LESLIE COOMBES LAID his cigarette in the ashtray and picked up
his cocktail, sipping slowly. As he did so, he gave an irrationally
apprehensive glance at the big globe of the planet floating off the
floor on its own contragravity, spotlighted by a simulated sun and
rotating slowly, its two satellites, Xerxes and Darius, orbiting
about it. Darius still belonged outright to the Company, even after
the Pendarvis Decisions. Xerxes never had; it had been reserved by
the Federation as a naval base when the old Company had been
chartered. The evening shadow-line had just touched the east coast
of Alpha Continent and was approaching the spot that represented
Mallorysport.
Victor Grego caught the involuntary glance and laughed.
“Still nervous about it, Leslie? It’s had its teeth
pulled.”
Yes, after it had been too late, after the Fuzzy Trial, when
they had realized that every word spoken in Grego’s private
office had been known to Naval Intelligence, and that Henry
Stenson, who had built it, had been a Federation undercover agent.
There had been a microphone and a midget radio transmitter inside.
Stenson had planted a similar set in a bartending robot at the
Residency, which was why the former Resident General, Nick Emmert,
was now aboard a destroyer bound for Terra, to face malfeasance
charges. Coombes wondered how many more of those things Stenson had
strewn about Mallorysport; he’d almost dismantled his own
apartment looking in vain for one, and he still wasn’t
sure.
“It wouldn’t matter, anyhow,” Grego continued.
“We’re all friends now. Aren’t we,
Diamond?”
The Fuzzy on Grego’s chair-arm snuggled closer to him,
pleased at being included in the Big One conversation.
“Tha’s ri’; everybody friend. Pappy Vic, Pappy
Jack, Unka Less’ee, Unka Gus, Pappy Ben, Flora, Fauna . . . ” He went on naming all the people, Fuzzies and Big Ones,
who were friends. It was a surprising list; only a few months ago
nobody but a lunatic would have called Jack Holloway and Bennett
Rainsford and Gus Brannhard friends of his and Victor
Grego’s. “Everybody friend now. Everything
nice.”
“Everything nice,” Coombes agreed. “For the
time being, at least. Victor, you’re getting Fuzzyfuzz all
over your coat.”
“Who cares? It’s my coat, and it’s my Fuzzy,
and besides, I don’t think he’s shedding
now.”
“And all bad Big Ones gone to jail-place,” Diamond
said. “Not make trouble, anymore. What is like, jail-place?
Is like dark dirty place where bad Big Ones put Fuzzies?”
“Something like that,” Grego told the Fuzzy.
The trouble was, they hadn’t put all the bad Big Ones in
jail. They hadn’t been able to prove anything against Hugo
Ingermann, and that left a bad taste in his mouth. And it reminded
him of something.
“Did you find the rest of those sunstones,
Victor?”
Grego shook his head. “No. At first I thought the Fuzzies
must have lost them in the ventilation system, but we put
robo-snoopers through all the ducts and didn’t find anything.
Then Harry Steefer thought some of his cops had held out on him,
but we questioned everybody under veridication and nobody knew
anything. I don’t know where in Nifflheim they
are.”
“A quarter-million sols isn’t exactly
sparrow-fodder, Victor.”
“Almost. Wait till we get enough men and equipment in at
Yellowsand Canyon; we’ll be taking out twice that in a day.
My God, Leslie; you ought to see that place! It’s
fantastic.”
“All I’d see would be a lot of rock. I’ll take
your word for it.”
“There’s this layer of sunstone flint, averaging two
hundred feet thick, all along the face of the Divide for eight and
a half miles west of the canyon and better than ten miles east of
it; it runs back four miles before it tapers out. Of course,
there’s a couple of hundred feet of sandstone on top of it
that’ll have to be stripped off, but we’ll just shove
that down into the canyon. It won’t, really, be as much of a
job as draining Big Blackwater was. Are the agreements ready to
sign?”
