The Unicorn Trade Read online

  The helpful Earthman was not tall, he was dark and chiselfaced and sleekly pomaded, dapper in blue pajamas with a red zig-zag, a sleighbell cloak and curly-toed slippers. “You’re from Mars, aren’t you?” he asked in the friendliest tone Matheny had yet heard.

  “Yes. Yes, I am. M-my name’s Peter Matheny, I, I—” He stuck out his hand to shake and chips rolled over the floor. “Damn! Oh, excuse me, I forgot this was a church. Never mind them! No, please, I just want to g-g-get the hell out of here.”

  “Good idea. How about a drink? I know a bar downshaft.”

  Matheny sighed. “A drink I need the very most.”

  “My name’s Doran. Gus Doran. Call me Gus.” They walked back to the deaconette’s booth and Matheny cashed what remained of his winnings.

  “I don’t want to, I mean, if you’re busy tonight, Mr. Doran—”

  “Nah. I am not doing one thing in particular. Besides, I have never met a Martian. I am very interested.”

  “There aren’t many of us on Earth,” agreed Matheny. “Just a small embassy staff and an occasional like me.”

  “I should think you would do a lot of traveling here. The old mother planet and so on.”

  “We can’t afford it,” said Matheny. “What with gravitation and distance, such voyages are much too expensive for us to make them for pleasure. Not to mention our dollar shortage.” As they entered the shaft, he added wistfully: “You Earth people have that kind of money, at least in your more prosperous brackets. Why don’t you send a few tourists to us?”

  “I always wanted to,” said Doran. “I would like to see the, what they call, City of Time, and so on. As a matter of fact, I have given my girl one of those Old Martian rings last Ike’s Birthday, and she was just gazoo about it. A jewel dug out of the City of Time, like, made a million years ago by a, uh, extinct race … I tell you, she appreciated me for it!” He winked and nudged.

  “Oh,” said Matheny. He felt a certain guilt. Doran was too pleasant a little man to deserve—“Of course,” he said ritually, “I agree with all the archeologists it’s a crime to sell such scientifically priceless artifacts, but what can we do? We must live, and the tourist trade is almost nonexistent.”

  “Trouble with it is, I hear Mars is not so comfortable,” said Doran. “I mean, do not get me wrong, I don’t want to insult you or anything, but people come back saying you have given the planet just barely enough air to keep a man alive. And it gets so cold that soon even the dimmest lady tourist gets the idea of that Brass Monkey Memorial you have erected. And there are no cities, just little towns and villages and ranches out in the bush—I mean, you are being pioneers and making a new nation and all that, but people paying half a megabuck for their ticket expect some comfort and, uh, you know.”

  “I do know,” said Matheny. “But we’re poor! We’re a handful of people trying to make a world of dust and sand and scrub thorn into fields and woods and seas. We can’t do it without substantial help from Earth, equipment and supplies—which can only be paid for in Earth dollars—and we can’t export enough to Earth to earn those dollars.”

  By that time they were entering the Paul Bunyan Knotty Pine Bar & Grill, on the 73rd level. Matheny’s jaw clanked down. “Whassa matter?” asked Doran. “Ain’t you ever seen a ecdysiastic technician before?”

  “Uh, yes, but … well … not in a 3-D image under ten magnifications.” Matheny followed Doran past a sign announcing that this show was for purely artistic purposes, into a booth. There a soundproof curtain reduced the noise level enough so they could talk in normal voices.

  “What’ll you have?” asked Doran. “It’s on me.”

  “Oh, I couldn’t let you. I mean—”

  “Nonsense. Welcome to Earth! Care for a Thyle and vermouth?”

  Matheny shuddered. “Good Lord, no!”

  “Huh? But they make Thyle right on Mars, don’t they?”

  “Yes. And it all goes to Earth and sells at 2000 dollars a fifth. But you don’t think we’d drink it, do you? I mean, well, I imagine it doesn’t absolutely ruin vermouth. But we don’t see those Earthside commercials about how sophisticated people like it so much.”

