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and jobber and sales engineer and so on, down to the retailer, have taken their percentage, and the advertising agency has been paid, and about fifty separate Earth taxes—there’s very little profit going back to the distillery on Mars. The same principle is what’s strangling us on everything. Old Martian artifacts aren’t really rare, for instance, but freight charges and the middlemen here put them out of the mass market.”
“Have you not got some other business?”
“Well, we do sell a lot of color slides, postcards, baggage labels and so on to people who like to act cosmopolitan, and I understand our travel posters are quite popular as wall decoration. But all that has to be printed on Earth, and the printer and distributor keep most of the money. We’ve sold some books and show tapes, of course, but only one has been really successful—I Was a Slave Girl on Mars.
“Our most prominent novelist was co-opted to ghostwrite that one. Again, though, local income taxes took most of the money; authors never have been protected the way a businessman is. We do make a high percentage of profit on those little certificates you see around—you know, the title deeds to one square inch of Mars—but expressed absolutely, in dollars, it doesn’t amount to much when we start shopping for bulldozers and thermonuclear power plants.”
“How about postage stamps?” inquired Doran. “Philately is a big business, I have heard.”
“It was our mainstay,” admitted Matheny, “but it’s been overworked. Martian stamps are a drug on the market. What we’d like to operate is a sweepstakes, but the anti-gambling laws on Earth forbid that.”
*
Doran whistled. “I got to give your people credit for enterprise, anyway!” He fingered his mustache. “Uh, pardon me, but have you tried to, well, attract capital from Earth?”
“Of course,” said Matheny bitterly. “We offer the most liberal concessions in the Solar System. Any little mining company or transport firm or—or anybody—who wanted to come and actually invest a few dollars in Mars—why, we’d probably give him the President’s daughter as security. No, the Minister of Ecology has a better-looking one. But who’s interested? We haven’t a thing that Earth hasn’t got more of. We’re only the descendants of a few scientists, a few political malcontents, oddballs who happen to prefer elbow room and a bill of liberties to the incorporated state—what could General Nucleonics hope to get from Mars?”
“I see. Well, what are you having to drink?”
“Beer,” said Matheny without hesitation.
“Huh? Look, pal, this is on me.”
“The only beer on Mars comes forty million miles, with interplanetary freight charges tacked on,” said Matheny. “Heineken’s!”
Doran shrugged, dialed the dispenser and fed it coins.
“This is a real interesting talk, Pete,” he said. “You are being very frank with me. I like a man that is frank.”
Matheny shrugged. “I haven’t told you anything that isn’t known to every economist.”
Of course I haven’t. I’ve not so much as mentioned the Red Ankh, for instance. But, in principle, I have told him the truth, told him of our need; for even the secret operations do not yield us enough.
The beer arrived. Matheny engulfed himself in it. Doran sipped at a whiskey sour and unobtrusively set another full bottle in front of the Martian.
“Ahhh!” said Matheny. “Bless you, my friend.”
“A pleasure.”
“But now you must let me buy you one.”
“That is not necessary. After all,” said Doran with great tact, “with the situation as you have been describing—”
“Oh, we’re not that poor! My expense allowance assumes I will entertain quite a bit.”
Doran’s brows lifted a few minutes of arc. “You’re here on business, then?”
“Yes. I told you we haven’t any tourists. I was sent to hire a business manager for the Martian export trade.”
“What’s wrong with your own people? I mean, Pete, it is not your fault there are so many rackets—uh, taxes—and middlemen and agencies and et cetera. That is just the way Earth is set up these days.”
*
Matheny’s finger stabbed in the general direction of Doran’s pajama top. “Exactly. And who set it up that way? Earthmen. We Martians are babes in the desert. What chance do we have to earn dollars on the scale we need them, in competition with corporations which could buy and sell our whole planet before breakfast? Why, we couldn’t afford three seconds of commercial time on a Lullaby Pillow ’cast. What we need, what we have to hire, is an executive who knows Earth, who’s an Earthman himself. Let him tell us what will appeal to your people, and how to dodge the tax bite and—and—well, you see how it goes, that sort of, uh, thing.”
Matheny felt his eloquence running down and grabbed for the second bottle of beer.
“But where do I start?” he asked plaintively, for his loneliness smote him anew. “I’m just a college professor at home. How would I even get to see—”
“It might be arranged,” said Doran in a thoughtful tone. “It just might. How much could you pay this fellow?”
“A hundred megabucks a year, if he’ll sign a five-year contract. That’s Earth years, mind you.”
“I’m sorry to tell you this, Pete,” said Doran, “but while that is not bad money, it is not what a high-powered sales scientist gets in Newer York. Plus his retirement benefits, which he would lose if he quit where he is now at. And I am sure he would not want to settle on Mars permanently.”
“I could offer a certain amount of, uh, lagniappe,” said Matheny. “That is, well, I can draw up to a hundred megabucks myself for, uh, expenses and, well . . . let me buy you a drink!”
Doran’s black eyes frogged at him. “You might at that,” said the Earthman very softly. “Yes, you might at that.”
Matheny found himself warming. Gus Doran was an authentic bobber. A hell of a swell chap. He explained modestly that he was a free-lance business consultant and it was barely possible that he could arrange some contacts . . . .
“No, no, no commission, all done in the interest of interplanetary friendship . . . well, anyhow, let’s not talk business now. If you have got to stick to beer, Pete, make it a chaser to akvavit. What is akvavit? Well, I will just take and show you.”
A hell of a good bloke. He knew some very funny stories, too, and he laughed at Matheny’s, though they were probably too rustic for a big-city taste like his.
“What I really want,” said Matheny, “what I really want—I mean what Mars really needs, get me?—is a confidence man.”
“A what?”
“The best and slickest one on Earth, to operate a world-size con game for us and make us some real money.”
“Con man? Oh. A slipstring.”
“A con by any other name,” said Matheny, pouring down an akvavit.
*
Doran squinted through cigarette smoke. “You are interesting me strangely, my friend. Say on.”
“No.” Matheny realized his head was a bit smoky. The walls of the booth seemed odd, somehow. They were just leatheroid walls, but they had an odd quality.
“No, sorry, Gus,” he said. “I spoke too much.”
“Okay. Forget it. I do not like a man that pries. But look, let’s bomb out of here, how about it? Go have a little fun.”
“By all means.” Matheny disposed of his