“Yes. The general agreement obligates the Company to
continue all the services performed by the old chartered company;
in return, the Government agrees to lease us all the unseated
public lands declared public domain by the Pendarvis Decisions,
except the area north of the Little Blackwater and the north branch
of the Snake River, the Fuzzy Reservation. The special agreement
gives us a lease on the tract around the Yellowsand Canyon; we pay
four-fifty sols for every carat weight of thermofluorescent
sunstones we take out, the money to be administered for the Fuzzies
by the Government. Both agreements for nine hundred and ninety-nine
years.”
“Or until adjudged invalid by the court.”
“Oh, yes; I got that inserted everywhere I could stick it.
The only thing I’m worried about now is how much trouble the
Terra-side stock-holders of the late Chartered Zarathustra Company
may give us.”
“Well, they have an equity of some sort, as
individuals,” Grego admitted. “But there simply is no
Chartered Zarathustra Company.”
“I can’t be positive. The Chartered Loki Company was
dissolved by court order, for violation of Federation law. The
stockholders lost completely. The Chartered Uller Company was taken
over by the Government after the Uprising, in 526; the Government
simply confirmed General von Schlichten as governor-general and
payed off the stockholders at face value. And when the Chartered
Fenris Company went bankrupt, the planet was taken over by some of
the colonists, and the stockholders, I believe, were paid two and a
quarter centisols on the sol. Those are the only precedents, and
none of them applies here.” He drank some more of his
cocktail. “I shall have to go to Terra myself to represent
the new Charterless Zarathustra Company, Ltd., of
Zarathustra.”
“I’ll hate to see you go.”
“Thank you, Victor. I’m not looking forward to it,
myself.” Six months aboard ship would be almost as bad as a
jail sentence. And then at least a year on Terra, getting things
straightened out and engaging a law firm in Kapstaad or
Johannesburg to handle the long litigation that would ensue.
“I hope to be back in a couple of years. I doubt if I shall
enjoy reaccustoming myself to life on our dear mother
planet.” He finished what was in his glass and held it up.
“May I have another cocktail, Victor?”
“Why, surely.” Grego finished his own drink.
“Diamond, you please go give Unka Less’ee
koktel-drinko. Bring koktel-drinko for Pappy Vic, too.”
“Hokay.”
Diamond jumped down from the chair-arm and ran to get the
cocktail jug. Leaning forward, Coombes held his glass down where
Diamond could reach it; the Fuzzy filled it to the brim without
spilling a drop.
“Thank you, Diamond.”
“Welcome, Unka Less’ee,” Diamond replied just
as politely, and carried the jug to fill Pappy Vic’s
glass.
He didn’t pour a drink for himself. He’d had a
drink, once, and had never forgotten the hangover it gave him; he
didn’t want another like it. Maybe that was one of the things
Ernst Mallin meant when he said Fuzzies were saner than Humans.
GUSTAVUS ADOLPHUS BRANNHARD puffed contentedly on his cigar.
Behind him, a couple of things more or less like birds twittered
among the branches of a tree. In front, the towering buildings of
Mallorysport were black against a riot of sunset red and gold and
orange. From across the lawn came sounds of Fuzzies—Ben
Rainsford’s Flora and Fauna and a couple of their visitors—at
play. Ben Rainsford, an elfish little man with a bald head and a
straggly red beard, sat hunched forward in his chair, staring into
a highball he held in both hands.
“But, Gus,” he was protesting. “Don’t
you think Victor Grego can be trusted?”
That was a volte-face for Ben. A couple of months ago he’d
been positive that there was no infamous treachery too black for
Grego.
“Sure I do.” Gus shifted the cigar to his left hand
and picked up his own drink, an old-fashioned glass full of straight
whiskey. “You just have to watch him a little, that’s
all.” A few drops of whiskey dribbled into his beard; he
blotted them with the back of his hand and put the cigar back into
his mouth. “Why?”
“Well, all this ‘until adjudged invalid by the
court’ stuff in the agreements. You think he’s fixing
booby traps for us?”
“No. I know what he’s doing. He’s fixing to
bluff the Terra-side stockholders of the old Chartered Company.
Make them think he’ll break the agreements and negotiate new
ones for himself if they don’t go along with him. He wants to
keep control of the new Company himself.”
“Well, I’m with him on that!” Rainsford said
vehemently. “Monopoly or no monopoly, I want the Company run
on Zarathustra, for the benefit of Zarathustra. But then, why do
you want to hold off on signing the agreements?”
