“My boy, I am terribly sorry, but we are helpless in the hands of the workers’ consortium.” Dimitrios spread his own hands to demonstrate helplessness, although it was hard to find remorse on his broad, wrinkled face. “You cannot expect me to absorb the entire cost of the extortion by myself.”
“How much are you getting back from them? Ten percent?
Fifteen? What is your commission for helping to rob your friends and relatives?”
“How do you find the hardness to say such things to me, Nikos?”
“Easily, old thief.”
“I have dandled you on my knee as if you were my own godson!” the old man objected.
“Dimitrios, I have known you for what you were since I was ten years old. I am not blind, like my father.”
“Your father is hardly blind. Do not doubt that I will report these slanders to him. Perhaps you had better leave—before I lose my patience and dandle you into the vacuum.”
“I’ll wait while you make the call, Dimitrios. I would like to hear what you have to say to him.”
“You think I won’t?” Dimitrios shouted, his face darkening.
But he made no move to reach for the radiolink. A magnificent scowl gathered on his brow, worthy of Pan.
“My hair is gray, my son. Your hair is brown. For forty years I have . . .”
“Other shipyards hold to their contracts,” Pavlakis impatiently interrupted. “Why is my father’s own cousin an incompetent? Or is it more than mere incompetence?”
Dimitrios stopped emoting. His face froze. “There is more to business than what is written in contracts, little Nikos.”
“Dimitrios, you are right—you are an old man, and the world has changed. These days the Pavlakis family runs a shipping line. We are no longer smugglers. We are not pirates.”
“You insult your own fa—”
“We stand to make more money from this contract with Ishtar Mining Corporation than you have dreamed of in all your years of petty larceny,” Pavlakis shouted angrily.
“But the Star Queen must be ready on time.”
What hung in the close artificial air between them, known to them both but unmentionable, was the desperate situation of the once powerful Pavlakis Lines, reduced from the four interplanetary freighters it had owned to the single, aging vessel now in the yards. Dimitrios had intimated that he had creative solutions to such problems, but young Pavlakis would not hear of them.
“Instruct me, young master,” the old man said poisonously, his voice trembling. “How does one, in this new world of yours, persuade workers to finish their jobs without the inducement of their accustomed overtime?”
“It’s too late, isn’t it? You’ve seen to that.” Pavlakis drifted to the window and watched the flashing of the plasma torches. He spoke without facing the old man.
“Very well, keep them at it, and meanwhile take as many bribes as you can, gray-hair. It will be the last job you do for us. And who else will deal with you then?”
Dimitrios thrust his chin up, dismissing him.
Nikos Pavlakis took a convenient shuttle to London that same afternoon. He sat cursing himself for losing his temper. As the craft descended, screaming through the atmosphere toward Heathrow, Pavlakis kept a string of amber worry beads moving across his knuckles. He was not at all certain his father would support him against Dimitrios; the two cousins went back a long way, and Nikos did not even want to think about what they might have gotten up to together in the early, loosely regulated days of commercial space shipping. Perhaps his father could not disentangle himself from Dimitrios if he wanted to. All that would change when Nikos took over the firm, of course . . . if the firm did not collapse before it happened.
Meanwhile, no one must know the true state of the Company’s affairs, or everything would collapse immediately.
The worry beads clicked as Nikos muttered a prayer that his father would enjoy a long life. In retirement.
It had been a mistake to confront Dimitrios before Pavlakis was sure of his own position, but there could be no backing down now. He would have to put people he could trust on the site to see to the completion of the work.
And—this was a more delicate matter—he would have to do what he could about extending the launch deadline.
Freighters, blessedly, did not leave for the planets every month; it was not a simple matter to find room for a shipment as massive as this consignment of robots from the Ishtar Mining Corporation. A delay in Star Queen’s departure for Venus was not the most auspicious beginning to a new contract, but with luck it would not be fatal.
Perhaps he could arrange an informal discussion with Sondra Sylvester, the Ishtar Mining Corporation’s chief executive, before talking the situation over with his father.
Rehearsing his arguments, Pavlakis descended toward London.
At the same moment Mrs. Sondra Sylvester was flying through the dark overcast sky west of London in a Rolls- Royce executive helicopter, accompanied by a ruddy, tweedy fellow, Arthur Gordon by name, who having failed to press a cup of Scotch whiskey upon her was helping himself from a Sterling Silver decanter from the recessed bulkhead bar. Gordon was head of Defence Manufactures at Rolls-Royce, and he was much taken with his tall, darkeyed passenger in her elegant black silks and boots. His helicopter flew itself, with just the two of them in it, toward the army proving grounds on the Salisbury Plain.
“Lucky for us the army were eager to help,” Gordon said expansively. “Frankly your machine is of great interest to them—they’ve been pestering us for details ever since we undertook development. Haven’t given them anything proprietary, of course,” Gordon said, fixing her with a round brown eye over the lip of the silver cup.
“And they’ve declined to go all official on us, so there’s been no unpleasantness.”
“I can’t imagine the army is planning maneuvers on the surface of Venus,” Sylvester remarked.
“Bless me, neither can I, ha ha.” Gordon took another sip of the whiskey. “But I imagine they’re thinking that a machine which can operate in that sort of hell can easily do so in the mundane terrestrial variety as well.”
Two days earlier Sylvester had arrived at the plant to inspect the new machines, designed to Ishtar Mining Corporation’s specifications and virtually handmade by Rolls- Royce. They were lined up at attention, waiting for her on the spotless factory floor, six of them squatting like immense horned and winged beetles. Sylvester had peered at each in turn, looking at her slim reflection in their polished titanium-alloy skins, while Gordon and his managers stood by beaming. Sylvester had turned to the men and briskly announced that before taking delivery she wished to see one of the robots in action. See for herself. No use hauling all that mass to Venus if it wouldn’t do the job.
The Rolls-Royce people had traded shrewd glances and confident smiles. No difficulty there. It had taken them very little time to make the arrangements.
The helicopter banked and descended. “Looks like we’re just about there,” Gordon said. “If you look out the window to your left you can catch a glimpse of Stonehenge.”
Without undue haste he screwed the top back on the silver flask of Scotch; instead of returning it to the bar he tucked it into the pocket of his overcoat.
The helicopter came down on a wind-blasted moor, where a squad of soldiers in battle fatigues stood to attention, their camouflage trousers flapping about their knees like flags in a stiff breeze. Gordon and Sylvester dismounted from the helicopter. A group of officers approached.
A lieutenant colonel, the highest ranking among them, stepped forward smartly and inclined his head in a sharp bow. “Lieutenant Colonel Guy Witherspoon, madame, at your service.” He pronounced it “lef-tenant.”
She held out her hand and he shook it stiffly. She had the impression he would rather have saluted. The colonel turned and shook Gordon’s hand. “Marvelous beast you’ve constructed here. Awfully good of you folks to let us look on. May I introduce my adjutant, Captain Reed?”
More handshakes. “Are you making records of these tests, Colonel?” Sylvester asked him.
“We had planned to do, Mrs. Sylvester.”
“I have no objection to the army’s knowing, as long as the information is kept strictly confidential. Ishtar is not the only mining company on Venus, Colonel Witherspoon.”
“Quite. The Arabs and Ni . . . hmm, that is, the Japanese —need no help from us.”
“I’m glad you understand.” Sylvester hooked a loose strand of her long black hair away from her red lips. She had one of those faces that was impossible to place—Castilian?
Magyar?—and equally impossible to overlook or forget. She gave the belted young officer with the gingery mustache a warm smile. “We are grateful for your cooperation, Colonel. Please proceed whenever you’re ready.”