CHAPTER VII

The next morning, which was Saturday, I put Thrombley in charge of the

routine work of the Embassy, but first instructed him to answer all

inquiries about me with the statement, literally true, that I was too

immersed in work of clearing up matters left unfinished after the death

of the former Ambassador for any social activities. Then I called the

Hickock ranch in the west end of Sam Houston Continent, mentioning an

invitation the Colonel and his daughter had extended me, and told them I

would be out to see them before noon that same day. With Hoddy Ringo

driving the car, I arrived about 1000, and was welcomed by Gail and her

father, who had flown out the evening before, after the barbecue.

Hoddy, accompanied by a Ranger and one of Hickock's ranch hands, all

three disguised in shabby and grease-stained cast-offs borrowed at the

ranch, and driving a dilapidated aircar from the ranch junkyard, were

sent 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's

herd camps and slaughtering crews. It was a pleasant day and I managed

to make it constructive as well.

Because of their huge size--they ran to a live weight of around fifteen

tons--and their uncertain disposition, supercows are not really

domesticated. Each rancher owned the herds on his own land, chiefly by

virtue of constant watchfulness over them. There were always a couple of

helicopters hovering over each herd, with fast fighter planes waiting on

call to come in and drop fire-bombs or stun-bombs in front of them if

they showed a disposition to wander too far. Naturally, things of this

size could not be shipped live to the market; they were butchered on the

range, and the meat hauled out in big 'copter-trucks.

Slaughtering was dangerous and exciting work. It was done with medium

tanks mounting fifty-mm guns, usually working at the rear of the herd,

although a supercow herd could change directions almost in a second and

the killing-tanks would then find themselves in front of a stampede. I

saw several such incidents. Once Gail and I had to dive in with our car

and help turn such a stampede.

We got back to the ranch house shortly before dinner. Gail went at once

to change clothes; Colonel Hickock and I sat down together for a drink

in 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 briefing

I received," I replied. "I must say that I agree with your opinions.

Especially with your opinion of local political practices. Politics is

nothing, here, if not exciting and exacting."

"You don't understand it though." That was about half-question and

half-statement. "Particularly our custom of using politicians as clay

pigeons."

"Well, it is rather unusual...."

"Yes." The dryness in his tone was a paragraph of comment on my

understatement. "And it's fundamental to our system of government.

"You were out all afternoon with Gail; you saw how we have to handle the

supercow herds. Well, it is upon the fact that every rancher must have

at his disposal a powerful force of aircraft and armor, easily

convertible to military uses, that our political freedom rests. You see,

our government is, in effect, an oligarchy of the big landowners and

ranchers, who, in combination, have enough military power to overturn

any Planetary government overnight. And, on the local level, it is a

paternalistic feudalism.

"That's something that would have stood the hair of any Twentieth

Century 'Liberal' on end. And it gives us the freest government anywhere

in the galaxy.

"There were a number of occasions, much less frequent now than formerly,

when coalitions of big ranches combined their strength and marched on

the Planetary government to protect their rights from government

encroachment. This sort of thing could only be resorted to in defense of

some 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 Texan

history, to resist.

"So the right of armed intervention by the people when the government

invaded or threatened their rights became an acknowledged part of our

political system.

"And--this arises as a natural consequence--you can't give a man with

five hundred employees and a force of tanks and aircraft the right to

resist the government, then at the same time deny that right to a man

who has only his own pistol or machete."

"I notice the President and the other officials have themselves

surrounded by guards to protect them from individual attack," I said.

"Why doesn't the government, as such, protect itself with an army and

air force large enough to resist any possible coalition of the big

ranchers?"

"_Because we won't let the government get that strong!_" the Colonel

said forcefully. "That's one of the basic premises. We have no standing

army, only the New Texas Rangers. And the legislature won't authorize

any standing army, or appropriate funds to support one. Any member of

the legislature who tried it would get what Austin Maverick got, a

couple of weeks ago, or what Sam Saltkin got, eight years ago, when he

proposed a law for the compulsory registration and licensing of

firearms. The opposition to that tax scheme of Maverick's wasn't because

of what it would cost the public in taxes, but from fear of what the

government could do with the money after they got it.