“Just till after the election, Ben. We want our delegates
elected, and we want our Colonial Constitution adopted. Once we do
that, we won’t have any trouble electing the kind of a
legislature we want. But there’s going to be opposition to
this public-land deal. A lot of people have been expecting to get
rich staking claims to the land the Pendarvis Decisions put in
public domain, and now it’s being all leased back to the CZC
for a thousand years, and that’s longer than any of them want
to wait.”
“Gus, a lot more people, and a lot more influential
people, are going to be glad the Government won’t have to
start levying taxes,” Rainsford replied.
Ben had a point there. There’d never been any kind of
taxation on Zarathustra; the Company had footed all the bills for
everything. And now there wouldn’t be need for any in the
future, not even for the new Native Commission. The Fuzzies would
be paying their own way, from sunstone royalties.
“And the would-be land-grabbers aren’t organized,
and we are,” Rainsford went on. “The only organized
opposition we ever had was from this People’s Prosperity
Party of Hugo Ingermann’s, and now Ingermann’s a dead
duck.”
That was over optimism, a vice to which Ben wasn’t
ordinarily addicted.
“Ben, any time you think Hugo Ingermann’s dead, you
want to shoot him again. He’s just playing possum.”
“I wish we could have him shot for real, along with the
rest of them.”
“Well, he wasn’t guilty along with the rest of them,
that’s why we couldn’t. It’s probably the only
thing in his life he hasn’t been guilty of, but he
didn’t know anything about that job till they hauled him in
and began interrogating him. Why, Nifflheim, we couldn’t even
get him disbarred!”
He and Leslie Coombes had tried hard enough, but the Bar
Association was made up of lawyers, and lawyers are
precedent-minded. Most of them had crooked clients themselves, and
most of them had cut corners representing them. They didn’t
want Ingermann’s disbarment used as a precedent against
them.
“And now he’s defending Thaxter and the Evinses and
Novaes,” Rainsford said. “He’ll get them off,
too; you watch if he doesn’t.”
“Not while I’m Chief Prosecutor!”
He shifted his cigar again, and had a drink on that. He wished
he felt as confident as he’d sounded.
THE DEPUTY-MARSHAL UNLOCKED the door and stood aside for Hugo
Ingermann to enter, looking at him as though he’d crawled
from under a flat stone. Everybody was looking at him that way
around Central Courts now. He smiled sweetly.
“Thank you, deputy,” he said.
“Don’t bother, I get paid for it,” the
uniformed deputy said. “All I hope is they draw my name out
of the hat when they take your clients out in the jail-yard. Too
bad you won’t be going along with them. I’d pay for the
privilege of shooting you.”
And if he complained to the Colonial Marshal, Max Fane would
say, “Hell, so would I.”
The steel-walled room was small and bare, its only furnishings a
table welded to the steel floor and half a dozen straight chairs.
It reeked of disinfectant, like the rest of the jail. He got out
his cigarettes and lit one, then laid the box and the lighter on
the table and looked quickly about. He couldn’t see any
screen-pickup—maybe there wasn’t any—but he was sure there
was a microphone somewhere. He was still looking when the door
opened again.
Three men and a woman entered, in sandals, long robes, and,
probably, nothing else. They’d been made to change before
being brought here, and would change back after a close physical
search before being returned to their cells. Another deputy was
with them. He said:
“Two hours maximum. If you’re through before then,
use the bell.”
Then the door was closed and locked.
“Don’t say anything,” he warned. “The
room’s probably bugged. Sit down; help yourselves to
cigarettes.”
