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Ruler of the World by J. T.

McIntosh

CHAPTER ONE

Spacemen are flabby. They spend most of their lives in nogee or mere token gravity, there is little to do in space, and there's always plenty of good food and drink or they wouldn't have signed on.

Flabbier than any of the crew with her was the freighter Elegant Girl, invariably known with immeasurably greater accuracy as the Dirty Cow. She had been a good ship once and, within her limitations was still a reliable ship. But you couldn't run the best of ships forever without a broom or a woman on board, never fix anything but the engines, and expect her to smell of violets. The owners, Astrogo, didn't expect the Dirty Cow to smell of violets. They had no intention of ever coming nearer to her than the bank.

The bunk cabin had once been luxurious in its way. In low gravities, three-tiered bunks are not at all inconvenient; you can jump into the top one without effort and falling out of it doesn't necessarily wake you up. There had been tables and lockers and wardrobes and individual scanners and scores of other amenities for the men who had to spend weeks at a time in space.

The doors of the lockers and cabinets that still had doors swung crookedly on torn hinges; the tables were hideously scarred, and the gee units underneath, which had once secured things placed on top, had been kicked and bashed to improve their performance, with the opposite result; only two or three of the scanners still purveyed cracked music, only one a passable picture. And over everything lay the thick crust of assorted grime from a hundred planets.

Six of the crew of the Dirty Cow—there were only ten altogether, counting the three officers—were gathered around the fixed table in the center, each with a bare toe stuck into a deckring. They wore soiled pants, shorts, T-shirts, but mostly just shorts. They were a hairy lot, bearded and unshorn. Although they washed themselves occasionally, itches and body vermin being things even spacemen wouldn't encourage, their fastidiousness did not extend to wearing clean clothes.

The six spoke quietly, though no one even inside the door could have heard a word they said, far less anybody outside. Presently, having reached a decision, they turned to look up at the third-tier bunk where the seventh crewman, having given up trying to coax entertainment from his battered scanner, was reading a tattered book.

"Are you with us?" asked Weir, the hairiest of the six. The man in the bunk didn't hear him. "Are you with us?" Weir said more loudly, but still with furtive restraint, as if trying to shout in a whisper. The man in the bunk looked down. "In what?"

"Can it, Burrell, don't play the fool," said Collina irritably. "You know all about it. You said you were fed up hearing about it. Well, now we've made up our minds without you."

Ram Burrell rolled out of his bunk and with an experienced shove reached the floor, where he expertly grasped a deckring between two toes. Unlike the rest of them, he was naked. Although his stocky body, above average height but not much above, was lightly fuzzed, he was less hairy than any of the rest of them. And he was cleanshaven.

On the Dirty Cow a certain degree of personal uncleanliness was a matter of pride. Nobody got filthy enough to offend the sensitivities of the others, although sensitivity was a rare quality on the ship. Burrell, a hard, rough man, not only kept himself clean but ensured that his immediate surroundings were immaculate too. He reacted savagely when any crewman borrowed his sheets, blankets, or towels. The other six strongly resented this, though they were not precisely sure why.

"You've made up your minds about what?" he said. His avoidance of repetitive obscenity set him apart as much as his cleanliness. He didn't mind swearing, but when he did so it was for emphasis, and there could be no emphasis when every second word was the same. He was fortyish and, in clothes appeared overweight. When he was naked, however, it became clear that all his bulk was accounted for by bone and muscle, not always in the most aesthetic places.

"We're going to jump ship," said Weir, the usual spokesman. Collina, the other crewman with a lot to say, seldom achieved even the appearance of being constructive. Weir did. "Jumping ship isn't mutiny. The thing is, we do it together. The law won't be called in: the captain will have to find us and make us a better offer. It's not so easy to get a crew for the Dirty Cow."

Burrell nodded. "Fair enough. But why all the conspiracy now? You can't jump ship before Marsay, and it's nine weeks to Marsay—"

"We're jumping ship at bloody Paradiso," said Collina. "Can't you get that through your thick skull?"

Burrell looked at him pityingly. "You can't jump ship at Paradiso. I already told you."

