THE STANLEY DOCTRINE. As one of her principal reforms, Empress Stanley Five imposed on society the formal hierarchical structure still in use today. Given the fact that stratification was inevitable in any social system, she elected to ,introduce the arrangement that had served mankind the longest - that of hereditary nobility. Her logical mind took what was essentially a chaotic state of affairs and reorganized, simplified and, in a sense, standardized it. All inhabited space was divided into thirty-six Sectors, with Earth considered to be the center of the sphere. Each Sector is ruled by a grand duke, and may contain hundreds of planets. Single planets are ruled by dukes. Marquises rule continents or the equivalent thereof. Earls rule over what would previously have been considered states or small nations. Counts rule countries. Barons - the lowest ranking nobility - rule cities or districts.
(Stanhope, Elements of Empire, Reel 2, slot 408.)
The Hotel Splendide was the plushiest, most exclusive caravansary on Algonia. Rooms there started at two hundred rubles a night and rose sharply in price. The hotel’s chef was famous throughout most of Sector Three, and it was not uncommon that meals in the Splendide’s restaurant ran to seventy or eighty rubles a person. The grounds of the hotel covered more than forty hectares, and included virtually every recreational facility, licit and illicit, known to man. There was even a small private forest for guests who wanted to ‘commune with Nature’ without going too far from civilization.
Thus it was only natural that such a hotel would become the stopping place of Carlos and Carmen Velasquez, those flamboyant and flashy Citizens of Earth. Their arrival there created a small whirlwind of activity, and they quickly established themselves as favorites of both management and staff. Not only because they settled into the penthouse suite - at a thousand rubles a night - for what promised to be a long stay; not only because they were outgoing, gregarious and fun-loving; but also because they did not seem to realize that money came in denominations smaller than fifty Imperial rubles.
Though publicly they remained unflappable, privately the scale on which they were living frightened them a bit. ‘We could camp half our family in here,’ Yvette said when first they were alone in their suite, ‘and still have room left over there in the corner for tumbling mats.’
‘It’s all in a good cause, though,’ Jules said, going over to one of the suite’s four enormous vibrobeds and sprawling out on it. ‘I know it’s hard, but we’ll have to learn to live with luxury for a while.’
‘I’m just afraid I’ll get used to it, that’s all!’
The two visitors quickly settled into a regular routine of seemingly relaxed activity. They never rose before eleven and, after a light brunch, engaged in games of tennis and rondola by themselves, or played in team sports with other guests. Then came a brisk swim in the indoor pool, followed by a midafternoon snack. They retired to their suite until dinner, after which they walked for at least one hour through the relatively deserted pathways of the hotel’s planned forest. Unsuspicious activities for two people on a vacation for the purposes of relaxation.
But those walks in the late evening played a central role in their plans. Heretofore, all the SOTS agents who had investigated the criminal activity on Algonia had gone looking for it. They had found it, of course, but it was Yvette’s theory that perhaps they had only found what was meant for them to find. Perhaps the d’Alemberts would have more success if they let the criminal activity find them.
Their hikes on the first few nights were exploratory more than anything else. But after a while they hit upon a path that they particularly liked, and stuck to it monotonously from then on. Every evening they would take their rented car and drive it from the hotel to the corner of the grounds where the forest began; then they would park it and begin their six kilometer hike along a dark, heavily wooded area of hills and rocks. It was a route on which they encountered no other people; a route that had five places to order for an ambush; and a route that they had gone to much trouble to publicize.
For six nights they swung along their chosen path at a steady eight-kilometers-an-hour gait, swathed in complete silence ...
Complete silence? Yes. Their flashy but sturdy walking boots made not even a whisper of sound as they trod across the soft ground; no item of their apparel or equipment rattled or tinkled or squeaked or even rustled - everything had been designed that way. They could hear, but they could not be heard. Anyone lying in wait for them would have to spot them before moving into action - and the d’Alemberts themselves had very acute hearing and aerialists’ eyesight.
As they reached a clearing with minimal potential for danger, Yvette asked, ‘Do you suppose we goofed, Julie?’
‘Uh uh, pretty sure not. I’ve learned to trust your intuitions. I think it’s just taking them some time to get the operation set up. Consider: Senor and Senora Velasquez can’t just disappear into thin air - it would raise entirely too many questions. Also, besides the king-sized fortunes we’re wearing, everyone knows we’ve got enough capital tucked away in the Splendide’s safe to start a bank. They’ll want to get their hands on that, too. I think they’ll want to use substitutes for us, after getting us out of the way- and that will take a bit of planning. We didn’t specifically design these three quarters naked outfits of ours to make it hard to impersonate us, but it worked out well that way. There aren’t too many people around who could carry off that imposture.’
‘That’s right. They’d have to check out the Splendide, going past the entire staff that knows us well because of our tips, and pry our fortune out of the safe. Nice; I never thought of it cutting both ways. The only way they can match our physiques is to get two other DesPlainians or ex-Puritans, or people from some other heavy gravity world.’ Jules nodded. ‘And for that, they’ll have to send out. Heavy grav types like us just don’t do much unessential traveling to light grav planets. It’s just not comfortable, as you and I both know. In fact, another month of this with no work at grav and we’ll both be as flabby as two tubes of boiled noodles.’