He remained standing, looking at them: Conrad Evins, small and
usually fussy and precise, now tense and haggard. He had been chief
gem-buyer for the Company; the robbery had been his idea
originally—his or his wife’s. Rose Evins, having lighted a
cigarette, sat looking at it, her hands on the table. She was a
dead woman and had accepted her fate; her face was calm with the
resignation of hopelessness. Leo Thaxter, beefy and blue-jowled,
with black hair and an out-thrust lower lip, was her brother. He
had been top man in the loan-shark racket, and banker for the
Mallorysport underworld; and he had been the front through whom
Ingermann had acquired title to much of the privately owned real
estate north of the city. It had been in one of those buildings, a
vacant warehouse, that the five Fuzzies captured on Beta Continent
had been kept and trained to crawl through ventilation ducts and
remove simulated sunstones from cabinets in a mock-up of the
Company gem-vault. Phil Novaes, the youngest of the four, was
afraid and trying not to show it. He and his partner, Moses
Herckerd, former Company survey-scouts, had captured the Fuzzies
and brought them to town. Herckerd wasn’t present; he’d
stopped too many submachine-gun bullets the night of the attempted
robbery.
“Well,” he began when he had their attention,
“they have you cold on the larceny and burglary and criminal
conspiracy charges. Nobody, not even I, can get you acquitted of
them. That’s ten-to-twenty, and don’t expect any
minimum sentences, either; they’ll throw the book at all of
you. I do not, however, believe that you can be convicted of the
two capital charges, enslavement and faginy. Just to make sure,
though, I believe it would be wise for you to plead guilty to the
larceny and burglary and conspiracy charges if the prosecution will
agree to drop the other two.”
The four looked at one another. He lit a fresh cigarette from
the end of the old one, dropping the butt on the floor and tramping
it.
“Twenty years is a hell of a long time,” Thaxter
said. “You’re dead a damn sight longer, though. Yes, if
you can make a deal, go ahead.”
“What makes you think you can?” Conrad Evins
demanded. “You say they’re sure of conviction on the
sunstone charges. Why would they take a plea on them and drop the
Fuzzy charges? That’s what they really want to convict us
on.”
“Want to, yes. But I don’t believe they can, and I
think Gus Brannhard doesn’t, either. Enslavement is the
reduction of a sapient being to the status of chattel property;
purchase or sale of a sapient being so chattelized; and/or
compulsory labor or service under restraint. Well, we’ll
claim those Fuzzies weren’t slaves but willing
accomplices.”
“That’s not the way the Fuzzies tell it,” Rose
Evins said indifferently.
“In court, the Fuzzies won’t tell it any way at
all,” he told them. “In court, the Fuzzies will not be
permitted to testify. Take my word for it; they just
won’t.”
“Well, that’s good news,” Thaxter grunted
skeptically. “If true. How about the faginy
charge?”
Ingermann puffed on his cigarette and blew smoke at the overhead
light, then sat down on the edge of the table.
“Faginy,” he began, “consists of training minor
children to perform criminal and/or immoral acts; and/or compelling
minor children to perform such acts; and/or deriving gain or profit
from performance of such acts by minor children. According to the
Pendarvis Decisions, Fuzzies are legally equivalent to human
children of under twelve years of age, so according to the
Pendarvis Decisions, what you did when you trained those Fuzzies to
crawl through ventilation ducts and remove simulated sunstones from
cabinets in a mock-up of the Company gem-vault was faginy; and so
was taking them to Company House and having them crawl in and get
out the real sunstones; and, according to law, the penalty is death
by shooting, mandatory and without discretion of the court.
“Well, I’m attacking this legal fiction that a
mature adult Fuzzy is a minor child. No one in this
Government-Company axis wants to have to defend the Fuzzies’
minor-child status in court. That’s why they’ll take
your pleas on the sunstone charges and drop the Fuzzy charges. As
you remarked, Leo, twenty years is a long time, but you’re
dead a lot longer.”
An incredulous, almost hopeful, look came into Rose
Evins’s eyes, and was instantly extinguished. She
wasn’t going to abandon the peace of resignation for the
torments of hope.
“Well, yes,” she said softly. “Plead us guilty
on those other charges. It won’t make any
difference.”
Her husband also agreed, taking his cue from her; Novaes took
his from both, simply nodding. Thaxter’s mouth curved down
more at the corners, and his lower lip jutted out farther.
“It better not,” he said. “Ingermann, if you
plead us guilty on the sunstone charges and then get us shot for
faginy or enslavement—”
“Shut up!” Ingermann barked. He was frightened; he
knew what Thaxter was going to say next. “You damned fool,
didn’t I tell you they have this room bugged?”
