The Year's Best Science Fiction 9

He held up a dirty hand. “Not all the Moon. Just those rights on it. The rest of the Moon you can keep.”

“It’s still a lot. You’ve got to go a hell of a lot higher than two thousand dollars for any hunk of real estate that big.”

Eksar began wrinkling and twitching. “How—how much higher?”

“Well, let’s not kid each other. This is the big time now! We’re not talking about bridges or rivers or seas. This is a whole world and part of another that you’re buying. It takes dough. You’ve got to be prepared to spend dough.”

“How much?” He looked as if he were jumping up and down inside his dirty Palm Beach suit. People going in and out of the store kept staring at us. “How much?” he whispered.

“Fifty thousand. It’s a damn low price. And you know it.”

Eksar went limp all over. Even his weird eyes seemed to sag. “You’re crazy,” he said in a low, hopeless voice. “You’re out of your head.”

He turned and started for the revolving door, walking in a kind of used-up way that told me I’d really gone over the line. He didn’t look back once. He just wanted to get far, far away.

I grabbed the bottom of his filthy jacket and held on tight.

“Look, Eksar,” I said, fast, as he pulled. “I went over your budget, way over, I can see that. But you know you can do better than two thousand. I want as much as I can get. What the hell, I’m taking time out to bother with you. How many other guys would?”

That got him. He cocked his head, then began nodding. I let go of his jacket as he came around. We were connecting again!

“Good. You level with me, and I’ll level with you. Go up a little higher. What’s your best price? What’s the best you can do?”

He stared down the street, thinking, and his tongue came out and licked at the side of his dirty mouth. His tongue was dirty, too. I mean that! Some kind of black stuff, grease or grime, was all over his tongue.

“How about,” he said, after a while, “how about twenty-five hundred? That’s as high as I can go. I don’t have another cent.”

He was like me: he was a natural bargainer.

“You can go to three thousand,” I urged. “How much is three thousand? Only another five hundred. Look what you get for it. Earth, the whole planet, and fishing and mineral rights and buried treasure, all that stuff on the Moon. How’s about it?”

“I can’t. I just can’t. I wish I could.” He shook his head as if to shake loose all those tics and twitches. “Maybe this way. I’ll go as high as twenty-six hundred. For that, will you give me Earth and just fishing rights and buried-treasure rights on the Moon? You keep the mineral rights. I’ll do without them.”

“Make it twenty-eight hundred and you can have the mineral rights, too. You want them, I can tell you do. Treat yourself. Just two hundred bucks more, and you can have them.”

“I can’t have everything. Some things cost too much. How about twenty-six fifty, without the mineral rights and without the buried-treasure rights?”

We were both really swinging now. I could feel it.

“This is my absolutely last offer,” I told him. “I can’t spend all day on this. I’ll go down to twenty-seven hundred and fifty, and not a penny less. For that, I’ll give you Earth and just fishing rights on the Moon. Or just buried-treasure rights. You pick whichever one you want.”

“All right,” he said. “You’re a hard man; we’ll do it your way.”

“Twenty-seven fifty for the Earth and either fishing or buried-treasure rights on the Moon?”

“No, twenty-seven even, and no rights on the Moon. I’ll forget about that. Twenty-seven even, and all I get is the Earth.”

“Deal!” I sang out, and we struck hands. We shook on it

Then, with my arm around his shoulders—what did I care about the dirt on his clothes when the guy was worth twenty-seven hundred dollars to me?—we marched back to the drugstore.

“I want a receipt,” he reminded me.

“Right,” I said. “But I put the same stuff on it: that I’m selling you whatever equity I own or have a right to sell. You’re getting a lot for your money.”

“You’re getting a lot of money for what you’re selling,” he came right back. I liked him. Twitches and dirt or not, he was my kind of guy.

We got back to the druggist for notarization, and, honest, I’ve never seen a man look more disgusted in my life. “Business is good, huh?” he said. “You two are sure hotting it up.”

“Listen, you,” I told him. “You just notarize.” I showed the receipt to Eksar. “This the way you want it?”

He studied it, coughing. “Whatever equity you own or have a right to sell. All right. And put in, you know, in your capacity as sales agent, your professional capacity.”

I changed the receipt and signed it. The druggist notarized.

Eksar brought that lump of money out of his pants pocket. He counted out 54 crisp new 50s and laid them on the glass counter. Then he picked up the receipt, folded it and put it away. He started for the door.

I grabbed up the money and went with him. “Anything else?”

“Nothing else,” he said. “It’s all over. We made our deal.”

“I know, but we might find something else, another item.”

“There’s nothing else to find. We made our deal.” And his voice told me he really meant it. It didn’t have a trace of the tell-me-more whine that you’ve got to hear before there’s business.

I came to a stop and watched him push out through the revolving door. He went right out into the street and turned left and kept moving, all fast, as if he was in a hell of a hurry.

There was no more business. OK. I had thirty-two hundred and thirty dollars in my wallet that I’d made in one morning.

But how good had I really been? I mean, what was the top figure in the show’s budget? How close had I come to it?

I had a contact who maybe could find out—Morris Burlap.

Morris Burlap is in business like me, only he’s a theatrical agent, sharp, real sharp. Instead of selling a load of used copper wire, say, or an option on a corner lot in Brooklyn, he sells talent. He sells a bunch of dancers to a hotel in the mountains, a piano player to a bar, a disc jockey or a comic to late-night radio. The reason he’s called Morris Burlap is because of these heavy Harris-tweed suits he wears winter and summer, every day in the year. They reinforce the image, he says.

I called him from a telephone booth near the entrance and filled him in on the giveaway show. “Now, what I want to find out—”

“Nothing to find out,” he cut in. “There’s no such show, Bernie.”

“There sure as hell is, Morris. One you haven’t heard of.”

“There’s no such show. Not in the works, not being rehearsed, not anywhere. Look: before a show gets to where it’s handing out this kind of dough, it’s got to have a slot, it’s got to have air time all bought. And before it even buys air time, a packager has prepared a pilot. By then I’d have gotten a casting call—I’d have heard about it a dozen different ways. Don’t try to tell me my business, Bernie; when I say there’s no such show, there’s no such show.”

So damn positive he was. I had a crazy idea all of a sudden and turned it off. No. Not that. No.

“Then it’s a newspaper or college research thing, like Ricardo said?”

He thought it over. I was willing to sit in that stuffy telephone booth and wait; Morris Burlap has a good head. “Those damn documents, those receipts, newspapers and colleges doing research don’t operate that way. And nuts don’t either. I think you’re being taken, Bernie. How you’re being taken, I don’t know, but you’re being taken.”

That was enough for me. Morris Burlap can smell a hustle through sixteen feet of rockwool insulation. He’s never wrong. Never.