This story must be a good 30 years old, maybe more, as my recollection is that I read it when I was quite young.
It’s a short story (or maybe novella) in which some people want to accomplish some task (nefarious or worthy, I no longer recall), but to do so they need for an incredibly wealthy person to do a particular thing. There is no way to convince him by talking to him that he should do it - he’ll have to be forced in some way. Since he is already ridiculously wealthy, they can’t pay him to do what they want.
The rich man is a collector of Asian ceramics/porcelain (probably something far more specific, like Ming Dynasty vases or something). So the coercion that the people decide upon is to acquire a beautiful piece of the item he collects, by stealing it from a museum or whatever means are necessary. They tell the rich man that if he does what they want, they will give him this otherwise unobtainable collector’s piece. I don’t remember how the story ends, but I believe this coercion is successful.
When I read that story as a young person, I thought it was a terrible plot device to posit that someone would do ANYTHING to get their hands on a stupid piece of pottery, no matter how beautiful. However, since then I have developed a great love for many Japanese and Korean ceramics, and now the story makes much more sense to me.
I ran a Champions superhero game about 30 years ago that involved one immortal Chinese villain stealing a bunch of artifacts (the original Mona Lisa, the (now empty) Genie’s lamp, a piece of the true Cross, the actual predictions of Nostradamus (“May 25, 1985, Apple up 3.25”) from another immortal hero; he hired them to get the artifacts back, but that’s probably not the story you read, unless you were playing Champions in the Bay Area back then…
I saw this thread, and saw that Andy L was the last poster, and said to myself, “Shucks, there’s no point opening it now; it’s already answered”.
And it turns out to be one I knew, and it was answered before Andy L’s post. Sigh.
EDIT: I suppose I can console myself by pointing out that the story was misplaced in The Past through Tomorrow, since in the Future History stories antigravity was invented by Andy L’s namesake.
Thanks for your confidence. I agree this story (and “The Long Watch”) don’t seem to fit into the Future History (and “Let there be Light” ought to be in there). In addition to the antigravity, there seem to be far too many alien species in “We Also Walk Dogs” solar system than there are in the rest of the Future History.
“The Long Watch” is certainly in the same continuity as Space Cadet, but I’m not 100% confident that that isn’t the Future History continuity. Both, at least, have diminutive humanoid natives on a swampy Venus.
The Future History’s Venus has slavery, and the US being converted into a fundamentalist dictatorship - and neither of these situations fit well with the Patrol of Space Cadet.
Could be, but it seems hard to work out how that would work - “The Long Watch” takes place before the dictatorship, so did the Patrol exist for the entire interregnum, or are the cadets in Space Cadet honoring Dahlquist as a hero of a precursor version of the Patrol?
I’m pretty sure that Dahlquist was from a precursor to the Patrol, in any event. Remember, the Patrol’s main job was as custodian of the nuclear weapons, and in The Long Watch, it was the guys who were supposed to be in charge of the nuclear weapons who were revolting. There’s no way the nuclear command structure stays unchanged through something like that. The Patrol was created because they realized they needed more guys like Dahlquist (and the other three of the Four).