The Complete Phule’s Company Boxed Set

by Robert Asprin

  “IRS?” said Phule. “Ugh—don’t remind me. If you hadn’t found me a galaxy-sized loophole, those bloodsuckers would have drained me dry. I’m amazed they gave up so easily.”

  “Don’t be so sure that they have, sir,” said Beeker. “Or alternatively, that they haven’t persuaded their friends in other government agencies to single you out for their attentions. It may be no coincidence that the Alliance Ecological Interplanetary Observation Union has chosen to request an environmental impact statement from you, not exactly the thing one would expect them to require of a military unit, if you follow me.”

  “Oh, I doubt that’s anything to worry about,” said Phule. He leaned back in his chair and propped his feet up on the desk. “Odds are, it’s just some bureaucrat looking for a way to pressure us into tossing him a bribe. I don’t mind that—as long as the rascal stays properly bribed, once I’ve paid him.”

  “There’s never any real guarantee of that, sir,” said Beeker. “The best one can hope for is that not too many other bureaucrats learn where the pot of gold is located. But sooner or later, they’re certain to sniff it out.”

  “We’ll worry about that if it happens,” said Phule. “And unless I get old and fat before my time, I’ll have moved on to something else by the time they realize they might be able to get a few credits out of me. It’s hard to pick a man’s pockets when he won’t stand still and wait for you.”

  “I hope you’re right, sir,” said Beeker. “One never ought to underestimate one’s enemies—especially when they wield the power to tax and to imprison.”

  “Oh, I won’t underestimate them, old bean,” said Phule. “But I’m not about to let them scare me, either.”

  “Very well, sir,” said Beeker, but his expression made it clear that he had ample reservations.

  * * *

  “Well, if you’re trying to hide anything from me, you’re doing a damned good job of it,” said Victor Phule, grudgingly.

  “The captain brought in some pretty slick accountants,” said Tullie Bascomb, with a shrug. “In this business, your bookkeeper can make you almost as much money as your bookmaker.”

  “Understood,” said Victor Phule. “That’s precisely why I asked to examine both sets of books—more to the point, it’s why I’m still not entirely convinced they’re accurate. Are you certain you don’t have a third set you’re hiding from me?”

  “If there’s a third set, the captain hasn’t told me anything about it,” said Bascomb. The casino manager stood comfortably at the foot of the desk where Phule was working, showing no signs of anxiety. “Not that it’s any of my business, you understand,” he continued. “I make sure the floor’s running smoothly, and leave the rest up to the people the captain’s put in charge. He wants my opinion, all he has to do is ask. But I’m not going to stick my nose into their business.”

  Victor Phule shuffled the hard copy pages, thinking. He knew better than to comment on Bascomb’s unstated corollary: that a certain nose was being stuck into the captain’s business and that it didn’t belong there. Still, he made a mental note of the crack. Bascomb was, as far as he could tell, a thoroughly competent manager, but it was worth remembering that his loyalty lay with the younger Phule. That was all right with Victor Phule, as long as Bascomb was willing to do as good a job for the father as he’d done for the son—assuming, of course, that Bascomb had been doing a good job for the son. As long as he was sticking his nose into his son’s business, Victor Phule intended to find that out as well. If he was going to stir up resentment, he might as well do a thorough job of it.

  He stood up from the desk and said to Bascomb, “I can see already that the gambling operations are driving the entire business—it looks as if everything else you’re doing is designed to attract customers to the casino floor to bet. So I want you to show me through the casino, give me a satellite view of all that’s involved in that end of the business.”

  “OK,” said Bascomb, without any great show of enthusiasm. “You want the tour right now?”

  “Right now,” said Victor Phule, his voice absolutely level. It was time to show Bascomb who was boss. Phule hadn’t built a galaxy-wide munitions business by being soft on his people. That appeared to be a lesson his son had failed to learn. Well, if the boy couldn’t do a man’s job, there was a man here ready to do it. He smiled coldly. “Lead the way,” he said, and fell in behind Bascomb as the casino boss led him out of the office. Behind Phule came his bodyguard, quiet and unobtrusive.

