Astounding Science Fiction Stories: An Anthology of 350 Scifi Stories Volume 2 (Halcyon Classics)

by Various

  Drake grinned. "On what charge?"

  "The theft of the Necklace of Algol."

  Drake looked directly at Belgezad. "Did old Fatface here say I took it?"

  "You can't talk that way," Dobigel snarled, stepping forward.

  "Who says so, Ugly?"

  At that, Dobigel stepped forward and threw a hard punch from his shoulder--straight at Drake's face.

  It never landed. Drake side-stepped it and brought a smashing uppercut up from his knees. It lifted Dobigel off his feet and sent him crashing back against old Belgezad, toppling them both to the floor.

  The policemen had all drawn their guns, but Drake was standing placidly in the middle of the room, his hands high above his head regarding the scene calmly.

  "I'll go quietly," he said. "I've got no quarrel with the police."

  One of the officers led him out into the hall while the others searched his room. Belgezad was sputtering incoherently. Another policeman was trying to wake up Dobigel.

  "If you're looking for the Necklace of Algol," Drake said, "you won't find it there."

  The captain of the police squad said: "We know that, Mr. Drake. We are merely looking for other evidence. We already have the necklace." He reached in his belt pouch and took out a small plastic box. He opened it, disclosing a glittering rope of jewels. "You were seen depositing this in a baggage locker at the spaceship terminal. We have witnesses who saw you, and we had it removed under police supervision."

  Viron Belgezad smiled nastily. "This time you won't get away, Drake! Stealing anything from the palace of the Shan carries a minimum penalty of twenty years in Thizar Prison."

  Drake said nothing as they took him off to the Royal Police Station and locked him in a cell.

  * * * * *

  It was late afternoon of the next day when the Prosecutor for the Shan visited Drake's cell. He was a tall, imposing man, and Drake knew him by reputation as an honest, energetic man.

  "Mr. Drake," he said as he sat down in a chair in the cell, "you have refused to speak to anyone but me. I am, of course, perfectly willing to be of any assistance, but I am afraid I must warn you that any statement made to me will be used against you at the trial."

  Drake leaned back in his own chair. One thing nice about Thizar, he reflected; they had comfortable jails.

  "My Lord Prosecutor," he said, "I'd like to make a statement. As I understand it, Belgezad claims he was gassed, along with a police guard who was with him. When he woke up, the necklace was gone. He didn't see his assailant."

  "That is correct," said the Prosecutor.

  Drake grinned. That was the way it had to be. Belgezad couldn't possibly have bribed the cop, so they both had to be gassed.

  "If he didn't see his assailant, how does he know who it was?"

  "You were followed from the palace by Jomis Dobigel, who saw you put the necklace into the baggage locker. There are several other witnesses to that."

  Drake leaned forward. "Let me point out, my Lord Prosecutor, that the only evidence you have that I was anywhere near the palace is the word of Jomis Dobigel. And he didn't see me inside the palace. I was outside the wall."

  The Prosecutor shrugged. "We admit the possibility of an assistant inside the walls of the palace," he said. "We are investigating that now. But even if we never find your accomplice, we have proof that you were implicated, and that is enough."

  "What proof do you have?" Drake asked blandly.

  "Why, the necklace itself, of course!" The Prosecutor looked as though he suspected Drake of having taken leave of his senses.

  Drake shook his head. "That necklace is mine. I can prove it. It was made for me by a respectable jeweler on Seladon II. It's a very good imitation, but it's a phoney. They aren't diamonds; they're simply well-cut crystals of titanium dioxide. Check them if you don't believe me."

  The Lord Prosecutor looked dumbfounded. "But--what--why--"

  Drake looked sad. "I brought it to give to my good friend, the Noble Belgezad. Of course it would be a gross insult to wear them at the Shan's Coronation, but he could wear them at other functions.

  "And how does my good friend repay me? By having me arrested. My Lord Prosecutor, I am a wronged man."

