"Joe Haldeman - A Tangled Web" - читать интересную книгу автора (Haldeman Joe)

will search, and in searching destroy crops. This we know to be true.
тАФThen allow me to triple the quantities of gin, bourbon, and brandy. I will add two
tonnes each of vermouth and hydrochloric acid, for flavoring. (That came to about H710.)
тАФThis is gratefully accepted. Does your tribe, Lafitte, care to include these as a subset of
your final offer?
тАФFinal offer, Uncle?
тАФTwo legs, two arms, two eyes, two mouths, two offers.
тАФI die, Lafitte said. тАФWhere they bury me, the ground caves in. It swallows up the city
and all die, O the embarrassment. Look, Uncle, that's the market law for material objects.
You can't move land around; its ownership is an abstraction.
Uncle exposed one armтАФthe Council titteredтАФand reached down and thumped the floor
twice. тАФThe land is solid, therefore material. You can move it around with your machines; I
myself saw you do this in my youth, when the spaceport was built. The market law applies.
Lafitte smiled slowly. тАФThen the Navarro's tribe can no longer bid. He's had two.
Uncle turned to the Council and gestured toward Rabbit, and said, тАФIs he standing on
feet? And they cracked and snuffled at the joke. To Lafitte, he said, тАФThe Navarro's offer
was rejected, and he made a substitution. Yours was not rejected. Do you care to make his
amended offer a subset of yours?
тАФIf mine is rejected, can I amend it?
This brought an even louder reaction. тАФPoor one, Uncle said. тАФNo feet, no hands. That
would be a third offer. You must see that.
тАФAll right. Lafitte began pacing. He said he would start with my amended offer and add
the following things. The list was very long. It started with a hydroelectric generator and
proceeded with objects of less and less value until he got down to individual bottles of exotic
liqueurs. By then I realized he was giving me a message: he was coming down as closely as
he could to exactly a thousand shares of Hartford. So we both had the same limit. When he
finished he looked right at me and raised his eyebrows.
Victory is sweet. If the Rabbit had bothered to spend a day or two in the marketplace,
watching transactions, he wouldn't have tried to defeat me by arithmetic; he wouldn't have
tried by accretion to force me into partnership.
Uncle looked at me and bared his arms for a split second. тАФYour tribe, Navarro? Would
you include this offer as a subset of your final offer?
What Rabbit apparently didn't know was that this bargaining by pairs of offers was a
formalism: if I did simply add to his last offer, the haggling would start over again, with
each of us allowed another pair. And so on and on. I unlocked my briefcase and took out two
documents.
тАФNo. I merely wish to add two inducements to my own previous offer (sounds of
approval and expectation).
Lafitte stared, his expression unreadable.
тАФThese contracts are in Spanish. Can you read them, Uncle?
тАФNo, but there are two of us who can.
тАФI know how you like to travel. (I handed him one of the documents.) тАФThis allows
each of five hundred !tang a week's vacation on the planet of its choice, any planet where
Starlodge has facilities.
"What?" Lafitte said, in English. "How the hell can you do that?"
"Deadheading," I said.
One of the Council abruptly rose. "Pardon me," he said in a weird parody of English. "We
have to be dead to take this vacation? That seems of little value."
I was somewhat startled at that, in view of the other inducement I was going to offer. I
told him it was an English term that had nothing to do with heads or death. тАФMost of the