Inside the embassy, Hoddan finished his breakfast with the ambassador.
“I’m giving you,” said the ambassador, “a letter to that character on Darth. I told you about him. He’s some sort of nobleman and has need of an electronic engineer. On Darth they’re rare to nonexistent. But his letter wasn’t too specific.”
“I remember,” agreed Hoddan. “I’ll look him up. Thanks.”
“Somehow,” said the ambassador, “I cherish unreasonable hopes for you, you, Hoddan. A psychologist would say that your group identification is low and your cyclothymia practically a minus quantity, while your ergic tension is pleasingly high. He’d mean that with reasonable good fortune you will raise more hell than most. I wish you that good fortune. And Hoddan—”
“Yes?”
“I urge you not to be vengeful,” explained the ambassador, “but I do hope you won’t be too forgiving of these characters who’d have jailed you for life. You’ve scared them badly. It’s very good for them. Anything more you can do along that line will be really a kindness, even though it will positively not be appreciated. But it’ll be well worth doing. I say this because I like the way you plan things. And any time I can be of service…”
“Thanks,” said Hoddan. “Now I’d better get going for the spaceport.” He’d write Nedda from Darth. “I’ll get set for it”
He rose. The ambassador stood up, too.
“I like the way you plan things,” he repeated appreciatively. “Well check over that box.”
They left the embassy dining room together.
It was well after sunrise when Hoddan finished his breakfast, and the bright and watchful new plainclothesmen were very much on the alert outside. By this time the sunshine had lost its early ruddy tint, and the trees about the city were vividly green, and the sky had become appropriately blue — as the sides on all human-occupied planets are. There was the beginning of traffic. Some was routine movement of goods and vehicles. But some was special.
For example, the trucks which came to carry the embassy shipment to the spaceport. They were perfectly ordinary trucks, hired in a perfectly ordinary way by the ambassador’s secretary. They came trundling across the square and into the embassy gate. The ostentatiously loafing plainclothesmen could look in and see the waiting parcels loaded on them. The first truck load was quite unsuspicious. There was no package in the lot which could have held a man even in the most impossibly cramped of positions.
But the police took no chances. Ten blocks from the embassy the cops stopped- it and verified the licenses and identities of the driver and his helper. This was a moderately lengthy business. While it went on, plainclothesmen walked over the packages in the truck’s body and put stethoscopes to any of more than one cubic foot capacity.
They waved the truck on. Meanwhile the second truck was loading up. And those watching saw that the last item to be loaded was a large box which hadn’t been seen before. It was carried with some care, and it was marked fragile, put into place and wedged fast with other parcels.
The plainclothesmen looked at each other with anticipatory glee. One of them reported the last large box with almost lyric enthusiasm. When the second truck left the embassy with the large box, a police truck came innocently out of nowhere and just happened to be going the same way. Ten blocks away, again the truckload of embassy parcels was flagged down and its driver’s license and identity was verified. A plainclothesman put a stethoscope on the questionable case. He beamed, and made a suitable signal.
The truck went on, while zestful, Machiavellian plans took effect.
Five blocks farther, an unmarked empty truck came hurtling out of a side street, sideswiped the truck from the embassy, and went careening away down the street without stopping. The trailing police truck made no attempt at pursuit. Instead, it stopped helpfully by the truck which had been hit. A wheel was hopelessly gone. So uniformed police, with conspicuously happy expressions, cleared a space around the stalled truck and stood guard over the parcels under diplomatic seal. With eager helpfulness, they sent for other transportation for the embassy’s shipment.
A sneeze was heard from within the mass of guarded freight, and the policemen shook hands with each other. When substitute trucks came — there were two of them — they loaded one high with embassy parcels and sent it off to the spaceport with their blessings. There remained just one, single, large box to be put on the second vehicle. They bumped it on the ground, and a startled grunt came from within.
There was an atmosphere of innocent enjoyment all about as the police tenderly loaded this large box on a second truck. Strangely, they did not head directly for the spaceport. The police carefully explained this to each other in loud voices. Then some of them were afraid the box hadn’t heard, so they knocked on it. The box coughed, and it seemed hilariously amusing to the policemen that the contents of a freight parcel should cough. They expressed deep concern and — addressing the box — explained that they were taking it to the Detention Building, where they would give it some cough medicine.
The box swore at them, despairingly. They howled with childish laughter, and assured the box that after they had opened it and given it cough medicine they would close it again very carefully — leaving the diplomatic seal unbroken — and deliver it to the spaceport so it could go on its way.
The box swore again, luridly. The truck which carried it hastened. The box teetered and bumped and jounced with the swift motion of the vehicle that carried it and all the police around it. Bitter, enraged, and highly unprintable language came from within.
The police were charmed. When the Detention Building gate opened for it, and closed again behind it, there was a welcoming committee in the courtyard. It included a jailer with a bandaged head and a look of vengeful satisfaction on his face, and no less than the three guards who had been given baths by a high-pressure hose. They wore unamiable expressions.
And then, while the box swore very bitterly, somebody tenderly loosened a plank — being careful not to disturb the diplomatic seal — and pulled it away with a triumphant gesture. Then all the police could look into the box. And they did.
Then there was a dead silence, except for the voice that came from a two-way communicator set inside.
“And now” said the voice from the box, “and now we take our leave of the planet Walden and its happy police force, who wave to us as our spaceliner lifts toward the skies. The next sound you hear will be that of their lamentations at our departure.”
But the next sound was a howl of fury. The police were very much disappointed to find that it hadn’t been Hoddan in tin1 box, but only one-half of a two-way communication pair. Hoddan had coughed, sneezed and sworn at them, but from the other instrument somewhere else. Now he signed off.
The spaceliner was not lifting off just yet. It was still solidly aground in the center of the landing-grid. Hoddan had hade farewell to his audience from the floor of the ambassador’s car, which at that moment was safely within the extra-territorial circle about the spaceship. He turned off the set and got up and brushed himself off. He got out of the car. The ambassador followed him and shook his hand.
“You have a touch,” said the ambassador sedately. “You seem inspired at times, Hoddan! You have a gift for infuriating constituted authority. You may go far!”