_In the future, we may discover new planets; our ships
may rocket to new worlds; robots may be smarter than
people. But we'll still have slick characters willing
and able to turn a fast buck--even though they have to
be smarter than Einstein to do it._
Anson Drake sat quietly in the Flamebird Room of the Royal Gandyll
Hotel, listening to the alien, but soothing strains of the native
orchestra and sipping a drink. He knew perfectly well that he had no
business displaying himself in public on the planet Thizar; there were
influential Thizarians who held no love for a certain Earthman named
Anson Drake.
It didn't particularly bother Drake; life was danger and danger was life
to him, and Anson Drake was known on half a hundred planets as a man who
could take care of himself.
Even so, he wouldn't have bothered to come if it had not been for the
fact that Viron Belgezad was a pompous braggart.
Belgezad had already suffered at the hands of Anson Drake. Some years
before, a narcotics gang had been smashed high, wide, and handsome on
Thizar. Three men had died from an overdose of their own thionite drug,
and fifty thousand credits of illicit gain had vanished into nowhere.
The Thizarian police didn't know who had done the job, and they didn't
know who had financed the ring.
But Belgezad knew that Anson Drake was the former, and Drake knew that
Viron Belgezad was the latter. And each one was waiting his chance to
get the other.
A week before, Drake had been relaxing happily on a beach on Seladon II,
twelve light-years from Thizar, reading a newsfax. He had become
interested in an article which told of the sentencing of a certain lady
to seven years in Seladon Prison, when his attention was attracted by
another headline.