Poul Anderson: A Circus of Hells

“I know, I know. I’m not asking you to skimp it. I told you I’m a loyal citizen. But if you jogged off your track awhile—it shouldn’t cost more than a couple of weeks extra—”

“Cost me my scalp if anyone found out,” Flandry said.

Ammon nodded. “That’s how I’ll know I can trust you to keep quiet. And you’ll trust me, because suborning an Imperial officer is a capital offense—anyhow, it usually is when it involves a matter like this, that’s not going to get mentioned to the authorities or the tax assessors.”

“Why not send your personal vessel to look?”

Ammon laid aside his mannerisms. “I haven’t got one. If I hired a civilian, what hold would I have on him? Especially an Old Town type. I’d likely end up with an extra mouth in my throat, once the word got around what’s to be had out there. Let’s admit it, even on this miserable crudball I’m not so big.”

He leaned forward. “I want to become big,” he said. It smoldered in eyes and voice; he shook with the intensity of it. “Once I know, from you, that the thing’s worthwhile, I’ll sink everything I own and can borrow into building up a reliable outfit. We’ll work secretly for the first several years, sell through complicated channels, sock away the profits. Then maybe I’ll surface, doctor the story, start paying taxes, move to Terra—maybe buy my way to a patent of nobility, maybe go into politics, I don’t know, but I’ll be big. Do you understand?”

Far too well, Flandry thought.

Ammon dabbed at his glistening forehead. “It wouldn’t hurt you, having a big friend,” he said. “Right?”

Associate, please, Flandry thought. Perhaps that, if I must. Never friend.

Aloud: “I suppose I could cook my log, record how trouble with the boat caused delay. She’s fast but superannuated, and inspections are lackadaisical. But you haven’t yet told me, sir, what the bloody dripping hell this is all about.”

“I will, I will.” Ammon mastered his emotions. “It’s a lost treasure, that’s what it is. Listen. Five hundred years ago, the Polesotechnic League had a base here. You’ve heard?”

Flandry, who had similarly tamed his excitement into alertness, nodded wistfully. He would much rather have lived in the high and spacious days of the trader princes, when no distance and no deed looked too vast for man, than in this twilight of empire. “It got clobbered during the Troubles, didn’t it?” he said.

“Right. However, a few underground installations survived. Not in good shape. Not safe to go into. Tunnels apt to collapse, full of nightskulks—you know. Now I thought those vaults might be useful for—Never mind. I had them explored. A microfile turned up. It gave the coordinates and galactic orbit of a planetary system out in what’s now no-man’s-land. Martian Minerals, Inc., was mining one of the worlds. They weren’t publicizing the fact; you remember what rivalries got to be like toward the end of the League era. That’s the main reason why knowledge of this system was completely lost. But it was quite a place for a while.”

“Rich in heavy metals,” Flandry pounced.

Ammon blinked. “How did you guess?”

“Nothing else would be worth exploiting by a minerals outfit, at such a distance from the centers of civilization. Yes.” A renewed eagerness surged in Flandry. “A young, metal-rich star, corresponding planets, on one of them a robotic base…It was robotic, wasn’t it? High-grade central computer—consciousness grade, I’ll bet—directing machines that prospected, mined, refined, stored, and loaded the ships when they called. Probably manufactured spare parts for them too, and did needful work on them, besides expanding its own facilities. You see, I don’t suppose a world with that concentration of violently poisonous elements in its ground would attract people to a manned base. Easier and cheaper in the long run to automate everything.”

“Right. Right.” Ammon’s chins quivered with his nodding. “A moon, actually, of a planet bigger than Jupiter. More massive, that is—a thousand Terras—though the file does say its gravity condensed it to a smaller size. The moon itself, Wayland they named it, Wayland has about three percent the mass of Terra but half the surface pull. It’s that dense.”

Mean specific gravity circa eleven, Flandry calculated. Uranium, thorium—probably still some neptunium and plutonium—and osmium, platinum, rare metals simply waiting to be scooped out—my God! My greed!

From behind his hard-held coolness he drawled: “A million doesn’t seem extravagant pay for opening that kind of opportunity to you.”

“It’s plenty for a look-see,” Ammon said. “That’s all I want of you, a report on Wayland. I’m taking the risks, not you.

“First off, I’m risking you’ll go report our talk, trying for a reward and a quick transfer elsewhere before my people can get to you. Well, I don’t think that’s a very big risk. You’re too ambitious and too used to twisting regulations around to suit yourself. And too smart, I hope. If you think for a minute, you’ll see how I could fix it to get any possible charges against me dropped. But maybe I’ve misjudged you.

“Then, supposing you play true, the place could turn out to be no good. I’ll be short a million, for nothing. More than a million, actually. There’s the hire of a partner; reliable ones don’t come cheap. And supplies for him; and transporting them to a spot where you can pick them and him up after you’ve taken off; and—oh, no, boy, you consider yourself lucky I’m this generous.”

“Wait a minute,” Flandry said. “A partner?”

Ammon leered. “You don’t think I’d let you travel alone, do you? Really, dear boy! What’d prevent your telling me Wayland’s worthless when it isn’t, coming back later as a civilian, and ‘happening’ on it?”

“I presume if I give you a negative report, you’ll…request…I submit to a narcoquiz. And if I didn’t report to you at all, you’d know I had found a prize.”

“Well, what if you told them you’d gotten off course somehow and found the system by accident? You could hope for a reward. I can tell you you’d be disappointed. Why should the bureaucrats care, when there’d be nothing in it for them but extra work? I’d lay long odds they’d classify your ‘discovery’ an Imperial secret and forbid you under criminal penalties ever to mention it anywhere. You might guess differently, though. No insult to you, Dominic. I believe in insurance, that’s all. Right?

“So my agent will ride along, and give you the navigational data after you’re safely away in space, and never leave your side till you’ve returned and told me personally what you found. Afterward, as a witness to your behavior on active duty, a witness who’ll testify under hypnoprobe if need be, why, he’ll keep on being my insurance against any change of heart you might suffer.”

Flandry blew a smoke ring. “As you wish,” he conceded. “It’ll be pretty cozy, two in a Comet, but I can rig an extra bunk and—Let’s discuss this further, shall we? I think I will take the job, if certain conditions can be met.”

Ammon would have bristled were he able. The Gorzunian sensed his irritation and growled. “Conditions? From you?”

Flandry waved his cigar. “Nothing unreasonable, sir,” he said airily. “For the most part, precautions that I’m sure you will agree are sensible and may already have thought of for yourself. And that agent you mentioned. Not ‘he’, please. It could get fatally irritating, living cheek by unwashed jowl with some goon for weeks. I know you can find a capable and at the same time amiable human female. Right? Right.”

He had everything he could do to maintain that surface calm. Beneath it, his pulse racketed—and not simply because of the money, the risk, the enjoyment. He had come here on a hunch, doubtless generated by equal parts of curiosity and boredom. He had stayed with the idea that, if the project seemed too hazardous, he could indeed betray Ammon and apply for duty that would keep him beyond range of assassins. Now abruptly a vision was coming to him, hazy, uncertain, and gigantic.