Never play cards with a telepath. Quarter-ante poker once a week with the boys is harmless, even fun. But the game takes on a very different feel when the stakes involve a half-billion credit contract and your opponent can read your mind.
A week ago I'd been sitting at the head of a boardroom table; a dozen lawyers down either side ignored me as they haggled and bickered over the fine points of a complex contract. The sound of it gave me a headache, but I didn't dare leave. I sat there, my eyes half closed, and fed bits of delicate fractal pastry to Reggie, the pet buffalo dog on my lap. It was that classic Terran tableau, a man and his dog. Well, almost. Buffalo dogs aren't dogs at all, but incredibly valuable alien lifeforms, far too expensive to have as pets. Reggie was the exception, possible only because I had a monopoly on the creatures throughout human space. That's why the lawyers were there.
Half worked for me. The rest represented a Taurian archaeological consortium from Arcadian space. In between bits of pastry I tried to follow the three or four simultaneous exchanges of legalese bouncing from left to right faster, and with more dead earnest, than any championship tennis match. I understood maybe one word in ten. Maybe. My head throbbed, and I was already regretting my promise to Betsy that I'd sit in in her place.
While I'd come a long way from my days as a stage hypnotist, I'm not really equipped to run things at my company. I usually leave that chore to Dr. Elizabeth Penrose, a woman with more talent in her big toe than I have in my whole family tree. Ordinarily, she'd be the one sitting in on this kind of meeting, right in the thick of it, squeezing concessions and favorable terms out of the opposition until they begged her to stop. There'd be no begging this time. An outbreak of Skurlia influenza had left her stranded in a temporarily quarantined spaceport on the other side of the solar system. The meeting couldn't be rescheduled. Instead, she'd sent me a curt note instructing me to go to the meeting but keep my mouth shut.
My initial excitement about learning a bit about how my business actually worked quickly faded when the lawyer babble began. Even Reggie had tired of all the blather. In desperation I'd started entertaining myself by trying out the new gizmo the guys down in Security had given me. I wore a thick gold ring set with tiny dials on my left pinkie, a surveillance jammer that could block all data transmissions in a ten meter radius. About ten minutes into the meeting, when the lawyer prattle had saturated my boredom filters and Reggie had started to fidget, I turned it on. Several of the lawyers on both sides twitched and shot to their feet, glancing about furtively. I continued petting Reggie with an expression of total innocence honed from years performing in some pretty seedy establishments. I don't think I fooled any of them. With nary a grumble they adapted, downgraded to legal pads and ink sticks, and resumed their intense negotiating.
Tiresome as it was, I knew why Betsy had wanted me to sit in. Dealing with Taurians is tricky; maybe it's just human projection but the bullish-looking aliens tend to be both stubborn and hot-tempered. It had taken months to get their lawyers this far, and with the end nearly in sight Betsy expected some last minute trick and wanted someone with authority there just in case. Regrettably, that someone was me.
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