Privateers Read Free Page A

as he watched the gray, wet evening slip inexorably into the darkness of night.
    “Once they called this the City of Lights,” he said to his young aide, almost sighing at the memory. He was a tall, rawboned man, vigorously active although well into his seventies. His thick hair and mustache still showed traces of gold among the silver. His voice was deep and strong. His big-knuckled hands dwarfed the glass he was holding.
    “The lights are on again,” replied the aide. His youthful face looked puzzled. He had the bland, innocent features of a born bureaucrat. Quistigaard knew that the youngster had gone straight from college into government service. Never been in the real world at all; never experienced a day for which he did not have an agenda already prepared. In triplicate.
    Quistigaard did sigh. It had been a long day, a long week, and now his flight back to Geneva had been delayed several hours. He sat under the awning of the hotel’s sidewalk cafe and watched the few straggling pedestrians scurrying toward their homes in the cold drizzle.
    “I didn’t mean it literally,” he told his aide.
    “Oh. Sorry.”
    Quistigaard took another sip of the Pemod and felt its warmth spread inside him. But it didn’t taste the same; not like the old days. Nothing was the same anymore.
    “When I was your age,” he said, “Paris was the most exciting place in the world. At this time of the evening the city was just beginning to come to life. The restaurants! The cars! The women!” He shook his head and gestured halfheartedly toward the emptying streets.
    “If the weather were better …”
    “It’s not the weather. It’s  not  the weather. It’s here.” Quistigaard tapped two fingers of his right hand against his breast. “The heart’s gone out of Paris. Out of all Europe. It’s all turned gray and dreary.”
    “You’re tired,” the aide murmured sympathetically. “Once the sun comes out and you get some fresh air into your lungs you’ll feel differently. Tomorrow you’ll be on the ski slopes. You’ll feel better then.”
    “I’ll have to fight my way past Russian tourists,” Quistigaard muttered.
    The aide laughed politely. Then, changing the subject quite deliberately, he said, “I thought the conference went rather well. Didn’t you?”
    The older man lifted his shoulders in a weary shrug. “Conferences always go smoothly when all the real work is done before the conference opens.”
    “You did a magnificent job.”
    I suppose there’s some sincerity in that, Quistigaard thought. After all, his job is secure; he doesn’t really have to butter me up.
    But he leaned across the tiny table and said, “The International Astronautical Council is nothing but a rubber stamp for the desires and actions of the Soviet Union. Since I am chairman of the council, that makes me the inkpad for the rubber stamp. You are working for an inkpad.”
    “That’s not true!” the young man blurted, astonished.
    Quistigaard smiled inwardly, pleased to have penetrated his bland façade. If I’m an inkpad, he thought, what does that make my assistant?
    “The conference resolved several very difficult issues,” the aide went on, his voice at least half an octave higher than it had been. “The matter of allocating new orbital slots for communications satellites; the question of disseminating geological data from observations made from orbit …”
    Quistigaard waved him to silence. “Tell me one issue that was decided in a way that the Russians did not approve.”
    The younger man blinked once, twice.
    “You see?” Quistigaard almost laughed. “It was the Soviet government which organized the agenda for the meeting. Every item on the agenda was agreed upon before the first session convened. Every issue went the way the Russians wanted it to go. We shuffled a great many papers. We listened to a number of boring speeches. We sat for four days and held sixteen concurrent sessions.”
    “We accomplished a lot,”