XV.
It so happened that for many long weeks there had been lying in New York space port an urgent shipment for Alsakan. And not only was that urgency a one-way affair. For, with the possible exception of a few packets, whose owners had locked them in vaults and would not part with them at any price, there was not a single Alsakanite cigarette left on Earth!
Luxuries, then as now, soared feverishly in price with scarcity. Only the rich smoked Alsakanite cigarettes, and to those rich the price of anything they really wanted was a matter of almost complete indifference. And plenty of them wanted, and wanted badly, their Alsakanite cigarettes. There was no doubt of that.
The current market report upon them was: "Bid, one thousand credits per packet of ten. Offered, none at any price."
With that ever-climbing figure in mind, a merchant prince named Matthews had been trying to get an Alsakanbound ship into the ether. He knew that one cargo of Alsakanite cigarettes safely landed in any Tellurian space port would yield more profit than could be made by his entire fleet in ten years of normal trading. Therefore, he had for weeks been pulling every wire, and even every string, that he could reach—political, financial, even at times verging altogether too close for comfort upon the criminal—but without results.
For, even if he could find a crew willing to take the risk, to launch the ship without an escort would be out of the question. There would be no profit in a ship that did not return to Earth. The ship was his, to do with as he pleased, but the escorting maulers were assigned solely by the Galactic Patrol, and that patrol would not give his ship an escort.
In answer to his first request, he had been informed that only cargoes classed as necessary were being escorted at all regularly; that seminecessary loads were escorted occasionally, when of a particularly useful or desirable commodity and if opportunity offered; that luxury loads, such as his, were not being escorted at all; that he would be notified if, as, and when the Prometheus could be given escort. Then the merchant prince began his siege.
Politicians of high rank, local and national, sent in "requests" of varying degrees of diplomacy. Financiers first offered inducements, then threatened to "bear down," then put on all the various kinds of pressure known to their pressure-loving ilk. Pleas, demands, threats, and pressures were alike, however, futile. The patrol could not be coaxed or bullied, cajoled, bribed, or cowed; and all further communications upon the subject, from whatever source originating, were ignored.