Free Privateers by Ben Bova Page B

him.
    “And to generate such increased revenue,” Malik was saying, his grin widening, “it will, of course, be necessary to raise the prices charged for lunar raw materials.”
    “Raise them,” Dan echoed.
    Malik nodded smugly. “You may not like it, but that is the decision that the Council of Ministers reached last week. The prices for all lunar ores will be increased by approximately twenty-five percent, as of the first of next month.”
    Dan’s first impulse was to take a swing at the Russian. Then he shrugged and laughed. It was all nonsense, a game that they played. The pious pronouncements they made about feeding the hungry and helping the poor was nothing more than a sham; the Russians’ real goal was to drive the last vestiges of capitalism out of the orbital factories and to monopolize every aspect of space industries. He knew it;
    Malik knew it. But still they maintained the pretense. What else was there to do but laugh?
    Malik’s dour-faced aides glanced uneasily at each other. Here the American capitalist had just been told that his costs for raw materials were going to be increased by twenty-five percent, and he was laughing. Even Malik looked surprised. Laughter was not what he had expected.

Chapter NINE

    When he was angry, really angry, Dan took a shower. It was a trick he had learned the hard way, back in the years when he had been an astronaut working on the earliest primitive space platforms, where water was so precious that even a sponge bath was something worth fighting over.
    He had cut short the tour with Malik as gracefully as he could and turned the Russian group over to one of his assistants, who headed them off toward the airfield. Dan’s smile evaporated as he went by helicopter to the roof of his office tower in Caracas and rode down the elevator to his apartment. Stalking past the robot butler before it could finish reading off the messages waiting for his attention, Dan went straight to the bathroom and stepped into the shower stall still fully clothed. The household computer sensed the presence of his body in the shower and turned on the water at precisely the mixture that Dan preferred.
    For long minutes Dan stood unmoving and let the steaming hot water bake the knots out of his tensed shoulders and neck. He kicked off his sodden loafers, then slowly stripped off his soaked coveralls and underwear. Alone in the shower he could shout, bellow, curse until he got his equilibrium back. He could pound the marble walls if he wanted to. Instead, he found himself laughing sardonically at the madness of it all. The world and everybody in it was crazy, and he was the craziest one of them all. He nudged the pile of soaked clothing to a corner of the shower stall with a bare toe, then stood luxuriating in the fact that he could have all the hot water he wanted, for as long as he wanted it.
    Finally he felt calm enough, in control of himself enough, to step out of the shower and begin toweling himself dry. The water turned off automatically; the heat lamp in the ceiling glowed as long as he stood on the floor plate beneath it.
    Freshly shaved and dressed in a pair of light slacks and an open-neck shirt, Dan went to the desk in his study, followed at a respectful distance by the butler robot. It was a squat fireplug of a machine that rolled across the thickly carpeted floor on noiseless trunnions. As a butler it was more of a curiosity than a servant: it could carry a tray of drinks or hors d’oeuvres, it could gather up empty glasses and take them back to the kitchen, but it was useless as a dresser or housecleaner.
    “There have been several phone messages, sir,” it said in the cultured voice of a distinguished British actor, long deceased. The robot’s inner computer was electronically linked, of course, to the phone and the household computer.
    “Hold them,” Dan commanded, “and get me a glass of sherry.”
    One good thing about a robot: it never argued, never insisted. “The