Free The Man Who Lost the Sea by Theodore Sturgeon

expenses—against the value of his holdings. When his holdings go up to a certain level the company stops keeping books on what he draws. It’ll be like that with you. You just take what you want, as often as you like, for as long as you live. One man might break up this organization by throwing assets away, but he’d have to work all day every day for a good long while to do it.”
    “We … ah … have no contract, Mr. Rockhard.”
    “That’s right, Mr. Deeming.”
    He’s saying, thought Deeming, you can trust me. And I can. But I can’t say that to him. He’d have to answer no. He said cruelly, “You ought to let him die.”
    “I know,” said Rockhard.
    “I’m a damn fool,” said Deeming. “I’ll do it.”
    Rockhard held out his hand and Deeming took it. It was a warm firm hand and when it let go it withdrew slowly as if it regretted theloss of contact, instead (like some) of falling away in relief. This was a man who meant what he said.
    Which of course, he thought, is only another species of damn fool, when you get down to it.
    Why me?
    That was the base thought, the kingpin thought, the keystone thought of everything that happened between that first meeting and the day he coined off for Revelo. By that time he knew the answer.
    Begin at Earth, go to Revelo, do a little job, and return. If it had been just that, and that’s all, there wouldn’t have been a reason for Deeming’s presence in the matter. The nameless pudgy man could have done it; the old man could have done it himself. But there were—details.
    There were the two interminable briefing sessions. He had the new coil; all he had to do was plug it into the alien ship.
    But the alien ship was hidden far from Earth.
    All right; given the ship, all he needed was to drop a Revelo course-coin into his autopilot and push the button.
    But he didn’t have a Revelo course-coin. Nobody had a Revelo course-coin. Few people even knew where it was. There was a coin, certainly. In the files at Astro City on Ybo. He’d have to get that one. The files …
    The files were in the Angel Headquarters building.
    Well, if he got the ship, and if he got the coin, and if Rockhard was right and the new coil worked properly, not only to get him through the death-field but back out again, and if this could be done without alerting an Angel (Rockhard’s reasoning was that by turning the field inside out, Don had almost certainly alerted them, but that the new design, which would not—he hoped—touch or affect the field, would permit Deeming to get in and both of them to get out again without activating any alarms. So that for an indeterminate time the Angels must operate on their original information—that one ship had gone in, none come out), and if Donald Rockhard were alive, and if he knew what message to give Deeming and if Deeming got back all right and if Rockhard understood the messageproperly and if, after all this, Rockhard paid off, why then, this looked like a pretty good deal. And also clearly something that only a man like Deeming could possibly accomplish.
    So there were the two long briefings with Rockhard and his scientific assistant Pawling (of whose discourse Deeming caught not one word in nine), and a hurried trip back to his own quarters, where he wrote suitable letters to the hotel and to his housing and food depots and maintenance and communications services and so on and on, including the mailing of the goat’s wrist-watch where it would do him the most good, and the paying of bills for liquor and clothing and garage, and, and … (“How doth the little busy bee/Keep from flipping his lid like me?” he sang insanely to himself as he did all the things that would assure the hive that it could rest easy, nobody was doing anything unusual around here, honest.) When he was finished with it his affairs were ready for him to resume in a couple of weeks, or, if not, a small secondary wave of assurances to the trades, comforts, and