An idea suddenly made contact in MacCauley’s mind. He signaled the officer and dragged out a notebook and pencil, unnecessarily, as it happened. The Kiddie, in sinuous gestures, signified that he could understand English, partly by lipreading, partly by picking up the sound in some weird fashion through rock-conduction and the sensitive soles of his splay feet.
Mac, enunciating carefully, spoke.
“One of your people has robbed me. I want him arrested. Where do I go?”
The Kiddie bobbed his head, and from the manner in which his luminiferous glands sparkled balefully, it was evident where he thought MacCauley should go. Nevertheless, he snapped out his little pad and stylus, and scrawled: “Commi wih me tu Offic he wil arange arest.”
MacCauley deciphered the scribble. He shrugged and said, “Okay. Hop to it, sonny.” He walked beside the diminutive policeman for a few hundred feet, glancing incuriously at the small burrows which pierced the rock walls and kicking away chunks of the queer, spongy rock on which the Kiddies subsisted, the equivalent of Earthly garbage.
He should have thought of the cops before, he realized. The Kiddies, as a race, were not numerous, and he could probably bully them into finding the thief and recovering his money. After all, why not?
He soon found out. The lolling half-breed Venusian interpreter who loafed around the ratty, worm-infested police station heard his complaint and deftly translated it for the benefit of a moth-eaten Kiddie who seemed to be as much in charge here as anyone else. MacCauley drew an easy breath, his first in two hours, and then—
The interpreter singsonged, “Forty Earth-dollars, please. Filing fee.”
MacCauley’s eyes narrowed. The old squeeze play. “Don’t be a sap,” he said flatly, his thin lips tight against his teeth. “I haven’t got forty cents. That little louse took everything that was in my pocket.”
The Venusian smirked, and regarded his greenish, webbed hand with great interest. “That is very bad, my friend,” he said, and flicked a flea from a fold in the skin of his wrinkled wrist. “Here on Pallas we have a law; the citizens must be protected. When a foreigner makes an accusation against a citizen, it is quite possible that he is wrong, and a great injustice will have been done. As you know, there is only one way to soothe a Palladian … money.”
MacCauley cursed bitterly, harsh, biting oaths. “All right,” he said then, forcing his tone to evenness. “I’ll sign a guarantee of the money. When you catch this pickpocket, you’ll reclaim the money; then I’ll put up the bond pending trial.”
By great effort the interpreter managed to look shocked. “That is absurd. You must pay now; if the Palladian is innocent, he will not have the money. No, it is impossible.”
“If he’s innocent it’ll be because you caught the wrong guy. Why, by all the Plutonian Ice Devils, should I have to pay for your mistake?”
The green-skinned man smirked again. “It is the law. The law is very strict. If you do not like it, you can go back to the planet you came from.” And he turned away, busying himself with some important-looking papers, dusty and much-handled. MacCauley was not too preoccupied to note that the blubbery Venusian was holding them upside-down.
MacCauley socked his balled fist into his palm and wondered if pacing the littered floor would help. He was now, he assured himself, in the worst of all fixes. The time he’d been trapped between two hostile groups of Mercurians who were settling a private argument with quarter-mile lightning bolts was a pleasure compared to this. Then he’d had his guns, at least, and no restrictions about using them.
He had to have his kit. Which meant getting his money back. It was necessary, he decided, to play his trump card. He hadn’t wanted to reveal himself as a freelancing T.P.L. man; word would be sure to leak out. But he certainly couldn’t accomplish anything otherwise; the chance of recovering the credits, and eventually his matériel, was nil without some sort of aid. And that was what he could get only by showing these small-time constables that he was Mr. Law himself. It may be also that he was motivated by justifiable conceit in T.P.L. itself.
“Okay,” he snapped suddenly, startling the pudgy hybrid with the sharpness of his voice. “I guess there’s no point in keeping under wraps any longer. Let me tell you who I am. …”
Twenty minutes later, as he stumbled out of the warped stone building, he was wondering dazedly why his T.P.L. affiliation had done him no good.
Tri-Planet Law was an organization that had considerable history, nor could all of it be written. It was the most potent single force in the history of any planet of the Solar System, figured any way you like. It was the only force whose rule was hardly ever challenged.
When you broke the law within the territories mandated by T.P.L., you did so with the very greatest caution. And you never tried to fight back if you were caught. It wasn’t really a large organization, relative to the vast throngs of intelligent life that swarmed the System. It was only a tiny decimal of one percent of the entire population of the thirty inhabited globes. But when you consider that the total census showed more than a hundred billion individuals of high enough brainpower to be rated sentient, you can understand that a fraction of a percent does mean close to a hundred and thirty thousand persons united into the best-organized police and military force that a hundred trained social technicians could evolve.
That is why MacCauley couldn’t understand the fact that the half-breed interpreter had practically laughed in his face.
True, T.P.L.’s hundred and thirty thousand of personnel were largely on the planets of Earth, Mars and Venus, plus their possessions and allied states. T.P.L. had no standing here, officially, but the organization had a de facto reign over
