After a pause Mr. Yee’s pragmatic voice answered. “Jack, Mr. Arnie Kott at Lewistown called us. He requested that we service an encoding dictation machine in which he places great trust. Since all others of our crew are tied up, I am sending you.”
6
Arnie Kott owned the only harpsichord on Mars. However, it was out of tune, and he could find no one to service it. No matter which way you cut it, there were no harpsichord tuners on Mars.
For a month now he had been training his tame Bleekman to tackle this task; Bleekmen had a fine ear for music, and his particular one seemed to understand what Arnie wanted. Heliogabalus had been provided with a translation into the Bleeky dialect of a manual on keyboard instrument maintenance, and Arnie expected results any day now. But meanwhile the harpsichord was virtually unplayable.
Back in Lewistown from his visit to Anne Esterhazy, Arnie Kott felt glum. The death of the black-market goodies man, Norbert Steiner, was a solid blow below the belt, and Arnie knew that he would have to make a move, probably a drastic and unprecedented one, to compensate for it. It was now three o’clock in the afternoon. What had he gotten out of his trip to New Israel? Only a piece of bad news. Anne, as usual, could not be talked into anything; she intended to go right on with her amateurish campaigns and causes, and if she were the laughingstock of Mars it did not matter to her.
“Goddamn you, Heliogabalus,” Arnie said with fury, “you get that goddamn instrument playing right or I’m kicking you out of Lewistown. You can go back to eating beetles and roots in the desert with the rest of your kind.”
Seated on the floor beside the harpsichord, the Bleekman winced, glanced up acutely at Arnie Kott, then lowered his eyes to the manual once more.
“Nothing ever gets fixed around here,” Arnie grumbled.
All Mars, he decided, was a sort of Humpty Dumpty; the original state had been one of perfection, and they and their property had all fallen from that state into rusty bits and useless debris. He felt sometimes as if he presided over an enormous junkyard. And then, once more, he thought about the Yee Company repair ‘copter which he had run into in the desert, and the zwepp piloting it. Independent bastards, Arnie said to himself. Ought to be taken down a peg or two. But they knew their worth. Vital to the economy of the planet; it was written on their faces. We bow to no man, et cetera. Arnie paced about the big front room of the Lewistown house which he maintained in addition to his apartment at Union Hall, hands in his pockets, scowling.
Imagine: that guy talked back to me just like that, Arnie reflected. He must be a hell of a good repairman to be so confident.
And Arnie also thought, I’m going to get that guy if it’s the last thing I do. Nobody talks to me like that and gets away with it.
But of the two thoughts about the Yee Company uppity repairman, the former slowly began to dominate his mind, because he was a practical man and he knew that things had to be kept running. Codes of conduct had to come second. We’re not running a medieval society here, Arnie said to himself. If the guy’s really good he can say what he wants to me; all I care about is results.
With that in mind, he telephoned the Yee Company at Bunchewood Park, and soon had Mr. Yee himself on the line.
“Listen,” Arnie said, “I got a sick encoder over here, and if you fellows can get it working maybe I can use you on a permanent contract basis; you follow me?”
There was no doubt of it; Mr. Yee followed him, all right. He saw the entire picture. “Our best man, sir. Right away. And I know we’ll give absolute satisfaction, any hour of the day or night.”
“I want one particular man,” Arnie said, and he thereupon described the repairman he had met in the desert.
“Young, dark-haired, slender,” Mr. Yee repeated. “Glasses, and with a nervous manner. That would be Mr. Jack Bohlen. Our finest.”
“Let me tell you,” Arnie said, “that this Bohlen guy talked to me in a way I don’t let nobody talk to me, but after I thought it over I realized he was in the right, and when I see him I’m going to tell him that to his face.” However, in actuality Arnie Kott no longer could recall what the issue had been. “That guy Bohlen seems to have a good head on him,” he wound up. “Can he get over here today?”
Without hesitation Mr. Yee promised service by five o’clock.
“I appreciate that,” Arnie said. “And be sure and tell him that Arnie holds no grudges. Sure, I was taken aback at the time; but that’s all over. Tell him–” He pondered. “Tell Bohlen he’s got absolutely nothing to worry about regarding me.” He rang off, then, and sat back with a feeling of grim, honest accomplishment.
So the day after all wasn’t a total waste. And, too, he had gotten an interesting bit of information from Anne, while over at New Israel. He had brought up the topic of the rumored goings-on in the F.D.R. Mountains, and as usual Anne knew a few inside yarns emanating from Home, accounts no doubt garbled in the chain of oral tellings . . . yet the nugget of veracity was there. The UN back Home was in the process of staging one of its periodic coups. It was going to descend on the F.D.R. Mountains in another couple of weeks and lay claim to them as public domain land belonging to no one–which was palpably true. But why was it that the UN wanted a big hunk of worthless real estate? There, Anne’s tale got perplexing. One story noised about back at Geneva was that the UN intended to build an enormous supernational park, a sort of Garden of Eden, to lure emigrants out of Earth. Another had it that the UN engineers were going to make a vast final attack on the problem of beefing up the power sources on Mars; they were going to set up a huge hydrogen atomic energy power plant, unique in both size and scope. The water system would be revitalized. And, with adequate sources of power, heavy industry could at last move over to Mars, taking advantage of free land, light gravity, low taxation.
And then another rumor had it that the UN was going to set up a military base in the F.D.R. Mountains to offset United States and Soviet plans along the same general lines.
Whichever rumor was true, one fact stuck out: certain parcels of land in the F.D.R. range were going to be acutely valuable, pretty soon. The entire range was up for sale right now, in pieces varying from half an acre to a hundred thousand acres, and at a staggeringly low price. Once speculators got wind of the UN’s plans, this would change . . . no doubt the speculators were already beginning to act. To claim land on Mars they had to be on the spot; it could not be done from Home–that was the law. So one could expect the speculators to start coming over any time now, if Anne’s rumors were correct. It would be like the first year of colonization, when speculators were active everywhere.
Seating himself at his out-of-tune harpsichord, Arnie opened a book of Scarlatti sonatas and began to bang away at one of his favorites, a cross-hand one on which he had been practicing for months. It was strong, rhythmic, vigorous music, and he pounded the keys with delight, ignoring the distorted sound itself. Heliogabalus moved further off to study his manual; the sound hurt his ears.
“I’ve got a long-playing record of this,” he said to Heliogabalus as he played. “So goddamn old and valuable that I don’t dare play it.”
“What is a long-playing record?” the Bleekman asked.
“You wouldn’t understand if I told you. Glenn Gould playing. It’s forty years old; my family passed it down to me. It was my mother’s. That guy could really hammer these crosshand sonatas out.” His own playing discouraged him, and he gave up. I could never be any good, he decided, even if this instrument were in peak condition like it was before I had it shipped here from Home.
Seated on the bench but not playing, Arnie ruminated once more on the golden opportunities involved in the F.D.R. Mountains land. I could buy in any time, he thought, with Union funds. But _where?_ It’s a big range; I can’t buy it _all_.
Who knows that range? he asked himself. That Steiner probably did, because as I understand it his base of operations is–or rather was–someplace near there. And there are prospectors coming and going. And Bleekmen live there, too.