The Long Run | Page 2

juice, they weren't good for him."
Jerry Jackson smiled for the first time. "'Sieur Jamethon wanted the job

himself. He only gave me your name--for a fee--after I turned him
down."
"Tell me about the job."
"You know CalleyTronics?"
Trent paused. "It's located on the eighth floor of the Down Plaza. They
sell inskins and image co-processors, MPUs, like that. Half the
webdancers I know buy from them."
"Frank Calley," said Jerry Jackson with a convincing enough display of
anger, "is a thief. He lifted fifteen terabytes of hot RAM, a hundred and
five thousand Credit Units worth of room-temperature superconductor
memory, from mah warehouse in Georgia." Under the stress of anger,
the accent became more audible.
A single drop of rain touched down on the transparent tabletop in front
of Trent.
"Let me guess," Trent said.
"Guess?"
"You want me to get your RTS back."
"Yes."
"What do you think you know about me?"
A touch of the anger was back in his voice. "You're supposed to be a
thief yourself." The word 'thief' was laced with astonishing disdain.
"You hire out to steal things for people. You--"
A second drop of rain joined the first. Jerry Jackson cut himself off as a
waiter, after an anxious glance at the sky, hurried out to where they
were seated.
"Monsieur," said the waiter hurriedly, with a French accent that might

have been real, "you wished to order a cup of coffee?"
"A pot," Trent corrected him. "A whole big pot of coffee."
"Monsieur, we do not sell coffee by the pot, only by the cup."
"May I speak to your manager?"
The waiter's features stiffened visibly. "Oui. One moment, monsieur."
Trent waited until the waiter had gone back inside. "So you want me to
boost fifteen terabytes of RTS from CalleyTronics?"
"Yes."
Trent counted five drops of rain on the cut crystal surface of the table.
Six. "It probably can't be done--straight boost, I mean. Calley's real
tight with the power structure in the Patrol Sectors, and his security's
pretty good. You'd be better off with a con, something that would leave
him wondering if he'd been hit--not sure--and feeling so stupid he
wouldn't go to the Peaceforcers with it for fear of being laughed at."
Jerry Jackson leaned forward with what seemed to Trent to be honest
curiosity. "What do you have in mind?"
"I don't know. What's good here?"
"Regarding Calley," Jerry Jackson said with great control, "what do
you have in mind?"
Trent looked at the man blankly. "Nothing. I'm not going to boost
Frank Calley for you, and I'm not going to con him either. Look, have
you ever eaten here before?"
"Never."
"Oh. Too bad. Usually when I go to a new restaurant I like to go with
somebody who's been there before, so I know what's good. You may
not know this," said Trent, "but two years ago a Player scored some

image co-processor hardware off CalleyTronics, chanted Calley's
accounting computer to believe the hardware had been properly paid
for and had it shipped to a drop box. It took Calley half a year to find
out who'd done it, but that summer they fished a corpse out of the East
River. His teeth had been pulled with pliers, his eyes were poked out,
his fingers had been chopped off, and his features defaced with acid.
They identified him by his inskin."
"You won't take the job?"
"Am I being asked?"
"Yes."
"No."
Jackson took a deep breath. "Why not?"
Trent shrugged. "No percentage. If I was going to, I'd do a con to get
Calley coming after me, get him to believe I had something he wanted.
But I'm not going to. The guy's mean, but he's also pretty straight; guys
like him always go to the Peaceforcers."
A gorgeous, mature woman in a black evening gown came out to their
table, with the waiter a few steps behind her. "Monsieur?"
"Yes?" said Trent politely.
For some reason his response seemed to throw her. Her accent was
considerably better than the waiter's; Trent would have bet she was
actually French. "You wished to order ..."
"Coffee."
"An entire pot?"
"Please."
"We do not sell coffee by the pot, monsieur. We do not even have a pot

to put the coffee in; the coffee is brewed in a single large--" She
hesitated, searching for a word. "--vat? Yes, vat, brewed in a vat in the
morning, and then put in stasis and poured from stasis a cup at a time."
"Okay. I want five, no, make that seven, seven cups of coffee, each one
about fifteen percent cream, one right after the other. Send the waitbot
out with a cup, give it about five minutes and send it out again. Do that
until I tell it to stop."