Meeting at Infinity Read online

  “I surprise me sometimes,” said Jockey dryly. He didn’t let it show, but he really meant that. Even to him, a Rate One wasn’t pennies; he’d gambled on a hunch in paying Curdy so well, and here was the reason, emerging hours later from his subconscious mind. It had happened before. It might happen again. That was what kept Jockey on top of the pile.

  He went on steadily, “I read that they’re getting set to dispossess Ahmed Lyken, the way they did to Ald and Porter. They won’t say so; they’ll fill the newstapes with crap about voluntary liquidation. But I’ll lay odds that Lyken’s going to get chiseled out.”

  “You been warning off Lyken’s ’cruiters all day, too.”

  Fact. Jockey nodded. He had been warning his valuable runners and agents to avoid the ’cruiters, because Lyken was tough. He’d fight. Jockey was still capable of hero-worship, and knew he was only a big frog in a small puddle. Lyken was a man he could admire for being large in the biggest of all.

  “It fits,” Gaffles was saying. “Athlone’s so far out of the class Clostrides belongs in, Clostrides wouldn’t notice him usually. Jockey, you think this is safe to be left with a raw cub like Curdy Wence?”

  “Not any more,” said Jockey. “Get out after him, Gaffles. If he hasn’t got anything, pick up where he’s got to. I want to know what connects Ahmed Lyken to Luis Nevada—fast.”

  The feeling of buoyancy that had come with the Rate One—mainly due to having so much money in one piece, partly to having been given a big job by Jockey—didn’t last long in Curdy’s mind. Where in hell did you start asking? Who was in a position to know something that meant something to a man like Ahmed Lyken?

  Someone he’d fired, maybe? But when Lyken or any of the merchant princes dismissed an employee, the best psychs available turned his hypnokeys for him. And those keys were nonsense phrases you could spend a year hunting for and never chance across. It was nearly foolproof. Curdy felt he was butting a concrete wall that way, and it was making him agitated. He slipped a fresh pad of tranks into his mouth.

  Maybe the tranks did it; maybe it was the fact that he was just passing the Octopus Bar again. Lorrel, who ran the Octopus, had been one of Jockey’s confidential aides while he was on the way up; he’d lost his hearing in some affair with a rival outfit while there still were rivals in the Eastern Quarter, and when Jockey came out on top he set Lorrel up in the Octopus as a kind of pension. If anyone knew—Lorrel would.

  Curdy went in quietly. The bar was still almost empty, but this time Lorrel was there, behind the counter. Curdy went up and gestured for attention; Lorrel hadn’t heard him come in, of course. He was that deaf.

  Forming his words very carefully, exaggerating his lip movements, Curdy said, “Lorrel, I’m doing a Rate One job for Jockey!”

  Lorrel’s eyes widened. He said nothing. He never did.

  Four hours later, as he started out of the Octopus, Gaffles turned on impulse and asked Lorrel, “Curdy Wence wasn’t here, was he?”

  “Sure he was,” scribbled Lorrel on his magnapad, He could not hear his own voice; if he tried to speak, he only squawked.

  It took Curdy some time to convince Lorrel that it was true. When the record was straight, he put his questions.

  “Lorrel, was anyone that didn’t have his hypnokeys all turned right ever fired by a franchise outfit?”

  Lorrel hesitated. Then he scrawled, “Jockey had one.”

  “Who fired him?” Curdy snapped.

  “Ald and Porter. Before your time!”

  Still, it had happened at least once. It was a line to follow. Curdy plunged on. “Know anyone fired by Lyken?”

  “Lots. He’s a hard number to keep satisfied.”

  The magnapad was crowding up. Lorrel wiped it and waited for a further question.

  “All hypnolocked, so far as you know?”

  “All solid,” Lorrel wrote—and added, “Why?”

  “I have to find out who might know something that would hit Lyken hard like concrete. Jockey’s business, though!”

  “Who you think you’re talking to?” countered Lorrel and a scowl stamped deep across his face.

  Later on, an astonished Gaffles said, “What did he want? Did you give him anything? Where did you send him?”