  Their first stop was a large room filled with video screens showing the casino from the viewpoint of the myriad cameras mounted above the floors. For every two or three screens, there was a casino employee intently peering at the scenes on display. “This is the nerve center of the whole operation,” said Bascomb. “Everything that goes on is recorded, so any funny business that goes on can be nipped in the bud. There’s always somebody who thinks he can beat us at our own game. We don’t mind the system players—in the long run no system can change the fact that the odds are rigged in the house’s favor. If a few people win in the short run, that just encourages more people to try to beat us. And the bigger the handle, the bigger our profit.”

  “So what are you looking for?” asked Victor Phule. “You’ve got a lot of expensive equipment here, and a lot of people sitting here watching it. What are they doing to earn their pay?”

  “We’re looking for two things,” said Bascomb. “Professional cheaters can cost us, at least if they can get in and out before we catch them. We’ve got a database of known cheaters that we share with the other major betting houses, and we can spot most of the grifters before they even get to the betting tables—sometimes even before they set foot in the casinos. Watch this.”

  He touched a remote control and a nearby monitor changed its display. Now it showed an elderly Asian woman pumping chips into a bank of quantum slots, with the zombielike effect of so many bored retired people. “Can you see what made us pick her out?” asked Bascomb.

  Victor Phule squinted at the display. “No,” he said, then, “Wait a minute. She’s not using the same tokens as everybody else, is she? They’re counterfeits!”

  “Pretty good,” said Bascomb, grudgingly. “Maybe we could get you a job as a spotter. But here’s the real catch—she’s not just putting in counterfeit tokens, they’re specially improved. Every one of them has a chip designed to increase her odds of winning one of the big jackpots. We might not have spotted it except she got caught five years ago doing the same thing at the Horny Toad Casino. She changed her disguise, but we still got her once the computer matched up her appearance with her MO. And a good thing—if we’d let her play a couple of hours, she was likely to walk out with ten or twenty thousand. Now look at this one.”

  The grandmotherly type disappeared and was replaced by a middle-aged businessman in ostentatiously casual garb at the craps table. At the end of a play, the man scooped a pile of chips off the table and walked casually toward the cashier’s booth. “Do you see the hustle?” asked Bascomb.

  Victor Phule scratched his head. “Run it again,” he said, annoyed that he hadn’t noticed anything out of the ordinary.

  “OK, keep your eyes open,” said Bascomb, with a smirk. Again the scene played out—perhaps ten seconds long.

  “I’ve got it!” said Phule. “Right where he turns, and his hand goes in his pocket—I don’t know what he’s doing, but that’s got to be when he does it.”

  Bascomb laughed. “Nah, he’s just putting his hand in his pocket, maybe to check his hotel key. As far as we can tell, he wasn’t doing anything this time.”

  Victor Phule glowered. “So what’s the point, then?”

  Bascomb toggled the remote, and the display changed to show the businessman and the Asian woman side by side. “The point is, this is the same hustler you saw before. Different day, different disguise.”

  “That’s hard to believe,” said Phule, peering intently at the two faces. “They’re so different …�
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  “Right, and so are these,” said Bascomb, toggling the remote to show a series of other faces: a flashily dressed young male, a weary-looking little fellow who might have been a file clerk, a statuesque black woman …” And the damnedest part is, the hustler isn’t even human,” he added. “You see what we have to deal with?”

  “I guess I do,” said Victor Phule, shaking his head. “What do you do when you catch … it?”

  “Put them on the first ship leaving the station and send the pic to the guards at the port of entry,” said Bascomb, with a smile. Now he’d shown the elder Phule that he was in charge, and that he belonged in charge. “With any luck, you’ll catch the hustlers before they even get to the casinos. That’s one of the advantages of operating on a self-governing space station—you have a chance keep the troublemakers out altogether, instead of having to catch them in the act.”

