Narabedla Ltd by Frederik Pohl Read Free Book Online Page A

wasn’t there.
     
    “There’s something funny, all right,” I told the telephone, which told the satellite, which told Marlene back in New York, “but I don’t know what I can do about it. I don’t know where Irene went.”
    “No names!” Marlene scolded, half a second tardily.
    “All right, but I don’t know where she went.”
    “She just split on you?”
    I said fairly, “Well, I sort of walked away on her, too. We had a little disagreement. But I thought I knew where she was.”
    Silence transported via satellite for a second; then, briskly, “So, tell me, Nolly, what are you going to do now?”
    “I don’t know,” I said.
    That produced more of that expensive silence. After about seventy-five cents’ worth I said, “I think I might as well catch the sleeper to Madrid. I was hoping to see some of the Spanish opera people tomorrow or the next day.”
    “Oh.” No inflection. Just an “oh.”
    “Maybe,” I said, “when I get back to New York, I’ll talk to the police, I think.”
    “All right, Nolly,” said Marlene, and I couldn’t tell whether the tone was disapproving or just attenuated by distance.
    So I hung up.
    Then I had a drink.
    Then I had dinner; and all the time I was thinking about it, and right between the avocat vinaigrette and the baby lamb chops I got on the house phone to seek a truce.
    No luck. Even bad luck; Irene Madigan had checked out.
    As far as I could see, that closed out the account.
    It didn’t feel closed out, though. And then I remembered the Narabedla Ltd. xeroxes Irene Madigan had given me. I fished them out of my pocket and glanced at them.
    Then I began to read in earnest. It was a shame to give those perfect little lamb chops only a part of my attention, but it was really fascinating. The more I looked at Narabedla’s holdings and operations the more awed I got.
    Nor was it just the money-spinning power that was impressive. What Narabedla did with the money was curious, too. Quite a lot of it they gave away.
    Political contributions—well, sure. Big companies keep the government as crooked as they can with gifts. Narabedla seemed to be paying off more than half the Congress—310 separate contributions to congressional campaign funds, all for the legal maximum of three thousand dollars each.
    That was a million dollars right there.
    I was a little startled to see that most of the names I recognized were likely to be liberal Democrats instead of the what’s-good-for-business-is-good-for-America types that usually got that kind of corporate dough. I was even more surprised to see what some of the other donations had gone for.
    Narabedla was angeling a large number of scientific and educational institutions. A hundred and fifty thousand to one university, eighty-five thousand to another, nearly a quarter of a million to a foundation—all to finance research on AIDS. There were twenty-five or thirty grants for medical research on a dozen other ailments, ranging from salmonellosis to flu. Fifteen thousand to the World Esperanto Association. Forty thousand to an astronomical observatory, “to undertake an analytical catalogue of pulsars and related objects.” Another twenty-five thousand to the same place that was marked, “Supplementary grant for the study of anomalous novae.” Sixty-five thousand to one university and eighty thousand to another for grants “for basic study of particle physics and Einstein-Rosen interactions.” A big one, nearly half a million, to CalTech: “Survey of earthquake precursors in the Palmdale Bulge.”
    It wasn’t all science and politics. The list went on for three pages—a few thousand here, a lot more thousand there, to a long list of do-good organizations—peace groups, civil rights groups, groups of all kinds from the NAACP to the Unitarian-Universalist Church of America; and I’m not even beginning to talk about the music conservatories and chamber-music quartets and struggling opera companies.
    He was quite a good