Presently he was trying to sing the verses to “The Green Hills of Earth.” A mellower man you never saw. I seized my chance.
“So you love the green hills of Earth so much, what are you doing here? Change your mind about Rio?”
Jack shook his head; the vibration ran down his arm and sloshed his drink. “Nope…” Outside a hen cackled, and Jack collapsed in laughter. “Let me rest my eyes on the fleecy skies…”
Grimly I stuck to the subject. “I thought you were all set with that Tucson arcology.”
“Oh, I was. I was indeed. It was a beautiful setup. Lots of pay, and—” He stopped abruptly.
“And other opportunities?” I was beginning to see the light.
“Wellll…yes. But you have to see it the way I did. First, it was a great opportunity to make a name for myself. A city in a building! Residential and business and industry all in the same place, one building to house a quarter…of a million…people. And it would have been beautiful, Corky. The plans were magnificent! I was in love with it. Then I got into it, and I saw what was really going on.
“Corky, everyone was stealing that place blind! The first week I went to the chief engineer to report shortages in deliveries and he just looked at me. ‘Stick to your own work, Halfey,’ says he. Chief engineer, the architects, construction bosses, even the catering crew—every one of them was knocking down twenty-five, fifty percent! They were selling the cement right off the boxcars and substituting sand. There wasn’t enough cement in that concrete to hold up the walls.”
“So you took your share.”
“Don’t get holy on me! Dammit, look at it my way. I was willing to play square, but they wouldn’t let me. The place was going to fall down. The weight of the first fifty thousand people would have done it. What I could do was make sure nobody got inside before it happened.” Jack Halfey chortled. “I’m a public benefactor, I am. I sold off the reinforcing rods. The inspectors couldn’t possibly ignore that.”
“Nothing else?” I asked.
“Wellll, those rods were metal-whisker compote. Almost as strong as diamond, and almost as expensive. I didn’t need anything else. But I made sure they’d never open that place to the public. Then I stashed my ill-gotten gains and went underground and waited for something to happen.”
“I never heard much about it. Of course, I wouldn’t, up here.”
“Not many down there heard either. Hush hush while the FBI looked into it. The best buy I ever made in my life was a subscription to the Wall Street Journal. Just a paragraph about how the Racket Squad was investigating Mafia involvement in the Tucson arcology. That’s when things fell into place.”
I swung around to refill his glass, carefully. We use great big glasses, and never fill them more than half full. Otherwise they slosh all over the place in the low gravity. I had another myself. It was pretty good vodka, and if I felt it, Jack must be pickled blue. “You mean the building fell in?”
“No, no. I realized why there was so much graft.” Jack sounded aggrieved. “There was supposed to be graft. I wasn’t supposed to get in on it.”
“Aha.”
“Aha you know it. I finished reading that article on a plane to Canaveral. The FBI couldn’t follow me to Rio, but the Mafia sure could. I’d heard there was a new opening for chief engineer for the Construction Shack, and all of a sudden the post looked very, very good;”
He chuckled. “Also, I hear that things are tightening up in the USA. Big crackdown on organized crime. Computer-assisted. Income tax boys and Racket Squad working together. It shouldn’t be long before all the chiefs who want my arse are in jail. Then I can go back, cash my stash, and head for Rio.”
“Switzerland?”
“Oh, no. Nothing so simple as that. I thought of something else. Say, I better get back to my bunk.” He staggered out before I could stop him. Fortunately it was walking distance from my place to his; if he’d had to fly, he’d probably have ended up roosting with the chickens.
“Bloody hell,” says I to myself.
Should I add that I had no intention of robbing Jack? I was just curious: what inflation-proof investment had he thought up? But I didn’t find out for a long time…
A month later the dollar collapsed. Inflation had been a fact of life for so long that it was the goal of every union and civil service organizer to get inflation written into their contracts, thereby increasing inflation. The government printed money faster to compensate: more inflation. One of those vicious spirals. Almost suddenly, the dollar was down the drain.
There followed a full-scale taxpayer revolt.
The Administration got the message: they were spending too much money. Aha! Clearly that had to stop. The first things to go were all the projects that wouldn’t pay off during the current President’s term of office. Long-term research was chopped out of existence. Welfare, on the other hand, was increased, and a comprehensive National Health Plan was put into effect, even though they had to pay the doctors and hospitals in promissory notes.
The Senator from Wisconsin didn’t even bother giving us his customary Golden Fleece award. Why insult the walking dead?
We met in our usual place, a cage-work not far from the north pole. Admiral McLeve was in the center, in zero gravity. The rest of us perched about the cage-work, looking like a scene from Hitchcock’s The Birds.
Dot had a different picture, from Aristophanes. “Somewhere, what with all these clouds and