"Keep a government poor and weak and it's your servant; let it get rich

and powerful and it's your master. We don't want any masters here on

New Texas."

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

"Casualty rate was too high," Hickock explained. "Remember, the

President's job is inherently impossible: he has to represent _all_ the

people."

I thought that over, could see the illogical logic, but ... "How about

your rancher oligarchy?"

He laughed. "Son, if I started acting like a master around this ranch in

the 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 your

thumb--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 else

and all of them armed, you just act real considerate of them if you want

to keep on living."

"Then would you say that the opposition to annexation comes from the

people who are afraid that if New Texas enters the Solar League, there

will be League troops sent here and this ... this interesting system of

insuring government responsibility to the public would be brought to an

end?"

"Yes. If you can show the people of this planet that the League won't

interfere with local political practices, you'll have a 99.95 percent

majority in favor of annexation. We're too close to the z'Srauff

star-cluster, out here, not to see the benefits of joining the Solar

League."

We left the Hickock ranch on Sunday afternoon and while Hoddy guided our

air-car back to New Austin, I had a little time to revise some of my

ideas about New Texas. That is, I had time to think during those few

moments when Hoddy wasn't taking advantage of our diplomatic immunity to

invent new air-ground traffic laws.

My thoughts alternated between the pleasure of remembering Gail's gay

company and the gloom of understanding the complete implications of the

Colonel's clarifying lectures. Against the background of his remarks, I

could find myself appreciating the Ghopal-Klüng-Natalenko reasoning: the

only way to cut the Gordian knot was to have another Solar League

Ambassador killed.

And, whenever I could escape thinking about the fact that the next

Ambassador to be the clay pigeon was me, I found myself wondering if I

wanted the League to take over. Annexation, yes; New Texas customs would

be 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 Embassy

about 1700. Everyone was there, including Stonehenge, who had returned

two hours earlier with the good news that the fleet had moved into

position only sixty light-minutes off Capella IV. I had reached the

point in my thinking where I had decided it was useless to keep Hoddy

and Stonehenge apart except as an exercise in mental agility. Inasmuch

as my brain was already weight-lifting, swinging from a flying trapeze

to elusive flying rings while doing triple somersaults and at the same

time juggling seven Indian clubs, I skipped the whole matter.

But I'm fairly certain that it wasn't till then that Hoddy had a chance

to deliver his letter-of-credence to Stonehenge.

After dinner, we gathered in my office for our coffee and a final

conference 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's

been active picking up those z'Srauff meteor-mining boats. They no

longer have a tight screen around the system. We do. I don't think that

anyone, except us, knows that the fleet's where it is."

_No matter what happens_, I thought glumly, and the phrase explained why

he hadn't been able to look at me.

"Well, boss, I gave you my end of it, comin' in," Hoddy said. "Want me

to go over it again? All right. In Bonneyville, we found half a dozen

people who can swear that Kettle-Belly Sam Bonney was making

preparations to protect those three brothers an hour before Ambassador

Cumshaw was shot. The whole town's sorer than hell at Kettle-Belly for

antagonizing the Hickock outfit and getting the place shot up the way it

was. And we have witnesses that Kettle-Belly was in some kind of deal

with the z'Srauff, too. The Rangers gathered up eight of them, who can

swear to the preparations and to the fact that Kettle-Belly had z'Srauff

visitors on different occasions before the shooting."

"That's what we want," Stonehenge said. "Something that'll connect this

murder with the z'Srauff."

"Well, wait till you hear what I've got," Parros told him. "In the first

place, we traced the gun and the air-car. The Bonney brothers bought

them both from z'Srauff merchants, for ridiculously nominal prices. The

merchant who sold the aircar is normally in the dry-goods business, and

the 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 price

of the gun, let alone the car. That is, not until a week before the

murder."

