would have this much ready cash for a practical joke? Several New York banks, I suppose, but financial institutions have notoriously bad senses of humor. The government has none at all. It has to be Smith.”
“You ought to find out if it’s real. I could take some of it down to the bank and ask.”
“Quiet. I want to think.”
Obediently she returned to her rocking chair, and Darzek remained seated on her desk. “Smith offered me a job,” he said slowly. “I named my price, and he seems to have met it. I think that constitutes a contract.”
“What sort of a job?”
“Quiet. First I’ll have to figure out how to get the money to a bank. Then I’ll cancel the Tahiti trip, and see a lawyer—”
“You need a whole law firm. Internal Revenue—”
“I’m not worried about the taxes. I want to make a will. Smith said the job might take years, with extensive travel, so there’s no point in keeping the office open. It’s a shame.”
“What’s a shame?”
“I’ve never had to do anything that I liked less.”
“What do you have to do?”
“Schluppy,” Darzek said sadly, “I never thought it would come to this, but here it is. You’re fired.”
“Mr. Darzek!”
“I’ll pay you two years’ salary in lieu of a month’s notice. Make that five years. No objections, now—it won’t scratch the surface of that million. You can set up your own detective agency. Or retire, and take my trip to Tahiti.”
Miss Schlupe blew a blast into her hankerchief. “I don’t want to retire,” she blubbered. “I want to work for you.”
“It’s nothing to cry about. There wouldn’t be anything for you to do if I kept you on.”
“I’m not crying about that.”
“Then why are you crying?”
“That’s the first time you ever called me Schluppy!”
Darzek picked up a box of money, hefted it thoughtfully, and put it down again. “I don’t like this at all. But I made a bad joke, and Smith called me on it, and I feel obligated to take his job. I wonder what it is.”
Chapter 3
There were seventeen new passengers in the ship’s day lounge and three in the night lounge, and none of them possessed a time segment’s worth of solvency. The captain alternately cursed the world of Quarm and all of its workings for inflicting these unwanted passengers on him and pleaded with those who occupied compartments to make room for them.
“They can’t live in the lounges,” the captain said.
“Why not?” asked Gul Brokefa, a wealthy trader whose family was occupying two compartments.
“Because,” the captain said gloomily, “the Quarmers say I have to take at least a hundred more passengers before they’ll release the ship. And if these stay in the lounges, where will I put a hundred more?”
Gul Brokefa rudely suggested a place, and the captain snarled back. There was a spirited exchange before Gul Brokefa flounced away disdainfully.
Biag-n, settled unobtrusively in a remote corner, enjoyed the altercation tremendously. So did the other passengers. They had little enough to occupy themselves. The viewing screen had been turned off at their request; there was nothing to see except the looming silhouette of the transfer station and Quarm’s distant, silvery crescent. The one was uninteresting and none of the refugees wanted to look at the other.
Biag-n was sharing a small compartment with four factors and their families. He considered himself fortunate, but this did not prevent him from finding the factors boring, their wives and mates disgusting, and their children an infernal nuisance. Eventually he would have to move in with them; in the meantime, he was living in the lounge. He liked it there.
He liked being alive. He had fully expected the rabid mob to tear him to pieces, but the proctors had marched him off to the Interstellar Trade Building, held him captive with other foreigners for three suspenseful days and nights, and finally transmitted the lot of them to a transfer station, where they were assigned to ships.
All cargos had been jettisoned and the ships’ hulls packed with passenger compartments, and these now held four times their planned capacity. No one knew how much longer the Quarmers would hold the ship in the paralyzing safety field of the transfer station. The captain, worried about his reserves of air and water and food, had imposed strict rationing.
Biag-n was hungry, but he made no complaint. Eventually they would reach safety, and he liked being alive. He even enjoyed the crowded lounge, where occasionally he could eavesdrop on the conversation of a colossus of interstellar trade, or watch his wife carelessly squandering solvency at a game of jwur. In normal circumstances he was not even privileged to glimpse such fabulous animates from afar. The warp of fortune was indeed crossed with both good and bad.
Biag-n quietly got to his feet and trailed after the captain, who was carrying the vain appeal for accommodations to the other end of the lounge. Gul E-Wusk, an enormous old trader and a giant even among the colossuses, sprawled near the entrance to the night lounge in a complicated ooze of arms and legs, proboscis dangling limply in a long-necked goblet of clear liquid. Common gossip had it that he drank water; Biag-n was curious, but lacked the temerity to ask him. The door to the night lounge lay open, and E-Wusk was conversing with a nocturnal invisible in the darkness beyond. An awed group of young undertraders stood nearby, listening with polite fascination.
The captain stated his problem, and E-Wusk quivered with laughter. “Oh, ho ho! A hundred more? I didn’t even know there were so many foreigners on Quarm! Where were they hiding?”
“Under rocks, with the rest of the slime,” the captain said gloomily.
“Oh, ho ho! Take my compartment. There’s room for twenty there if I stay out of it. Take Gul Meszk’s, too, and send him back to Quarm. He’s a Quarmer at heart—they didn’t even burn his warehouses!”
Gul Meszk, an angular sexrumane, was shuffling past with a look of constrained boredom on his pebbly face. He said resentfully, “Is it my fault that I don’t stock combustibles? Anyway, they did burn them. They burned all of them. You just didn’t happen to see it.”
E-Wusk delivered a long, gargling laugh. “You saw my warehouse burn. I hope the rascals singed their knobs.”
Meszk looked at him slyly. “Now that you mention it, your warehouse did produce an unusual smudge.”
“Smudge! You saw the flames. The Quarmers had to run home for their light shields. Oh, ho ho!” Rippling waves of laughter encircled his body. “I saw it coming. You can’t say I didn’t warn you. I cleared out my warehouse ten days ago. I told you then—”
“You told me,” Meszk agreed resignedly. “I thought it was another of your jokes.”
“Oh, ho ho!” E-Wusk flopped out supinely, gasping for breath. “Thought it was a joke!” He gurgled helplessly. “Oh, ho ho! That is a joke!”
“I hadn’t forgotten that gag of yours about the frunl,” Meszk grumbled. “I dumped my whole stock at a loss. So did everyone else.”
‘That wasn’t my gag,” E-Wusk said. “It was Gul Rhinzl’s. I saw what he was doing and cut myself in on it.”
“Anyway, the two of you cornered every scrap of Quarm, and then you doubled the price. With operators like you fleecing them at every turn, no wonder the Quarmers revolted.”
E-Wusk shook with merriment.
“So when you came around with that tale of doom and disaster, naturally I didn’t believe it. All I did was check through my inventory to try to figure out what