LESLIE COOMBES LAID his cigarette in the ashtray and picked up
his cocktail, sipping slowly. As he did so, he gave an irrationally
apprehensive glance at the big globe of the planet floating off the
floor on its own contragravity, spotlighted by a simulated sun and
rotating slowly, its two satellites, Xerxes and Darius, orbiting
about it. Darius still belonged outright to the Company, even after
the Pendarvis Decisions. Xerxes never had; it had been reserved by
the Federation as a naval base when the old Company had been
chartered. The evening shadow-line had just touched the east coast
of Alpha Continent and was approaching the spot that represented
Mallorysport.
Victor Grego caught the involuntary glance and laughed.
“Still nervous about it, Leslie? It’s had its teeth
pulled.”
Yes, after it had been too late, after the Fuzzy Trial, when
they had realized that every word spoken in Grego’s private
office had been known to Naval Intelligence, and that Henry
Stenson, who had built it, had been a Federation undercover agent.
There had been a microphone and a midget radio transmitter inside.
Stenson had planted a similar set in a bartending robot at the
Residency, which was why the former Resident General, Nick Emmert,
was now aboard a destroyer bound for Terra, to face malfeasance
charges. Coombes wondered how many more of those things Stenson had
strewn about Mallorysport; he’d almost dismantled his own
apartment looking in vain for one, and he still wasn’t
sure.
“It wouldn’t matter, anyhow,” Grego continued.
“We’re all friends now. Aren’t we,
Diamond?”
The Fuzzy on Grego’s chair-arm snuggled closer to him,
pleased at being included in the Big One conversation.
“Tha’s ri’; everybody friend. Pappy Vic, Pappy
Jack, Unka Less’ee, Unka Gus, Pappy Ben, Flora, Fauna . . . ” He went on naming all the people, Fuzzies and Big Ones,
who were friends. It was a surprising list; only a few months ago
nobody but a lunatic would have called Jack Holloway and Bennett
Rainsford and Gus Brannhard friends of his and Victor
Grego’s. “Everybody friend now. Everything
nice.”
“Everything nice,” Coombes agreed. “For the
time being, at least. Victor, you’re getting Fuzzyfuzz all
over your coat.”
“Who cares? It’s my coat, and it’s my Fuzzy,
and besides, I don’t think he’s shedding
now.”
“And all bad Big Ones gone to jail-place,” Diamond
said. “Not make trouble, anymore. What is like, jail-place?
Is like dark dirty place where bad Big Ones put Fuzzies?”
“Something like that,” Grego told the Fuzzy.
The trouble was, they hadn’t put all the bad Big Ones in
jail. They hadn’t been able to prove anything against Hugo
Ingermann, and that left a bad taste in his mouth. And it reminded
him of something.
“Did you find the rest of those sunstones,
Victor?”
Grego shook his head. “No. At first I thought the Fuzzies
must have lost them in the ventilation system, but we put
robo-snoopers through all the ducts and didn’t find anything.
Then Harry Steefer thought some of his cops had held out on him,
but we questioned everybody under veridication and nobody knew
anything. I don’t know where in Nifflheim they
are.”
“A quarter-million sols isn’t exactly
sparrow-fodder, Victor.”
“Almost. Wait till we get enough men and equipment in at
Yellowsand Canyon; we’ll be taking out twice that in a day.
My God, Leslie; you ought to see that place! It’s
fantastic.”
“All I’d see would be a lot of rock. I’ll take
your word for it.”
“There’s this layer of sunstone flint, averaging two
hundred feet thick, all along the face of the Divide for eight and
a half miles west of the canyon and better than ten miles east of
it; it runs back four miles before it tapers out. Of course,
there’s a couple of hundred feet of sandstone on top of it
that’ll have to be stripped off, but we’ll just shove
that down into the canyon. It won’t, really, be as much of a
job as draining Big Blackwater was. Are the agreements ready to
sign?”
