"I don't mean that way," I said. "I mean professionally. I wonder if I shouldn't seek wider horizons."
"New cases? Different cases? Give up divorce work? Oh, Boss!"
"Not give it up, Thais. Not that. I couldn't. Divorce is my life. Could a doctor give up healing? Could a Freudist give up lobotomy? No, I didn't mean that. Frankly, I meant should I get more aggressive. Go out and get cases that would have a certain advertising value." I didn't want to say I didn't feel like spending good protein on the sort of advertising Pancho and some of the other Legal Eagles, an unethical lot really, were buying. Besides, we Obanions have always been rather frugal.
Thais' face had come radiantly alive. "Oh, Joe—"
Now, that should have been a tip-off, because she never called me anything but boss. But I blundered right ahead because she was looking at me as though I were Clarence Darrow or somebody.
"I have a case. A real case. If you would—if you only would take it, you'd be famous. More famous, that is. You'd be really famous."
I knew that Thais had some rather questionable friends, being a Franklinist and all. And I knew too that some of them were spacegooks. But the combination of Lyra singing for Pancho and the way Thais was looking at me made me get careless.
"Tell me about it," I said in my best legal manner.
Her face fell. "Non-terrestrial." And then she brightened. "But that's the whole point. These people are citizens of Terra now ... and think of it—you will be the very first Legal Eagle to represent them in a divorce case tried under our laws."
Under our laws. Oh, I should have known. But almost all law is precedent. And I was blinded by trying a case that would set a precedent instead of follow one. Heaven help me, I said yes.