The Cat Who Walks Through Walls (10 page)

Sethos gave what could have been construed as a laugh. “Doctor, Golden Rule is a business enterprise undertaken for profit. I manage it for my partners to that end. No one has to live here, no one has to do business here. What I charge people to live here, or to do business here, is controlled solely by maximizing profit to the partnership, as guided by my best judgment to that end. If you don’t like it, you can take your business elsewhere.”

I was just about to shift the basis for discussion (I can see when I’m outgunned) when Gwen spoke up. “Mr. Sethos?”

“Eh? Yes, Mistress Novak? Mrs. Ames.”

“Did you get your start pimping for your sisters?”

Sethos turned a delicate shade of eggplant. He finally got control of himself well enough to say, “Mrs. Ames, are you being intentionally insulting?”

“That’s obvious, isn’t it? I don’t know that you have sisters; it just seems like the sort of enterprise that would appeal to you. You have injured us for no reason whatever. We come to you, asking for redress of grievance; you answer us with evasions, outright lies, irrelevant issues…and a fresh extortion. You justify this new outrage with a plonking sermon on free enterprise. Just what price did you usually charge for your sisters? And how much did you keep as your commission? Half? Or more than half?”

“Madam, I must ask you to leave my office…and this habitat. You are not the sort we want living here.”

“I am delighted to leave,” Gwen answered, not stirring, “just as quickly as you settle my account. And my husband’s account.”

“Get… OUT!”

Gwen put out her hand, palm up. “Cash first, you bald-faced swindler. The balance of our accounts plus the fare-home deposits we each made when we got here. If we leave this room without collecting, there’s not a prayer that you will ever pay what you owe us. Pay up and we leave. The first shuttle down to Luna. But pay up and right now! Or you’ll have to space me to shut me up. If you call in your goons, you flannel mouth, I’ll scream this place down. Want a sample?” Gwen tilted her head back, cut loose with a scream that made my teeth ache.

Sethos, too, apparently—I saw him flinch.

He stared at her a long moment, then touched some control on his desk. “Ignatius. Close the accounts of Dr. Richard Ames and of Mistress Gwendolyn Novak, uh”—with only a momentary hesitation he correctly stated my compartment number and that of Gwen—“and deliver them to my office at once. With cash to pay them off. With receipts to chop and print. No checks. What? You listen to me. If it takes longer than ten minutes we’ll hold a full-scale inspection of your department…see who has to be fired, who merely has to be demoted.” He switched off, did not look at us.

Gwen got out her little game board, set it for tic-tac-toe, which suited me, it being about the intellectual level I felt able to cope with then. She beat me four straight games, even though twice I had the first move. But my head was still aching from her supersonic scream.

I had not kept track of the exact time but it must have been about ten minutes later that a man came in with our accounts. Sethos glanced at them, passed them over to us. Mine appeared to be accurate; I was about to sign the receipt when Gwen spoke up. “What about interest on the money I had to deposit?”

“Eh? What are you talking about?”

“My fare back dirtside. I had to deposit it in cash, no IOUs accepted. Your bank here charges nine percent on private loans, so it ought to be paying at least savings account rates on impounded money. Although time-deposit rates would be more reasonable. I’ve been here more than a year, so…let me see—” Gwen took out the pocket calculator we had been using for tic-tac-toe. “You owe me eight hundred seventy-one and—call it even crowns—eight hundred and seventy-one crowns in interest. In Swiss gold that comes to—”

“We pay in crowns, not Swiss money.”

“All right, you owe it to me in crowns.”

“And we don’t pay interest on return ticket money; it is simply held in escrow.”

I was suddenly alert. “You don’t, eh? Dear, may I borrow that widget? Let’s see—a hundred and eighty thousand people…and one-way tourist fare to Maui on PanAm or Qantas is—”

“Seventy-two hundred,” Gwen answered, “except weekends and holidays.”

“So.” I punched it in. “Hmm, well over a billion crowns! One two nine six followed by six zeroes. How interesting! How enlightening. Sethos old boy, you may be skimming off over a hundred million a year, tax free, simply by placing all this money you are holding for us suckers in Luna City money funds. But I don’t think you use it that way—or not all of it. I think you run your whole enterprise using other people’s money…without their knowledge or consent. Right?”

The flunky (Ignatius?) who had fetched our accounts was listening with intent interest.

