Gladiator-At-Law

Chapter Twenty-Two

Back in Ryan's office Mundin said, lying, "It wasn't so bad."

Ryan had taken advantage of their absence to get coked to the eyebrows. He said dreamily, "Think of them. Hundreds of years old. You know what H. G. Wells said around 1940? 'A frightful queerness is coming into life.' Nothing went right, no matter what you did. Green, Charlesworth must have been hitting their stride about then. You know what Jonathan Swift called Green, Charlesworth? Struldbrugs. Only people were on to them, then. Gulliver said they had a law, no Struldbrug could keep his money after he was a hundred. Think of them. Hundreds and hundreds of years old, hundreds and hundreds and hun—"

Don Lavin touched his shoulder and he stopped. Harry Coett was smiling affably at his thumbnail. He started and said gently, "How about a drink?"

Mundin poured it for him, pretending not to notice that the big man was weeping.

"We must proceed to an orderly liquidation," said Nelson, his eyes roving from one corner to another. "Naturally any further action along our previous lines is out of the question."

Norma appeared at the door. Mundin had left her with the company nurse; but she had obviously pulled herself completely together. "Is it all settled by now?" she demanded grimly.

Mundin said, "Everybody seems to be in agreement." He felt weighted down by a tremendous apathy. Green, Charlesworth. They spoke, and the Titans lay down to die. Four men who aggregated eight times his age, thirty times his experience—you couldn't buck it.

"An orderly liquidation," nodded Nelson. "We'll take our licking. Of course. Under the circumstances—"

Norma cut in, "Do you want to fold?"

Coett rubbed his face. "Is there any question?" he asked.

"You mean you do. All right. Who else?"

Nelson said stiffly, "Norma, are you out of your mind?"

"Maybe," she said. "Maybe I am. You tell me. I'll tell you what I'm thinking, and you let me know if it's crazy. I'm thinking that Green, Charlesworth are a couple of old imbeciles. I don't know if they've lived a hundred years or a thousand. I don't care. I suppose there's no reason a man can't live a long time, if he's got plenty of money to spend on medicine; and I suppose that a man who pays the doctors to keep him going, no matter what, has plenty of chances to line up money. ... I don't care. It doesn't matter. They're human. I saw them, and, believe me, they're human—old; feeble; half insane. At least half. What have they got?"

Ryan, nodding his head to an inner music, chirped, "Money." He smiled.

"Money. So they've got it. As Mundin pointed out, so have we. Maybe they'll lick us, but by God they can't bluff us. I'm speaking just for me—I won't deny they can do anything they like to me, but they'll have to do it before I give up. Hear?"

Mundin said quickly, "Me too!"

Coett said reasonably, "Good-by."

He stood up, bowed, and headed for the door. Norma, suddenly shaking, said, "Damn you!" She pushed blindly past him.

Coett paused and shook his head. "Crazy," he said.

And in a moment she was back, holding a small celadon vase with blue shoulder-band and medallions. A couple of roses and small ferns were dangling limply from its neck.

Norma dumped the flowers and yelled to the vase, "I don't give a damn what you do, Green, Charlesworth! The bubble-house is going to be used the way my father planned it! If you people get in the way you're going out the window—and so are any of my yellow-bellied colleagues who don't back me up!"

The vase hummed and shattered in her hands. A flying chip of glass plowed a shallow, bloody furrow in her cheek. Among the shards on the carpet were tiny lumps of metal and crystal that glowed white-hot, fused and were gone. Mundin stamped out the dozen tiny fires on the rug, conscious of screams in the offices outside.

There was pandemonium for ten minutes. The damnedest things were exploding—a pen in Coett's jacket, the stockroom air-conditioner switch, a polarimeter in the lab, the 'in' basket on Ryan's desk. But, except for hysteria among the women, there was no damage. The small fires were easily extinguished.

Coett, dabbing at the scorched mess that was left of his jacket, bellowed at Norma, "You and your screwball schemes. Upset the contract-rental plan, will you? We're slave-drivers, are we? You cheap—"

He was hardly making sense. Mundin and Don started for him at the same time. Mundin was closer; he won the honor of knocking him down.

Nelson picked Coett up and dusted off the carbon from the charred rug. "Blood-pressure, Harry," he advised the older man. "Don't worry. We'll get these skunks."

Hubble was gnawing his nails. He said slowly, "You know, I was brought up to be a sensible, dollar-fearing young man, and Green, Charlesworth have more dollars than anybody else around. . . . You know—for God's sake, don't laugh at me. But I'm sticking, as long as my nerve holds out."

Norma flung her arms around him and kissed him. Charles said, "Hey, cut that—" and then stopped, as he realized he had no right to the sense of outrage which had suddenly overwhelmed him. The other two financiers looked scandalized.

"Traitor," Nelson said incredulously. "Well, all right. Get the hell out of this office—all of you lunatics. If I'd ever dreamed—"

"Suppose," Ryan told them gently, "you get out. Think it over. If you leave, you're in the clear—on paper at least. But we hold the lease; and you will kindly blow before we call the cops."

"Blood-pressure, Harry!" Nelson said sharply to Coett.