‘So let’s hope it won’t be a month, then. But we certainly should give them a couple more days. Anyone who thinks they can ambush us certainly deserves the opportunity to try.’
Five more hikes proved uneventful, and the two of them began feeling very discouraged. But on the sixth evening following that conversation, at a place where the path passed close to a dense stand of trees on one side and a thick patch of underbrush on the other, their straining ears heard rustling sounds and their keen eyes caught the blur of movement. ‘Rube!’ Yvette whispered to her brother, and Jules nodded. Both were braced for action.
For concealment, the place the attackers had chosen was ideal - as the d’Alemberts had set it up to be.
But in order to make their attack, the muggers would have to move-and, being of a relatively low echelon in the criminal world, they could not take effective precautions against their movements being detected. Also they had no idea whatsoever of how terribly fast their proposed quarries were.
At the first hint of activity, Yvette and Jules became lightning incarnate. Jules’ hat and swagger stick hit the ground almost instantaneously, and Yvette’s tiara was right beside them. The two used their well- muscled legs as springs to catapult them in low dives, Jules to his side of the road and Yvette to hers.
Diving straight through a bush, Jules found himself in the center of a clump of five men. Four of them were in a tight configuration, with the fifth standing a short distance away. Having Jules’ powerful body come flying suddenly into their midst upset them no end. As he landed, Jules slapped the nearest man on the head - but gently, so as not to break his neck. As his momentum carried him still further forward, he grabbed the shirt of this first unconscious man and pulled him along. Then, rolling quickly to his knees, he picked his victim up and hurled him bodily at another man some three meters away. The second man, hit by the ninety-five kilo mass of his compatriot, staggered backwards and fell to the ground.
Jules, of course, had not stopped to watch the effect of his throw; what was most important to him was to keep moving, to do as much damage as quickly as possible and to present as small a target as he could. Springing to his feet, he jumped straight at the third man, who cringed reflexively. Jules’ powerful fist lashed out and struck his would-be assailant squarely in the solar plexus. The man whooshed and crumpled lifelessly to the ground. In the same motion, Jules spun, almost ballet-like, on one foot while, with the other, he kicked the fourth man in the face - not with his toe, but with the whole big flat sole of his boot. The impact crushed the man’s face in and rendered him instantly unconscious.
That made the score four down and one to go. But that one would be a little more difficult, Jules realized as he peered through the darkness at his remaining adversary; this one was a DesPlainian, by the look of him - the man who had obviously been intended to substitute for ‘Carlos Velasquez’.
H e had been standing several meters away from the scene of the battle, not originally intending to take part in it, and the five seconds it had taken Jules to dispose of the other crooks had given this one time to regain his senses. He had a gun drawn, but Jules couldn’t tell in the darkness whether it was a stunner or a blaster.
Jules hit the ground immediately and used the darkness of the night to cover him. His opponent with the gun was moving about and making what to Jules seemed like an awful lot of noise, though the criminal hardly realized that. As a result, Jules could track his adversary by sound, and kept low. Circling around, he came up behind the man, grabbed him by the shoulder and spun him around. The man had time to register only the briefest look of surprise before Jules’ right fist came smashing up under his jaw. Knowing that the man was another DesPlainian, Jules made no effort to pull his punch, and gave the hapless fellow the full strength at his command.
The DesPlainian criminal fell to the ground, his gun dropping from his hand. Jules caught the gun on the fly; it was a stunner, set on eight. A nasty setting, because it would leave a person helpless for days and could have permanent paralytic effects on the nervous system.
A movement caught his eye where there should not have been one, and Jules whirled to face the threat. The second man, at whom he’d thrown the first, was getting to his feet, gun in hand. Jules had no time to reset the controls on his stunner; he fired point-blank and the man went down again. This time he lay very still.
Yvette, too, had had a busy time of it. Her dive took her between two trees and into a small crowd of people. With arms spread apart, she grabbed two heads in her hands and brought them together with a frightening crack. She rolled as she hit the ground, regained her feet and looked around. A shadow moved, and she attacked it. Bringing her knee up, she produced a sharp cry of pain from the man whose groin she had hit. As he doubled over, she grabbed him by the shoulders, lifted him over her head and flung him at a fourth shadowy figure approaching in the nighttime gloom. There was a satisfying thud as the bodies connected and collapsed on the ground.
Suddenly a blow hit her on the back of the neck. It was a hard one, as such things go, and might have inflicted serious damage on the spinal column of someone in less superb physical condition. In Yvette’s case, however, those neck muscles were so tight and hard that the blow merely stunned her momentarily. She stumbled forward from the impact, but recovered her poise quickly and turned the fall into a roll. After completing her somersault, she sprang to her feet, spun around and faced her attacker.
