Now I don’t pretend that was really good manners, but as it happens I actually was in a hurry, and besides, my gut was giving me fits. I put Essie in a cab going one way and caught another to take me to the court. Of course, if I had known then what he was waiting to tell me, I might have been more forthcoming with Walthers. But I didn’t know what I was walking away from.
Or what I was walking toward, for that matter.
For the last little bit I actually did walk, because traffic was more than normally snarled. There was a parade getting ready to march, as well as the normal congestion around the International Palace of Justice. The Palace is a forty-story skyscraper, sunk on caissons into the soapy soil of Rotterdam. On the outside it dominates half the city. On the inside it’s all scarlet drapes and one-way glass, the very model of a modern international tribunal. it is not a place where you go to to plead to a parking ticket.
It is not a place where individual human beings are considered very much at all, in fact, and if I had any vanity, which I do, I would preen myself on the fact that the lawsuit in which I was technically one of the defendants actually had fourteen different parties at interest, and four of them were sovereign states. I even had a suite of rooms reserved for my private use in the Palace itself, because all parties at interest did. But I didn’t go there right away. It was nearly eleven o’clock and therefore at least an even chance that the court would have started its session for the day, so I smiled and pushed my way right into the hearing room. It was crowded. It was always crowded, because there were celebrities to be seen at the hearings. In my vanity I had thought I was one of them, and I expected heads to turn when I came in. No heads. No turning. Everybody was watching half a dozen skinny, bearded persons in dashikis and sandals, sitting in a corral at the plaintiffs’ end of the room, drinking Cokes and giggling among themselves. The Old Ones. You didn’t see them every day. I gawked at them like everybody else, until there was a touch on my arm and I turned to see Maitre Ijsinger, my flesh-and-blood lawyer, gazing reprovingly at me. “You are late, Mijuheer Broadhead,” he whispered. “The Court will have noticed your absence.”
Since the Court was busy whispering and arguing among themselves over, I gathered, the question of whether the diary of the first prospector to locate a Heechee tunnel on Venus should be admitted as evidence, I doubted that. But you don’t pay a lawyer as much as I was paying Maitre Ijsinger to argue with him.
Of course, there was no legal reason for me to pay him at all. As much as the case was about anything, it was about a motion on the part of the Empire of Japan to dissolve the Gateway Corporation. I came into it, as a
The Heechee, thinking that the australopithecines they discovered when they first visited the Earth would ultimately evolve a technological civilization, decided to preserve a colony of them in a sort of zoo. Their descendants were “the Old Ones.” Of course, that was a wrong guess on the part of the Heechee. Australopithecus never achieved intelligence, only extinction. It was a sobering reflection for human beings to realize that the so-called Heechee Heaven, later rechristened the S. Va. Broadhead-far the largest and most sophisticated starship the human race had ever seen-was in fact only a sort of monkey cage.
major stockholder in the S. Ya.’s charter business, because the Bolivians had brought suit to have the charter revoked on the grounds that the financing of the colonists amounted to a “return to slavery.” The colonists were called indentured servants, and I, among others, had been called a wicked exploiter of human misery. What were the Old Ones doing there? Why, they were parties at interest, too, because they claimed that the S. Ya. was their property-they and their ancestors had lived there for hundreds of thousands of years. Their position in the court was a little complicated. They were wards of the government of Tanzania, because that’s where their ancestral Earth home had been decreed to be, but Tanzania wasn’t represented in the courtroom. Tanzania was boycotting the Palace of Justice because of an unfavorable decision over their sea-bottom missiles the year before, so its affairs were being handled by Paraguay-which was actually taking an interest mostly because of a border dispute with Brazil, which in turn was present as host to the headquarters of the Gateway Corp. You follow all this? Well, I didn’t, but that was why I hired Maitre Ijsinger.
