“Manager,” he said deliberately, “if you will pardon my using your title, you evidently cannot read.”
The manager had not lived in the atmosphere of the Earth’s Citizen’s Welfare State as long as he had without knowing that dogs eat dogs. He looked back at the card that had been delivered to his desk only minutes before and this time he read it thoroughly. Then, with a gesture, he signaled the Security men to return to their posts. But he did not take his eyes from the card.
“My apologies,” Morgan said when the Security police had retired out of earshot. There was no apology in the tone of his voice. “I perceive that you can read. Bully, may I say, for you.” The bantering tone was still in his voice, the pseudo-smile still on his lips, the chill of cold steel still in his eyes. “I realize that titles of courtesy are illegal on earth,” he continued, “because courtesy itself is illegal. However, the title ‘Commodore’ simply means that I am entitled to command a spaceship containing two or more persons other than myself. Therefore, it is not a title of courtesy, but of ability.”
The manager had long since realized that he was dealing with a Belt man, not an Earth citizen, and that the registration robot had sent him the card because of that, not because there was anything illegal. Men from the Belt did not come to Earth either willingly or often.
Still unable to override his instincts—which erroneously told him that there was something “wrong”—the manager said: “What does the ‘Sir’ mean?”
Harry Morgan glowed warmly. “Well, now, Mr. Manager, I will tell you. I will give you an analogy. In the time of the Roman Republic, twenty-one centuries or so ago, the leader of an Army was given the title Imperator. But that title could not be conferred upon him by the Senate of Rome nor by anyone else in power. No man could call himself Imperator until his own soldiers, the men under him, had publicly acclaimed him as such. If, voluntarily, his own men shouted ‘Ave, Imperator!’ at a public gathering, then the man could claim the title. Later the title degenerated—” He stopped.
The manager was staring at him with uncomprehending eyes, and Morgan’s outward smile became genuine. “Sorry,” he said condescendingly. “I forgot that history is not a popular subject in the Welfare World.” Morgan had forgotten no such thing, but he went right on. “What I meant to say was that the spacemen of the Belt Cities have voluntarily agreed among themselves to call me ‘sir’. Whether that is a title of ability or a title of courtesy, you can argue about with me at another time. Right now, I want my room key.”
Under the regulations, the manager knew there was nothing else he could do. He had made a mistake, and he knew that he had. If he had only taken the trouble to read the rest of the card—
“Awfully sorry, Mr. Morgan,” he said with a lopsided smile that didn’t even look genuine. “The—”
“Watch those courtesy titles,” Morgan reprimanded gently. “‘Mister’ comes ultimately from the Latin magister, meaning ‘master’ or ‘teacher’. And while I may be your master, I wouldn’t dare think I could teach you anything.”
“All citizens are entitled to be called ‘Mister’,” the manager said with a puzzled look. He pushed a room key across the desk.
“Which just goes to show you,” said Harry Morgan, picking up the key.
He turned casually, took one or two steps away from the registration desk, then—quite suddenly—did an about-face and snapped: “What happened to Jack Latrobe?”
“Who?” said the manager, his face gaping stupidly.
Harry Morgan knew human beings, and he was fairly certain that the manager couldn’t have reacted that way unless he honestly had no notion of what Morgan was talking about.
He smiled sweetly. “Never you mind, dear boy. Thank you for the key.” He turned again and headed for the elevator bank, confident that the manager would find the question he had asked about Jack Latrobe so completely meaningless as to be incapable of registering as a useful memory.
He was perfectly right.
CHAPTER III
The Belt Cities could survive without the help of Earth, and the Supreme Congress of the United Nations of Earth knew it. But they also knew that “survive” did not by any means have the same semantic or factual content as “live comfortably.” If Earth were to vanish overnight, the people of the Belt would live, but they would be seriously handicapped. On the other hand, the people of Earth could survive—as they had for millennia—without the Belt Cities, and while doing without Belt imports might be painful, it would by no means be deadly.
But both the Belt Cities and the Earth knew that the destruction of one would mean the collapse of the other as a civilization.
Earth needed iron. Belt iron was cheap. The big iron deposits of Earth were worked out, and the metal had been widely scattered. The removal of the asteroids as a cheap source would mean that iron would become prohibitively expensive. Without cheap iron, Earth’s civilization would have to undergo a painfully drastic change—a collapse and regeneration.
But the Belt Cities were handicapped by the fact that they had had as yet neither the time nor the resources to manufacture anything but absolute necessities. Cloth, for example, was imported from Earth. A society that is still busy struggling for the bare necessities—such as manufacturing its own air—has no time to build the huge looms necessary to weave cloth…or to make clothes, except on a minor scale. Food? You can have hydroponic gardens on an asteroid, but raising beef cattle, even on Ceres, was difficult. Eventually, perhaps, but not yet.
The Belt Cities were populated by pioneers who still had not given up the luxuries of civilization. Their one weakness was that they had their cake and were happily eating it, too.
Not that Harry Morgan didn’t realize that fact. A Belt man is, above all, a realist, in that he must, of necessity, understand the Laws of the Universe and deal with them. Or die.
Commodore Sir Harry Morgan was well aware of the stir he had created in the lobby of the Grand Central Hotel. Word would leak out, and he knew it. The scene had been created for just that purpose.
“Grasshopper sittin’ on a railroad track,
Singin’ polly-wolly-doodle-alla-day!
A-pickin’ his teeth with a carpet tack,
Singin’ polly-wolly-doodle-alla-day!”
He sang with gusto as the elevator lifted him up to the seventy-fourth floor of the Grand Central Hotel. The other passengers in the car did not look at him directly; they cast sidelong glances.
This guy, they seemed to think in unison, is a nut. We will pay no attention to him, since he probably does not really exist. Even if he does, we will pay no attention in the hope that he will go away.
On the seventy-fourth floor, he did go away, heading for his room. He keyed open the door and strolled over to the phone, where a message had already been dropped into the receiver slot. He picked it up and read it.
COMMODORE SIR HARRY MORGAN, RM. 7426, GCH: REQUEST YOU CALL EDWAY TARNHORST, REPRESENTATIVE OF THE PEOPLE OF GREATER LOS ANGELES, SUPREME CONGRESS. PUNCH 33-981-762-044 COLLECT.
“How news travels,” Harry Morgan thought to himself. He tapped out the number on the keyboard of the phone and waited for the panel to light up. When it did, it showed a man in his middle fifties with a lean, ascetic face and graying hair, which gave him a look of saintly wisdom.
* * * *
“Mr. Tarnhorst?” Morgan asked pleasantly.
“Yes. Commodore Morgan?” The voice was smooth and precise.
“At your service, Mr. Tarnhorst. You asked me to call.”
“Yes.