“You wouldn’t dare,” he hoped aloud. “Buck is right behind you, and Barney’s watching, don’t ever doubt it.”
“Sure, you have to speak your lines, Keeler,” I conceded, “but you know better.” Then he fooled me: he had more gall than I’d figured. He got up and walked away, and Barney and Buck closed in, front and back, and off they went, with everybody looking from them to me. Just as they reached the door I called after them:
“Buck and Barney, better hit the deck fast,” and I fired from under the table close enough to Buck’s ear to lend substance to my suggestion. Keeler looked as alone as the last tree in the woods when the timber harvesters finish, but he did his snappy hip-draw and I let him put two hard slugs into the paneling behind me before I got up and went over and took it away from him. He gibbered a little and tried to wrestle, but after I broke his arm the fight went out of him. Then he tried to deal, and that disgusted me and I got a little angry and broke his neck, almost accidentally.
3
Barney and Buck seemed a little uncertain about what to do next, after they’d gotten up and dusted themselves off, so I told them to get rid of Keeler in a discreet way, because even though my license has the endorsement that allows me to clam up in self-defense, I’d still have to stand trial and prove necessity. I always avoid that kind of publicity, so I shoved them out of my way and went out into the rutted street and along to the cracked and peeling plastic facade of the formerly (a very long time ago) tourist-elegant hostelry, done in the Early Delapidated Miami Beach style, and holed up in my quarters to think about my next move. I was just getting adjusted to the lumps in the sawdust mattress when the boys in blue arrived. They pointed some guns at me and told me they were Special Treasury cops, and showed me little gold badges to prove it. After they finished the room they told me not to leave town, that they’d have a fishy eye on me and, oh yes, to watch myself. While I was working on a snappy answer to that one, they left. They seemed to be in a hurry. The visit bothered me a little because I couldn’t figure what it was for, so I gave it up and got a few hours’ sleep.
Before dawn, about two hours later, I was at the broken-down ops shed, clearing my shore-boat, which went fast because I’d taken the time to put on the old uniform I kept in my foot-locker for such occasions. It was all “Yes, sir, Cap’n, sir” and “anything more I can do for you, sir?” A line captain still impresses the yokels in all those border towns. I made it to my bucket, which that year happened to be a converted ex-Navy hundred-ton light destroyer, and by the time I had unpacked, and downed a number-three-ration lunch, I was on track for home, with the job done, my hard-earned quarter-mil waiting, and not a care in the world. Just after I cleaned the disposal unit and reset it, feeling about as good as anybody in my profession ever gets to feel, they hit me.
It was only a mild jolt of EMS, that didn’t even heat the brass buttons on my fancy suit, but it put my tub into a tumble and blew every soft circuit aboard. I made it to the special manual-hydraulic-combustion panel I’d had installed very quietly at one of the best hot-drops on Callisto, and prepared my little surprise. The primitive optic fibre periscope showed me a stubby black fifty-tonner with the gold-and-blue blazon of the Special Treasury cops holding station parallel to my axis of spin and about a hundred yards away. Two men were on the way across, using the very latest in fail-safe EVA units, and towing a heavy-duty can opener, so I opened up before they could use the cutter, and was looking at the same pair who’d frisked my room back on Little C.
They were almost polite about it; it seemed they took my blue suit seriously, called me “Captain” ten times in five minutes. They didn’t waste a lot of time on preliminaries, just went directly to the cargo access hatch and broke the lock on it before I could key it, and after a good ten seconds inside, came out and told me my rights. It seems they’d found a load of the pink stuff that would have half the population of the System yodelling Pagliacci from the top of the nearest flagpole if it were evenly distributed. Now I knew what they’d been in a hurry to do after their informal call at my flop.
I explained that it was all just one of those snafus, that I must have gotten somebody else’s baggage by mistake, but they weren’t listening. Instead, two more glum-looking fellows arrived, and after a very brief conference, they went to my quarters and straight to the shore-pack I’d had with me on Ceres, and came up with an envelope full of documents that proved that I had bought and paid for the dope in the open market on Charon, about three weeks before I had been released from the hospital at Pluto Station. I told them about my alibi, and they checked a little and the boss cop, a skinny, big-nosed little bantam they called Mr. Illini, took me aside.
“Why a man in your position would think you could sneak a load in past us, is beyond me,” he confided. “You know as well as I do, Captain, that we’ve got the Inner Line sealed with the best equipment there is. No way can a tub like this get by us. Get your stuff, we’re going in to Mars Four to book you. And by the way, are you really Navy? If so, it seems you blew your retirement, pal.”
It seemed the boys had something in mind, so I didn’t spring my little surprise, but let them take me in tow.
4
Along the way, Illini gave me the dirt in small doses, starting with some cultural orientation on an extra-solar planet called Vangard, an almost-but-not-quite Earth-type in a lonely orbit out near Alpha, and all about how the first colonists had almost made it, in spite of a few problems like low G, so they had to learn to walk all over again, and an average surface temperature well below the freezing point of H20, and all that. Seems the low G had the effect of confusing the body’s growth control system, and the third generation males averaged nine feet in height, all in good proportion and fully functional, so the last few survivors hung on and stretched the original homestead rights past the three hundred year mark. “A damn shame,” Illini told me: “A handful of oversized squatters sustaining a Class Four Quarantine that prevents proper development of all that territory! Territory we need, dammit!” He worked up a little righteous wrath, going over all this stuff that he knew I knew at least as well as he did; then he got to the point:
“Just one left,” he said. “One man, one oversized clodhopper, and now they’ve raised the classification to Q-5! Not a damn thing we can do about it legally, Ulrik—but there are a few of us that think the needs of the human race take precedence. So—once this big fella is gone—Vangard is wide open. Need I say more?”
I was in no position to argue, even if I’d wanted to. They had me cold, and aside from the details of the planted dope and the planted papers, it was all perfectly legit. They were bona-fide T-men, and nobody, not even I, took jazreel-smuggling as a harmless, boyish prank.
I picked the right moment and tripped the master switch to cancel the surprise party for the boys, having decided I wasn’t quite yet ready for suicide. They never knew how close they’d come. Well, it would have been a flashy exit, for all hands.
It wasn’t a fun voyage home, but finally it was over, and they hustled me right along to jail, and the next day into court.
5
It wasn’t a real courtroom, but that figured, because it wasn’t a real court-martial, and a good thing, too. The load of pink stuff I’d been caught with would have gotten me cashiered, and life plus twenty in the big lockup at League Central, if the line-captain’s uniform I’d been wearing hadn’t been phony. Still, the boys weren’t kidding, so I played along solemnly as they went through the motions, found me guilty as hell, and then got down to business.
“Baird Ulrik,” the big fellow with the old-fashioned whiskers said in his big, official-sounding voice. “It is the judgment of this court that such disposal shall be made of you as is prescribed by itself.”