About all she could make out in the dim starlight was the other’s silhouette- but that was enough to tell her some vital facts. For one thing, the silhouette was definitely female; there was no way a male could have fit into that particular assemblage of curves. For another, the short, squat form obviously belonged to a DesPlainian, or at least someone from a high-grav world. Adding these facts rapidly together in her mind, she came to the conclusion that the woman she was facing was the ‘ringer’ brought in to impersonate her and steal her fortune. That only made sense; if the real Carlos and Carmen Velasquez were waylaid on the trail, the ersatz ones should be ready to move in instantly to take their places.
Once that conclusion was reached, however, it was pigeonholed in her mind. The main problem she faced at the moment was staying alive while incapacitating this other woman at the same time. That problem was complicated by the fact that the DesPlainian criminal most likely had a gun that she would be using any second.
Yvette dove back in the direction from which she had come, toward her attacker. As she dove, she also twisted in mid-air, so that when she landed it was on her side, stretched out horizontally. She converted her forward momentum into a rolling motion, so that she spun along the ground directly into the legs of the woman who’d been standing there. Like a bowling ball hitting a strike, Yvette’s body knocked the woman completely off her feet. The two females sprawled out on the ground in a tangle of shapely limbs.
The other girl landed on top, and tried to press an elbow into Yvette’s windpipe. The SOTE agent fended off the blow with her forearm, simultaneously bringing her knee up to make a sharp blow on the other’s spine. The attacking female cried out and fell over forward; Yvette clipped her on the chin as she went by, and the now unconscious ambusher tumbled loosely to the ground.
Yvette paused for a moment to regain her breath. As she got to her knees, she listened attentively for any sounds to indicate that more attackers were in the neighborhood. Only stillness reached her ears; even the normal night sounds had been hushed as the forest animals fled the scene of the fight.
Then her brother’s voice came whispering its way through the darkness across the road. ‘Eve?’ he asked tentatively. ‘Five here.’
‘Same here,’ she replied, springing lightly to her feet. ‘All smooth. Is there any clear space by you?’
‘Yes- lug them over this way.’
Yvette picked up two of her would-be kidnapers and hauled them to the other side of the pathway, where her brother was waiting with his victims. Jules helped carry the other three while she retrieved her tiara. In just a couple of minutes the ten unconscious or dead crooks - Jules was afraid that number eight stunner setting might have been a little too strong - were laid out on their backs in a neat row.
Yvette took a miniflash out of her boot and shone it on the faces of the two people who’d meant to impersonate them. ‘Ugh, do we look like that? No wonder everybody stares at us. I don’t think I’ll ever trust a mirror again.’
‘They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery,’ her brother pointed out.
‘’They’ say a lot of things that wouldn’t buy you a cupful of air on market day. We’d better get down to work. ”Au juste.’
Jules handed her his stun-gun, on which he had turned the setting back down to three. ‘If you want to start working on these creeps, I’ll go back and see if I can navigate the car along the path. Damn, I wish we’d been able to use our own it would have been a lot easier to fly in here.’
‘But out of character,’ Yvette reminded him. ‘The Velasquezes had to rent the biggest, flashiest limousine available. Consistency above all.’
Muttering something under his breath about what idiots the Velasquezes were, Jules set off back along their path to where they had parked their car. Some ten minutes later the car came crawling back along the route, moving with agonizing slowness as Jules navigated its way down the narrow path trying to avoid scraping the sides on the trees and rocks. By the time he pulled up, Yvette had just finished injecting their prisoners with nitrobarb from the small kit inside her boot. ‘They’ll be ready for questioning in twenty minutes.’ she said.
She helped her brother load their captives like cordwood into the back of the limousine, then guided him as he backed up the path to the highway. Once out on the open road, however, the d’Alemberts did not drive back to their hotel. Carting ten unconscious bodies through the lobby would have required a bit of explanation, even from such colorful and eccentric characters as Carlos and Carmen Velasquez.
Instead, Jules gunned their limousine on the road out of town. They had taken the opportunity soon after they arrived on Algonia to rent a country ‘house’- which most people would have considered a large estate - by phone from a broker. This house was so far removed from everything that they could have operated an illicit spacefield on the estate without the neighbors being any the wiser.
They unloaded their freight into the empty living room of the mansion and got down to serious business.
The man Jules had shot with the number eight stunner beam was useless for their purposes, but the other nine hoodlums were just coming out of the initial coma state induced by the nitrobarb and were ready to talk. Under sharp questioning by the two expert agents - and completely unable to lie or withhold knowledge under the nitrobarb’s influence- they revealed the complete details of their plan: how they had intended to waylay and kill the Velasquezes, substitute their own people for them, then have those substitutes check out of the hotel, taking all their money with them. The operation would have been perfect, had Carlos and Carmen been the people they’d seemed- but, unfortunately for these crooks, the d’Alemberts were not a pair of fops.
Yvette and Jules intensified their interrogation. It took no great effort to learn the name of these people’s immediate superior, a supposedly respectable stockbroker in a city over a thousand kilometers away. But they were after more information - the name of the biggest crime chief on the entire planet.
After peeling layer after layer of hierarchy, the SOTE agents got the information they were looking for, but it startled them nonetheless. The crime boss on this world was no less than the baron of the city of Osberg, which was the second largest city on Algonia.