  “Well, I’ll be a socialist creeper!” Doran’s face split in a grin. “You know, all my life I’ve hated the stuff and never dared admit it?” He raised a hand. “Don’t worry, I won’t blabbo. But I am wondering, if you control the Thyle industry, and sell all those relics at fancy prices … why do you call yourselves poor?”

  “Because we are,” said Matheny. “By the time the shipping costs have been paid on a bottle, and the Earth wholesaler and jobber and sales engineer and so on, down to the retailer, have taken their percentage, and the advertising agency has been paid, and about fifty separate Earth taxes … there’s very little profit going back to the distillery on Mars. The same principle is what’s strangling us on everything. Old Martian artifacts aren’t really rare, for instance, but freight charges and the middlemen here put them out of the mass market.”

  “Have you not got some other businesses?”

  “Well, we do sell a lot of color slides, postcards, baggage labels, and so on to people who like to act cosmopolitan; and I understand our travel posters are quite popular as wall decoration. But all that has to be printed on Earth, and the printer and distributor keep most of the money. We’ve sold some books and show tapes, of course, but only one has been really successful—I Was a Slave Girl on Mars. Our most prominent novelist was co-opted to ghostwrite that one. Again, though, your income taxes took most of the money; authors never have been protected the way a businessman is. We do make a high percentage of profit on those little certificates you see around—you know, the title deeds to one square inch of Mars—but expressed absolutely, in dollars, it doesn’t amount to much when we start shopping for bulldozers and thermo-nuclear power plants.”

  “How about postage stamps?” inquired Doran. “Philately is a big business, I have heard.”

  “It was our mainstay,” admitted Matheny, “but it’s been overworked. Martian stamps are a drug on the market. What we’d like to operate is a sweepstakes, but the antigambling laws on Earth forbid that.”

  Doran whistled. “I got to give you people credit for enterprise, anyway!” He fingered his mustache. “Uh, pardon me, but have you tried to, well, attract capital from Earth?”

  “Of course,” said Matheny bitterly. “We offer the most liberal concessions in the Solar System. Any little mining company or transport firm or … or anybody … who wanted to come and actually invest a few dollars in Mars—why, we’d probably give him the President’s daughter as security. No, the Minister of Ecology has a better-looking one. But who’s interested? Mars is forty million miles away at closest. We haven’t a thing that Earth hasn’t got more of. We’re only the descendants of a few scientists, a few political malcontents, oddballs who happen to prefer elbow room and a bill of liberties to the incorporated state—what could General Nucleonics hope to get from Mars?”

  “I see. Well, what are you having to drink?”

  “Beer,” said Matheny without hesitation.

  “Huh? Look, pal, this is on me.”

  “The only beer on Mars comes forty million miles, with interplanetary freight charges tacked on,” said Matheny. “Tuborg!”

  Doran shrugged, dialed the dispenser and fed it coins.

  “This is a real interesting talk, Pete,” he said. “You are being very frank with me. I like a man that is frank.”

  Matheny shrugged. “I haven’t told you anything that isn’t known to every economist.”

  Of course I haven’t. I’ve not so much as mentioned the Red Ānkh, for instance. But in principle, I have told him the truth, told him of our need; for even the secret operations do not yield us enough.

  The beer arrived. Matheny engulfed himself in it. Doran sipped at a whiskey sour and unobtrusively set a fresh brew in front of the Martian.

  “Ahhh!” said Matheny. “Bless you, my friend.”

  �
�A pleasure.”

  “But now you must let me buy you one.”

  “That is not necessary. After all,” said Doran with great tact, “with the situation as you have been describing—”

  “Oh, we’re not that poor! My expense allowance assumes I will entertain quite a bit.”

  Doran’s brows lifted a few minutes of arc. “You’re here on business, then?”

  “Yes. I told you we haven’t any tourists. I was sent to hire a business manager for the Martian export trade.”

  “What’s wrong with your own people? I mean, Pete, it is not your fault there are so many rackets … uh, taxes … and middlemen and agencies and et cetera. That is just the way Earth is set up these days.”

