DUE PROCESS Read online

  DUE PROCESS

  Algis Budrys

  Illustrated by Bernklau

  Frank Hertzog of International Tours, Incorporated, scratched himself behind one disproportionately large ear and lifted one shaggy eyebrow. He sat turned sideways to his desk, with his feet up on an extended drawer. His visitor sat stiffly in a chair placed at the opposite corner of the desk, so that Hertzog’s glance shot diagonally toward his visitor and, at his, convenience, over the visitor’s shoulder at the ocean horizon far away and far below.

  Hertzog nibbled jerkily at his upper lip. “Now, let me just get this clear in my own mind,” he said to the prim little man in the other chair. “You want cash in advance?”

  “No later than July 14th midnight,” the prim man affirmed. “It’s very important that the money should have reached our office in Basle by that time.” The little man sat with his thighs and knees pressed together, his back upright and his arms at his sides, with his hands clasped in his lap. He wore a black suit and a white shirt with a black string tie. He had a pale, boney face, and gray-black hair which had been clipped close at the sides and brushed flat on the top of his head with a white part straight down the middle. Motionless beads of perspiration covered his forehead.

  “And as soon as the money is in your office, you’ll have our order loaded on the first tube train out.”

  “That is correct,” the prim little man said. He was a liquor salesman. “I must remind you that today is July 1st.”

  “Well, now,” Frank Hertzog complained, “that seems like an awfully funny way to do business, all of a sudden. We’ve been good customers of yours for years. No ITI cruise ship serves anything but your brands.”

  “Naturally,” the little salesman said. “Our brands are the best in the world.”

  “So’s ITI’s credit rating. I don’t understand this, Mr. Keller, I really don’t. The account’s been settled every month. It almost sounds as if you don’t want our business. There are other wholesalers in this world, you know.”

  Mr. Keller gestured nervously. “Please, Mr. Hertzog. None of our competitors are organized to give you service equal to ours.”

  “Up to now they haven’t been, you mean. But you’re forcing me to wonder whether a little less service and a great deal more courtesy wouldn’t be worth it.”

  “Mr. Hertzog, I—” The little salesman suddenly leaned forward urgently. “It may cost me my job to speak frankly to you, Mr. Hertzog. You understand.”

  Hertzog leaned back and looked narrowly at Keller. “I’m not sure I do, Mr. Keller. You and my company have been dealing with each other for some time. In cases where a salesman has been handling the same account for years, it becomes a moot point whether he represents his employer or his account. A tacit arrangement of mutual advantage between salesman and account gradually evolves into being. This is a fact as old as salesmanship. I’m a little bit surprised at your reluctance to comply with business ethics, Mr. Keller. I really am. I wish you would say whatever is on your mind. I can’t say I care for your implication that anything you tell me in confidence might pass beyond this room.”

  Keller’s pale lips trembled at their corners. “Mr. Hertzog, you put me in a difficult position. You’re clearly in the right, and yet—”

  “If I’m in the right, Mr. Keller, then let’s have it. What’s going on?”

  The little man sighed. “Very well, Mr. Hertzog.” His voice fell, and he leaned forward to compensate for it, his eyes unconsciously darting about the room before he went on. “You know there’s been a change in the top management of my company? What has occurred is that the new directors are much more favorably inclined toward Capetown than toward Atlantis.”

  “That’s ridiculous!” Hertzog snapped. “Atlantis is the logical port facility for Europe. It’s true that transshipping goods into the tube train terminal here and running them through the tunnel under the Bay of Biscay and the contaminated coastline does add an expense. But shipping overland across Africa from Capetown is even more costly.”

  Keller spread his hand placatingly. “Please, Mr. Hertzog. You know this, and I know this. In time, even my directors will know this. But at the moment they have been beguiled by this new notion of zeppelin freighters. They have been shown plans for lighter-than-air craft with cargo capacities comparable to those of a steamship, and they have attended test flight demonstrations. They are impressed by the majesty of these huge constructions—you understand, Mr. Hertzog, they are like children. They will grow up, but meanwhile—” Keller shook his head.

