Authors: Frederik Pohl
PLATINUM POHL (57 page)
Milo Pulcher looked away quickly. His eyes stopped on the white face of the girl, and abruptly he knew how she had raised the money to send Jon to another star.
Pulcher found the girl a room and left her there. It was not what he wanted. What he wanted was to spend the evening with her and to go on spending time with her, until time came to an end: but there was the matter of her trial.
Twenty-four hours ago he had got the letter notifying him that the court had appointed him attorney for six suspected kidnapers and looked on it as a fast fee, no work to speak of, no hope for success. He would lose the case, certainly. Well, what of it?
But now he wanted to win!
It meant some fast, hard work if he was to have even a chance—and at best, he admitted to himself, the chance would not be good. Still, he wasn’t going to give up without a try.
The snow stopped as he located the home of Jimmy Lasser’s parents. It was a sporting-goods shop, not far from the main Tourist Agency; it had a window full of guns and boots and scuba gear. He walked in, tinkling a bell as he opened the door.
“Mr. Lasser?” A plump little man, leaning back in a chair by the door, got slowly up, looking him over.
“In back,” he said shortly.
He led Pulcher behind the store, to a three-room apartment. The living room was comfortable enough, but for some reason it seemed unbalanced. One side was somehow heavier than the other. He noticed the nap of the rug, still flattened out where something heavy had been, something rectangular and large, about the size of a Tri-V electronic entertainment unit. “Repossessed,” said Lasser shortly. “Sit down. Dickon called you a minute ago.”
“Oh?” It had to be something important. Dickon wouldn’t have tracked him down for any trivial matter.
“Don’t know what he wanted, but he said you weren’t to leave till he called back. Sit down. May’ll bring you a cup of tea.”
Pulcher chatted with them for a minute, while the woman fussed over a teapot and a plate of soft cookies. He was trying to get the feel of the home. He could understand Madeleine Gaultry’s desperation, he could understand the Foltis boy, a misfit in society anywhere. What about Jimmy Lasser?
The elder Lassers were both pushing sixty. They were first-generation Niners, off an Earth colonizing ship. They hadn’t been born on Earth, of course—the trip took nearly a hundred years, physical transport. They had been born in transit, had married on the ship. As the ship had reached maximum population level shortly after they were born, they were allowed to have no children until they landed. At that time they were all of forty. May Lasser said suddenly, “Please help our boy, Mr. Pulcher! It isn’t Jimmy’s fault. He got in with a bad crowd. You know how it is: no work, nothing for a boy to do.”
“I’ll do my best.” But it was funny, Pulcher thought, how it was always “the crowd” that was bad. It was never Jimmy—and never Avery, never Sam, never Walter. Pulcher sorted out the five boys and remembered Jimmy: nineteen years old, quite colorless, polite, not very interested. What had struck the lawyer about him was only surprise that this rabbity boy should have had the enterprise to get into a criminal conspiracy in the first place.
“He’s a good boy,” said May Lasser pathetically. “That trouble with the parked cars two years ago wasn’t his fault. He got a fine job right after that, you know. Ask his probation officer. Then the Icicle Works closed … .” She poured more tea, slopping it over the side of the cup. “Oh, sorry! But—But when he went to the unemployment office, Mr. Pulcher, do you know what they said to him?”
“I know.”
“They asked him would he take a job if offered,” she hurried on, unheeding. “A
job
. As if I didn’t know what they meant by a ‘job!’ They meant
renting
.” She plumped the teapot down on the table and began to weep. “Mr. Pulcher, I wouldn’t let him rent if I died for it! There isn’t anything in the Bible that says you can let someone else use your body and not be responsible for what it does! You know what tourists do! ‘If thy right hand offend thee, cut it off.’ It doesn’t say, unless somebody else is using it. Mr. Pulcher, renting is a
sin!
”
job
. As if I didn’t know what they meant by a ‘job!’ They meant
renting
.” She plumped the teapot down on the table and began to weep. “Mr. Pulcher, I wouldn’t let him rent if I died for it! There isn’t anything in the Bible that says you can let someone else use your body and not be responsible for what it does! You know what tourists do! ‘If thy right hand offend thee, cut it off.’ It doesn’t say, unless somebody else is using it. Mr. Pulcher, renting is a
sin!
”
“May.” Mr. Lasser put his teacup down and looked directly at Pulcher. “What about it, Pulcher? Can you get Jimmy off?”