  “A good policy,” said Phule, nodding. “The same idea works in the weapons business. You might be able to dodge missiles once they’re launched, but it’s a lot more effective to keep the other side from launching them to begin with.”

  “Makes sense to me,” said Bascomb. “The same idea is behind our employee screening program. We do an intensive background check on anybody applying for a job where they’ll handle money. That prevents most of the potential problems. These monitors here are our best shot at catching the ones we can’t interdict at the hiring stage. Every employee comes through this room as part of the orientation process, so they know their every move is being watched. That keeps most of ’em honest.”

  “And the rest?”

  “The rest we catch in the act,” said Bascomb. “And when we do, it’s a one-way ticket off Lorelei—forever.”

  “When?” Victor Phule’s voice had a skeptical edge to it. “I think you mean if. You don’t mean to say you catch all of them, do you?”

  “You better believe we catch all of them,” said Bascomb, stubbornly. “Nobody gets away with ripping off the Fat Chance.”

  “Overconfidence is your worst enemy,” said Victor Phule. “If you think you’re catching everything, you’re bound to be overlooking something. Come on, admit it—you can’t stop it all.”

  “We can, and we do,” said Bascomb, his jaw set even harder.

  “You can’t,” said Victor Phule. “And I’m going to prove it!”

  “That I want to see,” growled Bascomb. “Exactly how are you going to prove it?”

  “If I tell you, you’ll be looking for it,” said Phule. “Now, excuse me—I think I’ll go take a look at things from ground level. I have an idea exactly where you’re going wrong, and I’m going to rub your nose in it. And when I do, I think my son will want to know just what kind of man he’s put in charge of this casino.” He turned and stalked away, his bodyguard a pace behind him.

  “He already knows what kind of man I am, Mr. Phule,” muttered Bascomb. “Too bad you don’t know him well enough to trust his judgment.” He smiled, then turned to the casino employees watching the monitors. “Did you see that man who just left? I want you to watch him like a hawk every second he’s on camera. Here’s what I think he’s going to try …”

  * * *

  The Reverend Jordan Ayres was frustrated. For the first time in his career as a minister of the Church of the New Revelation, popularly known as the Church of the King, Rev had run into a problem he couldn’t solve by consulting the sacred texts and commentaries. Not even applying his good common sense—a commodity he believed himself to possess in ample measure—had he been able to get to the bottom of it. He tapped his fingers on his desk, staring at the useless computer readout, trying to decide what avenue to follow next.

  The problem was, there just wasn’t enough known about the Zenobians. It had been only a few short years since the human race had encountered the reptilian sophonts, who in their appearance and habits resembled nothing so much as miniature allosaurs. That had been back on Haskin’s Planet, where Captain Jester’s troops had intercepted one of their spaceships—an exploring party commanded by none other than Flight Leftenant Qual. And to the best of Rev’s knowledge, other than the members of Omega Company, no human being had set foot on the Zenobians’ home world. Of course, the Alliance had done a fair amount of crash research into this new race when the Zenobians had requested formal membership—but much of that research remained unpublished, or at least inaccessible to someone with Rev’s resources, which were far more comprehensive than those available to most civilians.

  In particular, nothing of the Zenobians’ religious beliefs had been recorded by the diplomatic, military, and commercial interview teams that did the groundwork for the Alliance treaty. It wasn’t even known for certain that they had any such beliefs. Except for the intriguing morsel that Flight Leftenant Qual had offered in response to Rev’s questions about the King …

  ’L’Viz. Qual had claimed that Zenobian myth spoke of a figure with that name, a name that resonated curiously with that by which the King had gone in his Earthly days. Even more intriguingly, Qual had remarked that, when Zenobians had first learned of the King, they had taken Him as a human borrowing from their own mythology. Could the King have manifested Himself on Zenobia, bringing his message to the reptilian sophonts of a world far distant from his own home? Rev knew he had to penetrate to the bottom of this mystery, one of the deepest he had found in all his years of reading the sacred texts. Its implications for the Church were staggering—and its solution could catapult him to the first rank of its spokesmen.

