John Brunner (8 page)

So I was right; that
is
one of their main traps.

"—and
consequently he was no longer an employee of the
Zygra
Company."

"What happened to him?" she
whispered out of a fog of sick dismay.

"How should
I
know?" Shuster shrugged. "Once he'd
broken the contract, the automatics ceased to recognize his existence."
He started to turn away,
then
paused.

"Oh,
and on a related point: of the last nine supervisors, not one has completed his
contract without infringing one of its clauses. Didn't
I
tell you, right back at our first meeting,
that you should reconsider your application and go along with my suggestion
instead? Well, it's too late now, of course. On your own pretty head
be
it, my dear!"

VIII

S
he was not—
not—
NOT going to give that horrible man Shuster the privilege of seeing her
break down. Somehow she maintained her self-control until the pelts were all
loaded and the crew had gone back aboard the ship, doing it so well, in fact,
that the last time Shuster glanced at her before entering the airlock his face
revealed a hint of gratifying uncertainty, as much as to say:
Am I the one who's overlooked something?

She managed a smile and gave him a mocking
wave, which he did not return.

The steel deck of the main station—visibly
lower in the water because of the massive cargo of pelts piled into the ship's
holds—thrummed to the warming of the interstellar drive. Vast energies made the
air prickly to the skin; a chance resonance-made the station's plates vibrate
and stir the water into
patternless
ripples.
Kynance
watched impassively, repressing her impulse to
dash out of the station's observation dome and hammer on the airlock for
admission.

The
ship lifted. For the first few feet the station rose also, floating higher with
the reduction in weight. A crack of daylight appeared under the polished hull;
the station rocked gently, as if relieved to give up its burden. And the
starship was on its way.

That was when
Kynance
had to burst into tears.

She
had never in her life felt so exposed, so vulnerable, so psychologically naked.
When the sobs allowed her to catch her breath, she cursed everyone she could
think of to blame for her plight, beginning with Shuster and continuing through
those bland college tutors who had made her believe in the actuality of
galactic law, concluding with herself as the most responsible of all.

The tears purged her of all the unvoiced
terror she had stored so tightly and so long, and when they ended she was able
to think with a clearer mind than for weeks previous. One factor dominated all
her thoughts: the problem of enforcement of what Shuster had contemptuously
called "legalisms."

It
hadn't been fair to curse her old tutors for making her regard legality as a
solid concept. She'd been exposed to enough new information since leaving
Earth, surely, to cure her of such academic illusions! It was time now or never
to take a hard cold look at the predicament in which she had landed herself,
and to gamble everything on the assumption that Shuster had been telling the
truth when he had sourly complimented her on being the best candidate the
Zygra
Company had ever had for this post.

Why? Start
there,
and perhaps the rest would follow.

Well
. . . Consider the fantastic
underpopulation
of the
outworlds
, compared with the standard of living and technological
development they enjoyed. The same reason which prevented the
Zygra
Company from assigning this post to their own
employees in rotation must operate when it came to finding an outside
candidate. Anybody capable of making himself a career in
outworld
society would already be grabbed by some other employer. The demands of
intensive training and incredibly high job-qualification would mean that people
were reluctant—even for a year at an enormous salary—to quit their permanent
employment and sit watching moss grow under automatic supervision.

In effect, this was an unskilled post. If it
weren't for the legal requirement that a celestial body must be occupied by a
human being in order for the company to maintain its claim, nobody would live
here at all.

What unskilled labor was there available on
worlds like Nefertiti, where ten-year-old children were already needed as
productive members of society? Hardly
any,
and what
there was fell neatly into two categories: social misfits, and immigrants
unused to the pace, lacking qualifications with which they could compete on
even terms against native
outworlders
.

Put me
in
category
two,
Kynance
told herself bitterly.

Now
moderate her original assumption that the government of Nefertiti had a vested
interest in the continued operations of the
Zygra
Company. (At this point she felt a stir of optimism, which was very welcome.)
Although the tax bills for the company must be enormous—large enough, more than
likely, to figure as a separate entry in the planetary budget—wouldn't it be
infinitely more profitable to dispossess the company, annex this unique world
and operate it without intermediaries? Of course it
wouldl
Hence the
Zygra
Company would be constrained to some
extent at least to comply with the galactic commercial laws. Minor
infringements wouldn't be worth taking up; the company could so easily render
expropriation profitless by triggering the poison reservoirs in its wandering
monitors, when the situation became hopeless. But a major, flagrant violation
would certainly drive the government to act.

This
much, then, was on her side: when Shuster talked
of
displaying records of the company's operation here to government
inspectors, he wasn't referring to a mere formality, but to an essential
condition of the company's continued existence.

What
of her predecessors, though? Legally or not, they had all been maneuvered into
breaking their contracts. Why? Surely immigrants in despair, desperate for
repatriation and lacking the funds to get home, would be a tiny minority among
the unskilled workers who applied for this post. (It rankled to think of
herself in this fashion, but she forced herself to recognize the truth of the
term in an
outworld
context.)

She
made the tentative assumption that during a stay of a year on
Zygra
it was possible to pick up information that the
company wanted to keep secret. Or—no, cancel
thatl
She
tensed as a great light dawned on her.