"You haven't been there any more than we have. For God's sake stop acting like—"

"Listen," said Burrell patiently, fixing the others with his eyes: the waverers Sneddon and Burks, the thinker Maddox, and the man who couldn't think at all, Johnson. "Paradiso isn't a planet, it's a space station, an artificial world, built and ran by Starways Inc., and it's run for millionaires. There's nothing for us there—"

"There's no law on Paradiso," Weir broke in. "For us, that can't be bad."

"For us, that can't be worse. There's no law for the rich. There's too much law for the poor. And that's us."

"Some say you're not so poor," Maddox murmured pensively. Burrell shrugged and gazed contemptuously around him.

For no apparent reason, something snapped in Collina.

It was impossible for Collina to argue without eventually exploding into violence. They all knew that, but what made them particularly wary of him was that there was no telling when he would become violent—often when the argument appeared to be dying out.

Perhaps it was the shrug that annoyed him. Anyway, he launched himself homicidally at Burrell, which was not a smart thing to do. There are dangers in nogee. A fall can't hurt you, even in a big ship that has mass enough to give her some sort of gravity. You fall all right, but air resistance prevents you from working up speed.

Propel yourself in nogee, however, as Collina had just done with a foot against the fixed table, and you so completely overcome air resistance that you resemble a runaway train. Anything in your way is doomed. And Burrell, naked, anchored, in a deckring, was in Collina's way. A runaway train cannot be stopped. But where the rails turn, it has to turn. If Burrell had tried to stop Collina dead he would have damaged himself considerably. Instead, he pulled himself to one side, released his toehold (or he'd have had two broken toes), and pushed Collina's shoulder. The reaction sent Burrell flying back against a steel wall, but he took the impact on his buttocks; his landing was nothing to the impact with which Collina struck the adjacent wall with his head.

Nobody went near him. He was out but probably not dead.

"I was telling you," continued Burrell, joining the group at the table,

"you can't jump ship at Paradise Marsay, sure. I'll jump ship with you at Marsay if you like. Only whatever the offer, I'm not coming back. I've had enough of the Dirty Cow."

"Stick to Paradiso," said Weir doggedly. "Why not Paradiso?" Burrell sighed. "Because there's no place to hide, that's why. Paradiso's a great big hotel in space. Everybody there is either a master or a servant. And the so-called servants, the Starways staff, get paid about ten times as much as us. So in Paradiso, assuming you get past the docks, which is a big assumption, you would get spotted in no time unless either you're getting paid twenty a day or you're paying two hundred a day."

"There's no cops—"

"Who told you there's no cops? You've been reading the travel agents'

brochures on Paradiso. Paradiso, where anything goes! Paradiso, where the party started twenty-one years ago and it hasn't stopped since! Take your pleasures wild or wonderful, you'll find them all in Paradiso!

Paradiso, where there's never been a crime! There can't be any crimes because there are no courts and no cops!"

They were licking their lips. "Well, what's wrong with that?" said Burks. Burrell gave up. They couldn't see that to keep things running smoothly in such a plastic heaven, Starways had to have a special branch in control—an iron hand in a velvet glove. Millionaires got drunk and aggressive as often as anybody else… more often than anybody else. There had to be an irresistible force to stop customers from annoying each other too much, or Paradiso wouldn't have lasted a month, let alone twenty-one years. That was obvious. It wasn't advertised but it stood to reason. And with that kind of undercover efficiency, the idea of a bunch of spacerats getting off a ship like the Dirty Cow and finding themselves a pad in Paradiso was ludicrous.

"The point is," said Weir obstinately, "we've got to be together in this. Are you with us, Burrell?"

Burrell didn't answer because Burks and Maddox and Sneddon were looking past him. The old trick of looking past a man to make him turn made sense only when an attack was intended from the front. And nobody had the guts to attack Ram Burrell except Collina.

Burrell moved slightly as the knife came down. He caught Collina's wrist, pivoted, and wrenched. Collina screamed, and the knife, which happened to be motionless at the instant of release, floated in the air like Lady Macbeth's Is this a dagger which I see before me?

Collina, released, stopped screaming and began to whimper.

"I've dislocated your shoulder," said Burrell casually. "I could put it back for you, but I won't. You'll have to go to the captain and see what he can do for you. He knows you, Collina. He'll get Schick to fix your shoulder and then he'll throw you in the brig."

