Lone Star Planet Page 7

  CHAPTER VII

  The next morning, which was Saturday, I put Thrombley in charge of theroutine work of the Embassy, but first instructed him to answer allinquiries about me with the statement, literally true, that I was tooimmersed in work of clearing up matters left unfinished after the deathof the former Ambassador for any social activities. Then I called theHickock ranch in the west end of Sam Houston Continent, mentioning aninvitation the Colonel and his daughter had extended me, and told them Iwould be out to see them before noon that same day. With Hoddy Ringodriving the car, I arrived about 1000, and was welcomed by Gail and herfather, who had flown out the evening before, after the barbecue.

  Hoddy, accompanied by a Ranger and one of Hickock's ranch hands, allthree disguised in shabby and grease-stained cast-offs borrowed at theranch, and driving a dilapidated aircar from the ranch junkyard, weresent to visit the slum village of Bonneyville. They spent all day there,posing as a trio of range tramps out of favor with the law.

  I spent the day with Gail, flying over the range, visiting Hickock'sherd camps and slaughtering crews. It was a pleasant day and I managedto make it constructive as well.

  Because of their huge size--they ran to a live weight of around fifteentons--and their uncertain disposition, supercows are not reallydomesticated. Each rancher owned the herds on his own land, chiefly byvirtue of constant watchfulness over them. There were always a couple ofhelicopters hovering over each herd, with fast fighter planes waiting oncall to come in and drop fire-bombs or stun-bombs in front of them ifthey showed a disposition to wander too far. Naturally, things of thissize could not be shipped live to the market; they were butchered on therange, and the meat hauled out in big 'copter-trucks.

  Slaughtering was dangerous and exciting work. It was done with mediumtanks mounting fifty-mm guns, usually working at the rear of the herd,although a supercow herd could change directions almost in a second andthe killing-tanks would then find themselves in front of a stampede. Isaw several such incidents. Once Gail and I had to dive in with our carand help turn such a stampede.

  We got back to the ranch house shortly before dinner. Gail went at onceto change clothes; Colonel Hickock and I sat down together for a drinkin his library, a beautiful room. I especially admired the walls,panelled in plastic-hardened supercow-leather.

  "What do you think of our planet now, Mr. Silk?" Colonel Hickock asked.

  "Well, Colonel, your final message to the State was part of the briefingI received," I replied. "I must say that I agree with your opinions.Especially with your opinion of local political practices. Politics isnothing, here, if not exciting and exacting."

  "You don't understand it though." That was about half-question andhalf-statement. "Particularly our custom of using politicians as claypigeons."

  "Well, it is rather unusual...."

  "Yes." The dryness in his tone was a paragraph of comment on myunderstatement. "And it's fundamental to our system of government.

  "You were out all afternoon with Gail; you saw how we have to handle thesupercow herds. Well, it is upon the fact that every rancher must haveat his disposal a powerful force of aircraft and armor, easilyconvertible to military uses, that our political freedom rests. You see,our government is, in effect, an oligarchy of the big landowners andranchers, who, in combination, have enough military power to overturnany Planetary government overnight. And, on the local level, it is apaternalistic feudalism.

  "That's something that would have stood the hair of any TwentiethCentury 'Liberal' on end. And it gives us the freest government anywherein the galaxy.

  "There were a number of occasions, much less frequent now than formerly,when coalitions of big ranches combined their strength and marched onthe Planetary government to protect their rights from governmentencroachment. This sort of thing could only be resorted to in defense ofsome inherent right, and never to infringe on the rights of others.Because, in the latter case, other armed coalitions would have arisen,as they did once or twice during the first three decades of New Texanhistory, to resist.

  "So the right of armed intervention by the people when the governmentinvaded or threatened their rights became an acknowledged part of ourpolitical system.

  "And--this arises as a natural consequence--you can't give a man withfive hundred employees and a force of tanks and aircraft the right toresist the government, then at the same time deny that right to a manwho has only his own pistol or machete."

  "I notice the President and the other officials have themselvessurrounded by guards to protect them from individual attack," I said."Why doesn't the government, as such, protect itself with an army andair force large enough to resist any possible coalition of the bigranchers?"

  "_Because we won't let the government get that strong!_" the Colonelsaid forcefully. "That's one of the basic premises. We have no standingarmy, only the New Texas Rangers. And the legislature won't authorizeany standing army, or appropriate funds to support one. Any member ofthe legislature who tried it would get what Austin Maverick got, acouple of weeks ago, or what Sam Saltkin got, eight years ago, when heproposed a law for the compulsory registration and licensing offirearms. The opposition to that tax scheme of Maverick's wasn't becauseof what it would cost the public in taxes, but from fear of what thegovernment could do with the money after they got it.

