Gladiator-At-Law

Chapter Twenty-Five

"I wanted to do it," Norvell Bligh was saying in a cracked voice. "I was willing to do it."

Norma had her arms around him, in the cab going back to Belly Rave. "Of course you were," she soothed him.

Mundin, riding dazedly beside them, tried to rest his brain. That was a pretty good little man, he thought. Good thing Shep took the play away from him. Well need him. But of course he can't see it that way, not yet.

Hubble was chattering vivaciously away. "Really an adventure. But the big adventure's coming up, eh, Mundin? After the piranha, Green, Charlesworth. They'll make us wish we were back with the piranha, wouldn't you say?"

Don Lavin advised him, "Shut up." Something had happened to Don Lavin. He might have learned something on the wire, Mundin thought. Funny, how you grow up after a while—after a very long while, for some people.

Reminded, he picked up the phone and asked information for a number.

Hubble, eavesdropping and irrepressible, said, "Oh, of course. The Stadium infirmary. We plain forgot about old Ryan, didn't we? And we'll need him for the big doings— when are you going to let us in on the plan, by the way? Now that we've got Don back we've got the stock. But we'll never vote it. You know that; they'll tie us up in injunctions from here to hell. I suppose—" He broke off, warned by Mundin's expression as he slowly hung up the phone. "Ryan?" Hubble demanded in a completely different tone.

Mundin nodded. "Hemorrhage," he said. "He died on the operating table." He sighed.

War was never cheap, he thought. Shep—almost Bligh— and now Ryan. Give me one more victory such as this, and I am undone, he quoted to himself, as he began to plot the final struggle that Ryan had helped to shape, and would not see.

"You'd think," grumbled Don Lavin, "that ten hours' sleep would fix a person up."

Mundin said worriedly, "It's almost time for the bell. Do you see Norvie?" They were in the Stock Exchange, waiting for the start of business. The enormous hall was packed with its customary seething, excitable throng—but not quite the customary feeling of tension, Mundin thought, putting out psychic feelers into the crowd. It was a more somber mass of speculators than the last tune he had been here, a worried bunch, fretful and disturbed. Their own publicity campaign, Mundin thought with a touch of satisfaction. There had been trading in G.M.L.; it was off a few points, over the last weeks.

Not much, but enough to shake, ever so slightly, the ironclad conviction of its stability. And if G.M.L. wasn't totally sound, the investors were wondering, almost aloud, what was?

They saw Norvie at last, inconspicuous against the far wall. He looked at them without visible recognition, then deliberately looked away. They followed his look; and there was Hubble, at a hundred-dollar window, chatting gaily with the investor at the window next to him. And then the bell rang for the first movement of the day.

"Your honor, sir," Mundin said formally to Don Lavin. Don acknowledged with an ironic bow and light-heartedly tapped out his first "sell" order:

333, 100 shares, market

The Big Board flickered and hummed, and the pari-mutuel computers totaled, subtracted, divided, and spat out their results. Mundin and Don had their glasses fixed to line 333; it flashed:

333, off 2

"Congratulations," said Mundin. "You have just thrown away a thousand bucks."

"My privilege," said Don, grinning. "Your turn, I believe."

The thirty-second warning bell sounded, and Mundin tapped out his own order—a hundred shares of Old 333, G.M.L. Homes, at the market. And they lopped off another half-point.

Don had been computing with a pencil and paper, thoughtfully. "At one movement every three minutes," he said, "and three hundred trading minutes in the day, at the present rate of progress we will bust G.M.L. right off the board in forty working days." They gravely shook hands.

A somberly dressed school teacher, showing her young civics class a first-rate example of The American Way in action, shepherded the kids past the line of betting windows where Don and Mundin were sitting. The investors on either side of the two conspirators were getting curious; the one next to Don leaned over and hissed, "Say buster—why pay the Exchange commission? You want to unload G.M.L. I can take you to a guy who'll make a private deal.

"Beat it," said Don, and punched out his order.

333, off 2

"Slow and steady," Mundin said philosophically.

A petulant little man, escorted by a grim guard, came stamping down the aisle. "K-81, K-82, K-83—oh, you must be the one," he counted. "You there, window K-85. And you. Are you aware of the penalties for non-delivery of stock sold through the pari-mutuel—"

"Take a look," said Mundin, shoving the stock certificates into his hands.