  The Prosecutor swallowed heavily and stood up. "The necklace has, naturally, been impounded by the police. I shall have the stones tested."

  "You'll find they're phonies," Drake said. "And that means one of two things. Either they are not the ones stolen from Belgezad or else Belgezad has mortally insulted his Shan by wearing false jewels to the Coronation."

  "Well! We shall see about this!" said the Lord Prosecutor.

  * * * * *

  Anson Drake, free as a lark, was packing his clothes in his hotel room when the announcer chimed. He punched the TV pickup and grinned. It was the girl.

  When the door slid aside, she came in, smiling. "You got away with it, Drake! Wonderful! I don't know how you did it, but--"

  "Did what?" Drake looked innocent.

  "Get away with the necklace, of course! I don't know how it happened that Dobigel was there, but--"

  "But, but, but," Drake said, smiling. "You don't seem to know very much at all, do you?"

  "Wha--what do you mean?"

  Drake put his last article of clothing in his suitcase and snapped it shut. "I'll probably be searched pretty thoroughly when I get to the spaceport," he said coolly, "but they won't find anything on an innocent man."

  "Where is the necklace?" she asked in a throaty voice.

  Drake pretended not to hear her. "It's a funny thing," he said. "Old Belgezad would never let the necklace out of his hands except to get me. He thought he'd get it back by making sure I was followed. But he made two mistakes."

  The girl put her arms around his neck. "His mistakes don't matter as long as we have the necklace, do they?"

  Anson Drake was never a man to turn down an invitation like that. He held her in his arms and kissed her--long and lingeringly.

  When he broke away, he went on as though nothing had happened.

  "Two mistakes. The first one was thinking up such an obviously silly plot. If it were as easy to steal jewels from the palace as all that, nothing would be safe on Thizar.

  "The second mistake was sending his daughter to trap me."

  * * * * *

  The girl gasped and stepped back.

  "It was very foolish of you, Miss Belgezad," he went on calmly. "You see, I happened to know that the real Norma Knight was sentenced to seven years in Seladon Prison over a week ago. Unfortunately, the news hadn't reached Thizar yet. I knew from the first that the whole thing was to be a frame-up. It's too bad that your father had to use the real necklace--it's a shame he lost it."

  The girl's eyes blazed. "You--you thief! You--" She used words which no self-respecting lady is supposed to use.

  Drake waited until she had finished, and then said: "Oh, no, Miss Belgezad; I'm no thief. Your father can consider the loss of that necklace as a fine for running narcotics. And you can tell him that if I catch him again, it will be worse.

  "I don't like his kind of slime, and I'll do my best to get rid of them. That's all, Miss B.; it was nice knowing you."

  He walked out of the room, leaving her to stand there in helpless fury.

  His phony necklace had come in handy after all; the police had thought they had the real one, so they had never bothered to check the Galactic Mail Service for a small package mailed to Seladon II. All he'd had to do was drop it into the mail chute from his room and then cool his heels in jail while the Galactic Mails got rid of the loot for him.

  The Necklace of Algol would be waiting for him when he got to Seladon II.

  * * *

  Contents

  IN CASE OF FIRE

  By Randall Garrett

  There are times when a broken tool is better than a sound one, or a twisted personality more useful than a whole one. For instance, a whole beer bottle isn't half the weapon that half a beer bottle is ...


  In his office apartment, on the top floor of the Terran Embassy Building in Occeq City, Bertrand Malloy leafed casually through the dossiers of the four new men who had been assigned to him. They were typical of the kind of men who were sent to him, he thought. Which meant, as usual, that they were atypical. Every man in the Diplomatic Corps who developed a twitch or a quirk was shipped to Saarkkad IV to work under Bertrand Malloy, Permanent Terran Ambassador to His Utter Munificence, the Occeq of Saarkkad.

  Take this first one, for instance. Malloy ran his finger down the columns of complex symbolism that showed the complete psychological analysis of the man. Psychopathic paranoia. The man wasn't technically insane; he could be as lucid as the next man most of the time. But he was morbidly suspicious that every man's hand was turned against him. He trusted no one, and was perpetually on his guard against imaginary plots and persecutions.