  That was a bad one. Lorrel’s loyalty to Jockey was complete. It took some smoothing over. But eventually Curdy was able to continue, “Look, Lorrel—you were once on the way up. You know what it’d mean to me to bring off a Rate One job for Jockey!”

  And you of all people don’t stand to lose if I do, he added silently.

  Afterwards, Lorrel scribbled—as he had for Curdy’s benefit—a single name: Erlking. Curdy had to ask who that might be; Gaffles didn’t, and he moved at once.

  At the time when Curdy set out from Holy Alley, things hadn’t really begun to build up in the Quarter. Lyken’s ’cruiters were out, as Jockey had warned him—teams of six to eight were touring the streets in vehicles fitted out as combined recruiting stations and paddy wagons, with blaring speakers on top turned to maximum gain. They were offering Rate Two per day—which was ridiculous—for short service employment, no guarantee of continuance but a minimum of ten days’ pay promised. The dregs, used to getting by on their public allotment of less than a quarter as much per day, were falling over one another to sign up; those who hung back undecided lost their chance because the wagons were full and moving on, signing contracts by the dozen as they got under way. But nothing else marked the day as exceptional.

  By the time Gaffles left the Octopus, however, the city was coming to life for the night. The Pleasuredrome had its drummers out for the new pageant, but the ’cruiters were still shouting them down; now, though, they hadn’t got things all their own way, for the cultists were after them. Wherever a recruiting wagon halted it was sure to be followed within moments by a cultist outfit with still more powerful speakers, bellowing about the White Death and the horrible fate in store for anyone meddling with Tacket’s Principle.

  The situation was getting ugly; Gaffies knew that before he had gone half a mile. He had never seen cultists out in such numbers. Someone must have tipped them off. And that suggested that sooner or later they were going to come to blows with the ’cruiters.

  Passing one of Jockey’s dependables, Gaffles paid him twenty to run a warning to Jockey at the Octopus. Warnings might not help, but he could do no more at the moment.

  Erlking, he was thinking. Yes, of course! Even though there had never been a suggestion that Erlking’s hypnokeys had ever been disturbed, Lyken’s last Remembrancer was a very, very logical person to ask first.

  Curdy was working under handicaps; he knew a fair amount about the extent of Jockey’s organization, but Gaffles knew it all—knew who to ask, where to find them. When he left the Octopus he was four hours behind Curdy; when he was given Erlking’s last known address, and went there, he was only forty minutes behind.

  This was a shabby lodging block on the fringes of the Quarter; in a small office in the basement, a sour-faced woman, who probably spoke with a higher-ranked accent than most of her lodgers, answered his questions.

  “Erlking moved, just ten days ago. He had money from somewhere, paid his back rent, and moved.”

  Gaffles grunted. He’d half expected that. People like Erlking were rootless. He said, “Where to?”

  The sour-faced woman gave an expressive shrug. “I didn’t ask. Why should I? He’d never had any mail, not in four years.”

  “Has anyone else been around asking for him today?”

  The answer to that cost him another twenty; he paid with good grace, and the woman softened slightly. She nodded.

  “A yonder boy, forty minutes gone. I told him no, too.”

  So Curdy had got this far, anyway. Not bad for a first job. You had to hand it to Jockey, Gaffles reflected. He knew what he was betting on. But strictly that wasn’t the important point. What did matter was that Erlking had gone; he might have left the Quarter, even. And scouring the city for him
tonight was going to be very tough work.

  He was turning to go when there was a beep from the outside annunciator, and the landlady switched on. A gruff, familiar voice said, “The law! Open up!”

  Athlone’s voice.

  Gaffles made his mind up quickly; he thrust another twenty at the landlady. “I’m after rooms,” he said. “I want to hear this if I can—okay?”

  The landlady made the money vanish, and triggered the outside door release. She didn’t say anything. They waited in silence for Athlone and his companions to come in.

  Athlone wasted no time. He glanced interrogatively at Gaffles, not recognizing him, and the landlady spoke up. “He came about rooms, but we don’t have any.”