  “Let them try zeppelin lighterage from Capetown to Europe across the African interior. One or two line squalls will grow ‘em up fast. Insurance rates are a great urge toward maturity,” Hertzog growled.

  “Exactly. Exactly,” Keller agreed. “But in the meantime they are convinced that Capetown will become the great cosmopolitan center of the Eastern Hemisphere, and that Atlantis will wither, out here on the ocean with nothing to sustain it. So they have instituted strict new policies. Please, Mr. Hertzog—one or two demonstrations of prompt, ready cash payment on your part, and they will think again. I realize it is an imposition on your self-esteem, but a truly great man can afford to be above such things.” His voice became a conspiratorial whisper. “After all, Mr. Hertzog, once the Capetown bubble has burst, you’ll be in a position to demand unheard-of discounts—”

  “Yes,” Hertzog said. “Yes, I see.” He stood up and strolled aimlessly about the office, his hands clasped behind his back. He stared out through the window without focusing his eyes, and wrinkled his nose, eventually coming to a halt beside the settee where Keller had left his brief case. “All right, Mr. Keller, I’ll have a bonded messenger at your Basle office by July 14th midnight,” he said. He fumbled with the handle of Keller’s brief case, swinging his hand absently backward and forward. Keller took it from him with a touch of asperity.

  “Thank you very much, Mr. Hertzog. I was sure you would understand the situation.”

  “Yes,” Hertzog said vaguely. “Yes,” he repeated, watching the salesman leave.

  Hertzog pressed Hoke Bannister’s call stud on his desk, then walked back to the glass wall of his office and looked out The stacked tiers of Atlantis rose up out of the ocean all around him, the water swelling around the massive concrete pilings on which they rested. It was a stormy day. The water was green and white under a gray sky, and rain swept in an exhilarating sheet across the invisible glass. Inside a two-mile perimeter, the water was calm. At the perimeter, where sonic turbulence broke up the wave action, leaping towers of foam clashed together and surrounded Atlantis in a rampart of froth. Frank Hertzog was smiling fondly through the glass when Hoke Bannister let himself in.

  “Yeah?” he said, rummaging through the liquor cabinet. He was an ugly, wide man who had recently acquired the habit of five-dollar Havana cigars. His mouth was broad enough so that he could keep one between his teeth at nearly all times and still talk and drink.

  “What would you do for thirty thousand dollars, Hoke?” Hertzog asked him, returning to his desk.

  “Thirty thousand dollars? You mean, what kind of rules would I break? Few. Thirty thousand dollars keep a man comfortable all his life, if he plays it careful, but no kicks, you know? You don’t take chances with that little bit of capital.”

  “What would you do for the standard salesman’s commission on a thirty-thousand-dollar order?”

  “You mean Keller?” Bannister finished putting his drink together and closed up the cabinet. “I was right, sending him up here, yeah?”

  “Yeah,” Hertzog said, looking down at the buttons on his desk. “Yeah.”

  Bannister took a gulp of his drink. He stared at it, snatched open the liquor cabinet, and held up the crystal whisky decan
ter he’d used. “What in blazes have you fed me?” he choked.

  Hertzog looked up. “I wanted you to try some of that. There’s a local chemical outfit that’s been trying to make scotch out of plankton.”

  “Frank, don’t turn Keller’s outfit loose yet,” Bannister said.

  “No,” Hertzog said, “no, I’m not going to.” He pushed a button. “Paulette,” he said. “Got that stuff for me?”

  “Yes, Frank. Coming up.” A slot clicked back on Hertzog’s desk, and a clipped sheaf of photostats slid up to fall flat on the desk. “I’ve put what I think is the relevant copy on top,” Paulette’s efficient voice said out of the air. Hertzog frowned down at the photostats. “Yes. I see you have. Thank you. And get hold of Thad Traven, will you, in the City Council building? That’s right—he’s the clerk. Make me a cocktail date for this afternoon. One of those plush and ebony places in Pleasure House ought to be just right, I think.”

  Thad Traven was thin and dark, with a mouth that over the years had been compressed within its original dimensions, so that after his lips folded under out of sight there was still a slit in his jaw for a half inch on either side.

