“It would have happened with or without us,” LaNague told her brusquely. “If not now, then later. Boedekker has only allowed me to say when; he didn't really change the eventual outcome.”
“And don't forget,” Zack said more gently, “that the people getting hurt bear a great deal of the blame. They've allowed this to go on for decades. The people of Throne are especially guilty – they've allowed the Imperium to make too many decisions for them, run too much of their lives, buy them off with more and more worthless fiat money. Now the bill's come due. And they've got to pay.”
“Right,” LaNague said. “This could not have happened if out-worlders had refused to allow the Imperium to debase the Imperial mark. If the mark had had something real backing it up – if it had represented a given amount of precious metal or another commodity, and had been redeemable for that, if it had been something more than fancy printed keerni paper, then there would have been no crash, no matter how many Imperial marks Eric Boedekker bought and dumped on the Interstellar Currency Exchange.”
“Why not?” Broohnin said.
“Because they would have real value, intrinsic value. And that's not subject to much speculation. People have been speculating in the mark for years now, watching for fluctuations in exchange rates, taking a little profit here and there, but knowing all the time that it really had no intrinsic value, only what had been decided on by the money lenders and traders.”
“But what does Boedekker get out of all this?” Zack asked. “He doesn't seem like the type to give up his fortune just to ruin the Imperial mark.”
“He gets revenge,” LaNague said, and explained about Liza Kirowicz. “With no direct descendant to hand his fortune to, he lost all desire to keep adding to it. And don't worry – I'm sure he's got plenty of credit left in his Earth accounts, plus I'm sure he probably sold a good number of marks short before the crash.”
“But I still don't see where all the Robin Hood business ties in,” Broohnin said, combing his fingers through the coiled blackness of his beard. “One doesn't lead to the other.”
“There's an indirect connection,” LaNague replied. “We'll let the people of Throne find out what's really happened to them, and then we'll offer them a choice: Metep or Robin Hood.”
“WHAT ARE WE going to do?” Metep VII wandered in a reverberating semi-circle around the east end of the conference table, alternately wringing his hands and rubbing them together. His perfect face framed eyes that were red-rimmed and hunted-looking. “I'm ruined! I'm not only broke, I'm now destined to go down in history as the Metep who killed the mark! What are we going to do?”
“I don't know,” Haworth said softly from his seat. Metep stopped his pacing and stared at him, as did everyone else in the room. It was the first time they could remember Daro Haworth without a contingency plan.
“You don't know?” Metep said, stumbling toward him, panic flattening and spreading his facial features. “How can you say that? You're supposed to know!”
Haworth held Metep's gaze. “I never imagined anything like this happening. Neither did anyone else here.” His eyes scanned the room, finding no sympathy, but no protest either. “It was a future possibility, a probability within a decade if we found no new markets for out-world goods. But no one could have predicted this. No one!”
“The Earthies did it,” Krager said. “They're trying to take over the out-worlds again.”
Haworth glanced at the elderly head of the Treasury and nodded. “Yes, I think that's the approach we'll have to take. We'll blame it on Earth. Should work… after all, the Exchange is based on Earth. We can say the Imperial mark has been the victim of a vicious manipulation in a cynical, calculated attempt by Sol System to reassert control over us. Yes. That will help get the anger flowing in some direction other than ours.”
“All right,” Cumberland said, shifting his bulk uneasily in his chair.
“That's the official posture. But what really happened? I think that's important to know. Did Earth do this to us?”
Haworth's head shake was emphatic. “No. First of all, the out-worlds have fallen into debt to Earth over the past few years, and the credit has always been tallied in marks – which means that our debt to them today is only 2 or 3 per cent of what it was yesterday. Earth lost badly on the crash. And second, I don't think anyone in the Sol System government has the ingenuity to dream up something like this, or the courage to carry it through.”
“You think it was just a freak occurrence?”
“I'm not sure what I think. It's all so far beyond the worst nightmare I've ever had…” Haworth's voice trailed off.
“In the meantime,” Krager said sarcastically, “while you sit there in a blue funk, what about the out-worlds – Throne in particular? All credit has been withdrawn from us. There's been no formal announcement, but the Imperium is now considered bankrupt throughout Occupied Space.”
“The first thing to do is get more marks into circulation,” Haworth said. “Immediately. Push the duplicators to the limit. Big denominations. We've got to keep some sort of commerce going.”
“Prices will soar!” Krager said.
“Prices are soaring as we talk. Anyone holding any sort of useful commodity now isn't going to part with it for Imperial marks unless he's offered a lot of them, or unless he's offered something equally valuable in trade. So unless you want Throne back on a barter economy by week's end, you'd better start pouring out the currency.”
“The agrarian worlds are practically on barter now,” Cumberland said. “They'll want no part–”
“Let the agrarian worlds fall into the Galactic Core for all I care!” Haworth shouted, showing emotion for the first time since the meeting had begun. “They're useless to us now. There's only one planet we have to worry about, and that's Throne. Forget all the other out-worlds. They can't reach us, and the sooner we put them out of our minds and concentrate our salvage efforts on Throne, the better we'll be! Let the farmers out there go on scratching their dirt. They can't hurt us. But the people here on Throne, and in Primus City especially… they can cause us real trouble.”