  Number two suffered from some sort of emotional block that left him continually on the horns of one dilemma or another. He was psychologically incapable of making a decision if he were faced with two or more possible alternatives of any major importance.

  Number three ...

  Malloy sighed and pushed the dossiers away from him. No two men were alike, and yet there sometimes seemed to be an eternal sameness about all men. He considered himself an individual, for instance, but wasn't the basic similarity there, after all?

  He was--how old? He glanced at the Earth calendar dial that was automatically correlated with the Saarkkadic calendar just above it. Fifty-nine next week. Fifty-nine years old. And what did he have to show for it besides flabby muscles, sagging skin, a wrinkled face, and gray hair?

  Well, he had an excellent record in the Corps, if nothing else. One of the top men in his field. And he had his memories of Diane, dead these ten years, but still beautiful and alive in his recollections. And--he grinned softly to himself--he had Saarkkad.

  He glanced up at the ceiling, and mentally allowed his gaze to penetrate it to the blue sky beyond it.

  Out there was the terrible emptiness of interstellar space--a great, yawning, infinite chasm capable of swallowing men, ships, planets, suns, and whole galaxies without filling its insatiable void.

  Malloy closed his eyes. Somewhere out there, a war was raging. He didn't even like to think of that, but it was necessary to keep it in mind. Somewhere out there, the ships of Earth were ranged against the ships of the alien Karna in the most important war that Mankind had yet fought.

  And, Malloy knew, his own position was not unimportant in that war. He was not in the battle line, nor even in the major production line, but it was necessary to keep the drug supply lines flowing from Saarkkad, and that meant keeping on good terms with the Saarkkadic government.

  The Saarkkada themselves were humanoid in physical form--if one allowed the term to cover a wide range of differences--but their minds just didn't function along the same lines.

  For nine years, Bertrand Malloy had been Ambassador to Saarkkad, and for nine years, no Saarkkada had ever seen him. To have shown himself to one of them would have meant instant loss of prestige.

  To their way of thinking, an important official was aloof. The greater his importance, the greater must be his isolation. The Occeq of Saarkkad himself was never seen except by a handful of picked nobles, who, themselves, were never seen except by their underlings. It was a long, roundabout way of doing business, but it was the only way Saarkkad would do any business at all. To violate the rigid social setup of Saarkkad would mean the instant closing off of the supply of biochemical products that the Saarkkadic laboratories produced from native plants and animals--products that were vitally necessary to Earth's war, and which could be duplicated nowhere else in the known universe.

  It was Bertrand Malloy's job to keep the production output high and to keep the materiel flowing towards Earth and her allies and outposts.

  The job would have been a snap cinch in the right circumstances; the Saarkkada weren't difficult to get along with. A staff of top-grade men could have handled them without half trying.

  But Malloy didn't have top-grade men. They couldn't be spared from work that required their total capacity. It's inefficient to waste a man on a job that he can do without half trying where there are more important jobs that will tax his full output.

  So Malloy was stuck with the culls. Not the worst ones, of course; there were places in the galaxy that were less important than Saarkkad to the war effort. Malloy knew that, no matter what was wrong with a man, as long as he had the mental ability to dress himself and get himself to work, useful work could be found for him.

  Physical handicaps weren't at all difficult to deal with. A blind man can work very well in the total darkness of an infrared-film darkroom. Partial or total losses of limbs can be compensated for in one way or another.

  The mental disabilities were harder to deal with, but not totally impossible. On a world without liquor, a dipsomaniac could be channeled easily enough; and he'd better not try fermenting his own on Saarkkad unless he brought his own yeast--which was impossible, in view of the sterilization regulations.

  But Malloy didn't like to stop at merely thwarting mental quirks; he liked to find places where they were useful.

  * * * * *

  The phone chimed. Malloy flipped it on with a practiced hand.

  "Malloy here."