“Yes. The general agreement obligates the Company to
continue all the services performed by the old chartered company;
in return, the Government agrees to lease us all the unseated
public lands declared public domain by the Pendarvis Decisions,
except the area north of the Little Blackwater and the north branch
of the Snake River, the Fuzzy Reservation. The special agreement
gives us a lease on the tract around the Yellowsand Canyon; we pay
four-fifty sols for every carat weight of thermofluorescent
sunstones we take out, the money to be administered for the Fuzzies
by the Government. Both agreements for nine hundred and ninety-nine
years.”
“Or until adjudged invalid by the court.”
“Oh, yes; I got that inserted everywhere I could stick it.
The only thing I’m worried about now is how much trouble the
Terra-side stock-holders of the late Chartered Zarathustra Company
may give us.”
“Well, they have an equity of some sort, as
individuals,” Grego admitted. “But there simply is no
Chartered Zarathustra Company.”
“I can’t be positive. The Chartered Loki Company was
dissolved by court order, for violation of Federation law. The
stockholders lost completely. The Chartered Uller Company was taken
over by the Government after the Uprising, in 526; the Government
simply confirmed General von Schlichten as governor-general and
payed off the stockholders at face value. And when the Chartered
Fenris Company went bankrupt, the planet was taken over by some of
the colonists, and the stockholders, I believe, were paid two and a
quarter centisols on the sol. Those are the only precedents, and
none of them applies here.” He drank some more of his
cocktail. “I shall have to go to Terra myself to represent
the new Charterless Zarathustra Company, Ltd., of
Zarathustra.”
“I’ll hate to see you go.”
“Thank you, Victor. I’m not looking forward to it,
myself.” Six months aboard ship would be almost as bad as a
jail sentence. And then at least a year on Terra, getting things
straightened out and engaging a law firm in Kapstaad or
Johannesburg to handle the long litigation that would ensue.
“I hope to be back in a couple of years. I doubt if I shall
enjoy reaccustoming myself to life on our dear mother
planet.” He finished what was in his glass and held it up.
“May I have another cocktail, Victor?”
“Why, surely.” Grego finished his own drink.
“Diamond, you please go give Unka Less’ee
koktel-drinko. Bring koktel-drinko for Pappy Vic, too.”
“Hokay.”
Diamond jumped down from the chair-arm and ran to get the
cocktail jug. Leaning forward, Coombes held his glass down where
Diamond could reach it; the Fuzzy filled it to the brim without
spilling a drop.
“Thank you, Diamond.”
“Welcome, Unka Less’ee,” Diamond replied just
as politely, and carried the jug to fill Pappy Vic’s
glass.
He didn’t pour a drink for himself. He’d had a
drink, once, and had never forgotten the hangover it gave him; he
didn’t want another like it. Maybe that was one of the things
Ernst Mallin meant when he said Fuzzies were saner than Humans.
GUSTAVUS ADOLPHUS BRANNHARD puffed contentedly on his cigar.
Behind him, a couple of things more or less like birds twittered
among the branches of a tree. In front, the towering buildings of
Mallorysport were black against a riot of sunset red and gold and
orange. From across the lawn came sounds of Fuzzies—Ben
Rainsford’s Flora and Fauna and a couple of their visitors—at
play. Ben Rainsford, an elfish little man with a bald head and a
straggly red beard, sat hunched forward in his chair, staring into
a highball he held in both hands.
“But, Gus,” he was protesting. “Don’t
you think Victor Grego can be trusted?”
That was a volte-face for Ben. A couple of months ago he’d
been positive that there was no infamous treachery too black for
Grego.
“Sure I do.” Gus shifted the cigar to his left hand
and picked up his own drink, an old-fashioned glass full of straight
whiskey. “You just have to watch him a little, that’s
all.” A few drops of whiskey dribbled into his beard; he
blotted them with the back of his hand and put the cigar back into
his mouth. “Why?”
“Well, all this ‘until adjudged invalid by the
court’ stuff in the agreements. You think he’s fixing
booby traps for us?”
“No. I know what he’s doing. He’s fixing to
bluff the Terra-side stockholders of the old Chartered Company.
Make them think he’ll break the agreements and negotiate new
ones for himself if they don’t go along with him. He wants to
keep control of the new Company himself.”
“Well, I’m with him on that!” Rainsford said
vehemently. “Monopoly or no monopoly, I want the Company run
on Zarathustra, for the benefit of Zarathustra. But then, why do
you want to hold off on signing the agreements?”
