"I was always a big fan of your show," it said. "Could I have your autograph?"
The Charonese were apparently caught off guard, like the rest of Luna, Like me. Nobody expected me to be acquitted. Nobody expected me to walk, free, from that courtroom. As a result, no shots were fired at me as I left in the middle of a solid wall of well-armed beef.
I made it back to the Golden Globe about an hour after the end of the performance. There was no question of me continuing in the role, even if we filled the theater with nothing but bodyguards. Buildings can be bombed.
The idea was to get packed, and get to a more secure location. Then get off the planet. Three of my new guardians went into my dressing room and checked to be sure no one was there, then I chased everybody out and closed and locked the door behind me.
I knew these would be my last moments alone for quite some time, but I was in too much of a hurry to savor them. So I went to the Pantechnicon and opened the lid. Then I reached down and unlatched the mirrored gaff—a shoplifter's word. It was no different from the magic boxes used for centuries in stage magic.
The old methods are the best.
And there he was. The Pantech's life support had hooked into him at various places that might have been painful, except I knew he could no longer feel anything. Nevertheless, he smelled bad. And how had he fared after more than forty-eight hours in the dark, unable to move or feel?
His eyes, the only part of him he could still move voluntarily, rolled slowly toward me. I saw in them nothing but madness.
I closed the gaff and began piling my clothing into the trunk.
When I was done, I slammed the lid.
And now here I sit. I won't tell you just where, thank you very much.
Or rather, I will tell you where I am, which is aboard the good ship Halley. I just won't tell you where the Halley is. It's a nice place to hide out, if you have to hide out. Toby is deliriously happy, reunited with his lady love, the fabulous Shere Khan. She gives him a tongue bath several times a day and looks on maternally when he humps her hind leg, that being as high as he can reach. The grub is great. The weather is great. The livin' is easy, fish are jumpin', and the cotton is high.
I hate it. I never did do well by myself.
Elwood doesn't seem to be aboard. Perhaps I've finally laid that ghost to rest. Hell of a time, I must say, just when I could really use the company.
I had an edgy few months moving around the system, waiting for Hal to get back. I stayed busy. You'd be surprised how much work it is to be a multibillionaire, even if you don't really care about the money. And I didn't... as money. I found I could care about hundreds, and thousands of dollars, because those amounts represented food on the table, oxygen to breathe, a measure of comfort. I could even care about millions, in the sense that, carefully managed, millions can buy you security over the long term, if you're careful with it. A billion is simply a number to me, and not even a number I can understand very well. The money becomes play money, counters on a board, just something to move around, not really quantifiable in terms of anything with meaning to me. How many hot dogs does a billion dollars buy? Can you eat that many hot dogs?
I now had many billions of dollars. I was never even sure how many.
What a billionaire does is own things. Owning things is a fairly dull way to live your life. To be good at being a billionaire you must get enjoyment from amassing wealth or, if you're a hands-on billionaire, hiring and firing people, juggling companies and inventories and financial instruments and banks and politicians. I just never saw why this should be fun. I'm only interested in owning things I can enjoy, or that do something for me that needs to be done.
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.)