“Civil disorder,” Metep said, nodding knowingly, almost thankfully. Riots he could understand, cope with. But all this economics talk…
“You expect major disturbances?”
“I expect disturbances – just how major they'll be depends on what we do in the next few weeks. I want to try to defuse any riots before they start; but once they start, I want plenty of manpower at our disposal.” He turned to Metep. “We'll need an executive order from you, Jek, ordering withdrawal of all Imperial garrisons from all the other out-worlds. We can't afford to keep them supplied out there anyway, and I want them all gathered tight around us if things get nasty.”
There was a chorus of agreement from all present.
Haworth glanced up and down the table. “It's going to be a long, hot summer, gentlemen. Let's try to hold things together until one of the probe ships makes contact with the aliens in the Perseus arm. That could be our only hope.”
“Any word yet?” Metep said.
“None.”
“What if we never hear anything from them?” Cumberland asked. “What if they never come back?”
“That could be useful, too.”
“FIFTY MARKS FOR A LOAF of bread? That's outrageous!”
“Wait until tomorrow if you think fifty's too much,” the man said laconically. He stood with his back against a blank synthestone wall, a hand blaster at his hip, his wares – unwrapped loaves of bread – spread on a folding table before him. “Probably be fifty-five by then.”
Salli Stafford felt utterly helpless, and frightened. No one had heard from Vin or any of the other probe pilots; no one at Project Perseus knew when they were coming back. Or if they were coming back. She was alone in Primus City and could daily see signs of decay: lengthening, widening cracks in its social foundations. She needed Vin around to tell her that everything would be all right, that he would protect h
er.
She needed money, too. She had read in one of The Robin Hood Readers that came out just after the bottom had dropped out of the mark that she should immediately pull all her money out of the bank and spend every bit of it. She didn't hesitate. Vin had grown to have unwavering faith in whoever was behind those flyers, and Salli had finally come around to believing in him, too. Especially after that long wait in their old back yard, when she had laughed at Vin's almost childish faith, and then the money had come down. She wasn't going to waste time laughing this time; she was down at the bank first thing the next morning, withdrawing everything that was left from Vin's advance for joining the probe fleet.
That had been a month ago, and it was the smartest thing she had ever done in her life. Within the first three days after the crash of the Imperial mark, fully half the banks in Primus had closed. They didn't fail – the Imperium prevented that by seeing to it that every depositor was paid the full amount of his or her account in nice, freshly minted paper marks – they simply ran out of depositors.
Salli followed up her foresight with shortsightedness that now seemed incredibly stupid. Instead of spending the entire ten thousand marks she had withdrawn on commodities, as The Robin Hood Reader had suggested, she waffled and spent only half. The rest she hid in the apartment. She now saw the error of that – prices had risen anywhere between 1,000 and 2,000 per cent in the intervening weeks. Steri-packed vegetables and staples she could have picked up for five marks then – and she had considered that exorbitant – were now going for fifty or sixty, with people thankful they could find them. It was crazy! The four thousand marks she had hidden away then would have bought her fifty thousand marks’ worth of food at today's prices. She cursed herself for not following Robin Hood's advice to the letter. Everyone in Primus now knew from personal experience what he had said back then. Nobody held onto cash any more; it was spent as soon as it was in hand. The only things worth less were Food Vouchers… retailers laughed when you brought them in.
Salli was afraid. What was going to happen when her money ran out? She had called Project Perseus but they had said they could not release Vin's second fifteen thousand until he had returned. She shrugged as she stood there on the street. What was fifteen thousand any more? Nothing!
“You gonna buy, lady?” the man asked, his eyes constantly shifting up and down the street. His legs straddled a large box of currency and he mentally took the measure of every passerby.
“Will you take anything else?”
His eyes narrowed. “Gold, silver, platinum if you've got any. I can let you take it out in trade or I can give you a good bundle of marks depending on what you've got.”
“I – don't have any.” She didn't know what had made her ask. She didn't really want bread. It was being made out in the hinterlands on isolated farms and there were no preservatives being used because there were none to be had. Bread like that went stale too fast to be worth fifty marks to a woman living alone.
He looked her up and down, his gaze seeming to penetrate her clothing. “Don't bother to offer me anything else you've got,” he sneered. “I've got more offers for that every day than I could handle in a lifetime.”
Tears sprang into Salli's eyes as she felt her face redden. “I didn't mean that!”
“Then why did you ask?”
Salli couldn't answer. She had been thinking about the future – the near future, when her money ran out. How was she to get by then? Her employer had told her he couldn't give her a raise, that his business had fallen off to the point where he might have to close up shop and go home.
As she turned away, the man called after her. “Hey, look, I'm sorry, but I've got a family of my own to feed. I've got to fly out and pick this up on my own. The freight unions aren't running till they get more money, you know that.”
