“Had me worried there for a minute, the way you stood there rolling your eyes and waving this piece of field artillery around.”
“Who are you?”
He smiled at the abruptness of my tone. “Well, it doesn’t matter who I am. What does matter is the organization that I represent.”
“The Corps?”
“Exactly. The Special Corps. You didn’t think I was the local police, did you? They have orders to shoot you on sight. It was only after I told them how to find you that they let the Corps come along on the job. I have some of my men in the building, they’re the ones who herded you up here. The rest are all locals with itchy trigger fingers.”
It wasn’t very flattering but it was true. I had been pushed around like a class M robot, with every move charted in advance. The old boy behind the desk—for the first time I realized he was about sixty-five—really had my number. The game was over.
“All right Mr. Detective, you have me so there is no sense in gloating. What’s next on the program? Psychological reorientation, lobotomy—or just plain firing squad?”
“None of those, I’m afraid. I am here to offer you a job in the Corps.”
The whole thing was so ludicrous that I almost fell out of the chair laughing. Me. James diGriz, the interplanet thief working as a policeman. It was just too funny. He sat patiently, waiting until I was through.
“I will admit it has its ludicrous side—but only at first glance. If you stop to think, you will have to admit that who is better qualified to catch a thief than another thief?”
There was more than a little truth in that, but I wasn’t buying my freedom by turning stool pigeon.
“An interesting offer, but I’m not getting out of this by playing the rat. There is even a code among thieves, you know.”
That made him angry. He was bigger than he looked sitting down and the fist he shook in my face was as large as a shoe.
“What kind of stupidity do you call that? It sounds like a line out of a TV thriller. You’ve never met another crook in your whole life and you know it! And if you did you would cheerfully turn him in if you could make a profit on the deal. The entire essence of your life is individualism—that and the excitement of doing what others can’t do. Well that’s over now, and you better start admitting it to yourself. You can no longer be the interplanet playboy you used to be—but you can do a job that will require every bit of your special talents and abilities. Have you ever killed a man?”
His change of pace caught me off guard, I stumbled out an answer.
“No… not that I know of.”
“Well you haven’t, if that will make you sleep any better at night. You’re not a homicidal, I checked that on your record before I came out after you. That is why I know you will join the Corps and get a great deal of pleasure out of going after the other kind of criminal who is sick, not just socially protesting. The man who can kill and enjoy it.”
He was too convincing, he had all the answers. I had only one more argument and I threw it in with the air of a last ditch defense.
“What about the Corps, if they ever find out you are hiring half-reformed criminals to do your dirty work we will both be shot at dawn.”
This time it was his turn to laugh. I could see nothing funny so I ignored him until he was finished.
“In the first place my boy, I am the Corps—at least the man at the top—and what do you think my name is? Harold Peters Inskipp, that’s what it is!”
“Not the Inskipp that—”
“The same. Inskipp the Uncatchable. The man who looted the Pharsydion II in mid-flight and pulled all those other deals I’m sure you read about in your misspent youth. I was recruited just the way you were.” He had me on the ropes and knew it. He moved in for the kill.
“And who do you think the rest of our agents are? I don’t mean the bright-eyed grads of our technical schools, like the ones on my squad downstairs. I mean the full agents. The men who plan the operations, do the preliminary fieldwork and see that everything comes off smoothly. They’re crooks. All crooks. The better they were on their own, the better a job they do for the Corps. It’s a great, big, brawling universe and you would be surprised at some of the problems that come up. The only men we can recruit to do the job are the ones who have already succeeded at it.
Are you on?”
It had happened too fast and I hadn’t had time to think. I would probably go on arguing for an hour. But way down in the back of my mind the decision had been made. I was going to do it, I couldn’t say no.
I was losing something, and I hoped I wouldn’t miss it. No matter what freedom I had working with an organization, I would still be working with other people. The old carefree, sole responsibility days were over. I was joining the ranks of society again.
There was the beginning of a warm feeling at the thought. It would at least be the end of loneliness. Friendship would make up for what I had lost.
Chapter 4
I have never been more wrong.
The people I met were dull to the point of extinction. They treated me like just another cog going around with the rest of the wheels. I was coggy all right, and kept wondering how I had ever gotten into this mess. Not really wondering, since the memory was still quite vivid. I was carried along with the rest of the gears, their teeth sunk into mine.
We ended up on a planetoid, that much was obvious. But I hadn’t the dimmest idea of what planets we were near or even what solar system we were in. Everything was highly secret and hush-hush, as this place was obviously the super-secret headquarters and main base of the Corps School too.
This part I liked. It was the only thing that kept me from cracking out. Dull as the cubes were who taught the courses, the material was something I could really sink my teeth into and shake. I began to see how crude my operations had been. With the gadgetry and techniques I soaked up I could be ten times the crook I had been before. Pushing the thought firmly away helped for a while, but it had a way of sneaking back and whispering nastily in my ear during periods of depression and gloom.
Things went from dull to dead. Half my time was spent working at the files, learning about the numberless successes and few failures of the Corps. I contemplated cracking out, yet at the same time couldn’t help but wonder if this wasn’t part of a testing period—to see if I had enough sticktoitiveness to last. I swallowed my temper, muffled my yawns, and took a careful look around. If I couldn’t crack out—I could crack in. There had to be something I could do to terminate this term of penal servitude.
It wasn’t easy—but I found it. By the time I tracked everything down it was well into sleep period. But that was all right. In some ways it even made it more interesting.
When it comes to picking locks and cracking safes I admit to no master. The door to Inskipp’s private quarters had an old-fashioned tumbler drum that was easier to pick than my teeth. I must have gone through that door without breaking step. Quiet as I was though, Inskipp still heard me. The light came on and there he was sitting up in bed pointing a .75 caliber recoilless at my sternum.
“You should have more brains than that, diGriz,” he snarled. “Creeping into my room at night! You could have been shot.”
“No I couldn’t,” I told him, as he stowed the cannon back under his pillow. “A man with a curiosity bump as big as yours will always talk first and shoot later. And besides—none of this pussyfooting around in the dark would be necessary if your screen was open and I could have got a call through.”