  “You’ve got a room free all right,” said Athlone heavily. “You just don’t know it yet.”

  The landlady looked blank, Athlone gestured to one of his subordinates, who produced a picture and gave it to him. He thrust it under the landlady’s nose.

  “Is that one of your tenants?” he snapped.

  The landlady nodded, glancing from the picture to Athlone’s face and back again, nervously. “That’s—that’s Gower in number ninety. Has he done something?”

  Athlone didn’t answer directly. He took back the picture and grunted. “Want to search his rooms,” he said. “Which way?”

  Gaffles hardly heard the landlady’s answer. He’d caught one quick glimpse of the picture, and things had suddenly begun to make sense.

  It was a picture of Luis Nevada.

  8

  FOR REASONS that outsiders were ignorant of, Ahmed Lyken had his office low down in the great tower dominating the complex of buildings which formed his base of operations. To one of his rivals, the knowledge might have been significant, or simply an example of eccentricity. Usually, the merchant princes preferred to look down on their domains, and Clostrides was copying them when he looked down on The Market.

  Looking through the window-wall of the office, Lyken could not see much of what he controlled. But he could hold it in his mind, and what he saw there pleased him. It had doubled its size since he took on his franchise. When he won, it would double again. He promised himself that.

  Somehow, it was no longer quite as easy to think “when he won.” “If he won” kept creeping back.

  He turned as a casual beep sounded on the door speaker, and the panels slid back to admit his baseman, Shane Malco, his hands full of documents, his face set in an expression of defeat. Lyken had his answer before he asked his question; he uttered it nonetheless.

  “Did you get him?”

  Malco shook his head. He dropped his documents on Lyken’s huge desk and stepped back. “That’s the finance and equipment report you called for,” he said parenthetically. And shifted to the main subject.

  “We got the address where he was last living, and went to it. It was a dreg’s lodging block on the edge of the Quarter. The team I sent spent almost an hour working the landlady over. All they got was that Erlking got money from somewhere, enough to pay off his back rent, and moved out. He left no address.”

  “Sure? Beyond doubt?”

  “There isn’t room for doubt.” Malco passed a tired hand across his face. “You shouldn’t just have fired him, Ahmed. You should have—”

  “Shot him?” interrupted Lyken with deceptive gentleness. “Pensioned him off in the franchise? I hope you were going to suggest the latter, Shane. Erlking had given me long and good service, and I wouldn’t have killed him off. Know that, Shane?”

  Malco licked dry lips and nodded. He said, “But you’re staking so much on this place Akkilmar!”

  Lyken shrugged. It cost him a lot of effort to make the shrug casual. “He was properly hypnoed,” he said shortly. “The fact that one of his locks was opened was a million-to-one chance. And it didn’t seem to have been opened very far, to judge from what truth serum dug out of Nevada’s mind. What have you done with him, by the way?”

  After a pause, Malco said, “Nothing—yet. What do you want done with him?”

  “Was his money good? Did you get the half million?”

  Taken aback, Malco nodded. He pointed at the documents on the desk. “You’ll find it there, under ‘contingencies reserve,’ ” he said. “It’s good, all right.”

  “Then take him through to the franchise, the way he asked to be taken,” said Lyken, and gave a curiously bitter laugh. “No one can say I don’t keep my bargains.”

  “Will do,” agreed Malco.

  “What else are you doing about Erlking?”

  “What can I do? I’ve got all the agents I can spare out scouring the city for him. But it’s getting very difficult.”

  “Trouble?”

  “I came mainly to tell you. Rioting. Started a few minutes ago. Several of our ’cruiters have been set upon by gangs of cultists. All the avenues leading to the base have been effectively blocked by crowds. I suspect that some of the cultists aren’t, if you get me. They’re trained rabblerousers. Someone we took in for questioning says he heard rumors of our having imported a new strain of the White Death. He said he didn’t believe it. I think he half did.”

  “I wondered how long they’d wait before turning that one loose. Damn that grain fungus! It’s given them just the opening they needed.”