“Just till after the election, Ben. We want our delegates
elected, and we want our Colonial Constitution adopted. Once we do
that, we won’t have any trouble electing the kind of a
legislature we want. But there’s going to be opposition to
this public-land deal. A lot of people have been expecting to get
rich staking claims to the land the Pendarvis Decisions put in
public domain, and now it’s being all leased back to the CZC
for a thousand years, and that’s longer than any of them want
to wait.”
“Gus, a lot more people, and a lot more influential
people, are going to be glad the Government won’t have to
start levying taxes,” Rainsford replied.
Ben had a point there. There’d never been any kind of
taxation on Zarathustra; the Company had footed all the bills for
everything. And now there wouldn’t be need for any in the
future, not even for the new Native Commission. The Fuzzies would
be paying their own way, from sunstone royalties.
“And the would-be land-grabbers aren’t organized,
and we are,” Rainsford went on. “The only organized
opposition we ever had was from this People’s Prosperity
Party of Hugo Ingermann’s, and now Ingermann’s a dead
duck.”
That was over optimism, a vice to which Ben wasn’t
ordinarily addicted.
“Ben, any time you think Hugo Ingermann’s dead, you
want to shoot him again. He’s just playing possum.”
“I wish we could have him shot for real, along with the
rest of them.”
“Well, he wasn’t guilty along with the rest of them,
that’s why we couldn’t. It’s probably the only
thing in his life he hasn’t been guilty of, but he
didn’t know anything about that job till they hauled him in
and began interrogating him. Why, Nifflheim, we couldn’t even
get him disbarred!”
He and Leslie Coombes had tried hard enough, but the Bar
Association was made up of lawyers, and lawyers are
precedent-minded. Most of them had crooked clients themselves, and
most of them had cut corners representing them. They didn’t
want Ingermann’s disbarment used as a precedent against
them.
“And now he’s defending Thaxter and the Evinses and
Novaes,” Rainsford said. “He’ll get them off,
too; you watch if he doesn’t.”
“Not while I’m Chief Prosecutor!”
He shifted his cigar again, and had a drink on that. He wished
he felt as confident as he’d sounded.
THE DEPUTY-MARSHAL UNLOCKED the door and stood aside for Hugo
Ingermann to enter, looking at him as though he’d crawled
from under a flat stone. Everybody was looking at him that way
around Central Courts now. He smiled sweetly.
“Thank you, deputy,” he said.
“Don’t bother, I get paid for it,” the
uniformed deputy said. “All I hope is they draw my name out
of the hat when they take your clients out in the jail-yard. Too
bad you won’t be going along with them. I’d pay for the
privilege of shooting you.”
And if he complained to the Colonial Marshal, Max Fane would
say, “Hell, so would I.”
The steel-walled room was small and bare, its only furnishings a
table welded to the steel floor and half a dozen straight chairs.
It reeked of disinfectant, like the rest of the jail. He got out
his cigarettes and lit one, then laid the box and the lighter on
the table and looked quickly about. He couldn’t see any
screen-pickup—maybe there wasn’t any—but he was sure there
was a microphone somewhere. He was still looking when the door
opened again.
Three men and a woman entered, in sandals, long robes, and,
probably, nothing else. They’d been made to change before
being brought here, and would change back after a close physical
search before being returned to their cells. Another deputy was
with them. He said:
“Two hours maximum. If you’re through before then,
use the bell.”
Then the door was closed and locked.
“Don’t say anything,” he warned. “The
room’s probably bugged. Sit down; help yourselves to
cigarettes.”