Short
of finding some crazy hermit, who might go out of his head and start
systematically sabotaging the fabulously complex automatics here, the company
stood no chance at all of getting a permanent supervisor. This followed from
the obvious premise that they advertised annually.
After a
period
of
several years, there would be,
scattered around the local star-systems, several ex-supervisors of
Zygra
.
Some enterprising rival firm might pick the
brains of all of them, and thus gain sufficient data to make a successful raid
on the
Zygra
Company. An accumulation of small facts
might reveal far more than the superficially attractive method of planting a
company spy to apply for the post.

She
frowned. So far she had reached two diametrically opposite conclusions, one
reassuring and one terrifying. On the one hand, she felt that the
Zygra
Company had to watch its step extremely carefully,
but on the other, she felt it was probably desperately—
paranoically
—afraid
that its secrets might somehow leak out and afford the opportunity for another
firm to pirate its source of wealth.

What
could she do, stranded here with the powerful
Zygra
Company as her opponent, to ensure that the balance would tip the right way at
the end of her tour? She had to take it for granted that the company could not
just minder her and dump her body over the side of the station; if this were
possible without the Nefertiti government stepping in, then she had been as
good as lost the minute she had entered
Shus-ter's
office.

After
a little thought she decided it was safe to accept that the reason for her
being the best-qualified candidate ever interviewed for the job was a little
more complicated than had at first appeared.

Typically,
her predecessors would have been in what she had called category one: social
misfits without permanent careers or outstanding qualifications enabling them
to switch jobs with impunity. Even people like that, however, would normally
have some kind of ties—wives, parents, brothers and sisters—and hence if they
disappeared on
Zygra
someone might come making
inquiries. None of the previous nine supervisors, Sinister had boasted, had
lasted through his year of office. But if nine sets of relatives had proceeded
to kick up a fuss, this might easily
had
excited
enough public concern to cause the
Nefertitian
government to expropriate the company. So the company would ideally seek
candidates who, first, were unskilled, and second, lacked kinfolk to ask awkward
questions.

(A corollary of this was the depressing point
that it might well have been her remote
Earthside
origin, not her
qualifications, that
had secured her
the post. She scowled at the idea and shoved it to the back of her mind.)

But
people with neither skills nor family would be very rare indeed on planets like
Nefertiti. For one thing, under-population implied an almost obsessive urge to
exploit human resources; for another, isolation would have made family ties
more precious than at home on Earth; and finally, if the potential candidate
got to a stage where he was actively antisocial, rather than just asocial, the
government would step in and order psychiatric treatment to restore him or her
as a contributing member of society.

She
nodded very slowly. This was a comforting conclusion to have reached, and it
would be best to cling to it as long as she could.
Kynance
Foy, with
Earthside
college degrees in qua-space
physics and interstellar commerce, not to mention her earlier study of business
law and practical engineering, was a very different proposition from some
neurotic
Neferti-tian
precariously poised between nonconformity
and psychotherapy.

Just
as she had brought a load of trammeling mental baggage with her from Earth, in
the shape of her preconceptions about the force of law and the way society
ought to operate, so too the
Zygra
Company—including
the computers which made the ultimate decisions—would predicate its future
plans on a set of vulnerable axioms.

Hadn't
Shuster blanched when he'd learned that she had studied law? Why, if not
because the company he worked for were flying a perilously tight orbit?

"
Studholme
and Zacharias versus the
Perseus
Asteroid Mining Company, 2011," she murmured aloud. "A contract entered
into by one of the parties with intent to deceive or defraud is not a valid
contract."

How
far did the term "intent to deceive or defraud" extend? Did it
include the setting of traps to make the victim break the conditions of
employment, or was that covered by the "caveat
signator
"
ruling in
Biicher
versus the
Ngat
Yu Rare Earths Combine, 2066? Not likely; the latter case concerned the supply
of goods, not payment of salary or exercise of an employee's contractual
benefits.

Chin
in hand, staring at nothing, she concentrated on what she remembered of the
great trail-blazing precedents with a ferocity her college instructors would
have applauded— though they might have been astonished.
Gubbins
and Kino-
shita
versus the Loki Rhodium Monopoly,
2012: "A company in law is a corporate counterpart of the individual;
hence an individual and a company enter into a contract with equal standing
before the law"—not very helpful, since most subsequent judges had tended
to be influenced by the fact that Judge
Petropavlov
had been institutionalized three weeks later for senile
dementia
....

What
a flimsy house-of-cards-like structure the law was, when you examined it in
this state of mind! How many people's lives—and deaths, she reminded herself
with a shudder-had been affected by what a judge had had for breakfast!

She
rose determinedly to her feet. She knew, or at any rate she could reasonably
believe, that from now until the harvesting ship returned to
Zygra
every moment of the day and night she would be
watched by recorders in some form or another, so that government computers on
Nefertiti could be assured of the legality of this operation. What could she
say or do to make certain the computers cited this moment, now, to bring to the
attention of the government's human officials?

She took a deep breath and addressed the air.

"My
name is
Kynance
Foy." She added the date and
time. "I have been engaged in the capacity of supervisor here by the
Zygra
Company. As a result of certain remarks made to me by
Executive Shuster of that company, I believe that an attempt will be made to
infringe the spirit of the contract of employment I have entered into.
I
adduce as circumstantial evidence the admitted fact that none of my nine
immediate predecessors has managed to complete his year of duty and collect his
salary. Compare
Studholme
and Zacharias versus the
Perseus
Asteroid Mining Company, 2011—1 think," she
concluded on a more doubtful note.