The Year's Best Science Fiction 9

It was hot in that hotel-room doorway, and I was sweating like crazy. But I was feeling better. All of a sudden, I’d got the message that Eksar wanted to do business with me. I grinned at him.

He changed color a little under all that dirt. “What’s your offer, anyway?” he asked, coughing. “Name a figure.”

“You name one. You got the property, I got the dough.”

“Aah!” he grunted impatiently, and pushed me out of the way. He was strong! I ran after him to the elevator.

“How much you want, Eksar?” I asked him as we were going down.

A shrug. “I got a planet, and I got a buyer for it. You, you’re in a jam. The one in a pickle is the one who’s got to tickle.”

The louse! For every one of my moves, he knew the countermove.

He checked out and I followed him into the street. Down Broadway we went, me offering him the thirty-two hundred and thirty he’d paid me, him saying he couldn’t make a living out of shoving the same amount of money back and forth all day. “Thirty-four?” Offered. “I mean, you know, thirty-four fifty?” He just kept walking.

If I didn’t get him to name a figure, any figure, I’d be dead.

I ran in front of him. “Eksar, let’s stop hustling each other. If you didn’t want to sell, you couldn’t be talking to me in the first place. You name a figure. Whatever it is, I’ll pay it.”

That got a reaction. “You mean it? You won’t try to chisel?”

“How can I chisel? I’m over a barrel.”

“OK, then. I’ll give you a break and save myself a long trip back to my client. What’s fair for you and fair for me and fair all around? Let’s say eight thousand even?”

Eight thousand—it was almost exactly what I had in the bank. He knew my bank account cold, up to the last statement.

He knew my thoughts cold, too. “You’re going to do business with a guy,” he said, between coughs, “you check into him a little. You got eight thousand and change. It’s not much for saving a guy’s neck.”

I was boiling. “Not much? Then let me set you straight, you Florence goddamn Nightingale! You’re not getting it! A little skin I know maybe I have to give up. But not every cent I own, not for you, not for Earth, not for anybody!”

A cop came up close to see why I was yelling, and I had to calm down until he went away again. “Help! Police! Aliens invading us!” I almost screamed out. What would the street we were standing on look like in ten years if I didn’t talk Eksar out of that receipt?

“Eksar, your client takes over Earth waving my receipt— I’ll be hung high. But I’ve got only one life, and my life is buying and selling. I can’t buy and sell without capital. Take my capital away, and it makes no difference to me who owns Earth and who doesn’t.”

“Who the hell do you think you’re kidding?” he said.

“I’m not kidding anybody. Honest, it’s the truth. Take my capital away, and it makes no difference if I’m alive or if I’m dead.”

That last bit of hustle seemed to have reached him. Listen, there were practically tears in my eyes the way I was singing it. How much capital did I need, he wanted to know —five hundred? I told him I couldn’t operate one single day with less than seven times that. He asked me if I was really seriously trying to buy my lousy little planet back— or was today my birthday and I was expecting a present from him? “Don’t give your presents to me,” I told him. “Give them to fat people. They’re better than going on a diet.”

And so we went. Both of us talking ourselves blue in the face, swearing by everything, arguing and bargaining, wheeling and dealing. It was touch and go who was going to give up first.

But neither of us did. We both held out until we reached what I’d figured pretty early we were going to wind up with, maybe a little bit more.

Six thousand, one hundred and fifty dollars.

That was the price over and above what Eksar had given me. The final deal. Listen, it could have been worse.

Even so, we almost broke up when we began talking payment.

“Your bank’s not far. We could get there before closing.”

“Why walk myself into a heart attack? My check’s good as gold.”

“Who wants a piece of paper? I want cash. Cash is definite.”

Finally, I managed to talk him into a check. I wrote it out; he took it and gave me the receipts, all of them. Every last receipt I’d signed. Then he picked up his little satchel and marched away.

Straight down Broadway, without even a good-bye. All business, Eksar was, nothing but business. He didn’t look back once.

All business. I found out next morning he’d gone right to the bank and had my check certified before closing time. What do you think of that? I couldn’t do a damn thing: I was out six thousand, one hundred and fifty dollars. Just for talking to someone.

Ricardo said I was a Faust. I walked out of the bank, beating my head with my fist, and I called up him and Morris Burlap and asked them to have lunch with me. I went over the whole story with them in an expensive place that Ricardo picked out. “You’re a Faust,” he said.

“What Faust?” I asked him. “Who Faust? How Faust?”

So naturally he had to tell us all about Faust. Only I was a new kind of Faust, a twentieth century-American one. The other Fausts, they wanted to know everything. I wanted to own everything.

“But I didn’t wind up owning,” I pointed out. “I got taken. Six thousand, one hundred and fifty dollars’ worth I got taken.”

Ricardo chuckled and leaned back in his chair. “O my sweet gold,” he said under his breath. “O my sweet gold.”

“What?”

“A quotation, Bernie. From Marlowe’s The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus. I forget the context, but it seems apt. ‘O my sweet gold.’”

I looked from him to Morris Burlap, but nobody can ever tell when Morris Burlap is puzzled. As a matter of fact, he looks more like a professor than Ricardo, him with those thick Harris tweeds and that heavy, thinking look. Ricardo is, you know, a bit too natty.

The two of them added up to all the brains and sharpness a guy could ask for. That’s why I was paying out an arm and a leg for this lunch, on top of all my losses with Eksar.

“Morris, tell the truth. You understand him?”

“What’s there to understand, Bernie? A quote about the sweet gold? It might be the answer, right there.”

Now I looked at Ricardo. He was eating away at a creamy Italian pudding. Two bucks even, those puddings cost in that place.

“Let’s say he was an alien,” Morris Burlap said. “Let’s say he came from somewhere in outer space. OK. Now what would an alien want with U. S. dollars? What’s the rate of exchange out there?”

“You mean he needed it to buy some merchandise here on Earth?”

“That’s exactly what I mean. But what kind of merchandise, that’s the question. What could Earth have that he’d want?”

Ricardo finished the pudding and wiped his lips with a napkin. “I think you’re on the right track, Morris,” he said, and I swung my attention back to him. “We can postulate a civilization far in advance of our own. One that would feel we’re not quite ready to know about them. One that has placed primitive little Earth strictly off limits—a restriction only desperate criminals dare ignore.”

“From where come criminals, Ricardo, if they’re so advanced?”

“Laws produce lawbreakers, Bernie, like hens produce eggs. Civilization has nothing to do with it. I’m beginning to see Eksar now. An unprincipled adventurer, a star-man version of those cutthroats who sailed the South Pacific a hundred years or more ago. Once in a while, a ship would smash upon the coral reefs, and a bloody opportunist out of Boston would be stranded for life among primitive, backward tribesmen. I’m sure you can fill in the rest.”