  But where to begin? Qual had implied that Zenobians were not comfortable speaking of such things to outsiders. That meant that Rev would need to take some sort of indirect approach. Did the little reptiles have sacred texts he might access somehow? Their libraries must have the information he wanted—but so far they had not linked their data to the Alliance’s interplanetary UniNet. Doubtless there were technicians who could make the connection unilaterally and find what Rev wanted. But where was he going to get a tech wizard with that level of expertise, and how was he going to pay him?

  Rev stood up from his desk. He paced over to his office window and stared out onto the Legion camp’s parade ground, thinking. The King had always said that no problem was too difficult to tackle—if the highest mountain stood between him and his goal, he would just climb it. All Rev needed to do was put his mind to it. There had to be a way. There had to be a way …

  * * *

  Zigger had never been aboard a space liner before. In fact, as far as he knew, nobody in his whole family had ever left their home world—not before he had decided to realize his ambition to join the Space Legion. The experience was considerably less dramatic than he had expected.

  For one thing, the spaceport had apparently been designed with the idea of giving travelers as forgettable an experience as possible. The furniture, the decor, the sights and sounds and smells—everything might as well have been designed to linger just below the threshold of annoyance, without ever breaking out into anything that evoked a specific response.

  And the ship itself—it might as well have been a crosstown hoverbus, for all the passengers’ awareness of being in deep space. Zigger found himself in one of a row of identical seats in the main cabin, unless he preferred to stay in his spartan bunk in the dormitory-like sleeping area. The Space Legion, for all its attempt to woo its new recruits, had made it perfectly clear that it was not going to pay for anything more than the basic intersystem fare from the Lepoid’s home world to the nearest Legion training camp. That meant a steerage-class ticket, with a very strict weight allowance for personal belongings. “Don’t you worry about extra clothes,” the recruiting sergeant had told him when he handed him the ticket. “You’ll be wearing Legion black before long.”

  Zigger would have liked to have at least a view screen in the cabin so he could watch the stars outside, even though he knew that hyperspace travel wildly distorted the appearance of everything outside the ship. Supposedly there was a view scre
en in the first-class lounge. Zigger was tempted to sneak up and take a look for himself, but he couldn’t figure out how to get past the heavy plasteel doors firmly protecting the People Who Mattered from curious Legion recruits and other such rabble. The population in steerage did seem to have a particularly high proportion of nonhuman sophonts, Zigger thought. Well, where he was going, that would be different.

  Meanwhile, there was nothing else to do but sit in the main cabin and view his Poot-Poot Brothers tri-vees. They were almost the only reminders of his youth that he hadn’t been prepared to leave behind as he embarked on his new life. His broad-jump medals, his talking ukulele, the lucky eighter he’d found on the street the day he’d won the math contest—even the favorite winter hat he’d worn until his mother had to mend the earholes three times: All were left behind. Even if he’d been sentimental about those artifacts, the exorbitant charges for overweight luggage would have changed his mind quickly enough.

  But the spaceline provided cheap tri-vee viewers for its passengers, and a reasonable library of current hits and all-time favorites, knowing full well that it offered little enough else to keep them from going slowly nuts in the long stretches between stars. And tri-vees took up almost no weight or space. So Zigger’s old friends, the Poot-Poot brothers, came along—and so did Oncle Poot-Poot and Mam’selle Toni and all the other series regulars.

  Zigger was scrolling through one of the early episodes, “Oncle Poot-Poot Meets Barky,” when he became aware of someone looking over his shoulder. He turned around to see a human—a young one, he thought, although he wasn’t familiar enough with the species to be entirely sure of his judgment. “Hey, I hope I’m not bothering you,” said the human. “It’s just been a long while since I saw a Poot-Poot tri-vee—that stuff’s really sly. I loved it when I was a kid. Especially that one with Barky, the Environmental Dog.”