  "Keep a government poor and weak and it's your servant; let it get richand powerful and it's your master. We don't want any masters here onNew Texas."

  "But the President has a bodyguard," I noted.

  "Casualty rate was too high," Hickock explained. "Remember, thePresident's job is inherently impossible: he has to represent _all_ thepeople."

  I thought that over, could see the illogical logic, but ... "How aboutyour rancher oligarchy?"

  He laughed. "Son, if I started acting like a master around this ranch inthe morning, they'd find my body in an irrigation ditch before sunset.

  "Sure, if you have a real army, you can keep the men under yourthumb--use one regiment or one division to put down mutiny in another.But when you have only five hundred men, all of whom know everybody elseand all of them armed, you just act real considerate of them if you wantto keep on living."

  "Then would you say that the opposition to annexation comes from thepeople who are afraid that if New Texas enters the Solar League, therewill be League troops sent here and this ... this interesting system ofinsuring government responsibility to the public would be brought to anend?"

  "Yes. If you can show the people of this planet that the League won'tinterfere with local political practices, you'll have a 99.95 percentmajority in favor of annexation. We're too close to the z'Srauffstar-cluster, out here, not to see the benefits of joining the SolarLeague."

  We left the Hickock ranch on Sunday afternoon and while Hoddy guided ourair-car back to New Austin, I had a little time to revise some of myideas about New Texas. That is, I had time to think during those fewmoments when Hoddy wasn't taking advantage of our diplomatic immunity toinvent new air-ground traffic laws.

  My thoughts alternated between the pleasure of remembering Gail's gaycompany and the gloom of understanding the complete implications of theColonel's clarifying lectures. Against the background of his remarks, Icould find myself appreciating the Ghopal-Klueng-Natalenko reasoning: theonly way to cut the Gordian knot was to have another Solar LeagueAmbassador killed.

  And, whenever I could escape thinking about the fact that the nextAmbassador to be the clay pigeon was me, I found myself wondering if Iwanted the League to take over. Annexation, yes; New Texas customs wouldbe protected under a treaty of annexation. But the "justified conquest"urged by Machiavelli, Jr.? No.

  I was still struggling with the problem when we reached the Embassyabout 1700. Everyone was there, including Stonehenge, who had returnedtwo hours earlier with the good news that the fleet had moved intoposition only sixty light-minutes off Capella IV. I had reached thepoint in my thinking where I had decided it was useless to keep Hoddyand Stonehenge apart excep
t as an exercise in mental agility. Inasmuchas my brain was already weight-lifting, swinging from a flying trapezeto elusive flying rings while doing triple somersaults and at the sametime juggling seven Indian clubs, I skipped the whole matter.

  But I'm fairly certain that it wasn't till then that Hoddy had a chanceto deliver his letter-of-credence to Stonehenge.

  After dinner, we gathered in my office for our coffee and a finalconference before the opening of the trial the next morning.

  Stonehenge spoke first, looking around the table at everyone except me.

  "No matter what happens, we have the fleet within call. Sir Rodney'sbeen active picking up those z'Srauff meteor-mining boats. They nolonger have a tight screen around the system. We do. I don't think thatanyone, except us, knows that the fleet's where it is."

  _No matter what happens_, I thought glumly, and the phrase explained whyhe hadn't been able to look at me.

  "Well, boss, I gave you my end of it, comin' in," Hoddy said. "Want meto go over it again? All right. In Bonneyville, we found half a dozenpeople who can swear that Kettle-Belly Sam Bonney was makingpreparations to protect those three brothers an hour before AmbassadorCumshaw was shot. The whole town's sorer than hell at Kettle-Belly forantagonizing the Hickock outfit and getting the place shot up the way itwas. And we have witnesses that Kettle-Belly was in some kind of dealwith the z'Srauff, too. The Rangers gathered up eight of them, who canswear to the preparations and to the fact that Kettle-Belly had z'Srauffvisitors on different occasions before the shooting."

  "That's what we want," Stonehenge said. "Something that'll connect thismurder with the z'Srauff."

  "Well, wait till you hear what I've got," Parros told him. "In the firstplace, we traced the gun and the air-car. The Bonney brothers boughtthem both from z'Srauff merchants, for ridiculously nominal prices. Themerchant who sold the aircar is normally in the dry-goods business, andthe one who sold the auto-rifle runs a toy shop. In their whole lives,those three boys never had enough money among them to pay the list priceof the gun, let alone the car. That is, not until a week before themurder."

  "They got prosperous, all of a sudden?" I asked.

