The crowd was silent.

They were incredulous.

They became hostile!

Heller stood there in the middle of the floor. Torgut was a half-dead mess against the far wall, blood trickling down his shoulders. Three town Turks were getting themselves untangled from chairs near him. Musef was collapsed and moaning at Heller’s feet.

With his two hands, Heller straightened up his own collar. “And now,” he said, in a conversational voice, “who pays me the five hundred lira?”

Now, money is a very important subject to the impoverished Turk. If Heller had had any sense, he would have simply walked out. But he doesn’t have any training in this sort of thing. I would have been running already.

The townsmen jabbered together. Then one said in English, “It wasn’t a fair bet. You, a foreigner, took advantage of these two poor boys!”

“Yes,” said an old Turk. “You exploited them!”

“No, no, no,” said the proprietor, getting brave. “You owe me for all this damage. You started the fight!”

Heller looked them over. “You mean you are not going to see that an honest wager is paid?”

The crowd sensed its numbers. It started to edge forward hostilely toward Heller. One tough-looking fellow was nearest Heller.

“Are you going to see that the bargain is kept?” said Heller to the nearest man.

The crowd was closer. Somebody had Torgut’s iron pipe.

“Ah, well,” said Heller. And before anyone could block him he grabbed Musef off the floor and with a wide sweeping movement threw him at the proprietor!

Musef landed against the counter. Glasses and bottles and kegs soared into the air. The counter fell over on the proprietor!

Every man in that room had ducked!

As the noise died down, Heller said, “Honor seems to be something you have never heard of.” He shook his head sadly. “And I did want to try some of your beer.”

Heller walked out.

The crowd had recovered a bit. They surged to the door after him and there they began to throw bottles and yell derisively and do catcalls.

Heller just kept on walking.

I saw that he was limping.

I really hugged myself. He had been utterly routed!

His crude scheme to get some money had failed.

Ah, indeed, the roles had reversed. He was the dog and I the hero here.

I went to bed singing — while Heller limped the miles back to base, broke, outcast and alone.

The next morning, I felt pretty cheery, I can tell you. I got up early and put on an orange silk shirt and black pants and a cobra-skin belt, with shoes to match.

I had melon and cacik — cucumber salad with yogurt, garlic and olive oil dressing — and I washed it down with very sweet coffee. Delicious. When I criticized it to the cook, he looked so woebegone, I really had to laugh. The whole staff looked woebegone, having been up all night trying to find something they had not done. The joke was on them. I really laughed.

Then I got busy with a big sheet of paper. I am a long way from a draftsman but I sure knew what I wanted. It was up to somebody else to try to make it out.

The school owned another piece of property a little bit closer to town. It had been planned to build a staff recreational hall there but I had other ideas.

I was designing a hospital. It would be one story, with a basement. It would have numerous wards and operating rooms. It would also have a parking lot. It would be surrounded by a wire fence made to look like a hedge. And in the basement it would have numerous private rooms nobody would suspect were there. It would have an Earth-type security system. Every room would be bugged.

I was going to register it as the “World United Charities Mercy and Benevolent Hospital.” I was going to make my fortune with it. They really train you in the Apparatus. “When you mean total evil,” one of my professors in Apparatus school used to say, “always put up a facade of total good.” It is an inviolable maxim of any competent government.

Finally, I finished it, hoping I could make the plan out myself — I had scratched out and changed quite a bit.

Then I had to write a bunch of orders: one to our Voltar resident engineer to dig some tunnels to it; another to our Istanbul attorney firm to get it registered real fast; another to the World Health Operation for the attorneys to forward which said it was a magnificent donation to the world of health and please could we use their name, too; and another to the Rockecenter Foundation for a grant “for the poor children of Turkey” — they always hand out money if their executives can get a slice back and if Rockecenter can get his name up in lights as a great humanitarian (hah! that would be the day!).

The last letter was just a dispatch. Here at the Blito-P3 base they have the usual Officers Council, chaired by the base commander, that is supposed to pass on new projects. But, as Section Chief of 451 and Inspector General Overlord, I surely didn’t need their consent. I just told them that this is what was going to happen and they could lump it. To Hells with their staff recreation. And besides, didn’t the Grand Council Order say to spread a little advanced technology on the planet? So they could go to Hells and do what they were told. I stamped it with my identoplate loud and plain. They knew better than to trifle with me. I even added a postscript to that effect.

It was quite a relief to get all this tedious work done. So I called for the housekeeper.

When she came in, hollow-eyed from no sleep, scared as to what I might want now, I said, “Melahat Hanim” (a very polite way of addressing a woman in Turkey is to add “hanim” to her name — it flatters them; they have no souls, you know), “has the beautiful lady arrived from Istanbul?”

She wrung her hands and shook her head negative. So I said, “Get out of here, you female dropping of camel dung,” and wondered what else I could do to while away the hours before ten. It’s no use going to town too early — the roads are too cluttered with carts.

Then I thought I had better check on Heller. I didn’t much care to know what he was doing in the ship so I hadn’t even bothered to rig the 831 Relayer.

The recorder was grinding away, the viewer was off. So I figured I might as well start early. I turned the viewer on and began to spot-check forward.

Last night he had simply walked home and gone aboard. Limping! Must have hurt his foot.

Speeding forward, I heard a shrill whistle on the strip. So I went back over it at normal speed.

I saw the airlock open and then, way down at the foot of the ladder, there was Faht Bey, holding a hull resonator against the tug’s plates.

“There you are,” said Faht Bey, looking up. “I’m the base commander, Officer Faht. Are you the Crown inspector?”

“I’m on Grand Council orders, if that’s what you mean. Come on up.”

Faht Bey was not about to climb that eighty feet of rickety ladder from the bottom of the hangar to the airlock on the vertical ship. “I just wanted to see you.”

“I want to see you, too,” said Heller, looking down the ladder. “The clothes in your costume section are too short and the shoes there are about three sizes too small for me.” I was disappointed. He hadn’t hurt his foot, it was tight shoes. Well, you can’t always grab the pot.

“That’s what I wanted to see you about,” Faht Bey yelled up at him. “The people in town are looking all over for somebody that fits your description. They say he waylaid two popular characters at different times in an alley and beat them up with a lead pipe. One has a cracked neck and the other a broken arm and fractured skull. They had to be shipped into Istanbul to be hospitalized.”

“How’d you know it fits my description?” said Heller. My Gods, he was nosy. “This is the first time you’ve seen me.”