Salli knew all that. The vid was full of it – bad news and more bad news. Shipping of goods was at a standstill. Employers were unable to raise wages quickly enough to keep their employees at subsistence level. Salli glanced back over her shoulder and saw that the bread seller had already forgotten her, and was now busy dickering with a man holding up a handful of fresh vegetables.
What was she going to do? Nothing in her life had prepared her for anything like this – she was slowly coming to the realization that her life had prepared her for little more than child rearing. No skill beyond rudimentary mathematics was required of her in the part-time job she was barely holding onto; she could be replaced in minutes. All her childhood had been spent learning to be dependent on men – her father, her brothers, and then Vin. Which was fine until now, when everything was falling apart, and her father and brothers were on the other side of the planet with no way to get to her or she to them. She was suddenly on her own, scared to death, and helpless.
Why am I like this? she thought, then snorted cynically. Why is the world like this? Why isn't Vin's money worth anything?
Vin – the name conjured up a vision of her husband's earnest face, and the worry lines that seemed to have become a part of his features over the past few years. She had never understood what had been plaguing him all this time. He had always acted as a buffer between her and the real world, taking the blows, absorbing them, and allowing only a few vibrations to disturb her. Now he was gone, and so was her insulation. And now she knew first hand the malaise of impotency that had so afflicted his psyche. She felt trapped in a world she had not made. On the surface it was physically similar, but everything had changed. Neither she nor anyone in the street around her had any control over what was happening to them Powerless, all of them.
And yet, we're to blame, she thought. No one out here made this world, but they all sat around idly or looked the other way while it was being made for them. It could have been stopped way back when, before things got too pushed out of shape, too far out of line. But it was too late now. Salli had an eerie feeling that giant forces were swinging back into balance again, impervious now to whatever was thrown up to block their return.
But she would cope. Anger would help her. Anger at the Imperium for causing this. Anger at herself and her society for leaving her so ill-equipped to cope with this or any other challenge outside the security of the nest. How many other women were caught in her situation right now? How many were losing the fight?
Salli wouldn't lose. She was learning fast. Today she would spend every last one of the remaining four thousand marks before they depreciated further. But not all at once. A little here, a little there, with frequent trips back to the apartment, hiding the purchases within her garments while in transit. It wouldn't do to have someone get the idea that she was stocking up on food; that was a sure way of inviting robbery. No, she would buy whatever was available, whatever was the least perishable, and then keep to her apartment, venturing out only for work and for absolute necessities. Yes, Salli would survive and hold out until things got better and Vin got back… she was somehow sure the latter would lead to the former.
And if things ever did get better – she set her mouth in a determined line – something would have to be done to see that this never happened again. She wanted a family, but no child deserved to grow up and face something like this.
Never again! she thought. This must never happen again.
LANAGUE HELD HIS POSITION until the recorder cycled off, then rose and stretched. “There. That ought to do it.” He glanced at Radmon Sayers, who said nothing as he dismantled the vid recorder. The warehouse was empty except for the two of them. “What's the matter, Rad?”
“Nothing,” Sayers replied, removing the recorded spool and handing it to LaNague. “It's just that I don't think this will work.”
“And why not?” LaNague snapped. “They have to be presented with a choice, and in order to make that choice they've got to know what their alternatives are.”
“I still think you could go about this differently. You're placing too much emphasis on these recordings. And frankly, I'm not impressed.”
LaN
ague bit back a terse reply. It angered him to be questioned at this point. With effort he kept his tone measured. “Do you still doubt me? I had to put up with enough of that from you and the rest before the floor fell out from under the mark. And then all of a sudden I was ‘brilliant,’ a ‘genius.’ When are you going to learn that I have been planning this, preparing it for years. I've had a lot more time to think things out than you or Zack or Metep or anyone on the Council of Five. I've out-thought them all. I know what I'm doing.”
“I don't doubt that,” Sayers replied. “You've proved it over and over again. But that doesn't make you infallible. That doesn't mean you're immune to an error of judgment, a miscalculation, just like the rest of us. Are you beyond a second opinion?”
“Of course I'm–”
“Then here's mine: I think the final phase of your plan is too personally dangerous to you, is subject to too many variables, and rests precariously on the persuasive power of these recordings… which, in my opinion as a professional in this area, is slight.”
“I appreciate your concern,” LaNague said softly after a short pause.
Sayers read his expression. “But you're not going to modify your plans, are you?”
LaNague shook his head. “I'm going to have to go with my record, and that's been too accurate so far to ignore.” He reached within his vest and withdrew a fifty-mark note. “Look at that!” he said, handing it to Sayers.
“What about it?” He glanced down at the face and could see nothing of any great significance.
“Turn it over.”
The reverse side was blank. “Counterfeit!” Sayers cried.
“No. That's the way the mint is releasing them. Not only is the supply of keerni paper getting short, but so's the dye. It's the ultimate ignominy. And fifty marks is now the lowest denomination. It's a mere three months since the crash and already the mark is approximating its true value: that of the paper it's printed on. Three months! None of you believed me when I told you things would happen this fast, so I don't expect any of you to believe me now.” He held up a vid spool. “But this will work – I guarantee it!”