Hate exploded from Collina's eyes. But Burrell wasn't interested. Even in his pain he would have refused to let Burrell touch him. So there was nothing for him to do but start for the door and the captain.

"He'll get you," said Maddox dispassionately. "Probably while you're asleep. He'll wait, and finally get you."

Maddox was probably right, except that Burrell wasn't going to be there to be got. The others weren't going to jump ship at Paradiso, but Burrell was.

Weir said again: "Are you with us, Burrell?"

Trying to talk them out of it wasn't going to work. He said: "Sure, why not? You've convinced me. We'll all jump ship at Paradiso."

CHAPTER TWO

Paradiso was a perfect silver sphere except for the docks, a huge square box against which the Roaring Twenties mirror ball slowly revolved. To the Dirty Cow the box was the docks; to the well-heeled patrons of Paradiso it was the spaceport. There were no luxury liners due, of course, or the Dirty Cow would never have been allowed within a million miles of Paradiso.

Yes, Paradiso could have stopped the Dirty Cow a million miles away. Though not officially armed, the space station had a defensive field superior to anything the Federation Navy possessed anywhere.

"Sure, we make our own way in, where and how we can, every man for himself," Burrell had agreed with the other five (Collina was still in the ship's brig). It didn't matter what he said to them, what he agreed to. They weren't going to make it. "Sure, we'll meet twenty-four hours from now at the nearest thing they've got in this place to a town square." Gravity came on as the freighter turned and drifted in to make contact with the port of Paradiso. In became down. Paradiso was below them. Landing bottom down, the men on board weighed first a couple of kilos, then ten, finally nearly thirty. But part of that was accounted for by deceleration.

There was one minor favorable factor in the plan to jump ship at Paradiso. Normally the crew was very busy indeed at loading and unloading times, but Paradiso claimed to possess the most automated docks in the galaxy: freighter crews didn't have to do a thing to help and were not encouraged to try. The crew, therefore, would not be immediately missed if any of them succeeded in getting lost.

The Dirty Cow made contact. Weir led the group to the bridge, where Captain Hoyt was talking to Unloading Control by the phone link automatically created when the ship was secured. The six crewmen waited respectfully, and when he put down the phone he looked at them suspiciously, with good reason. They were washed and in clean whites; as if that were not enough, their very respectfulness was a clanging alarm bell to him.

"Permission to go ashore, Sir," said Weir formally.

"You can't go ashore here," Hoyt snapped. "You know damn well—"

" 'Crew refreshment facilities,' " Maddox quoted, " 'must be provided at all unloading installations of F status and above.'"

"The focsle lawyer," Hoyt sneered. "That's for men engaged in loading and unloading. Here you don't have to."

"We don't have to sweat to get this old cow unloaded," Weir agreed. "So we can go ashore for a drink. We're respectfully asking permission. Sir. Also permission to draw on wages. Sir."

The captain glowered for a moment. Hoyt automatically kept them battened down even when he could have allowed them liberty. However, technically they had every right to land if Paradiso would let them, which he very much doubted.

He picked up the phone again. "Six of my crew want to land for a drink," he said shortly, willing the dockmaster to slap down a veto. The reply at first didn't please him, but as he went on listening a hard smile slowly grew to quite a benevolent beam, which meant, Burrell thought, that they were going to have about as much chance of getting through the docks into Paradiso as of getting out of a high-security jail. Burrell took care to say nothing at all. He had intended all along to jump ship at Paradiso. The fact that the rest of the crew later decided the same thing was to him, merely an unfortunate coincidence. Five minutes later they were ashore, on dry land. Burrell still found the archaic words that spacemen used slightly ridiculous. No scholar, he didn't know why the Control-room was called the bridge or what a focsle was or had been, but "ashore" and "dry land" to him still meant going down the gangplank of a seagoing vessel onto solid earth. This he had done often on many worlds, particularly Orleans, while none of the Dirty Cow's other crewmen had ever sailed the sea. Any sea. This shore, this dry land, was a steel corridor remarkable for two things, its cleanliness and its bareness. There was not a door, hatch, join, rivet or screw to be seen. There was not even the slightest indication of where the light was coming from. The one thing the corridor did have was gravity, about thirty percent gee, and since it didn't have the short-range effect associated with all the artificial gravity systems (like magnetism, strong at the point of contact and rapidly fading to nothing perhaps only an inch or two away), it was a reasonable assumption that the mass of Paradiso proper was directly below and supplying most of the gravity—not all of it, because although the silver sphere was big it wasn't that big. Weir and the other four were fifty yards ahead, whooping at the thought of booze and women and freedom. BurFrell followed more slowly, observing what little there was to observe.