Sethos growled. “Sign those receipts and get out.”

“Oh, I shall!”

“But pay us our interest,” Gwen added.

I shook my head. “No, Gwen. Anywhere but here we could sue him. Here he is both the law and the judge. But I don’t mind, Mr. Manager, as you have given me a wonderful, salable idea for an article—
Reader’s Digest
, probably, or
Fortune
. Uh, I’ll title it ‘Pie in the Sky, or How to Get Rich on Other People’s Money: The Economics of Privately-Owned Space Habitats.’ A hundred million a year swindled out of the public in Golden Rule habitat alone. Something along that line.”

“You publish that and I’ll sue you for everything you own!”

“Will you? See you in court, old boy. Somehow I don’t think you will want to wash your dirty linen in any court where you aren’t the judge. Mmm, I just got a wild idea. You’re finishing a very expensive addition—and I remember seeing in the
Wall Street Journal
that you did it without selling bonds. How much of that so-called escrow money is floating out there as rings one-thirty to one-forty? And how many of us leaving all the same week would it take to cause a run on your bank? Can you pay on demand, Sethos? Or is that escrow as phony as you are?”

“Say that in public and I’ll sue you in every court in the system! Sign that receipt and leave.”

Gwen would not sign until the cash was counted out in front of us, whereupon she did sign and so did I.

As we were accepting the money, Sethos’s desk terminal came to life. Its screen was visible only to him but the speaker’s voice identified him: Chief Proctor Franco. “Mr. Sethos!”

“I'm busy.”

“This is an emergency! Ron Tolliver’s been shot. I—”

“
What!
”

“It just happened! I’m in his office—he’s bad hurt, prob’ly won’t make it. But I got eyewitnesses. That fake doctor did it—Richard Ames—”

“Shut up!”

“But, boss—”

“Shut UP! You stupid, bumbling fool! Report to me at once.” Sethos turned his attention back to us. “Now get out of here.”

“Perhaps I had better wait and meet these eyewitnesses.”

“Get out. Get off this habitat.”

I offered Gwen my arm.

“You can’t cheat an honest man. He has to have larceny in his heart in the first place”

CLAUDE WILLIAM DUKENFIELD
1880-1946

Outside we found Bill still sitting on my duffel bag, the little tree in his arms. He stood up, an uncertain look on his face. But when Gwen smiled at him, he grinned back. I said, “Any problems. Bill?”

“No, boss. Uh, skin tried to buy little tree.”

“Why didn’t you sell it?”

He looked shocked. “
Huh?
It belongs to
her
.”

“That’s right. If you had sold it, do you know what she would have done? She would have drowned you in caterpillars, that’s what she would have done. So you were smart not to risk crossing her. But no rats. As long as you stick with her, you need never be afraid of rats. Right, Mistress Hardesty?”

“Correct, Senator. No rats, ever. Bill, I’m proud of you, not letting someone tempt you. But I want you to stop that slang—why, someone hearing you might think you were a nightwalker—and we wouldn’t want that, would we? So don’t say ‘a skin tried to buy the tree,’ just say ‘a man.’”

“Uh, matter o’ fac’, this skin was a slitch. Uh, a broad. Read?”

“Yes. But let’s try that again. Say ‘a woman.’”

“All right. That skin was a woman.” He grinned sheepishly. “You sound just like the Sisters that taught us at Holy Name, back dirtside.”

“I take that as a compliment. Bill…and I am going to nag you about your grammar and your pronunciation and your choice of words even more than they ever did. Until you talk as beautifully as the Senator does. Because, many years ago, a wise and cynical man proved that the way a person talks is the most important thing about him when it comes to dealing successfully with the world. Do you understand me?”

“Uh—Some.”

“You can’t learn everything at once and I don’t expect you to. Bill, if you bathe every day and speak grammatically, the world will decide that you are a winner and will treat you accordingly. So we’ll keep trying.”

I said, “And in the meantime it is urgent to get out of this bucket.”

“Senator, this is urgent, too.”

“Yes, yes, the old ‘how to housebreak a puppy’ rule. I understand. But let’s get moving.”

“Yes, sir. Straight to the spaceport?”

“Not yet. Straight down El Camino Real while checking every public terminal for one that will accept coins. Do you have any coins?”

“A few. Enough for a short call, perhaps.”

