The old man smiled. “You look interested. You know what’s the best situation in business? When you find two separated sets of people, and each is interested in what the other can supply. Now, that’s compound interest. You want to think about these things. The simple truths stand up when the hurricane sweeps away the fancy techniques. There are people who stand for the techniques, and people who stand for the basic truths. Without the first, you’re in trouble. Without the second, you’ve got no foundation, nothing to tie to, and get swept along in the current. That’s why sometimes the top people don’t seem as slick as the people working for them. Think it over. Maybe someday you’ll need this.”
Now, in the big room with the huge control console at one end. Nels Krojac stood perfectly still, saw why he was running the business, and saw what his job had to be if they were going to win. Sheaster had used every legal technique to save them. Reagan had extended the financial techniques to the limit. Now he, Krojac, had to work on the basic elements of the situation. The words “trade,” “interest,” and “compound interest” occurred to him, and he began to analyze the situation.
Later that day, in one of the ship’s powerful tenders, Krojac headed for the nearest subspace jump point that would take him far from Marshak III and its tiger-like inhabitants. At intervals along the trip, in and out of subspace, he tried to think of using the two misleading clauses of the contract. Each time, he felt dizzy, heard his ears begin to ring, and his vision fade. Each time, he stopped, and the symptoms slowly faded away. Finally he was satisfied. “It’s built-in. Distance doesn’t affect it. Now for the tricky part.”
As soon as he got back, Krojac sent Reagan down to set up a meeting with the natives. Then, prayerfully, since everything was now balanced on the brink of disaster, Krojac went down himself.
That same day, the natives changed their stand.
Human settlers could move into Marshak III, but they could settle only in a large region convenient to the rest-and-refit base. This was exactly where Krojac needed them to make his immediate profit. He came back up to the ship exhausted but triumphant. Reagan and Sheaster looked at him with awe.
“That’s just in time,” said Reagan. “A couple days later and we’d have been finished. In fact, right this minute I can hear the corks popping and the champagne fizzing at Reed & Osborne.”
Krojac sank into a chair. “The news will taste like vinegar.”
Sheaster stared at Krojac. “You remind me of my father. They had him finished half-a-dozen times. But it never took. Each time, the ground moved around under their feet, and when it got through moving, he was in the clear.”
“How,” Reagan demanded, “did you ever persuade the locals to allow settlement?”
“I convinced them they could buy the land back later. This is a rest-and-refit center, and anyone can go farther out if he pays his fare to the government. Well, if the locals offer a settler enough, it’s worth his while to move. Most settlers are convinced it’s better farther on anyway.”
“But wait a minute,” said Reagan, scowling. “Where do the locals get this money? Their rent for the R and R site isn’t going to cover it. Do we have to pay them some big—”
“We don’t pay them anything. They pay their own way.”
“What with? They’ve got no technology, no skills, no—”
“No skills?” said Krojac. He tossed across a sheaf of handwritten papers headed:
Marshak Contract Guaranty Corporation
Nels Krojac, Honorary President
Erkbat N. W. Marshak, President and
Chairman of the Board
Motto: When we enforce it, they don’t break it
Moderate fees
Offices on principal planets
Sheaster snorted. “Any contract can be broken—or bent into a pretzel. Then it’s up to the courts—” He paused in mid-sentence and stared at Krojac.
Reagan was saying. ” ‘Erkbat N. W. Marshak.’ Who’s that?”
“A big thing like a tiger that looks into your eyes, and when you say you mean what you say you mean, he just gives a little nod, and you better mean it, because any time you plan to get around it by some clever stunt, your hands and feet go numb, your ears ring, your head swims, and everything goes black.”
Sheaster whistled, and a look of amazed respect crossed his face.
Reagan stared into space. “A thing like that could make quite a simplification.”
Sheaster looked at Krojac. “This was your idea, or theirs?”
“Mine. It’s theirs now. I sold it to them, in return for permission to settle the territory in convenient reach of the base.”
Sheaster said dizzily, “So that gives them a source of income, with which they can buy back the homesteads that they now let us sell, so that we, in turn, have the money to pay the loans now due?”
“That’s it.”
Reagan said, “That puts us over the hump.”
Sheaster said in admiration. “A stroke of pure genius.”
Krojac shook his head. “The locals were interested in what I had to offer, and I was interested in what they had to offer.” He looked at Sheaster. “Your father had a name for that.”
Sheaster nodded. “He had names for a lot of things. I still call it genius.”
Krojac was positive. “It wasn’t.”
“What was it, then?”
“Compound interest,” said Krojac.
EXPERTS IN THE FIELD
Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Doyle glanced around from the crest of the natural amphitheater. In the distance, occasional groves of trees were scattered over the rolling grassland. Far off to his right, a dull metallic glint and a flash of dazzling sunlight told of the planetary-classification base near the wide slow-flowing river. Then he winced, and looked down into the big grassy bowl, where some two thousand large-browed tigerlike creatures, heads tilted back, created a shrieking torrent of noise that instantly set Doyle’s teeth on edge, gave him chills and a dizzy sensation, and now and then seemed to set up answering vibrations in his very bones.
To Doyle’s right, a tall pale man with a pipe in his hand winced at a high-pitched note that seemed to stop the universe, then sucked in a ragged breath, and gestured with the pipe stem.
“To your left, Colonel. See that group watching the machines? It’s obvious they’re talking. You can see they’re talking.”
About eighty feet away, a knot of angry felines, upright on their hind legs, with sinuously-twitching tails and glittering eyes, looked down the long outer slope at a fleet of big motionless earth-moving machines. Spread out in a thin line blocking these machines off from the hill were two squads of Doyle’s troops, their guns unslung and expressions wary.
As Doyle glanced from the machines to the troops, then back to the cluster of angry felines, one of the tigerlike creatures, his expression that of a man halfway through a string of profanity, balled one forepaw into a fist, and slammed it savagely into the other forepaw. Another feline pointed down the hill at one of the larger machines, his expression thoughtful, as if he were talking about the machine’s function. The creatures’ mouths were moving, and Doyle, though too far away to hear the words, had to admit that it certainly looked as if they were talking. But that was only one side of the question.
To Doyle’s left stood an impatient group in goggles and coveralls, headed by a burly barrel-chested man with a big black cigar jutting from one corner of his mouth, who glanced impatiently at his watch, turned angrily toward Doyle, and suddenly picked up a tripod with a big cone set at an angle on top, and carried it over.
Doyle fought off the effects of the singing, and forced his dazed mind to yield up facts about the antagonistic sets of individuals who crowded the landscape.
The tall pale man gesturing with outthrust pipe was Al Lindell, head of the planetary-classification unit on the planet, which was known as Marshak III. Lindell, acting under Article 12 of Interservice Regulations, had called Doyle on the screen the day before, and angrily demanded that the Space Force intervene to “stop a planetary grab by Nels Krojac, before we get a war out of it.”
Doyle had intently studied the face on the screen, to see a somewhat scholarly-looking man who was obviously boiling mad.
“A war?” said Doyle.
“That’s right. A planetary war with the inhabitants of Marshak III.”
“Who is causing the trouble?”
“Nels Krojac,” said Lindell. “He’s president of Interstellar Construction Corporation. He’s landed a work crew here, before the planet is classified.”
“You’re calling on me to stop him by force?”
“I am. Under Article 12, I hereby formally request your aid to prevent exploitation of an unclassified and, in my opinion, potentially dangerous planet.”
“Just a minute, Mr. Lindell.” Doyle looked up. “Major Burke—”