  "Mr. Malloy?" said a careful voice. "A special communication for you has been teletyped in from Earth. Shall I bring it in?"

  "Bring it in, Miss Drayson."

  Miss Drayson was a case in point. She was uncommunicative. She liked to gather in information, but she found it difficult to give it up once it was in her possession.

  Malloy had made her his private secretary. Nothing--but nothing--got out of Malloy's office without his direct order. It had taken Malloy a long time to get it into Miss Drayson's head that it was perfectly all right--even desirable--for her to keep secrets from everyone except Malloy.

  She came in through the door, a rather handsome woman in her middle thirties, clutching a sheaf of papers in her right hand as though someone might at any instant snatch it from her before she could turn it over to Malloy.

  She laid them carefully on the desk. "If anything else comes in, I'll let you know immediately, sir," she said. "Will there be anything else?"

  Malloy let her stand there while he picked up the communique. She wanted to know what his reaction was going to be; it didn't matter because no one would ever find out from her what he had done unless she was ordered to tell someone.

  He read the first paragraph, and his eyes widened involuntarily.

  "Armistice," he said in a low whisper. "There's a chance that the war may be over."

  "Yes, sir," said Miss Drayson in a hushed voice.

  Malloy read the whole thing through, fighting to keep his emotions in check. Miss Drayson stood there calmly, her face a mask; her emotions were a secret.

  Finally, Malloy looked up. "I'll let you know as soon as I reach a decision, Miss Drayson. I think I hardly need say that no news of this is to leave this office."

  "Of course not, sir."

  Malloy watched her go out the door without actually seeing her. The war was over--at least for a while. He looked down at the papers again.

  The Karna, slowly being beaten back on every front, were suing for peace. They wanted an armistice conference--immediately.

  Earth was willing. Interstellar war is too costly to allow it to continue any longer than necessary, and this one had been going on for more than thirteen years now. Peace was necessary. But not peace at any price.

  The trouble was that the Karna had a reputation for losing wars and winning at the peace table. They were clever, persuasive talkers. They could twist a disadvantage to an advantage, and make their own strengths look like weaknesses. If they won the armistice, they'd be able to retrench and rearm, and the war would break out again within a few years.

  Now--at this point in time--they could be beaten. They coul
d be forced to allow supervision of the production potential, forced to disarm, rendered impotent. But if the armistice went to their own advantage ...

  Already, they had taken the offensive in the matter of the peace talks. They had sent a full delegation to Saarkkad V, the next planet out from the Saarkkad sun, a chilly world inhabited only by low-intelligence animals. The Karna considered this to be fully neutral territory, and Earth couldn't argue the point very well. In addition, they demanded that the conference begin in three days, Terrestrial time.

  The trouble was that interstellar communication beams travel a devil of a lot faster than ships. It would take more than a week for the Earth government to get a vessel to Saarkkad V. Earth had been caught unprepared for an armistice. They objected.

  The Karna pointed out that the Saarkkad sun was just as far from Karn as it was from Earth, that it was only a few million miles from a planet which was allied with Earth, and that it was unfair for Earth to take so much time in preparing for an armistice. Why hadn't Earth been prepared? Did they intend to fight to the utter destruction of Karn?

  It wouldn't have been a problem at all if Earth and Karn had fostered the only two intelligent races in the galaxy. The sort of grandstanding the Karna were putting on had to be played to an audience. But there were other intelligent races throughout the galaxy, most of whom had remained as neutral as possible during the Earth-Karn war. They had no intention of sticking their figurative noses into a battle between the two most powerful races in the galaxy.

  But whoever won the armistice would find that some of the now-neutral races would come in on their side if war broke out again. If the Karna played their cards right, their side would be strong enough next time to win.

  So Earth had to get a delegation to meet with the Karna representatives within the three-day limit or lose what might be a vital point in the negotiations.

  And that was where Bertrand Malloy came in.

  He had been appointed Minister and Plenipotentiary Extraordinary to the Earth-Karn peace conference.