You'll be running a spacer worth a hell of a lot of dough and there will be a lot of people asking a lot of other people how you managed the deal. Probably none of them will ever get around to asking you, but your attitude is the same as the known gangster whose only visible means of support for his million-dollar estate and his yacht and his high living is his small string of hot-dog stands. That he owns these things is only an indication of thrift and good management."
"I get it," grinned Farradyne.
Clevis snapped, "This is no laughing matter. What goes along with this is important. You'll play this game as we outline it to you and in no other way. The first time we find you playing hanky-panky we'll have you by the ears in the morning. And if you cut a dido and get pinned for it, there you'll be with a forged license and a spacer that will have some very odd-looking registration papers so far as the Master Log runs. And no one is going to admit that they know you. Certainly the SAND office won't. And furthermore if you do claim any connection at any time for any reason whatsoever, we'll haul you in for attempting to impersonate one of us. You're a decoy, a sitting duck with both feet in the mud, Farradyne, and no damned good to anybody until you get mired deeper in the same stinking mud. Now for the second item."
"Second? Weren't there ten or twelve in that last?" grunted Farradyne.
"That was only the beginning. The second is this: do not, under any circumstances make any attempt to investigate that accident of yours. The game you are going to play will not permit you to make any attempt to clear up that mess. As a character of questionable background, your attitude must be that of a man caught in a bad show and forced to undergo visible suffering long enough for the public to forget, before you can resume your role of professional louse. Got this straight?"
Farradyne looked at Clevis; gaunt has-been looking at success. The window was dark now, but there were no stars visible from the surface of Venus; only Terra and Jupiter and Sirius and Vega and a couple of others that haloed through the haze. The call of the free blackness of space pulled at Farradyne. He turned back from the window and looked at the unmade bed, the insect-specked walls, the scarred dresser, the warped floor. His nose wrinkled tentatively and he cursed inwardly because he knew that the joint reeked of rancid sweat and mildewed cloth and his nose was so accustomed to this stink that he could not smell it.
Inwardly Farradyne came to understand, in those few moments while Clevis watched him quietly, that his oft-repeated statement that there were some things that even a bum wouldn't do was so much malarkey. Farradyne would join the hellblossom operators if it gave him an 

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