“I want it,” said Mundin,
The broker, horrified, said, “Bud, ain’t you made enough for one day? Come on, let’s go get a drink; I’ll buy. You fool around with the big boys, they punish you. Like G.M.L. You try to grab a share and you’ll get hurt. Unlimited resources, see—un-lim-it-ed. They’ve got ’em. Every movement, all day long, he has a ‘buy’ bid in. He bids ten thousand bucks, way over real value. You get a wild idea and bid over ten thousand and you’ll get it, sure. So next movement, what happens? He sells short, maybe. Maybe he waits. But sooner or later he does, and then you’re squashed. You know what they say, bud—’Him who sells what isn’t his’n must buy it back or go to prison.’ And plenty have.”
Mundin sai4 coldly, “What’s G.M.L. par?”
•Two thousand. But ya can’^eiaim it, didn’t I just tell you?
He’s got a bid in every movement. So ya see?”
Charles set himself to persuade the broker to do the thing Ryan had planned. Two movements went~by7 while Charles pleaded and threatened and bribed.
At last the broker, shaking, stumbled off toward the third tier, second aisle. Mundin followed him with his field glasses.
It was working. Mundin, sweating, saw in miniature, through the glasses, the greeting, the silent shove, the wordless rejoinder, the growing heat of the quarrel. The G.M.L. investor was a small, elderly fat man. The broker was small too, but lean and why.
The fight broke out as the thirty-second warning bell rang. Charles took his eyes off the fighters and the for once un-tended investor’s window, and steadily punched its two-bun-dred-and-fifty dollar tickets on Old 333.
One bid and no offerings did not constitute a transaction according to the electronic definitions of the New York Stock Exchange pari-mutuel machine. As it had all day, the Big Board said:
333, no change.
One bid, and no offerings. In a claiming movement^fttaeant a quick profit—the difference between the bid andKthe par value. An investor next to Charles, eyeing him respectfully, said, “What do ya like in Chemicals, bud?”
Mundin ignored him. He left his station, almost regretfully, and took the escalator up to the cashier’s windows marked “Industrials—$1,000 and up.”
“Two thousand dollars,” said the bored clerk, inspecting the tickets, glancing at his miniature of the Big Board, noting the “no change.” He began to count out hundred-dollar bills.
“I’m claiming,” Mundin said through stiff lips.
“Okay, mister—uh.” The clerk suddenly realized. “Jeez— Old 333! How’d you do it?”
“I’m claiming,” Charles said stubbornly. ‘Two thousand dollars par value. Let’s go.”
The clerk shrugged and tapped out an order on his keyboard. Moments later, one share of G.M.L. Homes voting common stock fluttered from a slot in the desk. The clerk filled in Charles’s name and home address and recorded them.
“You’ll get that to the company’s board of directors immediately?” the attorney asked.
“It’s automatic,” said the clerk. “It’s in their files now. Say, mister, if you don’t mind telling me how you pulled it off——”
He was being much too affable—and Charles saw, hi his ear, the little plug of a personal receiver. Quite possibly he was being stalled.
He darted into the crowd and was lost to sight within seconds.
The two gambles had paid off, Mundin thought, heading for the street and Belly Rave. The dice had rolled, and he got the stake; the dice rolled again and he got his single share of stock in G.M.L. Homes, entitling him to a seat at the annual stockholders’ meeting.
Now the real gambling would begin.
Mundin whistled for a cab. There was a commotion behind him, but the cab came before Mundin had time for more than a glimpse, not time enough to notice that the man who was being worked over, in broad daylight by three huskies, was a small, wiry man with a soiled Member’s button hi his lapeL
You fool around with the big boys, they punish you.
Chapter Thirteen
“getting on for noon,” Shep said. “Let’s find a restaurant.” “A restaurant?” Norvie Bligh giggled. He followed Shep down the littered, filthy street, wondering. In a week he had thought he had learned something about Belly Rave, under Shep’s tutelage. But he had seen no neon-guttering, glass-fronted havens.