anything otherwise; the chance of recovering the credits, and eventually his materiel, was nil without some sort of aid. And that was what he could get only by showing these small-time constables that he was Mr. Law himself. It may be also that he was motivated by justifiable conceit in TPL itself.

"Okay," he snapped suddenly, startling the pudgy hybrid with the sharpness of his voice. "I guess there's no point in keeping under wraps any longer. Let me tell you who I am...."

Twenty minutes later, as he stumbled out of the warped stone building, he was wondering dazedly why his TPL affiliation had done him no good.

Tri-Planet Law was an organization that had considerable history, nor could all of it be written. It was the most potent single force in the history of any planet of the Solar System, figured any way you like. It was the only force whose rule was hardly ever challenged.

When you broke the law within the territories mandated by TPL, you did so with the very greatest caution. And you never tried to fight back if you were caught. It wasn't really a large organization, relative to the vast throngs of intelligent life that swarmed the System. It was only a tiny decimal of one per cent of the entire population of the thirty inhabited globes. But when you consider that the total census showed more than a hundred billion individuals of high enough brain-power to be rated sentient, you can understand that a fraction of a per cent does mean close to a hundred and thirty thousand persons united into the best-organized police and military force that a hundred trained social technicians could evolve.

That is why MacCauley couldn't understand the fact that the half-breed interpreter had practically laughed in his face.

True, TPL's hundred and thirty thousand of personnel were largely on the planets of Earth, Mars and Venus, plus their possessions and allied states. TPL had no standing here, officially, but the organization had a de facto reign over all of space by virtue of the fastest and best-armed space-ships made. And Pallas, dependent upon the transient trade, certainly shouldn't be able to afford to anger representative of the body that ruled the space-lanes.

Something, Mac decided, was thoroughly rotten in the local checking office of TPL. Something that might show why the operative on Pallas hadn't begun to be able to find the man or men behind the narcophene racket.

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