The Merchant's War Read Free

course, the Veenies are so crazy they’d call that a victory for right and justice.
    The Embassy is located on the city’s main drag, O’Shea Boulevard, and of course on a day like this the Veenies were busy at their favorite sport—demonstrations. There were signs saying No advertising! and signs saying Earthmen go home! The usual stuff. I was amused to see the morning’s wimp appear, wrench a banner from a tall man with red hair and green eyes and go marching and shouting slogans back and forth in front of the Embassy. Right on schedule. The fever in the wimp was rising, and when it fell she would be weak and unresisting.
    The lounge began to fill with senior staff for the eleven o’clock briefing session, and one of the first to arrive was my roommate and rival, Hay Lopez. I jumped up and got his coffee-sub for him, and he looked at me with suspicion. Hay and I were not friends. We shared a duplex suite: I had the top berth. There were real good reasons for us not to like each other. I could imagine how he had felt, all those months, listening to Mitzi and me in the bunk above. I didn’t have to imagine, really, since I had come to know what it was like to hear sounds from below.
    But there was a way of dealing with Hay Lopez, because he had a black mark on his record. He had fouled up somehow when he was a Junior Media Director at his Agency. So naturally they furloughed him to the military for nearly a year, on reservation duty, trying to bring the Port Barrow Eskimos up to civilized standards. I didn’t know exactly what he’d done. But Hay didn’t know I didn’t know, and so a couple of judicious hints had kept him worried. He ran scared anyway, trying to erase that old blot, working harder than anybody else in the Embassy. What he didn’t want was another tour of duty north of the Arctic Circle; after the sea-ice and the tundra, he was the only one among us who never complained about the Venusian climate. So, “Hay,” I said, “I’m going to miss the old place when I get back to the Agency.”
    That doubled the suspicion in his eyes, because he knew that was a lie. What he didn’t know was why I was telling it. “We’ll miss you, too, Tenny,” he lied back. “Got any idea what you’ll be assigned to?”
    That was the opening I wanted. “I’m thinking of putting in for Personnel,” I lied. “I think it’s a natural, don’t you? Because the first thing they’ll want is updates on performance here— say,” I said, as though suddenly remembering, “we’re from the same Agency! You and me and Mitzi. Well, I’ll have a lot to say about you two! Real star-class performers, both of you.” Of course, if Lopez thought it over he’d realize the last thing I’d put in for—or get—would be Personnel, because my whole training was Copy and Production. But I only said Hay was hard-working, I never said he was smart; and before he knew what was happening I’d got his promise to take over my Polar Penal Colony trip for me—“to break in in case he got the assignment when I left.” I left him puzzling it out and went over to join a conversation about the kinds of cars we’d owned back on Earth.
    The Embassy had a hundred and eight on the duty roster—the Veenies were always after us to cut the number in half, but the Ambassador fought them off. He knew what those extra sixty people were there for—of course, so did the Veenies. I was maybe tenth or eleventh in the hierarchy, both because of my consular duties and my side assignment as Morale Officer. This meant that I was the one who selected commercials for the in-house TV circuits and—well—kept an eye on the other hundred and seven for Conservationist leanings. That didn’t take much of my time, though. We were a hand-picked crew. More than half of us were former Agency personnel, and even the consumers were a respectable bunch, for consumers. If anything, some of the young ones were too loyal. There’d been incidents. A couple of