Exciting entertainment, these telecasts of dashing
pirates, gorgeous victims and the always stupid Space
Patrol, but Jeff Thorne, famed Derelict of Mars, was
grimly bent on stopping them--in all their ghastly reality!
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Planet Stories Spring 1948.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
The three patrolmen leaped to their feet, saluting as they arose.
Bannerman, the Superintendent, extended a hearty fist.
"Welcome, General Wheelwright," he exclaimed, clicking his polished
heels.
"Glad to be aboard, gentlemen," rasped the Inspector-General of the
Planet Patrol, returning the salute. His broad chest, scaled from
throat to belt with the medals of twenty worlds, tinkled musically as
he rumbled the brusque greeting. "At ease. Resume your game. Bannerman,
a word with you, if you please."
As the Superintendent closed the black door behind them, he glanced
apprehensively at his superior. The big man had slumped in limp
exhaustion into the office chair before Bannerman's desk.
"Well, sir?" Bannerman finally asked. "Chain Lucas?"
"No," replied the General, hardly lifting his head. "Not yet." He
stared fixedly at his glittering boots, cool runnels of light glancing
along their polished curves.
"Senator Chanler is dead."
"Dead? Old Scrooge?" Bannerman's startled incredulity was tempered by
a sudden enthusiasm he made no great effort to conceal. "Who poisoned
him?" he inquired.
"Come now, Bannerman," replied Wheelwright, repressing a wan smile. "I
grant you he was a parsimonious fool, but at least we managed to skin
our appropriations through his committee one way or another."
"Skinned is certainly the word for it, sir," agreed Bannerman shortly.
"I'm afraid we'll remember Scrooge with regret," Wheelwright gloomily
rejoined. "What the new Senator on the committee will do to the
appropriation will ground half our ships."
"I had hoped for a relief," sighed Bannerman. "Who's the new man?"
"Chanler's daughter, Iris," replied Wheelwright. "Yes, yes, I know,"
he added testily as Bannerman's jaw fell open. "The girl's a reigning
beauty, famous on half a dozen worlds. The World Council appointed
her to fill the Senator's unexpired term. Just the usual courtesy, of
course, but she flew back from Venus and threw herself wholeheartedly
into the job."
"Has she long to serve?"
"She hadn't, but she knows publicity. Had enough of it, Lord knows. She
ran for the next term and was re-elected."
"But she's wealthy in her own right, they say. Surely she didn't
inherit Chanler's parsimony with his office?"
"Of course not, Bannerman. She's famous for her easy way with money,
and her Chanler's daughter. Notorious, if you like. But the girl's
a featherbrain, a romantic. Devotee of these gangster telecasts
glorifying crime." Wheelwright's snort was eloquent of his disgust.
"I know. We get them here, too. Same old Formula Number One, the Robin
Hood motif. Clean-living space-hawk raiding the lanes, confounding the
stupid Planet Patrol, scattering his loot to the poor. Very true to
life."
"It was corn five hundred years ago," scowled Wheelwright. "But it
drags them in today." He pounded the arm of his chair. "Who believes
crime does not pay when they can see for themselves on a hundred
scanner-screens that it does pay, and handsomely? Of course it's
fiction and they know it, but it tends to build up a subtle disrespect
for law and the Patrol in their minds. What ruined the old Congress but
the popular conception of them as a bunch of hick yokels stumbling over
a job too big for their provincial minds? These gangster things run
in cycles, of course, but I'd like to see this one run out right now."
"True enough, sir," nodded Bannerman, soberly. "I've noticed their
effect on the inner worlds. And you feel they influence the new ...
Senator?"
"I'd bet on it," growled Wheelwright. "When she was appointed, I
slipped in operatives. You know how those household groups talk. And we
know she had prejudices long before Chanler died. We've had to hold up
two or three of her interplanetary junkets on that toy yacht he gave
her, for her own safety, of course, but she's not forgotten. And she
lived for years with Chanler's groans on the waste and inefficiency of
the Patrol."
"Has she his power?"
"With her looks? More. She can block our whole appropriation or pare it
to the bone."
"And you think she might?" Bannerman was grimly serious.
"She talks of cutting us down, trimming off the fat, she calls it. Back
to the efficiency of the old pioneering days when men were men and
rockets were really rockets." He grinned wryly. "Between the screens
and Chain Lucas, she thinks it all a big, exciting game staked against
the daring outlaw. Romantic," he added.
Bannerman cursed. "I wonder how romantic those poor women thought it
was when they were tied up to the 'Orion's' dice bar and beaten to
death with iron bars? Or the seven we found cut to pieces in the wreck
of the 'Pantagruel?' And the pretty ballad of the 'Stargazer,' her
whole crew and most of the passengers pushed through airlocks into the
void?"
"Horror retailed from eighty million miles troubles no one," replied
Wheelwright. "She's a wild and reckless girl drunk with her own beauty
and this new power, Bannerman. Undisciplined, she means to discipline
us. She'll push us fifty years back down our own trail. We can't risk
it, Bannerman."
* * * * *
The Superintendent stared thoughtfully at his superior. He tapped his
desk gently with the long Mercurian dagger used as letter-opener. "What
do you propose, sir? You're not here for nothing."
"You can put that away," said Wheelwright, with some reluctance. "We're
not romantic, Bannerman. We'll find a better way."
"Seizing Chain Lucas?"
"A month ago it might have helped. Now, frankly, taking him might do
more harm than good."
"His reputation, I suppose."
"Exactly. I suppose he is the prototype of those telecasts we spoke
of a moment ago, a daring buccaneer attacking on sight under our very
noses, raiding but not killing, the most romantic of them all. Should
we get him, the cleverest lawyers of the System would fight to defend
him and we'd end up defending our own system against them all. They'd
have our blood for persecuting the Robin Hood of the star-ways."
"Robin Hood!" sneered Bannerman. "If they could see Banya Tor!"
"Exactly," agreed Wheelwright, grimly. He leaned forward, tapping
Bannerman's desk with a lean forefinger, his grey brows fierce over his
bright dark eyes. "The one place Lucas slipped his men, let them kill
for the sheer piratical joy of killing. We had nothing sure before, but
on Banya Tor he spun his own death-rope. Nothing has been touched, as
ordered?"
"Nothing, sir. The air-dome is still smashed where he drove his ship
through as the Patrol came down from the hills. The ... the bodies are
still just as his butchers left them. Frozen."
Wheelwright leaned back, clasping his knee in its black and silver
hose. His eyes fell. "I can't quite feature it. Perhaps he thought he
could clean up the asteroid afterward; perhaps his crew just got tired
playing Robin Hood. Anyway, letting off steam at Banya Tor is going
to cut short Chain Lucas' career before many days are out. I've seen
things on the runs we don't talk about, Bannerman, but those women
hanged in their own dresses over fires...." He shuddered violently.
Bannerman nodded.
"And the necklaces of hands and eyes Lucas hung on others before his
men dismembered them by inches," he added grimly.
"Exactly." General Wheelwright bit his lip. "The man's cracked, mad.
How many more atrocities we've found are actually his rather than the
work of lesser pirates we may never know. But to all the worlds he is
still the wild, free spirit of Adventure. Knowing nothing of Banya Tor."
"As you ordered," pointed out Bannerman. Wheelwright agreed.
"I have my reasons, Bannerman. Knowing nothing of all this, suppose
this Chanler woman could be taken to Banya Tor and shown exactly as he
left it in his flight the true horror of this pirate raid, the real
nature of piracy, the nature of the tin Robin Hood?"