Melchior's Fire by Jack Chalker

Author:Jack Chalker [Chalker, Jack]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: sf
Published: 2001-05-31T20:00:00+00:00

* * *

Norman Sanders almost choked on his claret. “Half? Half!”

“It’s reasonable considering the odds,” An Li pointed out. “You get an expert crew and the only front money required is the list of necessary equipment and supplies and the ship’s lease itself. We know pretty much what you’re worth, Mr. Sanders, and what this all costs. It will take you almost six months to make back the up-front cost of this expedition on interest alone. We agree on your bills up front, before we leave. We add that to your half. Other than that, it’s a split.”

“It’s outrageous! You’re nothing without my information!”

“And once we have it you become irrelevant,” she noted.

“This is blackmail! You’re all a dime a dozen! I can go out and hire a crew for next to nothing on this asshole of a world!”

“Then why don’t you and stop wasting all our time?” Randi Queson came back. “It’s because half of something is quite a bit, but half of nothing is nothing. You’re not buying bodies here, or you wouldn’t still be bothering with us at all. You’re hiring expertise that nobody else has, and you’re hiring the best. The best usually get a premium, but we’re offering this to you at standard rates because the profit potential is so high.”

“You don’t take this, what will you do? You’ll all be scrambling for garbage in the backwaters of this hole!”

“Not at all,” the doctor responded. “I’ll go back to teaching until something else comes up, and Jerry will stop figuring out how to disassemble things and go back to making things work with what’s at hand. Lucky will go back to tugs or some other commercial piloting job, Li may need a bit of help but she’ll wind up the same, and Sark, there, well, there’s always work for someone like him. A real jack of all trades.”

“I’m thinking of taking an offer as a contract enforcer with the entertainment guilds,” Sark said with a kind of eerie combination of smile and growl.

“You see, Mr. Sanders, we have lives, both real and future,” Randi told him, sounding quite confident. “You want the best, you need to pay for the best.”

Norman Sanders looked for a moment like he was going to have a stroke, then he calmed down enough so that at least his face no longer appeared to be bright red. He reached out, took the rest of the wineglass, and downed it.

“Thirty percent,” he managed.

“Fifty, Mr. Sanders. We’re not negotiating here. We’re setting a price. If you want to make it negotiations, though, then our share is seventy percent.”

“Seventy percent! But you said fifty!”

“That was before you said thirty. Now, we can go back and forth and wind up at fifty or we can just settle at fifty. Or, we can thank you for a good meal and a bad offer, leave, and get on with what we were doing before we met you. Your choice.”

Sanders was breathing hard, but the others noted that neither of his attractive assistants seemed the least concerned, so they weren’t, either.

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