They left, reducing the Big Seven to a Big Five—and Norvell Bligh, who truculently demanded to be filled in.

When he had been, he looked around at the glum faces and laughed. "Cheer up," he said. "Worse things happen in Belly Rave."

"We'll find out, no doubt," Mundin said numbly.

Norvell patted him on the shoulder. "Exactly," he nodded. "Exactly, Charles; that's the worst that can happen to you. And I've been there, folks. Oh, it's hell, no doubt about it. But—what isn't?"

Norma said imploringly, "Charles, listen to him. He's right. The world's in jail, Charles, and my father put it there, trying to make things nice. I'm almost glad he's dead, just so he can't see what his bubble-house did to the world. Nero never had a weapon like the bubble-house! And think of it in the hands of people like Mrs. Green and Mr. Charlesworth!"

Mundin said, breathing heavily, "Am I to understand that all you ask of an attorney is that he turn the world upside-down for you?"

Norvie Bligh snapped, "Come off it, Charlie!" He advanced almost menacingly on the lawyer, staring up into the bigger man's eyes. He said, "I've got a kid coming. I want him to have a chance at real life—not contract slavery. Oh, if it's money you want, we'll make money. G.M.L. is worth lots of money, and as I see it our first move is to take over G.M.L. But that's only the beginning!"

His cocksure confidence made something in the bridge of Mundin's nose tickle; he called it a beginning laugh, and suppressed it. But—Norvie Bligh, five-feet-four and without two nickels in his pocket, saying, "Let's take over G.M.L.—fourteen billion dollars and a nation of resources. . . ."

Mundin swallowed and grinned. "Well, as you say, what have we got to lose? Except you, Hubble."

"Call me Bliss," said the financier, wryly. "It's so descriptive of my entire life." He hesitated. "Oh, hell," he said after a moment. "Might as well show my credentials in the club. What you said, Bligh—'What isn't hell?' A good question. You think Belly Rave is tough, you ought to spend some time at a directors' meeting! You've met my wife—fine woman," he added hastily. "Or was once. But—corruption spreads. Disease spreads. Things are bad at the bottom, they've got to get bad at the top."

He shook his head, staring like a trapped animal at the scorched rug. "All my life, looking for something, trying to do something, trying to take over and change things—I didn't know how. And I don't know how now, but maybe you people do. Anyway, I'll help you try."

Norma, for once compassionate, said, "And even all that money doesn't help?"

Hubble laughed. "You ask me that. That's a good one. You've got more than I'll ever see, free and clear. Sell your stock on the Big Board if you want to find out for yourself." He shook his head and said abruptly, "Hell with it. What do we do now?"

Mundin, looking around the room, was astonished to find that everyone was looking at him. And then he saw why— Norma was looking to him; and Don was looking where Norma looked; and the others followed the Lavins.

He cleared his throat; and then he heard, with his mind, what his ears had heard moments before. "The Big Board!" he cried.

They looked at him. "Don't you see?" he demanded. "The Big Board, what Hubble said. If we can—what's that?"

"That" was a clear, ringing note that came, startlingly, from nowhere. They all looked up; Don Lavin shook himself and got to his feet, staring around. He started to walk toward the door; Mundin said:

"Hey, wait a minute! Where are you going?"

Don called something over his shoulder that sounded like "high wire"; but Mundin didn't catch it. For just then there was another little explosion in the room, the base of a lamp next to where Don had been sitting; and he had a couple more little fires to put out.

But there was, as before, no serious damage. "Hope they haven't got any more of these on a time fuse," Mundin commented. "Well, where were we?"

"You started to tell us what to do," Norvie Bligh said helpfully.

"Well, not exactly. I was just going to say that we may not be quite licked yet. We've got resources. For one, we owe money—maybe a million dollars, I guess; when you get into that kind of red ink, you're an important firm. For another, our campaign against G.M.L. isn't going to dry up just because a couple of men walked out on it. They're going to be in trouble for a while, come hell or high water; maybe we can fish in the troubled waters. For a third, we still have our biggest resource of all—Don and his stock. Where'd Don go?"

"He went out just before that thing blew up," Norvie said uneasily. "I thought he said something about 'the high wire,' but I guess I heard him wrong."

"That's the way I heard it," puzzled Mundin. "Funny. Excuse me." He phoned the reception desk, and slowly hung up the receiver. "They say he went out. They asked when he'd be back, and he said he wouldn't be. Said he was going to the Stadium."

There was a dense silence. "Does anybody," Hubble demanded, "know anything about what a 'high wire' may be? There could be some perfectly simple explanation—"

Norvie Bligh said faintly, "I know quite a lot about high-wire work. It's the most dangerous turn at the Field Day." He coughed. "It's kind of late to mention it. But, Charles, did you get the impression Don's eyes were shining?"

Norma and Mundin gasped at once. "The doctor," said Norma.

"The doctor!" echoed Mundin. "He said it might not all be out. There might be something deep, planted and left there—"

Ping.

A raucous cackle filled the room. Two voices chanted:

"Absolutely, Mr. Charlesworth?"

"Positively, Mrs. Green!"