Free Pohlstars by Frederik Pohl Page B

miasma of decay poured out. The body inside was days dead, but I could recognize the tired old face. In life it had belonged to Elsie Van Dorn. "I never thought of her, I gasped.
    "You don't have to think of her anymore, chuckled Dougie. "You're really pretty dumb, old man. It stood to reason that the Commodore would have arranged for your guard dog to get some money. All I had to do was get a look at his private bequests-you know how that's done, don't you? I flinched, but didn't meet his eyes. "Once I found her, it wasn't hard. She even had copies of the letters in her safe deposit box.
    I could not speak. I could only stare at poor Elsie, who had loved the child she had cared for and at the last paid the tariff on that love.
    "You've seen enough? You're convinced? And Dougie shoved the box into the scavenging chute. It was a two- meter drop, splash, gone forever into the secret deeps of the ocean. "So you don't have any excuse anymore, old man, said Dougie, "and I've had the papers drawn up for you. Here they are. Sign.
    And of course, as soon as he could get back to Miami with the signed papers, May turned over all her stock to him. I had begged her not to. She wouldn't meet my eyes on the phone as she said, "I feel-anyway, I hope-that once he has what he needs, he won't have to-
    She stopped there and shook her head, not wanting to name what he "had to do otherwise. And Dougie d'Agasto was crowned king of the grazing isles.
    Toll the bell, sound the knell, My lady she married the lord of hell. Her life she gave as wife and slave To a treacherous, lecherous, blood-soaked knave, An impudent villain whose touch defiles The sweetness and woe of the queen of the isles.
    The oaty-boats had a long run for their money, but there were clouds on the horizon. There was a new land- based energy source, deep methane from far under the crust; there was a new sky-based one, with MHD generators in orbit beaming down floods of microwave power. And every month a new huge oaty-boat appeared, or more than one, to add to our fleet or Betsy's or some foreigner's. They all had five-kilometer intakes now, and we were all huddling in the same patches of ocean, sucking out the delta-Ts. It was not just that the sea was never empty now, it was worse than that. The sweet Pacific reeked of oil. My suspicions about Betsy's plans were correct though it wasn't just gasoline she was making. She bought cheap coal from Australia, pyrolized it to make liquid hydrocarbons, and reacted them with her electrolysis gases to turn the waste char into fuel alcohol. It was cheap fuel to ship and cheap fuel to store, for it needed no liquefying, and she sold every drop of it back to the Australians, or to the Americans or the Europeans or the Japanese. And left the stink of her oil and the smudge of her filth far beyond the horizon.
    Half the other fleets were beginning to do the same, and Dougie called me on the carpet to find out why I had not proposed it for ourselves. They were back in the owner's country now, he and May and the boy, for he simply had overruled her objections to living in the place where Jeff had died. He kept me standing before his huge teak desk for ten minutes while he punched out data sets to study, face impassive, head twisted back to avoid the drifting smoke from the joint he never took out from between his lips, and then he confronted me: "Well? Can you explain why we missed the boat on this?
    Dougie d'Agasto's opinion of me didn't matter at all, but I didn't want him convincing May I was an old fool. "The market has peaked already, I said. "There's too many boats doing it.
    "Because we're getting to it too late!
    I shook my head. "Because hydrogen's a cleaner fuel- I saw that wasn't registering with him- and will always get a higher price- that did- and this little boom won't last long enough to amortize the cost of the pyrolytic converters. All it will do is turn the Pacific into Los Angeles. And indeed, there were days when my eyes