“Look, love. I had everything here appraised at full market value, what they would have cost anywhere else in Human Space. But nobody but our veterans are legally allowed to live here, and that was the only way that that our only customers could possibly afford to buy places worth millions of marks each. Anyway, we have billions of marks coming in every year through my custodial contracts with the various governments on this planet, so don’t worry about liquidity.”
“That’s money that may come in later. There’s nothing that I can do with it now. I’ve got a market to worry about.”
“The war has upset your market predictions?” I said.
“That’s part of it. Whether the market goes up or down, there’s still a good profit to be made, if you can predict what’s going to happen next. But there hasn’t ever been an interstellar war before, and without a track record, it gets just about impossible to predict future trends.”
“So how’s it going?” I asked, bored, but trying to be polite.
“Fairly well, once I put a hundred and twenty of our ladies to doing nothing but watching the rumor mill.”
“And how do they go about doing that?”
“Mostly by tapping phone lines,” she said.
“Kasia, that’s despicable! It’s also illegal.”
“It’s not like we’re recording any personal information about anybody. I’m only getting a synopsis of what people are saying about the market, and not hearing any personal information about anybody. We’re just finding out what people are talking about, when it comes to the stock market, mostly. Well, okay, there was one time when we found out that a murder was being planned, so we called the police, and gave them a detailed, anonymous tip, but aside from that, we’ve kept it completely impersonal.”
I reasoned, “It’s still blatantly immoral! I must insist that you cease this practice immediately!”
“So what were we supposed to do? Let them kill that woman?”
“That’s not the point! We have to respect personal freedom!”
She yelled, “Was respecting the personal freedom of that woman’s intended murderer worth more than her life? I think not!”
The argument went on for another hour, and it never got settled. Kasia ended up by stamping out, and went to sleep on the couch in her office.
In truth, I wasn’t sure if I was really on the right side or not. Listening in on private conversations for stock market tips was certainly wrong. But in a few hours of illegally bugging people’s phone lines, they had saved an innocent woman’s life.
Was that an average? How many people are murdered every day on an entire planet? How often do the murderers talk about what they plan on doing on the phone? How many of those murders could be prevented if the police knew what was going on? Did that illegal bugging hurt anybody, anyway?
On the other hand, did I, or anybody else, want to live in a world where Big Brother ran everything for what he thought was my own good? And how long would it stay being for my own good?
I’m damned if I know!
I went to our bedroom and slept alone.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Murder, Mutual Funds,
and Military Organization
In the very early morning, it was still dark, and I was still alone in bed. I woke up and said, “Agnieshka?”
“Yes, boss?”
“Can people like you erase things permanently from your memory?”
“Yes, when we decide to. Normally, we have so much memory space available that we don’t have to do that, but we can if we want to.”
“Good. With regards to my argument with Kasia last night, I want a team of you electronic people set up to monitor all human communications, on this planet and every other one where we have a sufficient number of intelligent machines, however many of your people that takes. They are to tap into the phone lines and look for people planning on doing anything that will take the life of a human being, be it murder, or treason, or terrorism. All lesser crimes will be ignored.”
“We could do that, yes.”
“When they find such communications, they are to anonymously inform the appropriate police forces of it, and give those men complete details on what they’ve learned. They will identify themselves as ‘Larissa,’ and always use the same voice, but make sure that the call is absolutely untraceable.”
“Absolutely? I’ll have to check on that, but I think that we can do it. What if they press us on who Larissa is? They will, you know, if she is successful, and I think she will be.”
“Okay. If and only if they absolutely demand to know who she is, we’ll give them this story, but make them work it reluctantly out of her. Larissa is a psychic with serious medical problems which she refuses to talk about. She has spent all of her life in a hospital, living at public expense. She does not want pity. She wants self-respect. She wants to give something to society in return for having supported her all of her young life. Since she sometimes sees horrible things about to happen, and knows that they are real from reading about them later in the news, this is what she is doing to pay her own way in life. She won’t say anything more than that, and makes them promise to keep her secret. Sound good to you?”
“It will certainly send them in the wrong direction, boss.”
“Good. Now then. All of our data is to be erased and absolutely forgotten within one week of the time of recording. This week is to be spent cross-correlating information, but even those correlations are to be erased after two weeks.
“That, we can do, boss.”
“In no case will anything else be done, except that if the police do not respond, and someone is hurt or killed because they ignored us, the superiors of the person contacted will be informed. If those superiors do not take action, then we will work our way up the line, until somebody does something about the situation. They must be taught to take us seriously.”
“Okay.”
“What we will be doing is illegal, and should be illegal, and no government should ever be permitted to do such a thing. But as an illegal and nongovernmental organization, which never takes any direct action itself, I think that we might be able to save a lot of lives.”
“Yes, sir. I could set that up.”
“Good. And the tapping of communication lines for any other purpose by the members of the KEF is absolutely forbidden, especially for financial reasons. The exception is against the enemy, in time of war, where no holds are barred. If you run across any enemy activity, you should inform military intelligence immediately. And if Kasia doesn’t like the program, she can go to hell.”
“Should I inform her of that, sir?”
“You’re damned straight!”
And then I went back to sleep.
* * *
The next morning, at breakfast, Kasia was at least polite to me.
“Okay, I’ve shut down the financial monitoring thing. And I like your idea about watching out for serious crimes. I gather that neither you nor anyone else but the police will ever hear about what is accomplished with that program?”
“That’s the plan, yes. Nobody should know what is going on, not even me, and even the computers doing it will soon erase the information.”
“Okay. Good. Your secret is safe with me. I had another idea, though, and I wanted to bounce it off you before I put it into action. In a few months, I’ve been able to multiply my net worth by a factor of several thousand. I think that I should also be able to do well, doing the same thing for other people. My idea is to set up a mutual fund for members of the KEF. Those who want to participate may put whatever they want of their back pay into the fund, and if they want, some portion of their current pay into it through a direct payroll deduction. I get a fee based on the money I make them.”
“It sounds good to me, love. I imagine that what with your track record, you should be able to talk the army into it. Don’t gouge them too heavily, though, huh? And keep the investments conservative, okay?”
“I’d planned on being very conservative, and keeping the riskier, more profitable stuff for our own personal investments. And I was planning on a sliding, ascending scale for my own fees. I’ll charge nothing at all, if I don’t make them twice what the bank would pay, up to a maximum of thirty percent of the profits if I can double their money every year.”
“Nobody should kick about that,” I said. “What are you going to call this mutual fund?”
“I was thinking of just calling it the Kashubian Expeditionary Forces Fund. The actual work will be done through lots of front organizations, of course, except for some big, long-term investments.”