The corridor made a right-angled turn, and through swing doors was a bar. It was a very ordinary bar except in one respect. There was only one door, the one by which they entered, and they knew already how little use that was to them. True, there was a toilet, but it was hardly worth investigating that. There would be the usual facilities and nothing else. There was a single barman behind a semi-circular bar with a counter higher and wider than usual and with no apparent break in it. Nor was there any perceptible way for the barman to get out at the back. One thing that was perceptible, however, and it needn't have been if it hadn't been meant as a warning, was a closed-circuit camera in the ceiling, watching. That Weir and the others were disappointed was evident from the sullen way in which they were ordering drinks. They wanted the drinks but they wanted far more. What Burrell had told them had made no impression—they expected to find a bar with the world going by outside, big windows, bustle, traffic, noise, open space, and women. What they got was a small conventional lounge bar entirely to themselves, with no windows, no door except the one they entered by, and certainly no women. Burrell, when his turn came, ordered beer and sat at the end of the bar, away from the others. His behavior for the last three months made this no surprise to the other five crewmen.

Weir and Maddox were in the washroom, checking it out. The other three had taken their drinks to the farthest table, no doubt to discuss the situation without being overheard by the barman.

It was as good a chance as Burrell was going to get. He waved a ten and said quietly: "I want to call at a bank."

The barman took the ten, saw what little there was to see in Burrell's face, saw the wad the ten came from, and nodded. "Dock bank only," he said.

"Sure. So long as it's a bank."

Spacemen, like any other men who worked for months on end without being able to spend their pay, ultimately had to handle large sums. The wisest among them would bank, or better still invest an occasional nest egg at ports of call that were not only financially safe but also in constant contact with other such places.

"Through there," said the barman.

He reached under the counter and the white quasi-marble pillar at the end of the bar rotated eccentrically. The gap created was wide enough for Burrell. As the pillar closed again, he heard the Dirty Cow's crewmen clamoring behind him, shouting after him, asking the barman where he'd gone, demanding the opportunity to go with him. Then silence. The barman wouldn't let them follow him. If they caused trouble he would put up the shutters and call the cops. It stood to reason he wasn't as alone and unprotected as he seemed to be. And none of the others were smart enough to hit on a way to make the barman let them through. He was in another bare steel corridor but the angle was different. This one led downwards and was therefore a shaft. The ladders on the sides seemed strangely primitive. But then, none of Paradiso's guests ever came here: only dockers and, occasionally, spacemen.

At the bottom of the ladder was a small landing and another set of swing doors. Through small circular windows, Burrell could see a circular shopping center, with the shops round the perimeter and a large clear space in the middle. There were groups of people milling about, men and women, mostly in overalls or whites like his own: dockland employees, Starways staff. But there were also tourists taking pictures (not that the scene was worth photographing—there were a thousand such centers in the galaxy at bus depots, railway stations, spaceports, seaports, trading posts). A group of chattering women wore bright trousers, playsuits, leotards. There were even some in long or short skirts, which meant they took gravity for granted even in a space station. Bald, overweight men wore shorts and sandals, with cameras bumping against pendulous bellies. Burrell threw off the whites that proclaimed him a servant rather than a master, stuffing them behind the rungs of the farthest ladder. Underneath he wore spotless white shorts. It had been a good guess that in a play world the golden people would wear play clothes, and the hired help would not.

He put his money, six hundred plus, in one pocket and a small leather case in the other. Now attired only in shorts and shoes, he pushed open the door and boldly walked into the crowd.

CHAPTER THREE

The bank was right opposite. He didn't go near it.