The petulant man looked, and giggled weakly. "Oh," he said fussily. "Well, of course—Come along, Haynes. There certainly wasn't anything to that complaint, was there? Terrible how these stories get started. . . ."

Haynes paused and leaned over Mundin. "I'm watching you," he said. "The exit door is right over there—next to the cashier's area. I'll be there, when you deposit that stock." He lumbered, casually threatening, away.

"Green, Charlesworth," whispered Mundin, and Don nodded. What else? Green, Charlesworth themselves, or one of their satellites; just checking, so far.

And once they had checked, they would know.

The thirty-second bell was ringing. Mundin started to punch out his order; then pressed the cancel plate. "Better step it up," he said over his shoulder to Don:

333, 500 shares, market

They lopped off a full point that time. ...

The Exchange had been going for half an hour, and already the buzz of whispers was louder than the calls of the speculators. Somebody was dumping G.M.L.

After the first drop, the market had firmed. Mundin, sweating doggedly over his punch keys, guessed that Green, Charlesworth's buying pool had orders to let the price drop a half point or a point at a time—no more. They could afford to watch and wait. They had plenty of time. And plenty of money. And plenty of resources.

And if the time and the money and the resources weren't enough—they had plenty of other ways to handle trouble.

Don Lavin was whispering something. Irritably Mundin looked up. "What?"

"I said, take a look at Belt Transport."

Mundin flicked his glasses over the Big Board. Belt Transport was off ten points, and he hadn't even noticed it. This was a hell of a time to get foggy-brained, he cursed himself. But he hadn't expected anything like that so soon; it had to be hunch players, two-bit investors getting worried and getting out. If that kept up, the big boys would be at the windows before long.

"You're right," Mundin told Don. "Give Norvie the nod."

Across the room, Norvie acknowledged the signal and began placing inconspicuous "buy" orders on the faltering stocks— all but G.M.L. He punched the keys as though he were punching Green, Charlesworth themselves, with a controlled, joyous rage. It had taken him a long time to realize that he was, after all, alive; and a longer time to get over the first wretched resentment that Shep had stolen his big scene, and died the death that Norvell had reserved for himself. But he was all over it now—and exulting at the chance to fight, however weakly, however ineffectually. . . .

Halfway through the second hour, they cued Hubble in, and he nodded, stopped piddling around with his two-dollar and five-dollar coppered bets and began following Nome's lead. Mundin and Don Lavin had switched to thousand-share lots by now, more than a million dollars' worth of stock at every movement, and were sullenly hammering old 333 off a point, another point—a point and a half—

Three times already the conditioned cashier's messenger had come down through the aisles with the Exchange's certified checks, taking away stock certificates and leaving the money; the transactions were getting that big. He came again and Mundin, catching a glimpse of the amount the check was made out for, felt his eyes pop. All of a sudden things came into focus: Charles Mundin, tossing millions of dollars' worth of stock into the hopper every couple of minutes, Charles Mundin who ninety days before couldn't scare up the price of his monthly installments on the Sleepless Secretary! He almost panicked; he looked up wildly, staring around at the watching hangers-on, the touts, the fascinated investors who had abandoned their own windows, the guards, the children of the civics class and their sedate teacher....

Something glinted and caught his eye. He hissed to the nearest kid, "Ixnay on the ottlebay!" The eight-year-old, squirming in his unaccustomed clothes, flushed and tucked the busted bottle farther out of sight hastily, but not so hastily that the eldest of the "class," a bony but sweet-faced thirteen, didn't catch it and move ominously closer. "Forget it, Lana," Mundin whispered. "Just keep them out of sight." He glanced at the "teacher," and then turned to the "teacher's" brother, beside him.

"How much have we dumped?" he demanded.

Don Lavin looked up from his penciled computations. "I make it just over eighteen thousand shares." A drop in the bucket, thought Mundin. They had started out with twenty-five per cent of G.M.L.'s entire stock issue—roughly seven million shares, in all, and their bloc close to two million. At that rate, he thought, they'd be there all year.

"Don," he said. "Don—both together, from now on. And twenty-five hundred shares at a time."

Fourteen billion dollars.

Fourteen billion dollars is massive, fourteen billion dollars has inertia; you don't shake it easily. Ram a Juggernaut into fourteen billion dollars. The Juggernaut crumples and spills its Hindic gods into the street; the fourteen billion dollars stands unmoved.

