Free Pohlstars by Frederik Pohl

collection of lovers. I am embarrassed to say that at that moment I could almost believe that it was for my own aging body's sake-almost. I croaked. "Why are you doing this, Betsy?
    "Aw She pouted. Then she shrugged. "Because I want everything that belongs to May. But I promise you it'll be worth it. I'm really good, Jason. And I also promise you, she added, getting slowly up and tugging me to my feet, "that in that nice big bed that you sleep in, that used to be May's, after the important stuff has been taken care of, I will tell you everything you want to know, and it will truly fascinate you.
    On that promise she cheated me, though not on anything else. I did not sleep much that night. When I woke at daylight and remembered who I had for a bedmate, she was gone. I pulled myself raggedly out of bed and threw a robe on, and while I was puzzling over what had happened, I heard a jet scream. I went to the lanai and there was Betsy's plane, a bright blue-white trail streaking across the pink morning sky. She had gotten what she wanted, and gone.
    She spoiled my sleep for more than one night. I could not get out of my mind what she had said and hinted. The worst was the implication that Jeff's death had not been an accident. Dougie was filth, of course. I had not thought he was a murderer, at least in my conscious mind; but now that Betsy had made me think about it, I could not doubt it anymore.
    I called in the security chief again, and from then on I was never without a couple of huskies within call.
    But that protected only me. What could protect my May? Logic told me that it would not make sense for Dougie to harm May as long as the boy would simply inherit-nor would it be reasonable for him to want the boy out of the way as long as Jimmy Rex stood to inherit the vast Appermoy billions. It would surely pay Dougie to bide his time, at least until the old lady died.
    But the stink of dead fish showed me there was something wrong with that chain of reasoning. Betsy knew what it was but, typically, had not told me. So I started other inquiries into motion.
    They weren't necessary. Before my agents had a chance to report, a morning came when I was awakened by the Fleet bursar pounding at the door, bursting with news.
    The dead fish had done the Appermoys in.
    For old man Appermoy had not been able to resist one more villainy before he died. The glassy pellets he dissolved the radionuclides in for disposal were not expensive. It was not usually worth his while to steal in so trivial an area. But there was a strike in a settling farm that he had not been able to buy off, and an accident to one of the vitrifying plants that put him behind schedule, and so he had eight hundred ton lots of high-level radio active waste with no legitimate place to put them. He had dumped them, raw, into his seamount. Of course, they had begun to dissolve into the sea almost at once.
    Appermoy had not killed the Pacific Ocean, for it was too big for even him. But he had so polluted three million square kilometers that fish were dying. The family had been able to keep the lid on-it is cheaper to bribe than to comply-until the weather betrayed them. For a solid month the Hawaiian winds blew the wrong way. They swept the waters out of the west, and washed radioactively hot waves onto Oahu and Maui and the Kona coast.
    The damage was too immense for bribes to work anymore, and they were a land-based conglomerate. So the land law could reach them, and that meant something like twenty billion dollars in damage suits already, with more in the offing, and the lax government agencies forced at last to stir themselves. "I'm sure, said the bursar gleefully, "that the old lady's tucked a few million away in pocket change here and there. But the company's bust!
    So Jimmy Rex had lost most of his legacy. . . and May had lost her insurance.
    Since I no longer believed that Jeff's accident had been an accident, I had to believe that an accident could easily happen to