"What is it?" McLeod asked, finding his voice.
"A receipt. For two thousand dollars. Sign it."
McLeod looked the paper over, then looked up at the burly man who had
shoved it at him. "_Fifty thousand Galactic credits!_ What is this
for?"
"The royalty check for your unprintably qualified book has come in,
Funny Man. The Government is taking ninety-eight per cent for income
taxes. Sign!"
McLeod pushed the paper back across the desk. "No. I won't. You can
confiscate my money. I can't stop that, I guess. But I won't give it
legal sanction by signing anything. I don't even see the two thousand
dollars this is supposed to be a receipt for."
Jackson, who was standing behind McLeod, grabbed his arm and twisted.
"Sign!" His voice was a snarl in McLeod's ear.
Eventually, of course, he signed.
* * * * *
"'Nother beer, Mac?" asked the bartender with a friendly smile.
"Yeah, Leo; thanks." McLeod pushed his quarter across the bar with one
hand and scratched negligently at his beard with the fingers of the
other. Nobody questioned him in this neighborhood. The beard, which
had taken two months to grow, disguised his face, and he had given his
name as McCaffery, allowing his landlord and others who heard it to
make the natural assumption that he was of Irish descent.
He was waiting. He had been forced to move from his apartment; nobody
wanted that dirty so-and-so, Professor McLeod, around. Besides, his
money was running short. He had never seen the two thousand. "You'll
get that when the Galactic bank cashes your royalty check," he had
been told. He was waiting.
Not hiding. No. That wasn't possible. The U.B.I. could find him
easily when they wanted him. There was no place he could have hidden
from them for very long. A man needs friends to stay hidden from an
efficient police organization for very long, and John Hamish McLeod
had no friends. "Jack McCaffery" had, since he was a pleasant kind of
fellow who made friends easily when he wanted them. But he had no
illusions about his new friends. Let them once suspect, however
faintly, that Good Old Jack McCaffery was really that Professor
McLeod, and the game would be up.
The U.B.I. would find him again all right, whenever it wanted him. And
McLeod hoped it would be soon because he was down to his last hundred
bucks.
So he waited and thought about fifty thousand Galactic credits.
The mathematics was simple, but it conveyed an awful lot of
information. To make fifty thousand credits from one thousandth of one
percent royalties on a book selling at five credits the copy, one must
needs sell a billion copies. Nothing to it.