Now, that should have been a tip-off, because she _never_ called me
anything but boss. But I blundered right ahead because she was looking
at me as though I were Clarence Darrow or somebody.
"I have a case. A _real_ case. If you would--if you only _would_ take
it, you'd be famous. More famous, that is. You'd be _really_ famous."
I knew that Thais had some rather questionable friends, being a
Franklinist and all. And I knew too that some of them were spacegooks.
But the combination of Lyra singing for Pancho and the way Thais was
looking at me made me get careless.
"Tell me about it," I said in my best legal manner.
Her face fell. "Non-terrestrial." And then she brightened. "But that's
the whole point. These people are citizens of Terra now ... and _think
of it_--_you_ will be the very first Legal Eagle to represent them in a
divorce case tried under our laws."
_Under our laws._ Oh, I should have known. But almost all law is
precedent. And I was blinded by trying a case that would _set_ a
precedent instead of follow one. Heaven help me, I said yes.
"Where are these spacegooks from? And what time can they be in the
office tomorrow?"
"The Llagoe Islands on Venus," she said excitedly. "And they can be
here anytime you say."
"Okay, ten hundred sharp. What do they do and how many people are
involved?"
"They're musicians. And, uh, there are three. And two correspondents."
She looked rather sheepishly at me as I raised my eyebrows and
commented that even in this day and age of easy morality that was quite
a number of 'people' to be involved in one divorce case. Too many, in
fact.
"Well, they _are_ subject to our laws," she said doubtfully.
"Indeed they are--thanks to a Subversive Congress." I made a few
notations on my desk pad. "Five of them, eh? A multiple marriage."