The Merchant's War Read Free Page B

Tennison Tarb, would you like to stand up so we can show you how much we’re going to miss you?”
    Well, I hadn’t expected it. It was one of the great moments of my life. There is no applause like the plaudits of your peers, and they gave it unstintingly—even Hay Lopez, though he was frowning as he clapped.
    I don’t know what I said, but when it was over and I was back in my chair I was surprised to find I didn’t have to reach out for Mitzi’s hand again. She had taken mine.
    In the afterglow I leaned over to whisper in her ear, meaning to tell her that I’d fobbed the Polar Penal Colony trip off on Hay, and so we could have the whole suite to ourselves that night. It didn’t get said. She shook her head, smiling, because the Ambassador had sneaked the new commercial tapes down early in the diplomatic pouch, and of course we all wanted to be quiet while we watched them.
    It never did get said. I sat there, dumb and happy, with my arm over Mitzi’s shoulder, and it didn’t even strike me as worrisome when I noticed Hay’s eye on us, glum and resentful—not until he edged his way over to the Ambassador and began whispering in his ear as soon as the films were over. And then it was too late. The son of a gun had thought it through. As soon as the lights went up he came grinning and nodding toward us, all cheer and good-fellowship, and I knew what he was going to say: “Hell, Tenny boy! The damnedest thing! I can’t take that PPC sortie for you. Big huddle with the Ambassador tomorrow—know you’ll understand how it is— hell of a thing to make you do in your last days here—”
    I didn’t listen to the rest of it. He was right. It was a hell of a thing to make me do, and I did understand. I understood real well that night, fretfully trying to pillow my head on the uncomfortable seat-back of the supersonic flight to the Polar Penal Colony. It would have been a lot easier to get my head comfortable if I hadn’t been so dismally sure that I knew exactly where Hay Lopez was pillowing his.

II
    At eight o’clock the next morning I was sitting in the conference room of the prison, across from the Veenie Immigration and Passport Control bureaucrat. “Nice to see you again, Tarb,” he said, unsmiling.
    “Always a pleasure to meet with you, Harriman,” I answered. Neither of us meant it. We’d sat opposite each other every few months, every time a prison ship came in from Earth, for four years, and we knew there was nothing nice or pleasurable to be expected.
    The Polar Penal Colony wasn’t really “polar” exactly, because it was up in the Akna Montes, about where the Arctic Circle would have been if Venus had had one. Naturally it wasn’t arctic. It wasn’t even appreciably less hot than the rest of the planet, but I guess the first Agency survey ships thought it would be. Otherwise why would they claim some of the least desirable real estate on Venus? It was Earth property, precariously established before the Veenie colonists were strong enough to do anything about it, and retained out of habit, like the foreign compounds in Shanghai before the Boxer Rebellion. At the moment we were on Veenie territory, in one of the few aboveground buildings at the perimeter of the PPC itself. The Veenies had rigid roofs over valleys. The prisoners— greks, we called them—had caves. The whole Polar Prison Colony was right outside our window, but you couldn’t see it. Here, too, since the kiln-dried Venusian rock was easy to dig, the prison had been dug.
    “I ought to tell you, Tarb,” he said smiling, but the tone was ominous, “that I’ve had some criticisms aimed at me since our last meeting. They say I’ve been too flexible. I don’t think I can be as accommodating this time.”
    I responded to the ploy instantly: “Funny you should say that, Harriman, because I’ve had the same thing. The Ambassador was furious over my letting you take those two credit delinquents.” Actually the Ambassador hadn’t