But fourteen billion dollars, or anything else that God ever made, has a natural rate of swing. Slap it with a feather, and wait; slap it again; slap it again. The oscillation builds. The giant construct vibrates and wobbles and sways.

And Don Lavin's twenty-five per cent interest was no feather.

The figures on the Big Board were plunging now—"333, off 10"; "333, off 6"; And even once, incredibly: "333, off 42." By working like dogs, Mundin and Bligh and Hubble and the Lavins had succeeded in cutting their collective fortunes in half, or just about. And it was time for something to happen.

Something did. "Hup, two. Hup, two. Hup, two." It was an eight-man squad of the City's Finest, and in their vanguard—

Del Dworcas.

He stepped coldly up to Mundin through a lane that opened in the slackjawed mob. "You," he said bitterly, "you cheat, you ingrate, you deadbeat, you!" Oh, no! thought Mundin, incredulously. Dworcas couldn't be— "I hand you herewith," Dworcas said formally, "this Summons & Complaint—give it to him, Herb—and attach all of your property pending adjudication thereof. Eight hundred dollars, Mundin! Loaned to you, to help you out, and you try to stiff me. With all the money you've got, too. Look at those stock certificates! Look at those checks! Boys, pick up his junk, and let's get out of here." He dried his eyes in a businesslike way and turned to go, as the cops reached for Mundin's and Lavin's stock.

"Hold it," squawked Mundin. "Del, listen—you're monkeying with something bigger than you are." Dworcas involuntarily stepped back away from him, glanced behind him, and looked nervously again at Mundin. He licked his lips.

"Yeah, mister," chimed in the sweet-faced thirteen-year-old by Dworcas's elbow. "Give the guy a chance. Go ahead."

Dworcas appeared to have trouble breathing. "Uh—all right," he got out. "Let's go, Herb."

"No, mister," implored the sweet-faced girl. "You don't want to go, just send the cops away. You want to stay here and watch that property, right?"

"Right," said Dworcas bitterly. "Beat it, Herb."

The big cop frowned and objected, "I give him the summons, Del. It says we got to take his stuff in pertective custody."

"Beat it, Herb!"

The cop shrugged petulantly and, gathering his squad, marched glowering away.

"Good work, Lana," breathed Mundin.

She shrugged. "All right, you kids," she said. "You can put the bottles away again. He'll stay put, won't you, buster?"

Fervently Dworcas choked, "Sure," watching the Wabbits with eyes as glassy as the bottles they were stowing away in their clothes again behind him.

Mundin turned limply back to the Big Board. He had missed a couple of movements, but—but—

He held the glasses rigid on Line 333 for long seconds. It said, 333, off 13.

"Don," he said unbelievingly, "Don, it's started. Somebody else is selling too!"

Coett? Nelson? Green, Charlesworth themselves? They never knew. But in a minute it was everyone. Old 333 plunged and plunged and plunged. Howling like maniacs, Mundin and Lavin poured in ten thousand shares at a time, and other thousands appeared from hidden portfolios, from ancient voting trusts, from the very air, it seemed. Off 15. Off 28. Off 47. Off 61.

The whole market was churning now, and the Big Board's figures had little to do with what was happening then and there; they were minutes behind. Twice there was trouble, and the busted bottles came out, and a couple of bleeding hulks slid to the floor of the Exchange to be trampled into mush. But only twice. The density of the crowd protected them; Hitler's panzers could not have driven through that mass to get at Mundin.

This was the critical point, Mundin told himself desperately, hunched over his keys, punching out orders and waiting for the slow, the agonizingly slow, response of the once-instantaneous Big Board. This was when they had to feel the pulse of the market, and know when, quietly, to stop selling and when, invisibly, to begin to buy. A hand snaked over his shoulder and picked something up.

"Watch it, bud!" Mundin ordered hoarsely, glancing up. But it was only Del Dworcas, taking back the summons & complaint his man had given Mundin.

His face white but composed, Dworcas quietly tore the paper up. "Yours," he said to Mundin, letting the pieces slip to the floor. "I know when to get off a losing horse, Charles. And don't forget who put you in touch with the Lavins."

The judgment of a practical politician, Mundin thought wonderingly. It was like a voice from the grave, Ryan's voice.

And by it he knew that they had won.