  Malco said nothing, but waited for instructions.

  “Give it half an hour,” said Lyken suddenly. “If the police haven’t cleared the streets by then, kidnap ’em. I’m going to get my twelve thousand through before midnight come hell or high bailiff!”

  “You think Clostrides is behind it?” Malco prompted.

  “Who else?”

  Lyken turned one more time to stare through the window-wall. While he had been talking to Malco, the lights had come on all over the tangle of buildings. Scarcely aware that he spoke aloud, he said under his breath. “Twice as big!”

  “What?” Malco looked confused.

  Lyken laughed again, this time without sounding bitter. He said, “Nothing, Shane. Can you handle things on the lines I indicated—for say two or three hours?”

  “Well, I could, I guess, but—!”

  “Carry on, then.” Lyken moved towards the door. “I have things to straighten out in the franchise itself.”

  “Are you going to Akkilmar, perhaps?” Malco asked after a pause.

  “That’s right.”

  “I hope you know what you’re doing, Ahmed. That’s all I can possibly say. I just hope you know.”

  So do I.

  The thought kept wriggling, naggingly, through Lyken’s mind, like a worm. For a long time he had expected a showdown with the Directors; he knew well enough that he was not liked, that his franchise was too successful, that he had taken a larger slice of the available market than any other concessionary except the Directors themselves. Fair enough. It was in the rules, the unwritten rules. And he had banked on two things to protect him.

  One was implicit in the fact that he had his office low down in the main tower of his base, and the portals through to the franchise on floors high above. You could never predict the geography—or the geology—of a Tacket franchise, and although you would go through and see the sun or the stars unchanged, at the same angle above the horizon as they were when you set out, you could not be sure of the ground underfoot.

  In Lyken’s franchise, a naked pillar of rock almost a thousand feet high and two hundred feet thick coexisted with his home base. His trading station perched on this pillar like the eyrie of an eagle, and it was invulnerable. The Directors would not be satisfied with simply closing his franchise. They wanted it—operating. And to save them from having to re-explore it expensively, bit by bit, they would also want the precious data stored in the trading post.

  That was one kind of insurance he had. And Akkilmar was the second.

  He was not absolutely sure, because you could never be sure about what some other franchise might hold, but he was almost sure that nothing like Akkilmar existed in any other franchise but h
is own.

  The first time he had seen the place, he had been misled by appearances. It was a sizeable small town, a long way south of his base, in a subtropical area and close to the sea on which it largely depended for food. It had been reported numerous times by scouts, and accurately described: a town of wooden buildings, with streets as smooth and green as good lawns, well populated by tall people whose complexions ranged from copper to gold, apparently without mechanical aptitude—even without the wheel. There were few civilizations in the franchise at all, on this continent; the Old World, as usual, had a near monopoly.

  Therefore it had gone long uninvestigated. Lyken had to repress a shudder when he thought how nearly he had overlooked the place altogether.

  Once, however, a scout had been lost while exploring natural resources—his heli had been struck by lightning during a storm, and his locators were out, so they had to search for him over thousands of square miles. Someone dropped in on the people of Akkilmar, to ask if they had seen the scout. They had not, they answered gravely, but they knew where he was and gave directions.

  The scout was within a mile of the spot they indicated, and after that Lyken looked into Akkilmar. He had no cause to regret the decision. Except, perhaps, that the people there made him feel inferior.

  Once his attention had been drawn to the place, he did not take long to realize that he had perhaps the most amazing and valuable prize in any known franchise: a society that by some process other than scientific logic, by intuition or direct perception, had arrived at scientific principles. And could make them do tricks.

  He had, even now, only a vague picture of what they could achieve. He had had nothing commercially useful out of them apart from the rho function field perceptor—and to date, no one had succeeded in making that work except for cocoonees cut off from the outside world. He had visualized it being employed as a kind of transmitterless television, and it was fairly certain that in Akkilmar it was used as such, but no normal person who had tried it had succeeded in interpreting its data properly. It would take a long time to understand Akkilmar’s nonscience. But it existed, and it was powerful.