Hebster nodded at his back and rose once more. “Probably wants her semiannual alimony dividend bonus. I’ll have to go. Sonia never does office morale any good.”
This meant trouble, he knew. “Wife-and-son” was executive code for something seriously wrong with Hebster Securities, Inc. He had not seen his wife since she had been satisfactorily maneuvered into giving him control of his son’s education. As far as he was concerned, she had earned a substantial income for life by providing him with a well-mothered heir.
“Listen!” Braganza said sharply as Hebster reached the door. He still kept his eyes studiously on the street. “I tell you this: You don’t want to come in with us. All right! You’re a businessman first and a world citizen second. All right! But keep your nose clean, Hebster. If we catch you the slightest bit off base from now on, you’ll get hit with everything. We’ll not only pull the most spectacular trial this corrupt old planet has ever seen, but somewhere along the line, we’ll throw you and your entire organization to the wolves. We’ll see to it that Humanity First pulls the Hebster Tower down around your ears.”
Hebster shook his head, licked his lips. “ Why? What would that accomplish?”
“Hah! It would give a lot of us here the craziest kind of pleasure. But it would also relieve us temporarily of some of the mass pressure we’ve been feeling. There’s always the chance that Dempsey would lose control of his hotter heads, that they’d go on a real gory rampage, make with the sound and the fury sufficiently to justify full deployment of troops. We could knock off Dempsey and all of the big-shot Firsters then, because John Q. United Mankind would have seen to his own vivid satisfaction and injury what a dangerous mob they are.”
“This,” Hebster commented bitterly, “is the idealistic, legalistic world government!”
Braganza’s chair spun around to face Hebster and his fist came down on the desk top with all the crushing finality of a magisterial gavel. “No, it is not! It is the SIC, a plenipotentiary and highly practical bureau of the UM, especially created to organize a relationship between Alien and human. Furthermore, it’s the SIC in a state of the greatest emergency when the reign of law and world government may topple at a demagogue’s belch. Do you think”—his head snaked forward belligerently, his eyes slitted to thin lines of purest contempt—“that the career and fortune, even the life, let us say, of as openly selfish a slug as you, Hebster, would be placed above that of the representative body of two billion socially operating human beings?”
The SIC official thumped his sloppily buttoned chest. “Braganza, I tell myself now, you’re lucky he’s too hungry for his blasted profit to take you up on that offer. Think how much fun it’s going to be to sink a hook into him when he makes a mistake at last! To drop him onto the back of Humanity First so that they’ll run amuck and destroy themselves! Oh, get out, Hebster. I’m through with you.”
He had made a mistake, Hebster reflected as he walked out of the armory and snapped his fingers at a gyrocab. The SIC was the most powerful single government agency in a Primey-infested world; offending them for a man in his position was equivalent to a cab driver delving into the more uncertain aspects of a traffic cop’s ancestry in the policeman’s popeyed presence.
But what could he do? Working with the SIC would mean working under Braganza—and since maturity, Algernon Hebster had been quietly careful to take orders from no man. It would mean giving up a business which, with a little more work and a little more time, might somehow still become the dominant combine on the planet. And worst of all, it would mean acquiring a social orientation to replace the calculating businessman’s viewpoint which was the closest thing to a soul he had ever known.