John Brunner – Jagged Orbit

“I can’t tell you how sorry I was to hear about Mayor Black firing you,” Lenigo continued. “We got that in hand, though, don’t we?” He glanced at Jones W. Jones.

“Yeah, it’s being taken care of,” the corpulent man said, and chuckled. “We let it be known in Capetown, by the way, that if Uys’s wife and family wanted him back they could have him one of two ways: today and intact, or tomorrow and in little itsy pieces. He left by an early plane this morning, incognito.”

“You don’t took too pleased,” Lenigo rumbled, staring at Diablo. “Something wrong, brother?”

Diablo collected himself. He said after a pause, “It all depends. Like-may I make a guess at the purpose of this meeting?”

“Well!” Lenigo leaned back in his chair, small eyes among many wrinkles very bright in his dark brown face. “Shoot, Brother! They always told me you were the best-informed stud on this continent, blank or knee-blank, and I’d appreciate the chance to hear you prove it. The more right you are, the more I want you on the proper side in the coming crunch. I guess I don’t have to tell you there’s going to be a crunch?”

“No.” Diablo felt sweat prickling on his forehead, but resisted the urge to wipe at it. “I say it goes like this. I say the Gottschalks-and most likely Anthony Gottin person-have offered cheap prototypes of ulpersonal weaponry which would allow in reality the kind of thing that blank citidef groups take for granted in setting up their damnfool block defense exercises, like one knee saboteur going in and wrecking a whole street of homes.”

He kept his gaze fixed on Lenigo’s face, which beno expression, but from the corner of his eye he saw Rosaleen Lincolnson tense. She’d always been bad at concealing her emotions, ever since he’d first met her ten years before.

“I’ve had a lot of fun in the past, myself, at the exof ISM because of that attitude-I’ve done shows in which one kneeblank about nine feet tall made with the Superman bit and all these here blanks tried to tie him down with sewing-thread like the Lilliputians and Gulliver. I-”

“Sure, I remember that,” Lenigo said. “A great image. And now it’s going to happen, baby!”

“The hell it is,” Diablo said. He hesitated, then decided to take the plunge, having ‘been implicitly shown correct up till now,

“Doing the kind of deal with the Gottschalks which you’re planning is exactly the same as Mayor Black doing a deal with Hermann Uys, and I’m not having any part of it.”

“Goddamn, man!” Lenigo exploded. “The Gottschalks are just about the only non-racialist group on this planet, and I’d do business with them any time. Anthony’s a honky, but Bapuji isn’t and Olayinka isn’t and-”

“Freeze it,” Diablo said coldly. “I don’t know if you realize why you were brought here, but I’ll spell it out for the rest of us in case you were ashamed to admit why. You were brought over because the Gottschalks wanted to scare the whole blank population of this counYou are like plague-you shut Mister Charley into a private prison cell of mindless fear.”

“That’s bad?” Lenigo said, and laughed.

“You’re going to tell us the Gottschalks have black equality at heart?” Diablo countered.

“Ever since the eighties they been giving us the tools to carve our own place in the sun,” Mehmet abd’Allah snapped. “Why you don’t freeze it for a minute and let Morton talk?”

“Because he said himself I’m the best-informed man on the continent,” Diablo said, and waited for it to sink in. During the pause, he wondered if he was actually being a fool, or worse yet a traitor, for stringing along with something that had been said by a man he’d himhelped into a Ginsberg ambulance a matter of an hour or so before.

“Even at the sample price of twenty-five thousand tealeaves,” he said, “you’re not going to get System C weaponry in quantities sufficient to exterminate every blank who can pay the full price of a hundred thousand. You-”

“Hold on a moment,” Jones W. Jones said, raising a broad pink-palmed hand. He turned to Lenigo.

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