Tuning William - Fuzzy Bones

Very efficient.

Hugo Ingermann was in the category of "other interested parties." As the moving and guiding force behind all activities illegal or even slightly shady in Mallorysport, Ingermann was interested in everything and everybody that might be on an incoming hypership from Terra.

This was not to say that Hugo Ingermann would turn honest business from his door. During the seven years or so that he had maintained his busy law practice in Mallorysport he had represented at least eight clients who were completely honest and respectable persons. He owned some land north of the capital city. And he was a partner in several perfectly legal businesses-to say nothing of being a major shareholder in a dozen more.

Ever alert to the opportunities which abound on a colony planet, Ingermann was also the architect and principal advisor of several loosely and informally organized conglomerates in Mallorysport.

Ivan Bowlby's entertainment enterprises-telecast productions, prize-fights, nightclubs formed the visible surface of his activities. Out of sight-prostitution, murder for hire, the black-market, and a little dope business here and there.

Spike Heenan's specialty was gambling: crap games, numbers, bookmaking, and fixing sports events. His respectable front-in which Hugo Ingermann was a partner-was a company which leased vending machines and electronic games.

Raul Laporte's talents leaned toward racketeering, extortion, plain old-fashioned country-style crime, and stolen goods. He had expertly developed a system of fences for illegal sunstone buying when the Company had been the only legal buyer for them. Rather than let that part of his operation lay fallow since the Pendarvis Decisions, Laporte had sketched out a plan to expand into straight robbery of sunstone prospectors right at the diggings-cut out the middleman-just as soon as he could find time to organize the operation personally.

The most respectably-fronted of Ingermann's proteges was Leo Thaxter, Loan Broker and Financier-also shylock, smuggler, bag-man, and protection racketeer. He used Laporte's strongarm employees for collections.

When Thaxter came to Zarathustra ten years earlier, he had fooled around with

some small-time rackets, set up some crooked labor unions and a couple of marketing cooperatives to put the squeeze on planters. Nothing really big, though, until he fell under the tutelage of Ingermann some four or five years later-who had showed him how to make good money by laundering bad money and investing the profits in six-for-five loans to people who couldn't borrow anywhere else.

His sister, Rose Thaxter, had married Conrad Evins, who later became the chief gem-buyer for the CZC. At the height of the Fuzzy craze, the three of them had kidnapped some Fuzzies and trained them to get into the Company gem vault through the ventilation system. Ambitious enterprise that; the vault contained upwards of one hundred million sols worth of sunstones.

They almost got away with it. Two minor henchmen, Phil Novaes and Moses Herckerd, had been caught inside Company House with the loot. Herckerd managed to get well-ventilated by a Company policeman with a submachine gun. Novaes lived to stand trial on charges of enslavement, with Mr. and Mrs. Evins, and the three of them received the mandatory sentence for that crime-death administered by a pistol shot in the back of the head; no discretion of the court allowed.

Ingermann angrily jerked out a fresh printout. The fools, he thought. If only the idiots had consulted me, I could have showed them the weak spots in their plan.

As it was, he had just barely managed getting Thaxter off, and had actually been arrested himself when the police started rounding up everyone connected with Thaxter.

The whole matter had been a great source of aggravation for Attorney General Gustavus Adolphus Brannhard, who "knew" they were all guilty, but didn't quite have enough on them to take it to court.

The hincty bastard tried to put me under veridication for questioning to have me disbarred. Ingermann became enraged every time he thought of the incident.

Patience will put the whole goody, goody lot of them in my hands, sooner or later; then I'll squeeze the juice out of their pious guts.

What irritated Ingermann was not that the caper had gone wrong, not that four people had been caught, not that he himself had come close to veridicated questioning about his enterprises, a thing that would have meant ruin and jail; but that the whole scheme had gone sour before he could get hold of the sunstones. He would have considered it a profitable bargain to trade the lives of four of his own people for- say-a double handful of sunstones.

Ingermann shook his head sadly and went back to perusing the printout sheets.

Now, here was an interesting item. Three first-class passengers from Terra.

The passage voucher number of one of them had an "R" suffix. Restricted entry; data not available except to official inquirers, and then on a "need to know"

basis only. No way to match the number up to a name at this end of the trip.

Payment vouchers were like boarding passes or baggage tickets. Passengers presented their vouchers to the chief steward upon entering the ship and he recorded the number on his manifest. After that it was a matter of head-counting and tally-keeping. Three boardings first-class for Zarathustra; and if three got off at Zarathustra all was in order. Anything more detailed was a violation of the Privacy Act.

An "R " suffix indicated the possible presence of a Federation official or government employee of fairly high rank among those three first-class

passengers.

Interesting.

The chief steward who recorded the voucher numbers might remember which passenger showed him the "R" voucher, but that steward had long-since switched over to an inbound ship at some intermediate port.

There was a way, of course, to dig out the information from the other end, on Terra, but it would take a year just to get the inquiry back to his source and receive a reply. Easier, really, to just knock them in the head one at a time here in Mallorysport and steal their ticket copies-if they hadn't already been tossed in the trash converter.

It might not amount to anything, but Ingermann made a stenomemophone note of it, anyway. If any one of these three people began to take an interest in things within his sphere of influence, it might warrant some further digging.

Chapter 7

When Major Lunt returned to his office, there was a slender gentleman sitting at his desk-with his feet propped up on it-and puffing on the short pipe that had yellowed the corners of his white moustache.

At the sound of boots scraping behind him, he bounded to his feet and turned.

"Hi, George," he said.

"Good morning, Jack. What's up?"

Holloway leaned on the corner of the desk. "Well, I need to get something worked up on paper for the mining reserve that we 're leasing to the Zarathustra Company up there in the Fuzzy Reservation."

When they were just getting this thing together, Holloway hadn't thought of himself as the Commissioner of Native Affairs, and he hadn't thought of the ZNPF as his private police force, although it was. There was a job to be done looking out for the Fuzzies' interests and it was too important to entrust to anyone else. In the early days he and George Lunt had shared a makeshift hut and called it an office, communicating by shouting back and forth from their desks. Now they had to hike through a hundred-twenty-foot stretch of desks and office machines and roboclerks and human secretaries to get to each other's offices.

"When I put this deal together in my head," Jack said, "Ben Rainsford was very busy being the new Governor General and very busy hating Victor Grego and the CZC as the unscrupulous enemy. Now that I've finally got them doing business with each other, the royalties we'll get from the Company for mining that rich patch of sunstones Gerd and I found in Fuzzy territory just might be enough to keep everything afloat until after the constitutional elections. The government can't levy taxes till then. In the meantime, I want to get the mining operation underway."