  “Exactly.” Matheny’s finger stabbed in the general direction of Doran’s pajama top. “And who set it up that way? Earthmen. We Martians are babes in the bush. What chance do we have to earn dollars on the scale we need them, in competition with corporations which could buy and sell our whole planet before breakfast? Why, we couldn’t afford three seconds of commercial time on a Lullaby Pillow ’cast. What we need, what we have to hire, is an executive who knows Earth, who’s an Earthman himself. Let him tell us what will appeal to your people, and how to dodge the tax bite and … and, well, you see how it goes, that sort of, uh, thing.” Matheny felt his eloquence running down and grabbed for the second bottle of beer.

  “But where do I start?” he asked plaintively, for his loneliness smote him anew. “I’m just a college professor at home. How would I even get to see—”

  “It might be arranged,” said Doran in a’ thoughtful tone. “It just might. How much could you pay this fellow?”

  “A hundred megabucks a year, if he’ll sign a five-year contract. That’s Earth years, mind you.”

  “I’m sorry to tell you this, Pete,” said Doran, “but while that is not bad money, it is not what a high-powered sales scientist gets in Newer York. Plus his retirement benefits, which he would lose if he quit where he is now at. And I am sure he would not want to settle on Mars permanently.”

  “I could offer a certain amount of, uh, well, lagniappe,” said Matheny. “That is, well, I can draw up to a hundred megabucks myself for, uh, expenses and, well … let me buy you a drink!”

  Doran’s black eyes frogged at him. “You might at that,” said the Earthman very softly. “Yes, you might at that.”

  Matheny found himself warming. Gus Doran was a thentic bobber. A hell of a swell chap. He explained modestly that he was a free lance business consultant and it was barely possible he could arrange some contacts … no, no, no commission, all done in the interest of interplanetary friendship … well, anyhow, let’s not talk business now. If you have got to stick to beer, Pete, make it a chaser to akvavit. What is akvavit? Well, I will just take and show you.

  A hell of a good bloke. He knew some very funny stories, too, and he laughed at Matheny’s, though they were probably too rustic for a big city taste like his.

  “What I really want,” said Matheny, “what I really want, I mean, what Mars really needs, get me?—is a confidence man.”

  “A what?”

  “The best and slickest one on Earth, to operate a world-size con game for us and make us some real money.”

  “Con man—Oh. A slipstring.”

  “A con by any other name,” said Matheny, pouring down an akvavit.

  “Hm.” Doran squinted through cigaret smoke. “You are interesting me strangely, my friend. Say on.”

  “No.” Matheny realized his head was a bit smoky. The walls of the booth seemed odd, somehow. They were just leatheroid walls, but they had an odd quality.

  “No, sorry, Gus,” he said. “I spoke too much.”

  “Okay. Forget it. I do not like a man that pries. But look, let’s bomb out of here, how about it? Go have a little fun.”

  “By all means.” Matheny disposed of his last beer. “I could use some gaiety.”

  “You have come to the right town, then. But let us get you a hotel room first and some more up to date clothes.”

  “Allez,” said Matheny. “If I don’t mean allons, or maybe alors.”

  The drop down to cabramp level and the short ride afterward sobered him; the room rate at the Jupiter-Astoria sobered him still more. Oh, well, he thought, if I succeed in this job no one at home will quibble. And the chamber to which he and Doran were shown was spectacular enough, with a pneumo direct to the bar and a full-wall transparency to show the vertical incandescence of the towers.

  “Whoof!” Matheny sat down. The chair slithered sensuously about his contours. He jumped. “What the dusty hell—Oh.” He tried to grin, but his face burned. “I see.”

  “That is a sexy type of furniture, all right,” agreed Doran. He lowered himself into another chair, cocked his feet on the 3-D, and waved a cigarette. “Which speaking of, what say we get some girls? It is not too late to catch them at home, a date here will usually start around 2100 hours earliest.”

  “What?”

  “You know. Dames. Like a certain blonde warhead with twin radar globes and swivel mounting, and she just loves exotics. Such as you.”

  “Me?” Matheny heard his voice climb to a schoolboy squeak. “Me? Exotic? Why, I’m just a little college professor, I, g-g-g, that is—” His tongue got stuck on his palate. He pulled it loose and moistened uncertain lips.

  “You are from Mars. Okay? So you fought bushcats barehanded in an abandoned canal.”