  "Yes. Two weeks before the shooting, Kettle-Belly Sam's bank account gota sudden transfusion: some anonymous benefactor deposited 250,000pesos--about a hundred thousand dollars--to his credit. He drew out75,000 of it and some of the money turned up again in the hands ofSwitchblade and Jack-High and Turkey-Buzzard. Then, a week before youlanded here, he got another hundred thousand from the same anonymoussource and he drew out twenty thousand of that. We think that was themoney that went to pay for the attempted knife-job on Hutchinson. Twodays before the barbecue, the waiter deposited a thousand at the NewAustin Packers' and Shippers' Trust."

  "Can you get that introduced as evidence at the trial?" I asked.

  "Sure. Kettle-Belly banks at a town called Crooked Creek, about fortymiles from Bonneyville. We have witnesses from the bank.

  "I also got the dope on the line the Bonney brothers are going to takeat the trial. They have a lawyer, Clement A. Sidney, a member of whatpasses for the Socialist Party on this planet. The defense will take theline of full denial of everything. The Bonneys are just three poor buthonest boys who are being framed by the corrupt tools of the BigRanching Interests."

  Hoddy made an impolite noise. "Whatta we got to worry about, then?" hedemanded. "They're a cinch for conviction."

  "I agree with that," Stonehenge said. "If they tried to base theirdefense on political conviction and opposition by the Solar League, theymight have a chance. This way, they haven't."

  "All right, gentlemen," I said, "I take it that we're agreed that wemust all follow a single line of policy and not work at cross-purposesto each other?"

  They all agreed to that instantly, but with a questioning note in theirvoices.

  "Well, then, I trust you all realize that we cannot, under anycircumstances, allow those three brothers to be convicted in thiscourt," I added.

  There was a moment of startled silence, while Hoddy and Stonehenge andParros and Thrombley were understanding what they had just heard. ThenStonehenge cleared his throat and said:

  "Mr. Ambassador! I'm sure that you have some excellent reasons for thatremarkable statement, but I must say--"

  "It was a really colossal error on somebody's part," I said, "that thiscase was allowed to get into the Court of Political Justice. It nevershould have. And if we take a part in the prosecution, or allow thosemen to be convicted, we will establish a precedent to support theprinciple that a foreign Ambassador is, on this planet, defined as apracticing local politician.

  "I will invite you to digest that for a moment."

  A moment was all they needed. Thrombley was horrified and ditheredincoherently. Stonehenge frowned and fidgeted with some papers in frontof him. I could see several thoughts gathering behind his eyes,including, I was sure, a new view of his instructions from Klueng.

  Even Hoddy got at least part of it. "Why, that means that anybody canbump off any diplomat he doesn't like...." he began.

  "That is only part of it, Mr. Ringo," Thrombley told him. "It also meansthat a diplomat, instead of being regarded as the representative of hisown government, becomes, in effect, a functionary of the government ofNew Texas. Why, all sorts of complications could arise...."

  "It certainly would impair, shall we say, the principle ofextraterritoriality of Embassies," Stonehenge picked it up. "And itwould practically destroy the principle of diplomatic immunity."

  "Migawd!" Hoddy looked around nervously, as though he could already hearan army of New Texas Rangers, each with a warrant for Hoddy Ringo,battering at the gates.

  "We'll have to do something!" Gomez, the Secretary of the Embassy, said.

  "I don't know what," Stonehenge said. "The obvious solution would be, ofcourse, to bring charges against those Bonney Boys on simplefirst-degree murder, which would be tried in an ordinary criminal court.But it's too late for that now. We wouldn't have time to prevent theirbeing arraigned in this Political Justice court, and once a defendant isbrought into court, on this planet, he cannot be brought into courtagain for the same act. Not the same _crime_, the same _act_."

  I had been thinking about this and I was ready. "Look, we must bringthose Bonney brothers to trial. It's the only effective way ofdemonstrating to the public the simple fact that Ambassador Cumshaw wasmurdered at the instigation of the z'Srauff. We dare not allow them tobe convicted in the Court of Political Justice, for the reasons alreadystated. And to maintain the prestige of the Solar League, we dare notallow them to go unpunished."

  "We can have it one way," Parros said, "and maybe we can have it twoways. But I'm damned if I can see how we can have it all three ways."

  I wasn't surprised that he didn't see it; he hadn't had the same urgencygoading him which had forced me to find the answer. It wasn't an answerthat I liked, but I was in the position where I had no choice.

  "Well, here's what we have to do, gentlemen," I began, and from therespectful way they regarded me, from the attention they were giving mywords, I got a sudden thrill of pride. For the first time since myscrambled arrival, I was really _Ambassador_ Stephen Silk.