When people are moving about in an open space, a keen eye soon spots the patterns of purpose. A group of elderly tourists stopped taking pictures and began to move in twos and threes towards an arcade. Burrell casually inserted himself among them. His guess proved to be correct; they were leaving the area, having had enough of slumming, and were going back to Paradise.

"Allow me," he said gallantly, and relieved a stout and puffing woman of the heaviest of her parcels. She looked at him doubtfully for a moment, afraid he might run off with them, and then her own inclination to accept his assistance decided her to trust him.

"Thank you," she gasped.

The arcade led to a shuttle stop, where two Starways employees, a man and a woman, were packing tourists into the cars as they arrived. Burrell hung back for a moment to make sure no tickets changed hands, then followed the stout lady.

Four minutes' later, having allowed himself to be persuaded that she needed no further assistance, he alighted at the shuttle's third stop. It was quite a place. The architects, faced with the problem of building within an artificial sphere, had decided neither to pack it like a block of office units nor to make a Pellucidar world using the rim as the base, which would have been possible using centrifugal gravity. Instead they had put a solid core in the center and made that the base, not only simplifying the technical problems by making several kinds of gravity possible, through multiple reinforcement, but also allowing for a type of architecture somewhere between Disney and the conceptions of the early science-fiction artists.

There were at least a dozen levels, Burrell guessed, between the central sphere and the rim. Each was so far from the next that the impression given was of spaciousness rather than of being closed in. And broad, sweeping walkways led from one level to the next, cunningly arranged so that wherever one stood, the eye could find real distance to look into, glimpses of three levels down or six levels up. The predominantly spiral lines gave the illusion that there was always open space directly above. There were no cars and only a basic public-transport system—the shuttle, the many elevators, an escalator here and there and a slow moveway on each level. Walking was obligatory. It was no hardship in halfgee.

Burrell found quite a few of the passers-by looking at him curiously, and soon realized why. This was a cool level, cooler than in the docks section, too cool for shorts only. The people here wore street clothes. On the nearest spiral walkway, however, he saw more gaily dressed tourists, going up, apparently to a warmer level. He walked across and followed them.

Here there were few obvious employees: the whole area belonged to the tourists, the guests, the millionaires. As Burrell suspected, the next level was warmer and the people about him began to shed sweaters, wraps, skirts. Some shoved them straight into disposal chutes. Others put them down, evidently expecting them to be there when they got back. He remembered another line from Paradiso publicity: There are no thieves in Paradiso.

To one side of the via was a garden leading to a recreation area. On the other was a small business complex that included a bank.

He walked into the bank and found it laid out quite conventionally. People liked their banks to look like banks, even when restaurants looked like glass balloons.

He told the first teller he saw: "I want to see the manager." The teller hesitated only for a second, then said: "Certainly, sir. Your name?"

"I'll tell him."

"Her, sir. Flora Fay. This way."

If Burrell had known the bank was managed by a woman called Flora Fay (she must be fifty and arid), he would have found another bank. It was too late, however… and when he saw Flora Fay, who was not only at least ten years younger than he was, but also much more gracefully formed, he was glad he had not missed the experience. He felt a very familiar urge stirring within him.

She was tall and blonde. When she gave him a cool hand, he put a diamond in it.

"I carry it for security. I'm not trying to sell it. I've got identification, but I find the diamond generally smoothes the way."

"It would."

She held out the cool hand again. Her eyes, he saw, were of the green hue intended for redheads. Very likely she was a redhead and had become a blonde for business hours. A bank manager, even in Paradiso, had to retain some shreds of respectability to be credible.

Again he slipped his hand in the left pocket of his shorts. From the small leather case he extracted a tiny black marble.

She took the marble and dropped it in the top of her desk computer. A typer began to chatter and a strip of paper rolled out of the slot. As Flora tore off the paper, the marble popped up and she gave it back to Burrell.

"Credit up to a million," she mused. "You're Ram Burrell of Orleans, retired contractor… retired?"

"I sold the business."

"Burrell," she said thoughtfully and looked at him for the first time with a spark of genuine interest. A long finger stabbed a repeater button on her desk. She tore off the slip and gave it to Burrell.

TO ALL BANK MANAGERS: