"William Tuning - Terro-Human - Fuzzy 04 - Fuzzy Bones" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tuning William)

to get well-ventilated by a Company policeman with a submachine gun. Novaes
lived to stand trial on charges of enslavement, with Mr. and Mrs. Evins, and
the three of them received the mandatory sentence for that crime-death
administered by a pistol shot in the back of the head; no discretion of the
court allowed.

Ingermann angrily jerked out a fresh printout. The fools, he thought. If only
the idiots had consulted me, I could have showed them the weak spots in their
plan.

As it was, he had just barely managed getting Thaxter off, and had actually
been arrested himself when the police started rounding up everyone connected
with Thaxter.

The whole matter had been a great source of aggravation for Attorney General
Gustavus Adolphus Brannhard, who "knew" they were all guilty, but didn't quite
have enough on them to take it to court.

The hincty bastard tried to put me under veridication for questioning to have
me disbarred. Ingermann became enraged every time he thought of the incident.
Patience will put the whole goody, goody lot of them in my hands, sooner or
later; then I'll squeeze the juice out of their pious guts.

What irritated Ingermann was not that the caper had gone wrong, not that four
people had been caught, not that he himself had come close to veridicated
questioning about his enterprises, a thing that would have meant ruin and
jail; but that the whole scheme had gone sour before he could get hold of the
sunstones. He would have considered it a profitable bargain to trade the lives
of four of his own people for- say-a double handful of sunstones.

Ingermann shook his head sadly and went back to perusing the printout sheets.

Now, here was an interesting item. Three first-class passengers from Terra.
The passage voucher number of one of them had an "R" suffix. Restricted entry;
data not available except to official inquirers, and then on a "need to know"
basis only. No way to match the number up to a name at this end of the trip.
Payment vouchers were like boarding passes or baggage tickets. Passengers
presented their vouchers to the chief steward upon entering the ship and he
recorded the number on his manifest. After that it was a matter of
head-counting and tally-keeping. Three boardings first-class for Zarathustra;
and if three got off at Zarathustra all was in order. Anything more detailed
was a violation of the Privacy Act.

An "R " suffix indicated the possible presence of a Federation official or
government employee of fairly high rank among those three first-class
passengers.

Interesting.

The chief steward who recorded the voucher numbers might remember which