pliers, a hammer and a cold chisel.

One of the horns came away as he screwed it off. He knew already from its fluorescence that it was hollowed out and filled with some substance, but he wanted to make sure. He shook the pale green powder inside out into his palm and sniffed it. Yes, that was it. There was the unmistakable odor of crushed cherries and the sickish sweetness of the hashish of the skies—trilibaine! Ah, now he was getting somewhere. And as he split a few back scales at random he found that each had a few grams of the insidious drug within it. One such hide would supply a retail peddler for many months, each scale a separate delivery.

He delayed no longer. He shifted his course toward Venus and at the same time sat down to his radio key. He sent:

"URGENT: Venusberg Sky Yard. Attention assistant dockmaster. Four tubes disabled account switchboard fire. Please reserve for me berth twenty-three. Litigation in prospect. Can you recommend lawyer? (signed) Hank Karns, captain, TS Swapper."

"Well," he said to himself as he carefully swept up the tell-tale green dust from the deck and added it to the bundle of broken scales and neatly bored and threaded horns preparatory to firing it all through the garbage tube into his wake, "I've shot my wad. Now let's see how smart Mr. Brown turns out to be."

He learned very soon that the thermobombs were but an added precaution. He had not been waiting more than a couple hours when his loudspeaker began to buzz. He glanced at it in surprise, as he was still a long way from Venus. The message began coming through, harsh and peremptory, "Lay to, Swapper, to receive a boarding party. Lay to, or take the consequences. Sky-guard calling. Lay to!"

Hank Karns cut his rockets and went to the airlock to await the arrival of the cruiser. It was not long in coming.

Two smartly uniformed young officers sprang in.

"Let's see your manifest," ordered one, curtly, while the other headed for the hold. In a moment the second came back with two flasks of the pale violet comet-dew.

"The old boy is lousy with the stuff," he reported to the other. "Cases and cases of it."

"Yes," said the first, "and not a damn word about it in the manifest. This makes the second one of these old coots we've hauled up this month—what do you say, shall we call this 

 Prev. P 14/19 next