The Invaders Plan

PART TEN

Chapter 1

I was on my way to getting even richer, but first I had to cover some tracks. Be neat has always been my motto.

Still sucking crumbs out of my teeth, I stepped into a streetside message center and started dropping hundredths-of-a-credit tokens in the slots. I got a greetings envelope, a fancy note sheet used for sending presents and a pen. Using the little desk, I wrote: Know All Lombar: Happy going away present. H. was adamant to buy these supplies but I got in real quick to protect your interests. I hope I did right.

Your alert subordinate, SoltanFor a hundredth of a credit, you can get a facsimile of something. I took the million-credit Zanco bill, copied it and on the duplicate drew a huge circle around the total, put an arithmetical division sign on it and the figure "2".

Then I drew an arrow and wrote Lombar.He would certainly get the idea. We are used to using informal codes in the Apparatus.

On the greetings envelope, I wrote: To a Great ChiefThen I took the blue paper that Zanco had written, refusing to give me a commission. I held it up to the glass and dropped in another hundredth credit to get a copy. I took the duplicate and diagonally across the bottom wrote: Please can you lift this restriction a little bit?

That done, I splurged and bought a two-hundredths-credit cover envelope, put it all inside and addressed it formally – and top secret – to Lombar Hisst as Chief of the Coordinated Information Apparatus.

Of course I didn't put it in the regular post. I walked a little way up the street to a place I knew was a cover operation for the Apparatus – a women's underwear shop – and gave it to the agent in the back office for immediate transmission.

It made me feel very virtuous. I could hear Lombar purr when he got that! He might even say, "Ah, that Gris: a perfect subordinate." Lombar never turns down money!

I had breakfasted rather well. I had bought five huge sweetbuns and had only been able to eat four and a half. As a benign philanthropist, I handed the leftover half to Ske. He just glanced at the teeth marks in it and put it down on the seat. Ungrateful.

Nothing could dampen my euphoria. "Power City!" I commanded in a lordly fashion. "Boulevard of the Metal Markets!" My driver made muttering noises. It is natural. Nobody likes to fly over Power City if he can help it. I was shortly looking down upon it. That is to say, trying to.

The air over the place is a violent yellow. It is not smoke: it is the effect of huge induction fields on the surrounding atmosphere; it does things to molecules, whether gaseous or colloidally suspended solids. These induction fields come from the huge conversion energy generators that hum and roar away, furnishing the bulk of the power for this side of the planet and providing at the same time, most of its rarer metals. The conversion of one element to another delivers both the metals and the power. It is very neat, really. But there is a lot of ore dumping and downblasts from heavy flying trucks and the atmosphere is pretty clogged. The whole complex, with its towering elliptical transformers and elliptical streets, was first created about a hundred and twenty-five thousand years ago – at the time of the first invasion – and although it has vastly expanded, it is said that nobody has cleaned it up since.

Drivers and pilots hate to fly over it and through it. It gets their vehicles filthy. It also makes car radios and controls operate in weird ways. Traffic control beams get distorted and there are crashes. And all this, coupled with having to battle flying lorries and ground lorries arriving and leaving for all parts of the planet, has prompted some wit to call it "Profanity City." Ske dodged and cursed his way to the Boulevard of the Metal Markets. About a two mile stretch of hit-or-miss shops and warehouses, it is not where one would choose to drive for a scenic holiday.

My driver really cursed when I made him drive not just up it but also back down it. I ignored him. I was looking at the price signboards. They change daily and no company ever knows what another company is going to post and a smart operator like myself doesn't just pick up a communications link and say, "Give me three lorry loads of lead." No, indeed.

I finally chose one that seemed lowest today and directed the driver to land at the office. It was the Reliable Ready-Pack Take Away Metals Company.

I went in. They are used to dealing with factory agent buyers from Industrial City and there are no sales talks. It's all old-pal and put-it-in-the-truck. They are not used to seeing someone come up in a smart airbus, smoking a fat puffstick and looking down his nose at them. They looked surprised. Dealing in metals has made them metallic in appearance. Even their aprons look like they are cast.

"Military purchases are out back," clanked the salesman.

"This is personal," I said. I laid the old lunch bag on the counter and he started to walk off. I pulled a sheaf of gold-colored money out of it and he came back.

"A cash deal?" he clanked. His eyeballs click-clicked this way and that to see if anybody else in the place was watching. I knew he was wondering how much cash he could skim off for himself.

"You are posting," I said, "gold for eleven credits the pound today."

"Special," he said. "Only .001 percent impure."

"I think," I said, "you have some for ten?"

"Come into this tank," he said quickly.

He did some rapid clanking on an old calculating machine. It was very complex. How much did he have to steal off the stockpile and add to my order in order to arrive at ten credits a pound. Then how much more did he have to steal and add in order to pocket how much for himself.

But my calculation was not obscure at all. I was going to hold on to one thousand credits to spend. I was not going to return any advanced pay – as I couldn't spend it where I was going. I had nine thousand credits to buy with. I wanted nine hundred pounds of gold.

With many clicks and cracks of his face, he finally had it worked out. It really didn't cost the company all that much. Lead was a third of a credit a pound. Converting it down to gold, which is lighter on the atomic scale, delivered enormous power generation and paid for the processing. The main cost to the power company was in packaging and wholesaling to such companies as Reliable Ready-Pack and it in turn had overheads and commissions. The only reason gold stayed up as high as it did was because the power combines preferred to do lighter element atomic conversion, due to electrical demands. The metals themselves tended to be secondary. So skimming off a few ingots was nothing he would be tagged for. It would go down as "ordinary business wear and tear."

"That welds the deal," he said.

"One more thing," I said. "I want heavy ingot packing cases, nine of them, one hundred pounds to the case."

"That's extra," he said.

"What's the name of that company just south of you?" I said.

"That welds the deal," he said.

With a bunch of "Hey, Ip" and "You there," he got the laborers at it. They found nine battered-up but lock-able ingot cases in the trash heap.

I took one of the fifty-pound ingots off the pile. Gold is deceptive. It looks small but it's heavy.It almost broke my arm. I poked at it with a fingernail and then put my teeth into a corner of it. Nice and soft. Pure gold. Gleaming, lovely! Gold is so pretty!

Into the cases it went, eighteen fifty-pound bars of it. The metal man falsified the inventory log. Out to the front loading platform went the dolly.

I counted nine thousand credits out of the sack and into his pincer-grip fingers. I got my personal receipt. We clanked hands.