make human society possible. Until you arrived I would have said lawless Llayless is the most law-abiding world in the galaxy. If there has been a murder on this world, the fact that I never heard of it doesn’t mean that the crime hasn’t been noticed and the murderer hasn’t already been punished—under our form of law, not yours. If I can assist you further, come and see me.”
He got to his feet and touched Dantler’s hand briefly. Mr. Jabek murmured, “Come with me, please,” and led him into the adjoining office.
Half an hour later, armed with every credential Mr. Jabek could provide for him, Dantler returned to the ground floor and nodded perfunctorily at the blue-blond receptionist as he passed her on his way to the exit.
Hunting for a murderer on a world without government was an entirely new experience for Dantler. Regardless of what Pummery had said, there was a principle that held true everywhere in the galaxy: No government meant no laws. As he left for the Last Hope mine, the reported scene of the murder, he wondered again what he would charge the murderer with when he caught him, and what court of justice he would bring him before on a world that had no courts.
Probably it would have to be an intergalactic court on some other world, but on strictly local issues, such courts usually applied the laws of the world on which the lawbreaking occurred. There would have to be some roundabout charge—perhaps based on the fact that by murdering Douglas Vaisey, Roger Lefory had summarily terminated his right to that nebulous old saw of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The attorneys would have the time of their lives with it, but Dantler was confident of a conviction. Murder was the most serious charge in the legal arsenal, and courts would lean over backward to properly punish a murderer—especially when the murder had occurred on an Unnullified world that had neither government, law, nor courts.
Now Dantler was back in Pummery again, having tracked his murderer to Pummery’s huge Smelter No. 2. It was an all-electric operation—clean, quiet, and effectively temperature controlled. Dantler’s credentials gave him direct and immediate access to its superintendent, a youngish-looking black man named Edwin Sharle, who seemed as quietly competent and efficient as his smelter.
He was completely unaware that he had harbored a murderer among his employees, but the name “Roger Lefory” was familiar to him. “The man was always complaining about something,” he said. “He kept claiming that the other employees were making him the victim of all their pranks. They smeared glue on his chair, and when he sat in it, he couldn’t get up. He had to cut his trousers off, and they were ruined. His fellow workers had a way of timing their breaks so he was left with all the work to do. They filled his locker with trash, and another time they balanced a can of paint so it dumped on him when he opened the locker’s door. That’s only the beginning of a list. I’m sure a record was made. Do you want to see it?”
Dantler shook his head. “What did you make of all that?”
“I checked his work record from the Last Hope mine and, before and after that, the Laughingstock. Everywhere he worked, he found excuses for not working. Many of the pranks he described sounded like fellow workers being fed up with his constantly shifting his workload to them. So I told him to try to be more friendly and cooperative with the people who worked with him and to do a little work himself.”
“With what result?”
“He quit without notice. Went to one of the more distant mines, the Shangri-la, and got a job there. I know that because they asked me for his work record. I never heard him mentioned again.”
Dantler’s next stop was the Llayless Record Section, where he was given a computer station and access to the complete record of Roger Lefory—to the extent that the world kept records on one of its lesser residents. Lefory’s entire employment history was there as far as the Shangri-la. Every employer, including the last one, remarked that the man was lazy and avoided work whenever he could. The file ended with a terse note from the Shangri-la manager, dated almost a year before. Employee Roger Lefory was missing from his job. There was nothing unusual about that—he had left every job he had held without notice—but this time there was no record that he had gone anywhere else. He had simply vanished.
Dantler made inquiries. There were a few solitary prospectors searching for paydirt on the far side of the mountains surrounding Pummery. Some of them had developed a knack for living off the country. There were edible plants, berries, and fruits. There were game birds and animals for those who had the skill to catch them. Most Llayless residents had no time for that sort of thing, but prospectors usually had little money and in any case didn’t want to take the time for a long trip back to a commissary. There was nothing unusual about a man being missing for almost a year.
Before leaving for the Shangri-la mine, Dantler paid another call on Jeffrey Wallingford Pummery. The factor greeted him courteously and asked how he could be of service.
Dantler described his investigation to date. “A man was murdered,” he said. “There are witnesses who saw it done. No report was made to anyone on the management level of the mines where Lefory worked, or to the smelter where he worked, or to world management because no report was required. The murderer was left free to drift from job to job. Now he has gone prospecting and may be difficult to find. This represents a flagrant violation of the Inter-World Federation’s constitution—failing to protect the lives of your citizens by providing no mechanism for taking action against a murderer. I’m going to recommend that your world’s status be changed immediately from ‘Unnullified’ to ‘Nullified.’ I’ll get a spacegram off today. As the law requires, I am giving you written notice of that fact so you can prepare your defense. There will be a hearing, of course.”
Pummery glanced at the paper Dantler handed to him and then handed it back. There was a faint smile
on his face. “I suggest that you hold off with your report—and with your notification—until you have completed your investigation. You haven’t visited the Shangri-la mine, yet. Surely your investigation will be incomplete without evidence from the last place Lefory is known to have worked.”
Dantler studied him warily. He scented a trap. After a moment’s thought, he said, “Certainly, if you prefer it. It probably won’t delay things more than a day.”
The Shangri-la was just as promising a mine as the Laughingstock, its manager—one Pierre Somler—told Dantler, but it was still in an early stage of development. Thus far its profits had been invested in machinery; the dwellings were shacks, and so was the office.
The manager vividly remembered Lefory. “The record said he was lazy. He was spectacularly lazy. On my visits to the diggings, I rarely found him working. He was always taking a break.”
“But you kept him on because of the labor shortage,” Dantler said wearily.
Somler nodded. “That, and because we always hope that a poor employee will change his habits.
Usually that happens when dividends are paid and everyone else receives a tidy bonus. A poor employee’s long list of demerits results in his receiving nothing. He immediately decides to be at the top of the list when the next dividends are declared. But it didn’t happen that way with Lefory. Shiftless he was; shiftless he remained.
“Then there were his complaints about his fellow workers. He kept saying they were trying to ‘get’ him. He had the darndest accidents, some of them almost unbelievable. He wanted to be a heavy machine operator, but on his first try, a freak short circuit nearly electrocuted him. After that he wouldn’t go near one of the machines. The head flew off a fellow worker’s pickax and put him in the hospital for a few days. If it’d hit him in the head instead of the back, it would have killed him. That sort of thing. Finally he vanished.”
“Was it a planned disappearance? I mean—did he accumulate supplies for a stay in the wilderness and take prospecting equipment with him?”
“I think he did. He had mentioned to one of the workers that he was going back to Pummery the next morning and leave Llayless on the first ship out. He thought this was an unlucky world for him, and he could do better starting fresh somewhere else. But that night someone broke into the commissary and took the sort of supplies a prospector would want, and a worker saw Lefory sneaking away on a mountain path with a pack on his back.”
“Is there any other evidence that he is out there in the wilderness?”
“No. But it’s the ideal place for him. No fellow workers he has to get along with, he can work whatever hours he sets for himself, and take a day off when he wants to. All he has to do is figure out how to eat regularly.”
“And all I have to do,” Dantler said, “is figure out how to catch him. A world without a government, and without any police force, is a poor place for a manhunt.”
Jeffrey Wallingford Pummery said with interest, “Do you mean you’ve abandoned your search?”
