On the seventeenth of the month of rains, Terence Bemish got a phone call in the evening. Shavash was on the line. They discussed a Chakhar nickel facility construction project for a while and then Shavash advised his friend to sell Inissa Logging Corporation stocks in case Terence had them.
"Oh, by the way, Shavash recalled, "a charter ship Laissa will arrive at your spaceport tomorrow. Could you make sure that customs don't bother them too much and check that their freight could be stored in some nice storage facility."
"All my storage space is crammed," Bemish replied.
"Why don't you load it into 17B?"
17B storage was empty — it had been built for military equipment and its walls, covered with lead sheets, insulated all irradiation.
"What about Giles?"
"Giles won't object," Shavash snorted.
The next day, the phone rang in Bemish's office. It was Ashinik.
"A charter flight has arrived," Ashinik said…
"Is it Laissa?"
"Yes."
"Send them to 17B storage."
In half an hour Ashinik came to Bemish to get storage "keys" — its electronic locks required an ingenious system of codes and, additionally, it had a microprocessor that could recognize the owner's retina pattern. The lock could store ten retina patterns in its memory but it currently had only two — Bemish's and Giles'. Only Bemish, however, knew the password.
The cargo delivered by Laissa was registered as medical equipment. That was not surprising. Every day, three hundred tons of medical equipment passed the spaceport. Accordingly to Bemish's calculations, every Weian peasant had by now one and a half CAT scanner.
Medical equipment was the only hardware that could be imported without tariffs and a lot of stuff entered the planet registered as such. It would be pretty hard to transport an oil drill, even disassembled, in cardboard boxes from Pepsi-Cola.
This time the cargo was too heavy to be unloaded by a forklift. Bemish watched for a while loading platforms with huge cubes, sealed and painted in green color, moving inside the classified storage area.
"Who owns the cargo?" Bemish inquired.
"Ascon Company."
Having returned to his office, Bemish checked Ascon Company out. It had been registered two months ago and it was an IC offshoot. Out of its cofounders, two were anonymous — they were probably colonel Giles and Shavash.
That's our Giles, that's our fighter for democracy! No surprise here that he won't object about his offshoot company using his storage area!
In three days, a party took place in Lore's house that was located half an hour away from the spaceport. Lore, five longshoremen, and Kissur were at the party.
Lore said, "I don't have to introduce our old friend to you. I will only say that two thousand years ago, a man named Irshahchan achieved at his planet what Marx wrote about five centuries ago and Shrainer half a century… Of course, Irshahchan was limited by his epoch and culture but, generally, his actions were correct. And I don't think that anybody has achieved more for the recovery of Irshahchan's and Marx' ideals than Kissur has. Now, we — six Earthmen — should be proud that we are helping, albeit to a small degree, to fix the world that our countrymen, obsessed by the spirit of capitalism, have corrupted."
Everybody agreed that, generally, the sovereign Irshahchan had thought a lot in unison with Marx and Shrainer — half a century ago — even though he had been somewhat backwards compared to the abovementioned thinkers. He had still been a despotic ruler of a patriarchic society.
By the midnight the company had gotten pretty high and Kissur suggested driving around. They loaded in Lore's Dodge and rushed downhill on a mountainous road. At a zigzag turn Lore, driving the car, suddenly saw a beetle shaped truck blocking the road. Lore lost his wits for a moment and Kissur, sitting next to him, swerved the steering wheel to the right and having opened the door, jumped out of the car.
None of the other passengers had Kissur's reflexes. The car smashed through the guard rail, dived into the gulf, flew two hundred meters down to the rocks and exploded. The explosion wouldn't have happened all that easily, if Kissur had not put an extra hydrogen tank in the trunk. This tank went off.
Kissur looked beyond the torn guard rail, made sure that everything was fine, climbed into the beetle shaped truck and was gone. Khanadar the Dried Date was at the truck's steering wheel.
The death of Lore Sigel and his friends didn't cause any suspicions. He had had at least eight crashes before and he had been quite high every time. And now they also found LSD in the blood of the magnificent six.
Nobody found anything connecting this episode and an unfortunate accident that happened two days later on a provincial planet Issan. Denny Hill, a technician from Nordwest base, was on the vacation at a local resort. He swam too far out in the local ocean and drowned.
In the beginning of May a large article filled a quarter of a page in one of the most influential newspapers — MegaMoney. A well known economy journalist and a Ronald Trevis' fan Christopher Blant figured out (or got a hint) to perform the simplest calculation — he took secondary balances that large banks had to publish and added up all the credits granted to the Empire of Great Light.
The result was that this year Weia had to pay off about one hundred forty million dinars on all its foreign and domestic loans; at the same time the total sum of all taxes collected this year would be only one hundred twenty million dinars. "The real total of all the Weian loans is probably higher," Blant wrote, "and it's clear that the only way Weia can make payments on its loans is to obtain more loans at a higher interest rate. It can't go on forever. Weian economy will crash and Weian ishevik will be devalued."
The investors clutched their heads. They demanded the Weian government to publish the real debt figures. During next week, the government published three different figures — eighty, hundred and hundred and thirteen billion — all of them signed by the finance minister.
It only spread the panic further.
Somebody started a rumor that the payments on the two billion dinars credit obtained by Weia from Galactic Bank would be postponed first — this credit had been turned into securities and distributed on the market after the bank had gone public.
The quotes went down by a factor of two and after that Weian government came out with a restructuring plan.
The two billion loan would be taken over by a new company BOAR that would obtain in exchange — at no cost — one of the largest nickel and other non-ferrous metals deposits in the Galaxy where the government had already built an ore enrichment facility. The concern and all the other companies registered at its territories would not have to pay anything towards the state's budget.
Three very influential Weian entrepreneurs and Terence Bemish were the company's cofounders. Even by the most modest estimate, the profit from the export of non-ferrous metals would be three times larger that the payments on the state's debt that the company would have to make. The bond prices skyrocketed at once to 97 % of their face value.
The bankers were tearing their hair out in shock. The newspaper article resulted — without any responsibility from the Weian government's side — in devaluation of the bonds. Their value could have dropped to even 30 % if somebody hadn't bought devalued securities through Ronald Trevis.
Inissa governor came, probably, the closest to the understanding of the true reasons behind the panic; he didn't really like Shavash and he sent him a birthday gift — a disinfectant can with a label "for avarice."
Bemish started visiting Earth often on BOAR business and every time he would wonder at a skyline awkwardly constricted by the buildings and a meager lonely moon. Once, in June, Trevis remarked that the calculations that Bemish held in his hands had been done by Ashinik and the lad had an internship in the head office during his holidays.
"How is he?" Bemish asked unaffectedly.
"He is trying hard," Trevis said, "but he is very disappointed."
"What is he disappointed with?"
"He is disappointed that nobody kisses his boots. They kissed his boots on Weia when he led the sect, didn't they?"
"No," Bemish answered, "they didn't kiss his boots. They gathered dust where he walked and gave it to the pregnant and to the sick to drink."
"Well," Trevis said, "he is disappointed that nobody gathers his dust."
"How is his wife doing?" Bemish asked unexpectedly.
"Is he married?" Trevis was surprised.
Bemish didn't answer.
Bemish had a bit of time after his meetings and before the ship's departure; he ascended to his hotel room and connected to the White Pages website via a computer. The computer thought for a while and then belched forth several green lines. On the black screen, they resembled a rim of meson irradiation formed around the exhausts of an interstar ship. Bemish sat on a coach motionless for a while and then he ordered a taxi and rode in it to the address that he got in the White Pages.