"Only trouble, some of these big boys fall in love with their work. This can get real troublesome, like I pick up this five to ten this way.
"See, they get this chump a couple too many. So, comes morning, he's still in the street. Real tough swinging a parole, too. I'm in here since five years, remember? So I'm real careful where I get muscle any more."
"Sounds interesting." Stan nodded thoughtfully.
"Great Space and all the little Nebulae," he said to himself. "What kind of a planet is this? Nothing in the histories about this sort of thing." He walked over to the washstand.
"Some day," he promised himself, "I'm going to get out of here. And when I do, I'll set up camp by Guard Headquarters. And I'll needle those big brains till they do something about this."
There was, he remembered, one organization that should be able to do more than a little in a case like this. He smiled to himself ruefully as he thought of the almost legendary stories he had heard about the Federation's Special Corps for Investigation.
As he remembered the stories, though, corpsmen seemed to appear from nowhere when there was serious trouble. No one ever seemed to call them in. No one even knew how to get in touch with them. He shrugged.
The men of the Special Corps, he remembered, were reputed to be something in the superhuman line.
For a large part of his life, he had dreamed of working with them, but he had been unable to find any way of so much as applying for membership in their select group. So, he'd done the next best thing. He'd gone into the Stellar Guard. And he'd lasted only a little more than three years.
Somehow, he'd taken it from there. He was still a little hazy as to how he'd managed to land in prison on Kell's planet. It had been a mere stopover.