"No, no," I said. "But..."

"You may be a Federal agent, sir, but you do not understand the brain. I will contest with violence any effort to remove a menace from society! Good day, sir!"

He banged down the phone.

I sat there staring.

Thank Gods, no such barriers stood between committing Heller and Krak. Their court orders were already signed and waiting only to be served.

But Teenie Whopper?

A pawn trained by experts in the badger game from infancy. A confirmed pot smoker. A pathological liar racing around ruining everyone's reputation.

She could get me sterilized and sent to prison to be (bleeped) by homo cons.

DANGEROUS! She made Jack the Ripper look like a saint!

I had passed by my last opportunity to murder her. I couldn't strangle her now without going to prison if she vanished.

I couldn't possibly leave her alive to ruin me with lies and photos. And I couldn't kill her. All solutions were blocked.

I began to feel sort of insane.

I couldn't stay here with homos pawing at me.

I couldn't leave.

Yet I had to leave.

If I left, Teenie and a warrant for rape could reach me and finish me wherever I went.

Suddenly, bravely, I realized I could not just sit there and go crazy.

I must get a plan. I must get a plan. I must get a plan!

Heller's viewer was a sort of mockery to me. The day, where he was, was beautiful and mild, a calm disturbed only by the rolling swell which pulsed through the blue water. The clouds, as in a picture book, stood like castles along the horizon. The yacht's stabilizers had her rolling not at all.

He was standing at the rail, gazing out, probably westward to New York under the horizon. It was an otherwise deserted sea.

Captain Bitts came up. "Top of the morning to you, Mr. Haggarty," he saluted. "It's pleased I am to see you all shipshape and Bristol fashion and well recovered from your wounds."

"It was poker," said Heller. "A truly remarkable game. Very therapeutic and instructive, too. But I was thinking, Captain Bitts, now that you have my marker for $18,005, the only way you can collect it is to land me in New York and let me go to a bank."

Suddenly I penetrated the sneakiness of the man. He had worked out a way to bribe Captain Bins! By letting him win at poker! Ah, Heller, go ahead and plot: if you succeed in getting ashore, the court will have you picked up and committed to Bellevue Hospital, thanks to Dingaling, Chase and Ambo and my ingenuity.

Mentally, I urged at Captain Bitts to fall for it. It would deliver Heller into my hands.

"Mr. Haggarty," said Captain Bitts, "this is very tempting. But let us review the situation: The enemies of Turkey are after you; probably Russian agents dog your trail; I have my orders from the owner's concubine to not let you ashore. I regret that, even to my financial distress, the answer is no."

(Bleep) him! He thought Krak was my concubine as she had used my Squeeza credit card to buy the yacht. He was working against his own boss! Me.

"Ah, well," said Heller, "if you won't, you won't. It does happen, however, that I am a little bored. I have heard of a game called 'dice.' Could you teach me to play it?"

Captain Bitts assured him that he would be glad to, first thing after lunch.

I thought all this over. I was looking for some advantage on which to base a plan.

Something went flash in my head. I grabbed the phone and called the State Department in Washington, office of the Secretary of State. I decided to use the name of Rockecenter's law firm.

"This is Swindle and Crouch," I told the clerk.

"Yessir!" he said, instantly respectful and alert.

"There is a yacht upon the high seas called the Golden Sunset. There is a desperate and notorious criminal aboard, an American. I want your advice about calling the Navy Department to have her boarded and the criminal seized."

"Where is he wanted, sir?"

"There is an outstanding commitment warrant unserved in the New York Superior Court. And within a few days there will be another warrant."

"What is the national flag of the yacht, sir?"

"Turkish," I said.

"I will have to get an opinion from our Citizen Harassment Section. Please hold on."

I sat anxiously.

He came back on. "I'm terribly sorry that I have bad news, sir. We are of course devoted to the arduous task of making all possible trouble for U. S. citizens wherever they may be found, and we are usually very successful at it: just today we had a U. S. mother and her two babies seized by the Chinese after we planted contraband in their nursing bottles, so we don't want to give you the idea that we lack zeal. But through an oversight by our Legal Section, the extradition treaty between Turkey and the United States has expired and it will take several years to get the paper work from one basket to another here to get it renewed. So it would be illegal to board the yacht and seize the subject U. S. citizen."

"Oh, too bad!" I said.

"Do you know if the subject U. S. citizen has committed any crimes in Turkey? If he has, why, then we could threaten to reduce our support of their army-they're very dependent upon their army to keep the people under repressive rule-and the Turks, of course, would arrest and imprison the man."

"I'm afraid we couldn't prove any crimes in Turkey," I said.

"That's too bad," said the State Department man. "It's sort of frustrating to have some U. S. citizen out there that we can't harass and get arrested. Usually we can think of some way, unless, of course, the person is a known political terrorist: we have to protect those to keep everything stirred up and the media happy. If he isn't a registered terrorist or a drug runner, there should be some way the State Department could help make trouble in the world."

"He isn't either one of those," I said.

"Ah, wait a minute. As soon as your call came in, we flashed the information into our various sections that Swindle and Crouch was on the line, and our State Department Intelligence Chief has just slid a memo onto my desk. He recommends you call the President and have him order the CIA to simply blow the yacht out of the water. This is the routine solution to such cases and I hope it is of assistance. We can't have some U. S. citizen out of the country and unharassed, so we are only too glad to have your assistance in serving the national in­terest."

"Count on the Rockecenters to do that," I said and hung up.

(BLEEP)!

I couldn't put the solution into effect for two good reasons: Heller was carrying a CIA passport identifying him as H. Hider Haggarty, and the moment the CIA heard that, they would think it was one of their own men and wouldn't act. The other reason was more personal. It had really not occurred to me before that I owned that yacht!

For a bit I wondered about simply sending the cap­tain a radio and telling him when and where to dock and have the court officers waiting there to pick up Heller. But it was too simple to work. They warn you against simple solutions in the Apparatus. It, however, was impossible because the captain would think the radio was a fake. For all he knew, the real owner was in Turkey and not in New York. Without my presenting identity to Cap­tain Bitts personally, he would just consider my radio a ruse of the enemies of Turkey. He would show it to Heller and Heller would be alerted that I had a hand in this. Heller would tell Krak and Krak would track me down.

This train of thought collided abruptly with the fact that the Countess Krak might very well, at that moment, be following some line of investigation which would lead her to me!

A horrifying threat!

It was one of those awful days when just at the moment you were sure things couldn't get any worse, they did!