The Merchant's War Read Online Free

said a word, but then neither had Harriman’s bosses. He nodded, acknowledging the end of the first round with no decision either way and began to roll the dossiers.
    Harriman was a hardball bargainer, and sneaky. So was I. We both knew the other fellow was out to gain victories, straight mano-a-mano, the only difference being that the best victories were when the other fellow never found out what he had lost. Earth had emptied its jails and dumped the worst of the scum here. Murderers, rapists, credit-card frauds, arsonists were the least of them. Or the worst, depending on your point of view. We didn’t want the occasional mugger, for instance— didn’t want the expense of feeding him, didn’t want the task of keeping him in line. Neither did the Veenies. What the Veenies wanted out of each prisoner contingent was the vilest of the traitors. Conservationists. Contract Breach felons. Antiadvertising zealots, the kinds that deface billboards and short-circuit holograms. They wanted to make them full Venusian citizens. We didn’t want to give them up. They were the kind we used to brain-burn, sometimes still do, and if they were lucky enough to get away with five or ten PPC years from some soft-hearted judge we felt they should serve them out in full. Those people earned their sentences! Letting them go free into the Venusian population was no punishment at all. In practice, it came down to a horse trade. Both of us gave a little, took a little; the art of the bargaining was to reluctantly “give” what you were really anxious to have the other guy take.
    I plinked the display key and cursored the top six names. “Moskowicz, McCastry, Bliven, the Farnell family—I suppose you want those, but you can’t have them until they’ve served at least six months hard.”
    “Three months,” he bargained. They were all down as CCs—criminal Conservationists— just the kind of misfits the Veenies welcomed into their population.
    I said positively, “Six months, and I ought to hold out for a year. On Earth they’re the worst kind of criminals, and they need to be taught a lesson.”
    He shrugged, disliking me. “What about this next prisoner, Hamid?”
    “Worst of the lot,” I declared. “You can’t have him. He’s convicted of credit-card larceny, and he’s a Consie to boot.”
    He tensed at the epithet but inspected the printout. “Hamid wasn’t convicted of, ah, Conservationism,” he pointed out.
    “Well, no. We couldn’t get a confession.” I smiled confidentially, one law-enforcement officer to another. “We didn’t have any firsthand witnesses, either, because, as I understand it, his whole cell was picked up and liquidated some time ago, and he was never able to make contact again. Oh, and there’s some evidence ‘Hamid’ isn’t his real name— the technicians think his Social Security tattoo’s been altered.”
    “You didn’t prosecute him for that,” said Harriman thoughtfully.
    “Didn’t need to. Didn’t need to press the Conservationist count, either—we had him fair and square on credit-card. Now,” I said, rushing him on, “what about these three? They’re all Medicare malingerers, not a very serious offense—I could commute them right away if you want to take them in—”
    If there’s one thing Veenies hate, it’s being put in a position where their “ideals” tell them one thing and their common sense something else. He flushed and stammered. Theoretically the Medicare frauds were perfect candidates for Venusian citizenship. They were also old, and therefore liabilities in what is still, after all, a pretty rugged frontier society. It took his mind right off Hamid, as I had wanted it to do.
    Four hours later we were at the bottom of the list. I’d given him fourteen greks, six right away, the others over a matter of months. He’d refused two, and I’d held onto another twenty or so. We still hadn’t settled Hamid. He glanced at his notes. “I am instructed,” he