So I set out to give it away.
Not all of it, of course. And not at random. There were some things I needed to own, and giving away billions could greatly enhance my chances for survival, if done properly.
The first thing I wanted to own was the Halley. So I set out to buy it and found I already owned it. At least I owned a holding company that owned several other companies, one of which owned Halley. (I found I also owned a large piece of the cargo ship I had hopped and almost starved on between Pluto and Uranus. Fancy that.) Obtaining title to Halley was simply a matter of shifting money from one pocket to another.
So I kept on the move, and I managed my billions, and I watched my bodyguards. Which of you, I wondered, would sell me out for a few million? Because the Charonese were still after me, and the word on the underground nets was that a reward of several million was being offered.
And I thought.
I soon boiled my future down to four options.
One. Kill myself. I mention this one only in passing. I'm embarrassed now by my grandstanding in the courtroom. Oh, I was serious enough; death really would be preferable to incarceration. But I should have waited, not broadcast my intentions to the whole system. Suicide is always an option, for anyone, and it would still be an option for me if the Charonese were closing in and there was no hope of escape. Death is certainly better than a year of inventive torture. But not until all alternatives have failed.
Two. Keep moving. It didn't seem at all promising. The solar system is a large place with many hidey-holes, but the Charonese would never stop looking, and all it would take is one mistake and I'd be facing option one again. In the end, there is no place to hide.
So there are really only two choices when faced with an enemy determined to kill you. Get out of town, or kill the enemy.
I was planning to get out of town. I still am, but then the Charonese upped the ante. They did something they had never done before. They went public.
After the trial it was touch and go. They must have felt it was only a matter of time. They could afford to wait. But then Halley returned from its trip to the outer reaches, I boarded, alone, and vanished. Not hard to do in the vastness of space. Once I dropped off the radar screens of the near planets, I could go anywhere and simply sit there. Do you have any idea how many chunks of rock the size of Halley there are in the system? Well, neither do I, but it's in the billions and it takes a long time to get from one to the other. I send out no radio signals; I have hundreds of tiny, high-gee drones that I release, like notes in a bottle, to zip out their messages when they are a safe distance away and untraceable to me. The Charonese are welcome to listen to those messages, and to the ones sent out to me. They will learn nothing useful.
When they realized the magnitude of the problem, they broke their rule of keeping a low profile in the inner planets. Apparently the rule that says no killing of a Charonese shall go unpunished supersedes all others.
They put a price on my head. Publicly. A very large price, enough to make the claimant the eighteenth richest person in the system, shortly to become the seventeenth richest, upon my elimination. I'm sure you've heard of it; it is only the biggest news story of the century.
"Isn't this awful?" the opinion writers opined.
"That poor boy!" sobbed the sob sisters.
"Somebody should do something!" raged the outraged.
And so forth. And what did anyone do about it?
Nothing.
Though humanity's capacity for atrocity is endlessly inventive, it is also sadly imitative. Not much is really new. Shortly after the Charonese announced their bounty on my head a search of the history archives turned up a similar situation. Back in the twentieth century a man by the name of Salman Rushdie wrote a book that some people didn't like. Most of these people were in a religious hell called Iran, apparently a country inhabited entirely by pigs and whores. The religious wallahs of this cesspool offered a lot of money to anyone who would kill Rushdie. (I never heard if the reward was ever claimed. I can only hope he had the sweetest revenge possible, which was to die at a ripe old age. Quietly, in his own bed.)
So there was precedent for an entire nation going after one man. What seems to be new, in my case, is that the one man is going to fight back.
In the words of the great Bugs Bunny, "I suppose you know, this means war!"
I hereby declare that a state of war exists between the planet of Charon and me, Kenneth Catherine Duse Faneuil Savoyard Booth Johnson Ivanovich de la Valentine.
That should have them trembling in their boots.
But don't laugh yet. Remember, I have more money than Charon.
And remember, I can run, but they can't hide.
And most importantly, remember this: it is more than theoretically possible to smash a planet like a ripe watermelon. Charon is not even a very big watermelon. More like a frozen grape.
It's been rumored that several governments possess weapons, bombs I guess you'd call them, capable of busting a planet. If this is true I've been unable to confirm it. If you know of such a weapon, can get your hands on one, and want to become an extremely rich person, contact my law firm, Flynn and Associates, and be prepared to prove it. I'm in the market.
Oh, yes, indeed. I will double the price on my head for information leading to the complete, total, genocidal destruction of the nation of Charon. At this moment, in advanced physics labs all over the system, men and women are sitting around thinking, thinking, thinking as hard as they can, trying to come up with a way to do it. The word has been out, underground, for some time in that community. Now I'm making it public.
Genocidal. I used the word quite deliberately. It is my intention, if I can, to kill every Charonese. Why not? It's their intention to kill me. If the established governments of the solar system won't do anything to protect me, I have no choice but to take the law into my own hands. Which isn't precisely right, since there doesn't seem to be any law that covers my predicament. But I think you know what I mean.
Ah, but what about the innocent children? I hear you cry.
I won't say I haven't worried about it. And I don't know what to do about it. Every one of those children will grow up to be Charonese adults, sworn to kill me. And, in my opinion, growing up Charonese is a fate worse than death.
But I will do what the Charonese never did for me. I'm issuing a warning. Parents of Charon, if you value the lives of your children, get out now, while you still can. You have one year during which I will hold my fire. After that, you may expect a rain of death without further warning.
I am at war.
So, realistically, what is the likelihood of such a rain of death? Not very good. A fair-sized asteroid accelerated to near light speed would turn the trick, arriving too quickly for them to do anything about it. But no one is able to do that, yet. Anything slower gives their planetary defenses—and they have the best—time to destroy or divert it. There have been other methods proposed, all of them extremely blue-sky.
I was a bit shocked to find out how cheap and easy a biological solution would be. There are some very scary guys out there, with some very scary toys capable of killing millions, or even the entire human race, with bioengineered diseases. All of them are far too dangerous to even consider, and the existence of such folks and their toys provides me with still another reason for doing what I always knew, in the back of my mind, I would have to do.