The attorney reflected. He hadn’t known about Jimmy Lasser’s probation before, and that was a bad sign. If the county prosecutor was holding out on information of that sort, it meant he wasn’t willing to cooperate. Probably he would be trying for a conviction with maximum sentence. Of course, he didn’t have to tell a defense attorney anything about the previous criminal records of his clients. But in a juvenile case, where all parties were usually willing to go easy on the defendants, it was customary … . “I don’t know, Mr. Lasser. I’ll do the best I can.”
“Damn right you will!” barked Lasser. “Dickon tell you who I am? I was committeeman here before him, you know. So get busy. Pull strings. Dickon will back you, or I’ll know why!”
Pulcher managed to control himself. “I’ll do the best I can. I already told you that. If you want strings pulled, you’d better talk to Dickon yourself. I only know law. I don’t know anything about politics.”
The atmosphere was becoming unpleasant. Pulcher was glad to hear the ringing of the phone in the store outside. May Lasser answered it and said: “For you, Mr. Pulcher. Charley Dickon.”
Pulcher gratefully picked up the phone. Dickon’s rich, political voice said sorrowfully, “Milo? Listen, I been talking to Judge Pegrim’s secretary. He isn’t gonna let the kids off with a slap on the wrist. There’s a lot of heat from the mayor’s office.”
Pulcher protested desperately: “But the Swinburne kid wasn’t hurt! He got better care with Madeleine than he was getting at home.”
“I know, Milo,” the committeeman agreed, “but that’s the way she lies. So what I wanted to say to you, Milo, is don’t knock yourself out on this one because you aren’t going to win it.”
“But—” Pulcher suddenly became aware of the Lassers just behind him. “But I think I can get an acquittal,” he said, entirely out of hope, knowing that it wasn’t true.
Dickon chuckled. “You got Lasser breathing down your neck? Sure, Milo. But you want my advice you’ll take a quick hearing, let them get sentenced and then try for executive clemency in a couple months. I’ll help you get it. And that’s another five hundred or so for you, see?” The committeeman was being persuasive; it was a habit of his. “Don’t worry about Lasser. I guess he’s been telling you what a power he is in politics here. Forget it. And, say, tell him I notice he hasn’t got his tickets for the Chester A. Arthur Day Dinner yet. You pick up the dough from him, will you? I’ll mail him the tickets. No—hold on, don’t ask him. Just tell him what I said.” The connection went dead.
Pulcher stood holding a dead phone, conscious of Lasser standing right behind him. “So long, Charley,” he said, paused, nodded into space and said, “So long,” again.
Then the attorney turned about to deliver the committeeman’s message about that most important subject, the tickets to the Chester A. Arthur Day Dinner. Lasser grumbled, “Damn Dickon, he’s into you for one thing after another. Where’s he think I’m going to get thirty bucks?”
“Tim. Please.” His wife touched his arm.
Lasser hesitated. “Oh, all right. But you better get Jimmy off, hear?”
Pulcher got away at last and hurried out into the cold, slushy street.
At the corner he caught a glimpse of something palely glowing overhead and stopped, transfixed. A huge skytrout was swimming purposefully down the avenue. It
was a monster, twelve feet long at least and more than two feet thick at the middle; it would easily go eighteen, nineteen ounces, the sort of lunker that sportsmen hiked clear across the Dismal Hills to bag. Pulcher had never in his life seen one that size. In fact, he could only remember seeing one or two fingerlings swim over inhabited areas.
was a monster, twelve feet long at least and more than two feet thick at the middle; it would easily go eighteen, nineteen ounces, the sort of lunker that sportsmen hiked clear across the Dismal Hills to bag. Pulcher had never in his life seen one that size. In fact, he could only remember seeing one or two fingerlings swim over inhabited areas.
It gave him a cold, worried feeling.
The skyfish were about the only tourist attraction Altair Nine had left to offer. From all over the Galaxy sportsmen came to shoot them, with their great porous flesh filled with bubbles of hydrogen, real biological Zeppelins that did not fly in the air but swam it. Before human colonists arrived, they had been Altair Nine’s highest form of life. They were so easy to destroy with gunfire that they had almost been exterminated in the inhabited sections; only in the high, cold hills had a few survived. And now … .
Were even the fish aware that Altair Nine was becoming a ghost planet?
The next morning Pulcher phoned Madeleine but didn’t have breakfast with her, though he wanted to very much.
He put in the whole day working on the case. In the morning he visited the families and friends of the accused boys; in the afternoon he followed a few hunches.