He remained standing, looking at them: Conrad Evins, small and
usually fussy and precise, now tense and haggard. He had been chief
gem-buyer for the Company; the robbery had been his idea
originally—his or his wife’s. Rose Evins, having lighted a
cigarette, sat looking at it, her hands on the table. She was a
dead woman and had accepted her fate; her face was calm with the
resignation of hopelessness. Leo Thaxter, beefy and blue-jowled,
with black hair and an out-thrust lower lip, was her brother. He
had been top man in the loan-shark racket, and banker for the
Mallorysport underworld; and he had been the front through whom
Ingermann had acquired title to much of the privately owned real
estate north of the city. It had been in one of those buildings, a
vacant warehouse, that the five Fuzzies captured on Beta Continent
had been kept and trained to crawl through ventilation ducts and
remove simulated sunstones from cabinets in a mock-up of the
Company gem-vault. Phil Novaes, the youngest of the four, was
afraid and trying not to show it. He and his partner, Moses
Herckerd, former Company survey-scouts, had captured the Fuzzies
and brought them to town. Herckerd wasn’t present; he’d
stopped too many submachine-gun bullets the night of the attempted
robbery.
“Well,” he began when he had their attention,
“they have you cold on the larceny and burglary and criminal
conspiracy charges. Nobody, not even I, can get you acquitted of
them. That’s ten-to-twenty, and don’t expect any
minimum sentences, either; they’ll throw the book at all of
you. I do not, however, believe that you can be convicted of the
two capital charges, enslavement and faginy. Just to make sure,
though, I believe it would be wise for you to plead guilty to the
larceny and burglary and conspiracy charges if the prosecution will
agree to drop the other two.”
The four looked at one another. He lit a fresh cigarette from
the end of the old one, dropping the butt on the floor and tramping
it.
“Twenty years is a hell of a long time,” Thaxter
said. “You’re dead a damn sight longer, though. Yes, if
you can make a deal, go ahead.”
“What makes you think you can?” Conrad Evins
demanded. “You say they’re sure of conviction on the
sunstone charges. Why would they take a plea on them and drop the
Fuzzy charges? That’s what they really want to convict us
on.”
“Want to, yes. But I don’t believe they can, and I
think Gus Brannhard doesn’t, either. Enslavement is the
reduction of a sapient being to the status of chattel property;
purchase or sale of a sapient being so chattelized; and/or
compulsory labor or service under restraint. Well, we’ll
claim those Fuzzies weren’t slaves but willing
accomplices.”
“That’s not the way the Fuzzies tell it,” Rose
Evins said indifferently.
“In court, the Fuzzies won’t tell it any way at
all,” he told them. “In court, the Fuzzies will not be
permitted to testify. Take my word for it; they just
won’t.”
“Well, that’s good news,” Thaxter grunted
skeptically. “If true. How about the faginy
charge?”
Ingermann puffed on his cigarette and blew smoke at the overhead
light, then sat down on the edge of the table.
“Faginy,” he began, “consists of training minor
children to perform criminal and/or immoral acts; and/or compelling
minor children to perform such acts; and/or deriving gain or profit
from performance of such acts by minor children. According to the
Pendarvis Decisions, Fuzzies are legally equivalent to human
children of under twelve years of age, so according to the
Pendarvis Decisions, what you did when you trained those Fuzzies to
crawl through ventilation ducts and remove simulated sunstones from
cabinets in a mock-up of the Company gem-vault was faginy; and so
was taking them to Company House and having them crawl in and get
out the real sunstones; and, according to law, the penalty is death
by shooting, mandatory and without discretion of the court.
“Well, I’m attacking this legal fiction that a
mature adult Fuzzy is a minor child. No one in this
Government-Company axis wants to have to defend the Fuzzies’
minor-child status in court. That’s why they’ll take
your pleas on the sunstone charges and drop the Fuzzy charges. As
you remarked, Leo, twenty years is a long time, but you’re
dead a lot longer.”
An incredulous, almost hopeful, look came into Rose
Evins’s eyes, and was instantly extinguished. She
wasn’t going to abandon the peace of resignation for the
torments of hope.
“Well, yes,” she said softly. “Plead us guilty
on those other charges. It won’t make any
difference.”
Her husband also agreed, taking his cue from her; Novaes took
his from both, simply nodding. Thaxter’s mouth curved down
more at the corners, and his lower lip jutted out farther.
“It better not,” he said. “Ingermann, if you
plead us guilty on the sunstone charges and then get us shot for
faginy or enslavement—”
“Shut up!” Ingermann barked. He was frightened; he
knew what Thaxter was going to say next. “You damned fool,
didn’t I tell you they have this room bugged?”