  “What’s a bushcat? And we don’t have canals. The evaporation rate—”

  “Look, Pete,” said Doran patiently. “She don’t have to know that, does she?”

  “Well, well, no. I guess not. No.”

  “Let’s order you some clothes on the pneumo,” said Doran. “I recommend you buy from Schwartzherz, everbody knows he is expensive.”

  While Matheny jittered about, shaving and showering and struggling with his new raiment, Doran kept him supplied with akvavit and beer. “You said one thing, Pete,” he remarked. “About needing a slipstring. A con man, you would call it.”

  “Forget that. Please. I spoke out of turn.”

  “Well, you see, maybe a man like that is just what Mars does need. And maybe I have got a few contacts.”

  “What?” Matheny gaped out of the bathroom.

  Doan cupped his hands around a fresh cigarette, not looking at him. “I am not that man,” he said frankly. “But in my line I get a lot of contacts, and not all of them go topside. See what I mean? Like if, say, you wanted somebody terminated, and could pay for it, I could not do it. I would not want to know anything about it. But I could tell you a phone number.”

  He shrugged and gave the Martian a sidelong glance. “Sure, you may not be interested. But if you are, well, Pete, I was not born yesterday. I got tolerance. Like the Good Book says, if you want to get ahead, you have got to think positively. And your mission is pretty important.”

  Matheny hesitated. If only he hadn’t taken that last shot—! It made him want to say yes, immediately, without reservations. And therefore maybe he became over-cautious.

  They had instructed him on Mars to take chances if he must.

  “I could tell you a thing or two which might give you a better idea,” he said slowly. “But it would have to be under security.”

  “Okay by me. Room service can send us up an oath right now.”

  “What? But—but—” Matheny hung onto himself and tried to believe that he had landed on Earth less than six hours ago.

  In the end he did call room service and the machine was trundled in. Doran swallowed the pill and donned the conditioner helmet without an instant’s hesitation. “I shall never reveal to any person unauthorized by yourself whatever you may tell me under security, now or at any other time,” he recited. Then, cheerfully: “And that formula, Pete, happens to be the honest-to-zebra truth.”

  “I know.” Matheny stared embarrassed at the carpet. “I’m sorry to … to … I mean, of course I trust you, but—
”

  “Forget it. I take a hundred security oaths a year, in my line of work. Maybe I can help you. I like you, Pete, damn if I don’t. And of course I might stand to get an agent’s cut, if I arrange—Go ahead, boy, go ahead.” Doran crossed his legs and leaned back.

  “Oh, it’s simple enough,” said Matheny. “It’s only that we already are operating con games.”

  “On Mars, you mean?”

  “Yes. There never were any Old Martians. We erected the ruins fifty years ago for the Billings-worth Expedition to find. We’ve been manufacturing relics ever since.”

  “Huh? Well, why, but—”

  “In this case it helps to be at the far end of an interplanetary haul,” said Matheny. “Not many Terrestrial archeologists get to Mars, and they depend on our people to—Well, anyhow—”

  “I will be clopped! Good for you!” Doran blew up in laughter. “That is one thing I would never spill, even without security. I told you about my girl friend, didn’t I?”

  “Oh, yes, the Little Girl,” said Matheny apologetically. “She was another official project.”

  “Who?”

  “Remember Junie O’Brien? The little golden-haired girl on Mars, a mathematical prodigy, but dying of an incurable disease? She collected Earth coins.”

  “Oh, that. Sure, I remember—Hey! You didn’t!”

  “Yes. We made about a billion dollars on that one.”

  “I will be double damned. You know, Pete, I sent her a hundred buck piece myself.… Say, how is Junie O’Brien?”

  “Oh, fine. Under a different name, she’s now our finance minister.” Matheny stared out the wall, his hands twisting nervously behind his back. “There were no lies involved. She really does have a fatal disease. So do you and I. Every day we grow older.”

  “Uh!” exclaimed Doran.

  “And then the Red Ānkh Society. You must have seen or heard their ads … let me think … ‘What mysterious knowledge did the Old Martians possess? What was the secret wisdom of the Ancients? Now the incredibly powerful semantics of the Red Ānkh (not a religious organization) is available to a select few—’”