a reasonably kindly man, so he merely teased me with it until I wanted to throttle him.

“You have made no financial investment in this colony so far, Joel,” he began. We were Joel and Paul by then. “Looking over your records, I see that your motives in joining us were personal and emotional rather than economic. I would like to explain, briefly, why I think that was a mistake, and then—”

“Paul, excuse me for interrupting, but your pump is sucking air. I have no capital at all.”

He held up his hands. “Please—indulge me for just a moment. Think of it as a hypothetical. I did say ‘briefly.’”

He really did have a nice smile. Odd or not. “You have the floor.”

“I say I am the ship’s banker, and that is one of the things I do. I am also our colony’s chief financial adviser, and act as its representative.”

I nodded, impressed. “Quite a job. It can’t be easy, arranging to borrow such stupendous sums, let alone handling them wisely.”

“Let me give you an imaginary hypothetical conversation between me and a Terran banker, shortly before we left the Solar System.”

He proceeded to act it out, using different hokey but clever cartoon voices:

“Banker: Greetings, gentleman merchant adventurer, hereafter known as GMA. I assume you’re here to ask about a loan, and I’m sorry to say money is very tight just now—

“GMA: I have some lubricant with me.

“Banker: Excuse me?

“GMA: I can help solve tight money. I am here to discuss a loan, as you suggest. But I don’t want to borrow. I want to lend you money.

“Banker: Really? Well, now. That would certainly be agreeable, in principle. What sort of terms and conditions did you have in mind?

“GMA: Here is a check, representing gold dollars in Zurich.

“Banker: How m—oh my, a great many.

“GMA: A very great many.

“Banker: I… see. And you want to give it to us.

“GMA: I want you to invest it for me at compound interest. A rate of eleven percent a year would be acceptable.

“Banker: That is a very high rate of interest!

“GMA: Not if I undertake not to touch the money for twenty years…

“Banker: Ah. I begin to see. But what’s in it for me—besides the usual fees? How does this loosen tight money?

“GMA: You have the full use of that money for twenty years, and keep all the profits. All you have to do is invest soundly enough so the capital sum remains intact… a trick venture capitalists like yourself are rather good at.

“Banker: Well, thank you. But I don’t see what’s in it for you . For the same twenty years, you’re depriving yourself of that same money, receiving no payments.

“GMA (smiling broadly): Yes, but you see, I intend to age more slowly than you….”

He smiled.

“I get it—I think,” I told Paul. “It really is a clever swindle.”

“It’s not a swindle,” he said.

“It has to be. People are earning large sums of money for either sitting and waiting, or else for traveling expensively. Somebody has to be getting swindled for it. TANSTAAFL.”

“That principle doesn’t apply here. In this one case, there is such a thing as a free lunch. Wealth is being created by time . Nobody’s being swindled because nobody’s losing anything.”

I must have looked stubborn.

“The key phrase was, ‘You will have the use of that money for twenty years.’ Suppose the moment we get to Immega 714 we do an instant one-eighty, slingshot around it and hotfoot it right back to Sol at the same speed. It took us twenty years to get there, twenty years to come back; we arrive at Terra forty years older than we started. But what we find when we debark—”

I started to see it. “Finagle on fire!”

“—is a Terra more than one hundred and sixty years older than when we left it.”

“With a hundred and twenty years of free interest!” The beauty of it washed over me.

“Not free,” he said. “We had to get our butts up to a large fraction of c, and keep them there for forty years. But real cheap. Are you ready for more of the special blend?”

“Oh, that really is lovely, Paul,” I said as he poured generous refills for both of us. “You’re absolutely right: for the first time, I genuinely regret not having been able to kick any money into the pot myself.”

“Well, theoretically, of course, a person could choose to buy in even now—or for that matter, at any point in the trip, although the degree of participation would naturally go down some as the voyage gets longer.”

I grinned, and a faint tingling of the lips told me the special blend was beginning to hit me. “With what I make turning shit and piss back into food, plus what I hope in my wildest dreams to earn in tips playing at the Horn of Plenty, by the time we reach Peekaboo I can confidently expect to see profits in the low five figures.”

That mysterious smile had never quite left him, even when he was playing Banker and GMA. It was still there, and now his eyes were twinkling, too. “Joel, let me tell you about another starship, a long time ago. One of the unlucky ones. There was bad sickness aboard, one you didn’t get over. Both their telepaths died in the first wave, so the only reports were by radio and laser. Some of their Relativists died, and then it was reported that all the others were infected, and the quantum ramjet was being shut down. That cut the power for the radio and lasers, and the ship passed from human history.”