“Right then,” Bolivar said. “We go stir up old Dirty Dorsky and get out of here…”

“…and do something about it,” James added, finishing the sentence. They did this often, many times thinking as one.

We marched. In step, at a good doubletime of 120 paces to the minute. Through the great hall and past all the skeletons in chains, up the main staircase, splashing through the water running constantly down it, and into the Head’s office.

“You can’t go in there,” his secretary-bodyguard said, surging to his feet, 200 kilos of trained fighting flesh. We scarcely slowed and only broke step going over his unconscious body. Dorsky looked up growling when we came through the door, gun ready in his fist.

“Put it away,” I told him. “It is an emergency and I have come for my sons a few days early. Would you be so kind as to give them their graduation certificates and expiration of term-served papers.”

“Go to hell. No exceptions. Get out of here,” he suggested.

I smiled at the unswerving gun and decided that explanation would be more fruitful than violence.

“This is a bit of an emergency. My wife, the boys’ mother, was arrested this morning and taken away.”

“It was due to happen. You lead undisciplined lives. Now get out.”

“Listen, you dough-faced, moron-brained, military dinosaur, I came here for neither your sympathy nor malice. If this was an ordinary arrest the arrestees would have been unconscious soon after opening the door. Detectives, cops, military police, customs agents, none of those could stand before the wrath of my sweet Angelina.”

“Well?” he said, puzzled, but gun barrel still ready.

“She went along quietly in order to give me time. Time that I will need. Because I checked the license plate numbers and these thugs were agents for…” I took a deep breath, “…agents for Interstellar Internal and External Revenue.”

“The income tax men,” he breathed and his eyes glowed redly. The gun vanished. “James diGriz, Bolivar diGriz, step forward. Accept these graduation certificates as tokens of your reluctant completion of all courses and of time served here. You are now alumni of Dorsky Military Boarding School and Penitentiary and I hope you will, like the other graduates, remember us with a little curse before retiring each night. I would shake your hands except my bones are getting brittle and I am laying off the hand-to-hand combat. Go forth with your father and join him in the battle against evil and strike a blow for me as well.”

That was all there was to it. A minute later we were out in the sunshine and climbing into the car. The boys left their childish possessions behind them in the school and entered the world of adult responsibility.

“They won’t hurt Mom, will they?” James asked. “They won’t live long if they do,” Boliver said, and I distinctly heard his teeth grinding together.

“No, of course not. Getting her release will be easy enough, as long as we can get to the records in time.”

“What records?” Bolivar asked. “And why did Dirty Dorsky help so easily? That’s not like him.”

“It is like him because under that veneer of stupidity, violence and military sadism he is still roughly human like the rest of us. And like us, he regards the tax man as the natural enemy.”

“I don’t understand,” James said, then grabbed the handhold as we snarled around a tight bend just a micrometer from the edge of the vertical drop.

“Unhappily you will,” I told him. “Your lives have been sheltered up until now, in that you have been spending but not earning. Soon you will be earning like the rest of us and, with the arrival of your first credit, sweat of your palms and brow, the tax man will arrive as well. Swooping in ever smaller circles, screaming shrilly, until he perches on your shoulder and with yellow beak bites most of the money from your grasp.”

“You sure turn a nice simile, Dad.”

“It’s true, it’s true,” I muttered, swinging into the motorway and roaring into the fast lane. “Big government means big bureaucracy which means big taxes; there seems to be no way out of it. Once you’re involved in the system, you are trapped, and you end by paying more and more taxes. Your mother and I have a little nest egg put aside for investing for your future. Money earned before you lads were born.”

“Money stolen before we were born,” Bolivar said. “Profits from illegal operations on a dozen worlds.”

“We didn’t!”

“You did, Dad,” James said. “We broke into enough files and records to find out just where all the money came from.”

“Those days are behind us!”

“We hope not!” both boys said in unison. “What would the galaxy be like without a few stainless steel rats to stir them up. We have heard your bedtime lectures about how bank robbery helps the economy. It gives the bored police something to do, the newspapers something to print, the population something to read about, the insurers something to pay off. It is a boost to the economy and keeps the money in circulation. It is the work of a philanthropist.”

“No! I did not raise my boys to be crooks.”

“You didn’t?”

“Well, maybe to be good crooks. To take only from those who can afford it, to injure no one, to be kind, courteous, friendly and irreverent. To be crooked just long enough to be enlisted in the Special Corps where you can serve mankind best by tracking down the real crooks.”

“And the real crooks we are tracking down now?”

“The income tax people! As long as your mother and I were stealing money and spending it there were no problems. But as soon as we took our hard-earned salaries in the Corps and invested them we ran afoul of the tax people. We made a few minor bookkeeping errors…”

“Like not reporting any of your profits?” James asked innocently.

“Yes, that’s the sort of thing. By hindsight it was rather foolish. We should have gone back to robbing banks. So now we are enmeshed in their coils, playing their games, getting involved in court actions, audits, lawyers, fines, jail terms—the whole mess. There is only one answer, one final solution. That is why your mother went away calmly with these financial vampires. To leave me free to cut the Gordian knot and get us out of this mess.”

“What will we have to do?” they asked in eager unison.

“Destroy all of our tax records in their files, that’s what. And end up broke—but free and happy.”

We sat in the darkened car and I nibbled nervously at my finger-nails. “It’s no good,” I said at last. “I am racked with guilt. I cannot steer two innocents into a life of crime.”

There were snorts, indicating strong emotions of some kind, from the back seat. Then the doors were hurled open and slammed shut again just as quickly and I looked up in shocked surprise as they both stamped away down the night-filled street. Had I driven them away? Would they attempt to do the job on their own and bungle it? What disasters lay ahead? I was fumbling with the door handle, trying to make my mind up, when the footsteps grew louder again, returning. I stepped out to meet them when they came back, faces grim and empty of humor.

“My name is James,” James said, “and this is my brother, Bolivar. We are adults under law having passed the age of eighteen. We can legally drink, smoke, curse and chase girls. We can also, if we choose, decide to break any law or laws of any planet knowing full well that if we are caught in crime we will have to pay the penalty. We have heard a rumor from a relative that you, crooked Slippery Jim, are about to break the law in a singularly good cause and we want to sign up for the job. What do you say, Dad?”

What could I say? Was that a lump in the old rat’s throat, a tear forming in his rodent eye? I hoped not; emotion and crime do not mix.

“Right,” I snapped, in my best imitation of a drill sergeant with piles. “You’re enlisted. Follow instructions, ask questions only if the instructions are unclear, otherwise do what I do, do what I say. Agreed?”