H. Piper - The H. Beam Piper Essential - 30 Sci-Fi Classics & Fantasy Titles in One Edition

"I thought it might be something like that," he lied brazenly. "But, Bish ... Excuse me, I mean, Mr. Ware..."

"Bish, if you please, Oscar."

"Bish, what I'd like to know is what you wanted with Ravick," he said. "They didn't send any Executive Special Agent here for five years to investigate this tallow-wax racket of his."

"No. We have been looking for him for a long time. Fifteen years, and I've been working on it that long. You might say, I have made a career of him. Steve Ravick is really Anton Gerrit."

Maybe he was expecting us to leap from our chairs and cry out, "Aha! The infamous Anton Gerrit! Brought to book at last!" We didn't. We just looked at one another, trying to connect some meaning to the name. It was Joe Kivelson, of all people, who caught the first gleam.

"I know that name," he said. "Something on Loki, wasn't it?"

Yes; that was it. Now that my nose was rubbed in it again, I got it.

"The Loki enslavements. Was that it?" I asked. "I read about it, but I never seem to have heard of Gerrit."

"He was the mastermind. The ones who were caught, fifteen years ago, were the underlings, but Ravick was the real Number One. He was responsible for the enslavement of from twenty to thirty thousand Lokian natives, gentle, harmless, friendly people, most of whom were worked to death in the mines."

No wonder an Executive Special would put in fifteen years looking for him. You murder your grandmother, or rob a bank, or burn down an orphanage with the orphans all in bed upstairs, or something trivial like that, and if you make an off-planet getaway, you're reasonably safe. Of course there's such a thing as extradition, but who bothers? Distances are too great, and communication is too slow, and the Federation depends on every planet to do its own policing.

But enslavement's something different. The Terran Federation is a government of and for—if occasionally not by—all sapient peoples of all races. The Federation Constitution guarantees equal rights to all. Making slaves of people, human or otherwise, is a direct blow at everything the Federation stands for. No wonder they kept hunting fifteen years for the man responsible for the Loki enslavements.

"Gerrit got away, with a month's start. By the time we had traced him to Baldur, he had a year's start on us. He was five years ahead of us when we found out that he'd gone from Baldur to Odin. Six years ago, nine years after we'd started hunting for him, we decided, from the best information we could get, that he had left Odin on one of the local-stop ships for Terra, and dropped off along the way. There are six planets at which those Terra-Odin ships stop. We sent a man to each of them. I drew this prize out of the hat.

"When I landed here, I contacted Mr. Fieschi, and we found that a man answering to Gerrit's description had come in on the Peenemünde from Odin seven years before, about the time Gerrit had left Odin. The man who called himself Steve Ravick. Of course, he didn't look anything like the pictures of Gerrit, but facial surgery was something we'd taken for granted he'd have done. I finally managed to get his fingerprints."

Special Agent Ware took out a cigar, inspected it with the drunken oversolemnity he'd been drilling himself into for five years, and lit it. Then he saw what he was using and rose, holding it out, and I went to the desk and took back my lighter-weapon.

"Thank you, Walt. I wouldn't have been able to do this if I hadn't had that. Where was I? Oh, yes. I got Gerrit-alias-Ravick's fingerprints, which did not match the ones we had on file for Gerrit, and sent them in. It was eighteen months later that I got a reply on them. According to his fingerprints, Steve Ravick was really a woman named Ernestine Coyón, who had died of acute alcoholism in the free public ward of a hospital at Paris-on-Baldur fourteen years ago."

"Why, that's incredible!" the Reverend Zilker burst out, and Joe Kivelson was saying: "Steve Ravick isn't any woman...."

"Least of all one who died fourteen years ago," Bish agreed. "But the fingerprints were hers. A pauper, dying in a public ward of a big hospital. And a man who has to change his identity, and who has small, woman-sized hands. And a crooked hospital staff surgeon. You get the picture now?"

"They're doing the same thing on Tom's back, right here," I told Joe. "Only you can't grow fingerprints by carniculture, the way you can human tissue for grafting. They had to have palm and finger surfaces from a pair of real human hands. A pauper, dying in a free-treatment ward, her body shoved into a mass-energy converter." Then I thought of something else. "That showoff trick of his, crushing out cigarettes in his palm," I said.

Bish nodded commendingly. "Exactly. He'd have about as much sensation in his palms as I'd have wearing thick leather gloves. I'd noticed that.

"Well, six months going, and a couple of months waiting on reports from other planets, and six months coming, and so on, it wasn't until the Peenemünde got in from Terra, the last time, that I got final confirmation. Dr. Watson, you'll recall."

"Who, you perceived, had been in Afghanistan," I mentioned, trying to salvage something. Showing off. The one I was trying to impress was Walt Boyd.

"You caught that? Careless of me," Bish chided himself. "What he gave me was a report that they had finally located a man who had been a staff surgeon at this hospital on Baldur at the time. He's now doing a stretch for another piece of malpractice he was unlucky enough to get caught at later. We will not admit making deals with any criminals, in jail or out, but he is willing to testify, and is on his way to Terra now. He can identify pictures of Anton Gerrit as those of the man he operated on fourteen years ago, and his testimony and Ernestine Coyón's fingerprints will identify Ravick as that man. With all the Colonial Constabulary and Army Intelligence people got on Gerrit on Loki, simple identification will be enough. Gerrit was proven guilty long ago, and it won't be any trouble, now, to prove that Ravick is Gerrit."

"Why didn't you arrest him as soon as you got the word from your friend from Afghanistan?" I wanted to know.

"Good question; I've been asking myself that," Bish said, a trifle wryly. "If I had, the Javelin wouldn't have been bombed, that wax wouldn't have been burned, and Tom Kivelson wouldn't have been injured. What I did was send my friend, who is a Colonial Constabulary detective, to Gimli, the next planet out. There's a Navy base there, and always at least a couple of destroyers available. He's coming back with one of them to pick Gerrit up and take him to Terra. They ought to be in in about two hundred and fifty hours. I thought it would be safer all around to let Gerrit run loose till then. There's no place he could go.

"What I didn't realize, at the time, was what a human H-bomb this man Murell would turn into. Then everything blew up at once. Finally, I was left with the choice of helping Gerrit escape from Hunters' Hall or having him lynched before I could arrest him." He turned to Kivelson. "In the light of what you knew, I don't blame you for calling me a dirty traitor."

"But how did I know..." Kivelson began.

"That's right. You weren't supposed to. That was before you found out. You ought to have heard what Gerrit and Belsher—as far as I know, that is his real name—called me after they found out, when they got out of that jeep and Captain Courtland's men snapped the handcuffs on them. It even shocked a hardened sinner like me."

There was a lot more of it. Bish had managed to get into Hunters' Hall just about the time Al Devis and his companion were starting the fire Ravick—Gerrit—had ordered for a diversion. The whole gang was going to crash out as soon as the fire had attracted everybody away. Bish led them out onto the Second Level Down, sleep-gassed the lone man in the jeep, and took them to the spaceport, where the police were waiting for them.