We can do it, too. We’ve got all the time we need to build up our base, even if that man has warned his kind—who probably wouldn’t believe him anyway. Because remember this always, and feel secure: No being on the third planet ever knows what is happening on the other side of its satellite.
Public Eye
The great criminal lawyer had never looked so smugly self-satisfied, not even just after he had secured the acquittal of the mass murderer of an entire Martian family.
“Yes, gentlemen,” he smirked, “I will gladly admit that this century has brought the science—one might almost say the art—of criminalistics to its highest peak. Throughout the teeming billions of the system, man continues to obey his primal urge to murder; yet for fifty years your records have not been blotted, if I may indulge in such a pen-and-ink archaism, by one unsolved murder case.”
Fers Brin shifted restlessly. He was a little too conscious of the primal urge to murder in himself at the moment. It was just as well that Captain Wark chose that point to interrupt the florid speech.
“Mr. Mase,” the old head of the Identification Bureau said simply, “I’m proud to say that’s true. Not one unsolved murder among damned near seventy billion people, on nine planets and God knows how many satellites and asteroids; but I’d hate to tell you how many unconvicted murderers.”
“Who needs to tell him?” Brin grunted.
“Oh come now,” Dolf Mase smiled. “I’m hardly responsible for all of them. Ninety per cent or so, I’ll grant you; but there are other lawyers. And I’m not at all sure that any of us are responsible. So long as the system sticks to the Terran code, which so fortunately for criminals was modeled on Anglo-American concepts rather than on the Code Napoleon . . .”
Captain Wark shook his grizzled head. “Uh-uh. We’ll keep on sticking to the idea that if justice is bound to slip, it’s better to free the guilty than convict the innocent. But it kind of seems to us, Mr. Mase, like you’ve been pushing this ‘free the guilty’ stuff a little far.”
“My dear Captain!”
The patronizing tone was too much for Brin. “Let’s cut the politeness, Mase. This is a declaration of war. Let’s have it out in the open. Captain Wark represents everything that’s official and sound and inescapable. And me—well, as the best damned public eye in the business, I represent everything that’s unofficial and halfjetted and just as inescapable. And we’re feeding it to you straight. Your quote legal unquote practice amounts to issuing a murder license to anybody with enough credits. You’ve got three choices: A, you retire; B, you devote that first-rate mind of yours to something that’ll benefit the system; C, the Captain and I are going to spend every minute off duty and half of ’em on hunting for the one slip you’ve made some time that’ll send you to the asteroid belt for life.”
Dolf Mase shrugged. “I wish you a long life of hunting. There’s no slip to find. And no!” he protested as Captain Wark began to speak. “Spare me the moral lecture which I can already read, my dear captain, in those honest steely eyes of yours. I have no desire to devote myself to the good of the system, nor to the good of anyone save Dolf Mase. Such altruism I leave to my revered if somewhat, as you would say, Mr. Brin, ‘half-jetted’ brother. I suffered enough from his starveling nobility in my younger days—I too declared war, first on him and then on the rest of the seventy billion . . . Good day, gentlemen—and may tomorrow find waiting in my office a sextuple sex slayer!” With this—and a gust of muted laughter—Dolf Mase left the Identification Bureau.
“You’ve got to hand it to him,” Fers Brin chuckled in spite of himself, as he contemplated the closing panel. “He picked the most unpronounceable damned exit line I ever heard.”
“And he pronounced it,” the Captain added morosely.
“He never slips,” Fers murmured.
The phone buzzed and Captain Wark clicked his switch.
The face on the screen bore an older, gentler version of the hawk-beaked, cragbrowed Mase features which had so recently been sneering at them. The voice too had the Mase resonance and formality, without the oversharp bite.
“Thank you, gentlemen,” said Lu Mase. “Deeply though I regret what I heard, I confess that I needed to hear it.”
“It’s like I told you, Professor,” said the Captain. “He’s always hated you and the cream of it all, to him, was making you think that he did his job for the sake of justice.”
Fers moved into phone range. “And now that you know, what follows?” he demanded. “There’s bound to be something somewhere. The devil himself isn’t perfect in deviltry.”
On the screen Professor Mase’s eyes seemed to stare unseeing at the infinite array of microbooks which lined his study. “There was that time when Dolf was young . . . He’d convinced me that he’d changed . . . And of course you’d have to study the statute of limitations.”
“We’ll have the best men in the system on it tomorrow,” Wark assured him hastily. “Just a minute. I’ll turn on the scriber and you can give me the details.”
“He’s my brother, Captain,” Mase said softly.
“Which means how much to him?” Fers snapped.
“Still . . . I’ll be in your office tomorrow at nine, Captain.”
The screen went dark.
Fers began a little highly creative improvisation in the way of cursing, not unaided by his habit of drinking with space pilots.
But Captain Wark was more sanguine. “What’s another day, Brin, when we’ve got the war launched at last? That was a first-rate job you did of fast-talking the Professor into listening in—and the brilliant Dolf Mase fell into the good old trap of thinking a phone’s off when its screen’s dead.”
“He didn’t fall,” Fers corrected. “He didn’t care. He’s so proud of what a big