  “I can tell you’re a steady man, Thad,” Frank Hertzog said to him. “A planner. A man who weighs all the possibilities before he moves.”

  “No one’s ever caught me looking foolish,” Traven agreed. He sipped his sherry Martini and let his glance run over the faded tattoo of a mermaid on Hertzog’s bare forearm.

  “Yeah, well, I’m just a sort of Johnny-come-lately, you might say,” Hertzog said apologetically. “When you come right down to it, all I am is a seaman roustabout whose father happened to leave him a travel agency. Oh,” he said, cutting off any protest by Traven, “I’ve been lucky and managed to build up the business, and all that. Got a few dollars in my pocket. You know. But I’m really just a guy who hasn’t got the sense not to whack off on foolish chances. Every once in a long while, a gamble like that will pay off for somebody. I’ve been lucky, like I say. When I need to know something—I mean, when it’s something that takes a sophisticated man with a trained mind, why, I’ve got to come to a man like yourself for help.”

  Traven smiled. “You’re more flattering than I perhaps deserve.”

  “No, no, I mean it, Thad. For instance, a man like me, that runs a travel agency, is naturally interested in other places in the world besides Atlantis. Sometimes it seems to me that it wouldn’t be a bad idea to develop some interests in Europe or Africa—Sevastopol, say, or Capetown. I mean, besides opening branch offices. Take a real hand in local business. But if I had just gone ahead and done that, I would have found myself in real trouble with the civic government, here, because I didn’t understand it was better to keep our hands off the Mainland. Whereas, if I’d come to you, I’m sure you would have been glad to explain it to me.”

  “Of course, Frank. The prime tenet of the Conservative party is that, here in our isolation from the Mainland, we are in an ideal position to avoid their difficulties. As long as our only real link to them is the freight tube, we stand in the position of acting as their clearing house. If we actively participate in their affairs, then we may well become embroiled in their attempts to deal with the results of the devastation. As long as we remain aloof, we are in the position of collecting our handling charges and letting it go at that. Involvement with the Mainland may easily entail added responsibilities for which we have no desire.”

  “Now,” Hertzog explained eagerly, “I can see that, once it’s been explained to me. Before, I thought that, inasmuch as we’re descended from people who pushed the tube through from the Mainland and built this place, we were still somehow bound to those countries.”

  Traven smiled. “It’s been a hundred years, Frank. None of the original sponsoring governments are still in existence. There is no legal basis for any such notion.”

  “No, I can see that, now, listening to you. But I needed to have it clarified.”

  Traven took a meditative sip of his drink. “Well, now,” he said deprecatingly, “you didn’t do so badly in that affair with William Waring. If he had been permitted to organize his investment syndicate, the weight of that much capitalization would have swung the civic elections to a slate of candidates pledged toward intervention in mainland affairs. You saved a great deal for many people in addition to yourself, there.”

  “Oh, well, he was all mixed up with a try at defrauding ITI of twenty thousand dollars. That’s a lot of money. I was pretty surprised when I knocked him over and found out there was more to it than that. Just some more luck, Thad. But, you know, that was what got me thinking.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes, well I’ve been thinking that there Waring was setting up this business, which could have broken me, and I didn’t have the faintest idea of it. If I’d had somebody who could tell me what was going on in civic politics, I wouldn’t have been in the dark.” He finished his drink and pointed to Traven’s glass. “Have another?”

  “Why, yes, thank you,” Traven said carefully.

  Hertzog signaled to the watchful waiter, and went on. “The elections run off next week, don’t they?”

  “As a matter of fact, they do—the first Tuesday after the Fourth of July. But they’ll be pretty much a formality, this year. All the Mainland Interventionists withdrew after Waring was exposed. Not all of them were his candidates, of course, but even the legitimate ones were tarred with his brush.”

  “Uh-huh. Let’s see, now… I’m not up to this stuff, like I said… you’re on the Conservative ticket this year as usual, aren’t you?”

  Traven’s lips closed entirely. “Yes, I am. I’ll be the candidate for City Clerk, as usual.”

  “Excuse me, Thad, but that’s not too far up the totem pole, is it?”