“Good. But keep your eyes open for a change maker, too. Now that you and I have canceled our credit codes, we’ll have to use coins.”

We picked up our burdens again and started out. Gwen said quietly, “I don’t want Bill to hear this…but it’s not difficult to convince a public terminal that you are using a correct credit code when you are not.”

I answered just as quietly, “We will resort to that only if honesty won’t work. My darling, how many more little scams do you have tucked away?”

“Sir, I don’t know what you’re talking about. A hundred meters ahead of us—Does that booth on the right have the yellow sign? Why are so few public booths equipped to receive coins?”

“Because Big Brother likes to know who is calling whom…and with the credit code method we are practically begging him to share our secrets. Yes, that one does have the sign. Let’s pool our coins.”

The Reverend Doctor Hendrik Hudson Schultz answered his terminal promptly. His Santa Claus visage peered at me, sizing me up, counting the money in my wallet.

“Father Schultz?”

“In the flesh. How can I serve you, sir?”

Instead of answering, I took out a thousand-crown note, held it in front of my face. Dr. Schultz looked at it, raised his bristling brows. “You interest me, sir.”

I tapped my ear while glancing left and right, then I signed all three of the three little monkeys. He answered, “Why, yes, I was about to go out for a cup of coffee. Will you join me? One moment—”

Shortly he held up a sheet of paper on which he had printed in large block letters:

OLD MACDONALD’S FARM

“Can you meet me at Sans Souci Bargrill? That’s on Petticoat Lane right across from my studio. About ten minutes, perhaps?” All the while he was talking, he was jabbing a finger at the sign he was showing me.

I answered, “Righto!” and switched off.

I was not in the habit of going to farm country, since full gravity is not kind to my bad leg and farms have to be at full gravity. No, that’s not correct; there may be more habitats in the System that use for farming whatever fractional gee they wish (or that mutated plants prefer) than there are that use natural sunlight and full gee. As may be. Golden Rule goes the natural sunlight and full gee route for much of its fresh food. Other spaces in Golden Rule use artificial light and other accelerations for growing food—how much, I don’t know. But the enormous space from ring fifty to ring seventy is open air, side to side, save for struts and vibration dampers and walkways joining the principal corridors.

In this span of twenty rings—eight hundred meters—radii 0-60, 120-180, and 240-300 let in the sunlight; radii 60-120, 180-240, and 300-0 are farmland—of which 180-240, ring 50-70 is Old MacDonald’s Farm.

That’s a lot of farmland. A man could get lost there, especially in fields where corn grows even taller than it does in Iowa. But Doc Schultz had paid me the compliment of assuming that I would know where to meet him: at a popular outdoor restaurant and bar called The Country Kitchen, right spang in the middle of the farm, ring sixty, radius 210, at (of course) full gravity.

To reach the restaurant we had to go downstairs forward of ring fifty, then walk aft (at full gee, damn it!) to ring sixty, a distance of four hundred meters. A short distance, oh certainly—about four city blocks. Try it on a false foot with a stump that has already been used too much in walking and too much in carrying for one day.

Gwen spotted it, in my voice, or my face, or my walk, or something—or she read my mind, maybe; I’m not sure she can’t. She stopped.

I stopped. “Trouble, dear?”

“Yes. Senator, put down that bundle. I’ll balance Tree-San on my head. Give me the bundle.”

“I’m all right.”

“Yes, sir. You surely are and I’m going to keep you that way. It is your privilege to be
macho
whenever you wish…and it’s my privilege to go female and be vaporish and weak and unreasonable. Right now I’m about to faint. And I’ll stay that way until you give me the bundle. You can beat me later.”

“Hmm. When is it my turn to win an argument?”

“On your birthday, sir. Which this is not. Let me have the bundle. Please.”

It was not an argument I wanted to win; I handed over the bundle. Bill and Gwen went on ahead of me, with Bill walking in front, breaking trail. She never lost control of the burden balanced on her head, even though the road was not corridor-smooth—a dirt road. Real dirt—a piece of totally unnecessary swank.

I limped slowly along behind, leaning heavily on my cane and putting almost no weight on my stump. By the time I reached the outdoor restaurant I felt fairly well recovered.

Dr. Schultz was leaning against the bar with an elbow hooked over it. He recognized me, did not admit it until I came up to him. “Dr. Schultz?”