From the families he learned nothing. The stories were all about the same. The youngest boy was Foltis, only seventeen; the oldest was Hopgood at twenty-six. They all had lost their jobs, most of them at the Icicle Works, saw no future, and wanted off-planet. Well, physical transport meant a minimum of ten thousand dollars, and not one of them had a chance in the worlds of getting that much money in any legitimate way.
Mayor Swinburne was a rich man, and his three-year-old son was the apple of his eye. It must have been an irresistible temptation to try to collect ransom money, Pulcher realized. The mayor could certainly afford it, and once the money was collected and they were aboard a starship it would be almost impossible for the law to pursue them.
Pulcher managed to piece together the way the thing had started. The boys all lived in the same neighborhood, the neighborhood where Madeleine and Jon Gaultry had had a little apartment. They had seen Madeleine walking with the mayor’s son—she had had a part-time job, now and then, taking care of him. The only part of the thing that was hard to believe was that Madeleine had been willing to take part in the scheme, once the boys approached her.
But Milo, remembering the expression on the girl’s face as she looked at the tourists, decided that wasn’t so strange after all.
For Madeleine had rented.
Physical transport was expensive and eternally slow.
But there was a faster way for a man to travel from planet to planet—practically instantaneous, from one end of the Galaxy to the other. The pattern of the mind is electronic in nature. It can be taped, and it can be broadcast on an electromagnetic frequency. What was more, like any electromagnetic signal, it could be used to modulate an ultra-wave carrier. The result: Instantaneous transmission of personality, anywhere in the civilized Galaxy.
The only problem was that there had to be a receiver.
The naked ghost of a man, stripped of flesh and juices, was no more than the countless radio and TV waves that passed through everyone all the time. The transmitted personality had to be given form. There were mechanical receivers, of course—computerlike affairs with mercury memory cells where a man’s intelligence could be received, and
could be made to activate robot bodies. But that wasn’t
fun.
The tourist trade was built on
fun.
Live bodies were needed to satisfy the customers. No one wanted to spend the price of a fishing broadcast to Altair Nine in order to find himself pursuing the quarry in some clanking tractor with photocell eyes and solenoid muscles. A body was wanted, even a rather attractive body; a body which would be firm where the tourist’s own, perhaps, was flabby, healthy where the tourist’s own had wheezed. Having such a body, there were other sports to enjoy than fishing.
could be made to activate robot bodies. But that wasn’t
fun.
The tourist trade was built on
fun.
Live bodies were needed to satisfy the customers. No one wanted to spend the price of a fishing broadcast to Altair Nine in order to find himself pursuing the quarry in some clanking tractor with photocell eyes and solenoid muscles. A body was wanted, even a rather attractive body; a body which would be firm where the tourist’s own, perhaps, was flabby, healthy where the tourist’s own had wheezed. Having such a body, there were other sports to enjoy than fishing.
Oh, the laws were strict about misuse of rented bodies.
But the tourist trade was the only flourishing industry left on Altair Nine. The laws remained strict, but they remained unenforced.
Pulcher checked in with Charley Dickon. “I found out why Madeleine got into this thing. She rented. Signed a long-term lease with the Tourist Agency and got a big advance on her earnings.”
Dickon shook his head sadly. “What people will do for money,” he commented.
“It wasn’t for her! She gave it to her husband, so he could get a ticket to someplace off-world.” Pulcher got up, turned around and kicked his chair as hard as he could. Renting was bad enough for a man. For a woman it was—
“Take it easy,” Dickon suggested, grinning. “So she figured she could buy her way out of the contract with the money from Swinburne?”
“Wouldn’t you do the same?”
“Oh, I don’t know, Milo. Renting’s not so bad.”
“The hell it isn’t!”
“All right. The hell it isn’t. But you ought to realize, Milo,” the committeeman said stiffly, “that if it wasn’t for the tourist trade we’d all be in trouble. Don’t knock the Tourist Agency. They’re doing a perfectly decent job.”
“Then why won’t they let me see the records?”
The committeeman’s eyes narrowed and he sat up straighter.
“I tried,” said Pulcher. “I got them to show me Madeleine’s lease agreement, but I had to threaten them with a court order. Why? Then I tried to find out a little more about the Agency itself—incorporation papers, names of shareholders and so on. They wouldn’t give me a thing. Why?”
Dickon said, after a second, “I could ask you that too, Milo. Why did you want to know?”
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