GUSTAVUS ADOLPHUS BRANNHARD puffed contentedly on his cigar. Behind him, a couple of things more or less like birds twittered among the branches of a tree. In front, the towering buildings of Mallorysport were black against a riot of sunset red and gold and orange. From across the lawn came sounds of Fuzzies — Ben Rainsford’s Flora and Fauna and a couple of their visitors — at play. Ben Rainsford, an elfish little man with a bald head and a straggly red beard, sat hunched forward in his chair, staring into a highball he held in both hands.

“But, Gus,” he was protesting. “Don’t you think Victor Grego can be trusted?”

That was a volte-face for Ben. A couple of months ago he’d been positive that there was no infamous treachery too black for Grego.

“Sure I do.” Gus shifted the cigar to his left hand and picked up his own drink, an old-fashioned glass full of straight whiskey. “You just have to watch him a little, that’s all.” A few drops of whiskey dribbled into his beard; he blotted them with the back of his hand and put the cigar back into his mouth. “Why?”

“Well, all this ‘until adjudged invalid by the court’ stuff in the agreements. You think he’s fixing booby traps for us?”

“No. I know what he’s doing. He’s fixing to bluff the Terra-side stockholders of the old Chartered Company. Make them think he’ll break the agreements and negotiate new ones for himself if they don’t go along with him. He wants to keep control of the new Company himself.”

“Well, I’m with him on that!” Rainsford said vehemently. “Monopoly or no monopoly, I want the Company run on Zarathustra, for the benefit of Zarathustra. But then, why do you want to hold off on signing the agreements?”

“Just till after the election, Ben. We want our delegates elected, and we want our Colonial Constitution adopted. Once we do that, we won’t have any trouble electing the kind of a legislature we want. But there’s going to be opposition to this public-land deal. A lot of people have been expecting to get rich staking claims to the land the Pendarvis Decisions put in public domain, and now it’s being all leased back to the CZC for a thousand years, and that’s longer than any of them want to wait.”

“Gus, a lot more people, and a lot more influential people, are going to be glad the Government won’t have to start levying taxes,” Rainsford replied.

Ben had a point there. There’d never been any kind of taxation on Zarathustra; the Company had footed all the bills for everything. And now there wouldn’t be need for any in the future, not even for the new Native Commission. The Fuzzies would be paying their own way, from sunstone royalties.

“And the would-be land-grabbers aren’t organized, and we are,” Rainsford went on. “The only organized opposition we ever had was from this People’s Prosperity Party of Hugo Ingermann’s, and now Ingermann’s a dead duck.”

That was over optimism, a vice to which Ben wasn’t ordinarily addicted.

“Ben, any time you think Hugo Ingermann’s dead, you want to shoot him again. He’s just playing possum.”

“I wish we could have him shot for real, along with the rest of them.”

“Well, he wasn’t guilty along with the rest of them, that’s why we couldn’t. It’s probably the only thing in his life he hasn’t been guilty of, but he didn’t know anything about that job till they hauled him in and began interrogating him. Why, Nifflheim, we couldn’t even get him disbarred!”

He and Leslie Coombes had tried hard enough, but the Bar Association was made up of lawyers, and lawyers are precedent-minded. Most of them had crooked clients themselves, and most of them had cut corners representing them. They didn’t want Ingermann’s disbarment used as a precedent against them.

“And now he’s defending Thaxter and the Evinses and Novaes,” Rainsford said. “He’ll get them off, too; you watch if he doesn’t.”

“Not while I’m Chief Prosecutor!”

He shifted his cigar again, and had a drink on that. He wished he felt as confident as he’d sounded.

THE DEPUTY-MARSHAL UNLOCKED the door and stood aside for Hugo Ingermann to enter, looking at him as though he’d crawled from under a flat stone. Everybody was looking at him that way around Central Courts now. He smiled sweetly.

“Thank you, deputy,” he said.

“Don’t bother, I get paid for it,” the uniformed deputy said. “All I hope is they draw my name out of the hat when they take your clients out in the jail-yard. Too bad you won’t be going along with them. I’d pay for the privilege of shooting you.”

And if he complained to the Colonial Marshal, Max Fane would say, “Hell, so would I.”

The steel-walled room was small and bare, its only furnishings a table welded to the steel floor and half a dozen straight chairs. It reeked of disinfectant, like the rest of the jail. He got out his cigarettes and lit one, then laid the box and the lighter on the table and looked quickly about. He couldn’t see any screen-pickup — maybe there wasn’t any — but he was sure there was a microphone somewhere. He was still looking when the door opened again.

Three men and a woman entered, in sandals, long robes, and, probably, nothing else. They’d been made to change before being brought here, and would change back after a close physical search before being returned to their cells. Another deputy was with them. He said:

“Two hours maximum. If you’re through before then, use the bell.”

Then the door was closed and locked.

“Don’t say anything,” he warned. “The room’s probably bugged. Sit down; help yourselves to cigarettes.”

He remained standing, looking at them: Conrad Evins, small and usually fussy and precise, now tense and haggard. He had been chief gem-buyer for the Company; the robbery had been his idea originally — his or his wife’s. Rose Evins, having lighted a cigarette, sat looking at it, her hands on the table. She was a dead woman and had accepted her fate; her face was calm with the resignation of hopelessness. Leo Thaxter, beefy and blue-jowled, with black hair and an out-thrust lower lip, was her brother. He had been top man in the loan-shark racket, and banker for the Mallorysport underworld; and he had been the front through whom Ingermann had acquired title to much of the privately owned real estate north of the city. It had been in one of those buildings, a vacant warehouse, that the five Fuzzies captured on Beta Continent had been kept and trained to crawl through ventilation ducts and remove simulated sunstones from cabinets in a mock-up of the Company gem-vault. Phil Novaes, the youngest of the four, was afraid and trying not to show it. He and his partner, Moses Herckerd, former Company survey-scouts, had captured the Fuzzies and brought them to town. Herckerd wasn’t present; he’d stopped too many submachine-gun bullets the night of the attempted robbery.

“Well,” he began when he had their attention, “they have you cold on the larceny and burglary and criminal conspiracy charges. Nobody, not even I, can get you acquitted of them. That’s ten-to-twenty, and don’t expect any minimum sentences, either; they’ll throw the book at all of you. I do not, however, believe that you can be convicted of the two capital charges, enslavement and faginy. Just to make sure, though, I believe it would be wise for you to plead guilty to the larceny and burglary and conspiracy charges if the prosecution will agree to drop the other two.”

The four looked at one another. He lit a fresh cigarette from the end of the old one, dropping the butt on the floor and tramping it.

“Twenty years is a hell of a long time,” Thaxter said. “You’re dead a damn sight longer, though. Yes, if you can make a deal, go ahead.”

“What makes you think you can?” Conrad Evins demanded. “You say they’re sure of conviction on the sunstone charges. Why would they take a plea on them and drop the Fuzzy charges? That’s what they really want to convict us on.”