“Can you imagine the awful monotony of life in the ship? The work is sheer rote and repetition. They can’t read or watch screentapes. They were born in the ship, and the books and screentapes are meaningless because they know nothing to compare them with. The only change they see is each other, aging toward death. Frequent pregnancies are a Godsend to them. They compare and discuss them; they wonder who the fathers are; they make bets of rations; the men brag and keep score. The girls look forward to their first and their last. The jokes they make up about them! The way they speculate about twins! The purgative fear, even, keeps them sane.”
“And then,” Ross said, “ ‘the box.’ ”
Staring straight ahead at the ship’s port Marconi echoed: “Yes. ‘The box.’ If there were another way—but there isn’t.”
His breezy young boss, Charles Oldham IV, was not pleased with what Ross had to report.
“Asked for Haarland!” he repeated unbelievingly. “Those dummies didn’t know where they were going or where they were from, but they knew enough to ask for Haarland.” He slammed a ruler on his desk and yelled: “Goddamn it!”
“Mr. Oldham!” Ross protested, aghast. For a superior to lose his temper publicly was unthinkable; it covered you with embarrassment.
“Manners be Goddamned too!” Oldham screamed, breaking up fast. “What do you know about the state of our books? What do you know about the overhead I inherited from my loving father? What the hell do you know about the downcurve in sales?”
“These fluctuations—” Ross began soothingly.
“Fluctuations be Goddamned! I know a fluctuation when I see one, and I know a long-term downtrend when I see one. And that’s what we’re riding, right into bankruptcy, fellow. And now these Goddamned dummies blow in from nowhere with a consignment exclusively for Haarland—I don’t know why I don’t get to hell out of this stupid business and go live in a shack on Great Blue Lake and let the planet go ahead and rot.”
Ross’s horror at the unseemly outburst was eclipsed by his interest at noting how similarly he and Oldham had been thinking. “Sir,” he ventured, “I’ve had something on my mind for a while—”
“It can wait,” Oldham growled, collecting himself with a visible effort. So there went his chance to resign. “What about customs? I know Haarland hasn’t got enough cash to lay out. Who has?”
Ross said glibly: “Usual arrangement, sir. They turn an estimated twenty-five percent of the cargo over to the port authority for auction, the receipts to be in full discharge of their import tax. And I suppose they enter protective bids. They aren’t wasting any time—auction’s 2100 tonight.”
“You handle it,” Oldham muttered. “Don’t go over one hundred thousand shields. Diversify the purchases as much as possible. And try to sneak some advance information out of the dummies if you get a chance.”
“Yes, sir,” Ross said. As he left he saw Oldham taking a plastic bottle from a wall cabinet.
And that, thought Ross as he rode to the Free Port, was the first crack he had ever seen in the determined optimism of the trading firm’s top level. They were optimists and they were idealists, at least to hear them tell it. Interplanetary trading was a cause and a mission; the traders kept the flame of commerce alight. Perhaps, thought Ross, they had been able to indulge in the hypocrisy of idealism only so long as a population upcurve assured them of an expanding market. Perhaps now that births were flattening out—some said the dirty word “declining”—they all would drop their optimistic creed in favor of fang-and-claw competition for the favors of the dwindling pool of consumers.
And that, Ross thought gloomily, was the way he’d go himself if he stayed on: junior trader, to senior trader, to master trader, growing every year more paranoidally suspicious of his peers, less scrupulous in the chase of the shield …
But he was getting out, of course. The purser’s berth awaited. And then, perhaps, the awful depressions he had been enduring would lift off him. He thought of the master traders he knew: his own man Oldham, none too happy in the hereditary business; Leverett, still smug and fat with his terrific windfall of the Sirius IV starship fifteen years ago; Marconi’s boss Haarland—Haarland broke the sequence all to hell. It just wasn’t possible to think of Haarland being driven by avarice and fear. He was the oldest of them all, but there was more zest and drive in his parchment body than in the rest of them combined.
In the auction hall Ross found a seat near the velvet ropes. One of the professional bidders lounging against a wall flicked him an almost imperceptible signal, and he answered with another. That was that; he had his man, and a good one. They had often worked together in the commodity pits, but not so often or so exclusively that the bidder would be instantly known as his.
Inside the enclosure Marconi, seated at a bare table, labored over a sheaf of papers with one of the “Sonnies” from the ship. Sonny was wriggling in coveralls, the first clothes he had ever worn. Ross saw they hadn’t been able to get shoes onto him.
Who else did he know? Captain Delafield was sitting somberly within the enclosure; Win Fraley, the hottest auctioneer on the Port, was studying a list, his lips moving. Every trading firm was represented; the heads of the smaller firms were there in person, not daring to delegate the bidding job. Plenty of Port personnel, just there for the excitement of the first longliner in fifteen years, even though it was well after close of the business day.
The goods were in sealed cases against the back wall as usual. Ross could only tell that some of them were perforated and therefore ought to
