State of War

ability, to each, according to his need.’ You know what that means?”

Tyrone nodded. “Of course. It means those who can do stuff help those who can’t.”

“Technically. What it means in practice is that people with ability carry everybody else. And there are a lot more people without special abilities than there are with ’em. Communism says that a guy smart enough to come up with a cure for cancer is exactly the same as somebody who digs ditches. And in the eyes of the law, that’s how it should be, when it comes to getting away with murder, say. But the truth is, a guy who can invent a cure for cancer is a lot rarer than a guy who digs ditches. I personally have trouble with a baseball or basketball player making thirty or forty million dollars a year while a schoolteacher might make only a little more than minimum wage — that’s skewed in a way I truly can’t understand. But you have to recognize that talent and skill should be rewarded somehow, otherwise there’s no reason to invent that cure except altruism. If you take away the thing a man spends his energy making and give him nothing in return, you take away his desire to do it again. And that of anybody else who looks at all the work needed and says to himself, ‘Why bother? It won’t help me or mine any.’ ”

“Yes, but—”

“Look at South America, Ty. Every few years, they have a revolution in one of the banana republics. Everybody in power gets tossed out and a new crew comes in. If you invested a few million in a company down there, and all of a sudden it gets nationalized and taken over for ‘the good of the people,’ how much do you figure you’ll want to invest from that point on?”

“But we’re talking about knowledge, Dad, not hardware.”

“And I’m here to tell you that knowledge is more valuable than hardware, because without knowledge, hardware doesn’t exist. Without the minds that came up with the internal combustion engine, or the steamer, or the electric motor, there wouldn’t be any automobiles, or freighters, or airplanes. You have to have metal benders, yes, but without blueprints all you get is… bent metal.”

Tyrone frowned, but Howard wasn’t finished.

“In our society, Ty, if you do something valuable, you get recognized for it. Could be fame, could be power, could be money, sometimes it’s all three, but the bottom line is, if you do the work, you are supposed to get the credit, and all the perks that go along with it. Sometimes it doesn’t work that way. Sometimes the inventor gets screwed. But that’s how we want it to work. Because it is right, and on some level, people know it.

“When you download ‘free’ music, or somebody’s newest novel that’s been pirated, scanned, and posted on the web, or the formula for a drug that somebody worked years to develop, you might as well be walking into their house and stealing it at gunpoint. Theft is theft, no matter how you spin it. And it’s wrong: ‘Thou shalt not steal’ is recognized by every civilized society and most major religions, and for a good reason. If there are no rules to protect people, then it becomes anarchy.”

“There are exceptions,” Tyrone said, his voice stubborn. “What about the aluminum companies in World War II?”

Howard nodded. “Yes, there are exceptions. And, yes, during World War II one company was forced to give its process to the others. But a war for your country’s survival is not exactly the same as some college student swiping music for his personal collection, now is it?”

Tyrone grinned. “Well, no.”

“A great part of common law around the world is dedicated to protecting the property rights of its citizens. When you start skirting those laws, you start down the road to big trouble. If they can take that cancer cure, what’s to stop them from taking that software you wrote for a new game? TANSTAAFL means that outside of real estate, pretty much everything of value in our world was, somewhere, somehow, some when, thought up, created, developed, produced, and distributed by somebody. That somebody paid for it, in blood, sweat, or tears, in time or money, for love or whatever, and that anything you think of as ‘free,’ isn’t. You might get it free, but somebody paid for it.”

Tyrone shook his head.

“You don’t agree?”

“I hear you, Dad. But you make everything sound so… mercenary.”

“There’s not a thing wrong with being a mercenary, son. That’s how I make my living. In fact, that’s how most people make their living. If you do a job, you get paid for it. What’s wrong is making somebody do a job and then not paying them for it. That’s your CyberNation’s basic premise. What you get from them isn’t free. They stole it.”

Tyrone sat silent for a moment.

“Something?”

“No, what you say makes sense, but I get the feeling there’s something else here I’m missing, some argument for my side.”

Howard chuckled. Tyrone really was getting better at this. But he wasn’t there yet. “You’re right, Ty. There is.”

“Well, what is it?”

Howard chuckled again. “Oh, no, that’s for you to figure out. I’m not going to just give it to you. After all, haven’t you heard? There’s no such thing as a free argument.”

“Dad!” Tyrone groaned.

“Think about it some and you’ll get to it. It’s a good exercise.”

Tyrone went off, muttering to himself and shaking his head.

Howard felt a sense of pride as he watched the boy leave. Was there a valid argument against TANSTAAFL? Maybe. He couldn’t think of one offhand, but let his son believe there was, and he would keep looking. And sooner or later, he’d find it, bring it back, and hit his old man with it. Which was a good thing. Part of raising your child was teaching him how to take care of himself once he got out on his own. If you could take care of yourself physically, mentally, and spiritually, you had a leg up on most of the world.

November 1935 Port of Newark, New Jersey

Jay Gridley, sworn nemesis of evil, crouched low on the roof of the warehouse overlooking the Kill Van Kull, the waterway connecting New York Harbor with Newark Bay. He looked down upon the south docks, hidden in the shadows.

“Follow the money” was the classic investigative advice, but first, of course, you had to find the money.

If Jay was right, he was about to do just that.

It was a foggy night, cold, with the promise of yet colder days ahead. The chill brushed at him with icy fingers as the mist drifted up in slow gray billows, shrouding the farther lights into dim globes. Below, illuminated by fog- edged floods, floated the Corona, a rust-streaked tramp steamer just arrived from Spain. Faint trails of coal smoke still drifted from the stacks of the ship, tracing whorls that mixed with the natural mist in the night sky.

In another twenty years they’d call that smog…

He pulled his wide-brimmed slouch hat lower on his head. A carmine-hued scarf covered his mouth and chin. A dark cloak shrouded him. Thin, black leather gloves covered his hands. He blended into the night, nearly invisible, no more than a shadow.

He’d put a high-level watchbot on CyberNation’s wire transfers over the last few days. His sniffer had strained thousands of transactions, looking for relatively small chunks of money coming to the United States. CyberNation made all sorts of payments, naturally, so he’d set the bot’s sensors to filter out those that went to known companies, leaving only those that seemed to have no immediately legitimate destination, regardless of their size.

The rusted ship Corona docked below him was, in the real world, a large squirt of information coming over the net. Within it was a particular electronic payment from CyberNation that Jay wanted to trace. But to do that, he would have to get closer.

Noiselessly, he padded to the edge of the wall facing the river and climbed down the knotted black silk rope he’d placed there earlier. Earlier in the day, he had broken the single mercury-vapor lamp in the immediate area, so his movements now were in near-total darkness. The Port Authority, flush with more money than they’d ever had, despite the Depression, had been refitting the lights to the docks. They would, no doubt, be unhappy with his