  “No, it isn’t,” Traven said shortly.

  “It seems a shame. I don’t know Mayor Phillips to speak to, but it doesn’t seem to me he’s such an all-around hotshot.”

  “He is at party politicking,” Traven said bitterly. “The rest of us have to settle for what’s doled out to us.”

  “Hm-m-m. Seems like a funny way to run things. Doesn’t seem fair to me.”

  “It isn’t. But what can you expect? Atlantis is populated by people who don’t have to work very hard for their money, or even think too deeply about anything. Hardly twenty per cent of them even bother to vote, and most of those are brought in by Phillip’s organization. Of course, I can hardly complain about that. But, still—”

  “Seems to me you can complain. If you don’t go along with Phillips, you haven’t got a chance—as long as the vote stays low.”

  “But who has the resources to set up a rival organization? It takes money—money for air time, money for advertising, for posters, for rallies. Who has that sort of money?”

  “Well, now,” Hertzog said, twisting his glass lazily in his fingers and looking at it thoughtfully.

  “Good Heavens, Frank! You don’t know what you’re saying! And in any case, it’s too late this year—”

  “For a write-in candidate?”

  “Write-in? No— But the campaigning, man! There’s barely a week left!”

  “Well, you know, Thad, ITI owns the water taxis, one of the helicopter services, and four of the hotels. We buy half the air time. We take a standard full page ad in all three newspapers every day. On TV, we’ve got the Sonny Weams show, ‘Cactus and Hashknife Al,’ ‘Are You Smarter Than Your Wife?’ and the Williamton Sandberg Mills news-in-depth program. How would it be if you campaigned for mayor on something like, say, the Progressive Reform ticket, with a big get-out-the-vote push and posters staring everybody in the face every time he got into a boat or hailed a ‘copter? Think you could stir out, say, forty, forty-five per cent of the vote?”

  Traven was pale. “Great Heavens, Frank, that’s not legal! A corporation can’t throw its treasury behind a candidate like that. And what would your Board of Directors say?”

  “Comes to that, Thad, I
’m the Board of Directors.”

  “But still you can’t—”

  “Not even if I run for dogcatcher in agate type at the bottom of each ad? I want to be dogcatcher, Thad. I have a burning passion to become dogcatcher. I’m going to campaign like crazy. But I need somebody to head the ticket. How’s about it?”

  “Frank, I… do you mean this?”

  Hertzog dipped two fingers into the breast pocket of his sport shirt, took out two crumpled five-dollar bills and a slip of paper. He opened the paper and dropped it on the tablecloth in front of Traven. It was a certified ITI check for two hundred thousand dollars, made out to the Progressive Reform Party Campaign Fund.

  “Of course,” Hertzog said, “we’re going to need a campaign issue. How about this? Phillips and the Conservative Party are alienating business interests on the Mainland which are getting annoyed at our aloofness—and our handling charges. We’re losing business. Show ‘em the figures—we’re handling all the perishables, but the hard goods are being shipped by slow freight into Archangelsk and railroaded overland down to the Black Sea. And someday they’ll put a north-south railroad across Africa. Yes, through the jungle, if we press ‘em enough. Guarantee the populace a shorter work day and lower real estate taxes, if negotiations show we can increase our yearly gross by shading the handling charges a fraction.”

  Traven hesitated thoughtfully. “I’m not sure that jibes with my earlier public pronouncements.”

  “Yours? Mayor Phillips’, you mean. You’re coming out in the open, now. Swinging with both fists. Blowing the lid off. You’re not one of Waring’s gangsters—you’re a respectable ex-Conservative who’s had enough.”

  “Hm-m-m. Hm-m-m.” Traven smiled broadly. “I believe I can do it. Yes, it might be just the right kind of ammunition.”

  “Yes, it might. Well, Thad, you’re the experienced man, so I’ll leave it to you to set up the campaign headquarters and hire the public relations people. I’m sending a young fellow from my office—Bannister’s his name—to just lend a strong back and maintain a liaison with the ITI treasury, in case you run short—but I’ll keep my fumble fingers out of this. Good luck.”