If I let myself get personally involved in every lousy multimillion dollar lawsuit, I’d spend all my time in court. I’ve got too much to do with the remainder of my life for that, so in the normal course of events I would have let the lawyers fight it out and spent my time more profitably, chatting with Albert Einstein or wading along the Tappan Sea with my wife. However, there were special reasons for being here. I saw one of them, half asleep, on a leather chair near the Old Ones. “I think I’ll see if Joe Kwiatkowski wants a cup of coffee,” I told Ijsinger.
Kwiatkowski was a Pole, representing the East Europe Economic Community, and one of the plaintiffs in the case. Ijsinger turned pale. “He’s an adversary!” he hissed.
“He’s also an old friend,” I told him, exaggerating the facts of the case only slightly-he had been a Gateway prospector, too, and we’d had drinks over old times before.
“There are no friends in a court action of this magnitude,” Ijsinger informed me, but I only smiled at him and leaned forward to hiss at Kwiatkowski, who came along willingly enough once he was awake.
“I should not be here with you, Robin,” he rumbled once we were in my fifteenth-floor suite. “Especially for coffee! Don’t you got something to put in it?”
Well, I had-slivovitz, and from his favorite Cracow distillery, too. And Kampuchean cigars, the brand he liked, and salt herring and biscuits to go with them all.
The court was built over a little canal off the Maas River, and you could smell the water. Because I had managed to get a window open, you could hear the boats going through under the building’s arch and traffic from the tunnel under the Maas a quarter kilometer away. I opened the window a little wider because of Kwiatkowski’s cigar, and saw the flags and bands in the side streets. “What are they parading for today?” I asked.
He brushed the question aside. “Because armies like parades,” he grunted. “Now, no fooling around, Robin. I know what you want and it is impossible.”
“What I want,” I said, “is for the Eeek to help wipe out the terrorists with the spaceship, which is obviously in the interest of everybody. You tell me that’s impossible. Fine, I accept that, but why is it impossible?”
“Because you know nothing of politics. You think the E.E.E.C. can go to the Paraguayans and say, ‘Listen, go and make a deal with Brazil, say you will be more flexible on this border dispute if they will pool their information with the Americans so the terrorist spaceship can be trapped.’”
“Yes,” I said, “that is exactly what I think.”
“And you are wrong. They will not listen.”
“The Eeek,” I said patiently, having been well briefed for this purpose by my data-retrieval system, Albert, “is Paraguay’s biggest trading partner. If you whistle they jump.”
“In most cases, yes. In this case, no. The key to the situation is the Republic of Kampuchea. They have with Paraguay private arrangements. About these I will say nothing, except that they have been approved at the highest level. More coffee,” he added, holding out his coffee cup, “and this time, please, not so much coffee in it.”
I did not ask Kwiatkowski what the “private arrangements” were because, if he had been willing to tell me, he would not have called them private. I didn’t have to. They were military. All the “private arrangements” governments were making with each other these days were military, and if I had not been sweating about the terrorists I would have been sweating about the crazy way the world’s duly ordained governments were behaving. But one thing at a time.
So, on Albert’s advice, I got a lawyer from Malaysia into my private parlor next, and after her a missionary from Canada, and then a general in the Albanian Air Force, and for each one I had some bait to dangle. Albert told me what levers to pull and what glass beads to offer the natives-an extra allotment of colonization passages here, a “charitable” contribution there. Sometimes all it took was a smile. Rotterdam was the place to do it, because ever since the Palace was moved from The Hague, The Hague having been pretty well messed up in the troubles the last time some joker was fooling with a TPT, you could find anyone you wanted in Rotterdam. All kinds of people. All colors, all sexes, hi all kinds of costumes, from Ecuadorian lawyers in miniskirts to Marshall Islands thermal-energy barons in sarongs and shark’s-teeth necklaces. Whether I was making progress or not was hard to say, but at half-past twelve, my belly telling me that it was going to hurt in a serious way if I didn’t put some food in it, I knocked off for the morning. I thought longingly of our nice quiet hotel suite with a nice lukewarm steak from room service and my shoes off, but I had promised to meet Essie at her place of business. So I told Albert to prepare an estimate of what I had accomplished and recommendations about what I should do next, and fought my way to a cab.