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

"Yes. Two weeks before the shooting, Kettle-Belly Sam's bank account got

a sudden transfusion: some anonymous benefactor deposited 250,000

pesos--about a hundred thousand dollars--to his credit. He drew out

75,000 of it and some of the money turned up again in the hands of

Switchblade and Jack-High and Turkey-Buzzard. Then, a week before you

landed here, he got another hundred thousand from the same anonymous

source and he drew out twenty thousand of that. We think that was the

money that went to pay for the attempted knife-job on Hutchinson. Two

days before the barbecue, the waiter deposited a thousand at the New

Austin 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 forty

miles from Bonneyville. We have witnesses from the bank.

"I also got the dope on the line the Bonney brothers are going to take

at the trial. They have a lawyer, Clement A. Sidney, a member of what

passes for the Socialist Party on this planet. The defense will take the

line of full denial of everything. The Bonneys are just three poor but

honest boys who are being framed by the corrupt tools of the Big

Ranching Interests."

Hoddy made an impolite noise. "Whatta we got to worry about, then?" he

demanded. "They're a cinch for conviction."

"I agree with that," Stonehenge said. "If they tried to base their

defense on political conviction and opposition by the Solar League, they

might have a chance. This way, they haven't."

"All right, gentlemen," I said, "I take it that we're agreed that we

must all follow a single line of policy and not work at cross-purposes

to each other?"

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

voices.

"Well, then, I trust you all realize that we cannot, under any

circumstances, allow those three brothers to be convicted in this

court," I added.

There was a moment of startled silence, while Hoddy and Stonehenge and

Parros and Thrombley were understanding what they had just heard. Then

Stonehenge cleared his throat and said:

"Mr. Ambassador! I'm sure that you have some excellent reasons for that

remarkable statement, but I must say--"

"It was a really colossal error on somebody's part," I said, "that this

case was allowed to get into the Court of Political Justice. It never

should have. And if we take a part in the prosecution, or allow those

men to be convicted, we will establish a precedent to support the

principle that a foreign Ambassador is, on this planet, defined as a

practicing local politician.

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

A moment was all they needed. Thrombley was horrified and dithered

incoherently. Stonehenge frowned and fidgeted with some papers in front

of him. I could see several thoughts gathering behind his eyes,

including, I was sure, a new view of his instructions from Klüng.

Even Hoddy got at least part of it. "Why, that means that anybody can

bump off any diplomat he doesn't like...." he began.

"That is only part of it, Mr. Ringo," Thrombley told him. "It also means

that a diplomat, instead of being regarded as the representative of his

own government, becomes, in effect, a functionary of the government of

New Texas. Why, all sorts of complications could arise...."

"It certainly would impair, shall we say, the principle of

extraterritoriality of Embassies," Stonehenge picked it up. "And it

would practically destroy the principle of diplomatic immunity."

"Migawd!" Hoddy looked around nervously, as though he could already hear

an 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, of

course, to bring charges against those Bonney Boys on simple

first-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 their

being arraigned in this Political Justice court, and once a defendant is

brought into court, on this planet, he cannot be brought into court

again for the same act. Not the same _crime_, the same _act_."

I had been thinking about this and I was ready. "Look, we must bring

those Bonney brothers to trial. It's the only effective way of

demonstrating to the public the simple fact that Ambassador Cumshaw was

murdered at the instigation of the z'Srauff. We dare not allow them to

be convicted in the Court of Political Justice, for the reasons already

stated. And to maintain the prestige of the Solar League, we dare not

allow them to go unpunished."

"We can have it one way," Parros said, "and maybe we can have it two

ways. 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 urgency

goading him which had forced me to find the answer. It wasn't an answer

that 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 the

respectful way they regarded me, from the attention they were giving my

words, I got a sudden thrill of pride. For the first time since my

scrambled arrival, I was really _Ambassador_ Stephen Silk.