“Got anything for our auction, Poul?” a member of the Convention committee asked, halting beside him. “The auction is just about to start—we have to hurry.”

Still looking at the paper from his pocket, Poul murmured, “Urn, you mean something here with me?”

“Like a typescript of some published story, the original manuscript or earlier versions or notes. You know.” He paused, waiting.

“I seem to have some notes in my pocket,” Poul said, still glancing over them. They were in his handwriting but he didn’t remember having made them. A time-travel story, from the look of them. Must have been from those Bourbons and water, he decided, and not enough to eat. “Here,” he said uncertainly, “it isn’t much but I guess you can auction these.” He took one final glance at them. “Notes for a story about a political figure called Gutman and a kidnapping in time. Intelligent slime mold, too, I notice.” On impulse, he handed them over.

“Thanks,” the man said, and hurried on toward the other room, where the auction was being held.

“I bid ten dollars,” Howard Browne called, smiling broadly. “Then I have to catch a bus to the airport.” The door closed after him.

Karen, with Astrid, appeared beside Poul. “Want to go into the auction?” she asked her husband. “Buy an original Finlay?”

“Um, sure,” Poul Anderson said, and with his wife and child walked slowly after Howard Browne.

What the Dead Men Say

I

The body of Louis Sarapis, in a transparent plastic shatterproof case, had lain on display for one week, exciting a continual response from the public. Distended lines filed past with the customary sniffling, pinched faces, distraught elderly ladies in black cloth coats.

In a corner of the large auditorium in which the casket reposed, Johnny Barefoot impatiently waited for his chance at Sarapis’s body. But he did not intend merely to view it; his job, detailed in Sarapis’s will, lay in another direction entirely. As Sarapis’s public relations manager, his job was—simply—to bring Louis Sarapis back to life.

“Keerum,” Barefoot murmured to himself, examining his wristwatch and discovering that two more hours had to pass before the auditorium doors could be finally closed. He felt hungry. And the chill, issuing from the quick-pack envelope surrounding the casket, had increased his discomfort minute by minute.

His wife Sarah Belle approached him, then, with a thermos of hot coffee. “Here, Johnny.” She reached up and brushed the black, shiny Chiricahua hair back from his forehead. “You don’t look so good.”

“No,” he agreed. “This is too much for me. I didn’t care for him much when he was alive—I certainly don’t like him any better this way.” He jerked his head at the casket and the double line of mourners.

Sarah Belle said softly, “Nil nisi bonum.”

He glowered at her, not sure of what she had said. Some foreign language, no doubt. Sarah Belle had a college degree.

“To quote Thumper Rabbit,” Sarah Belle said, smiling gently, “ ‘if you can’t say nothing good, don’t say nothing at all.’ ” She added, “From Bambi, an old film classic. If you attended the lectures at the Museum of Modern Art with me every Monday night—”

“Listen,” Johnny Barefoot said desperately, “I don’t want to bring the old crook back to life, Sarah Belle; how’d I get myself into this? I thought sure when the embolism dropped him like a cement block it meant I could kiss the whole business goodbye forever.” But it hadn’t quite worked out that way.

“Unplug him,” Sarah Belle said.

“W-what?”

She laughed. “Are you afraid to? Unplug the quick-pack power source and he’ll warm up. And no resurrection, right?” Her blue-gray eyes danced with amusement. “Scared of him, I guess. Poor Johnny.” She patted him on the arm. “I should divorce you, but I won’t; you need a mama to take care of you.”

“It’s wrong,” he said. “Louis is completely helpless, lying there in the casket. It would be—unmanly to unplug him.”

Sarah Belle said quietly, “But someday, sooner or later, you’ll have to confront him, Johnny. And when he’s in half-life you’ll have the advantage. So it will be a good time; you might come out of it intact.” Turning, she trotted off, hands thrust deep in her coat pockets because of the chill.

Gloomily, Johnny lit a cigarette and leaned against the wall behind him. His wife was right, of course. A half-lifer was no match, in direct physical tete-a-tete, for a living person. And yet—he still shrank from it, because ever since childhood he had been in awe of Louis, who had dominated 3-4 shipping, the Earth to Mars commercial routes, as if he were a model rocket-ship enthusiast pushing miniatures over a paper-mache board in his basement. And now, at his death, at seventy years of age, the old man through Wilhelmina Securities controlled a hundred related—and non-related—industries on both planets. His net worth could not be calculated, even for tax purposes; it was not wise, in fact, to try, even for Government tax experts.

It’s my kids, Johnny thought; I’m thinking about them, in school back in Oklahoma. To tangle with old Louis would be okay if he wasn’t a family man… nothing meant more to him than the two little girls and of course Sarah Belle, too. I got to think of them, not myself, he told himself now as he waited for the opportunity to remove the body from the casket in accordance with the old man’s detailed instructions. Let’s see. He’s probably got about a year in total half-life time, and he’ll want it divided up strategically, like at the end of each fiscal year. He’ll probably proportion it out over two decades, a month here and there, then towards the end as he runs out, maybe just a week. And then—days.

And finally old Louis would be down to a couple of hours; the signal would be weak, the dim spark of electrical activity hovering in the frozen brain cells… it would flicker, the words from the amplifying equipment would fade, grow indistinct. And then—silence, at last the grave. But that might be twenty-five years from now; it would be the year 2100 before the old man’s cephalic processes ceased entirely.

Johnny Barefoot, smoking his cigarette rapidly, thought back to the day he had slouched anxiously about the personnel office of Archimedean Enterprises, mumbling to the girl at the desk that he wanted a job; he had some brilliant ideas that were for sale, ideas that would help untangle the knot of strikes, the spaceport violence growing out of jurisdictional overlapping by rival unions—ideas that would, in essence, free Sarapis of having to rely on union labor at all. It was a dirty scheme, and he had known it then, but he had been right; it was worth money. The girl had sent him on to Mr. Pershing, the Personnel Manager, and Pershing had sent him to Louis Sarapis.

“You mean,” Sarapis had said, “I launch from the ocean? From the Atlantic, out past the three mile limit?”

“A union is a national organization,” Johnny had said. “Neither outfit has a jurisdiction on the high seas. But a business organization is international.”

“I’d need men out there; I’d need the same number, even more. Where’ll I get them?”

“Go to Burma or India or the Malay States,” Johnny had said. “Get young unskilled laborers and bring them over. Train them yourself on an indentured servant basis. In other words, charge the cost of their passage against their earnings.” It was peonage, he knew. And it appealed to Louis Sarapis. A little empire on the high seas, worked by men who had no legal rights. Ideal.

Sarapis had done just that and hired Johnny for his public relations department; that was the best place for a man who had brilliant ideas of a non-technical nature. In other words, an uneducated man: a noncol. A useless misfit, an outsider. A loner lacking college degrees.