"You try to freeze me out of this session," said Arden, "and you'll find that I have the coldest shoulder in the Solar System."
As the party from Mars left the platform of the spacecraft that was poised on the Landing Stage of Venus Equilateral, another landing was made. This landing came from the same ship, but unlike the arrival of the Balers and Barney Carroll, the later landing was unseen, unknown, and unwanted.
Mark Kingman had been a stowaway.
Now, most stowaways are apprehended because success in such a venture is difficult. To properly stow away, it is calculated that more than the nominal cost of the trip must be spent in planning and preparation. Also, there is the most difficult of all problems—that of stepping blithely ashore under the watchful eye of purser or authority whose business it is to see that all the passengers who embarked ultimately disembark—no more and no less; plus or minus zero. (It is considered that an infant born aboard ship is a legal passenger and not a stowaway. This is a magnanimity on the part of the transportation companies who understand that they might have difficulty in persuading any court that the will exists to defraud the company of rightful revenues, etc.) (A death and burial at sea is also ignored; the transportation company has already collected for a full fare!)
But Mark Kingman had done it. He had come aboard in a large packing case, labelled:
CERTIFIED UNIQUES!
(Identium Protected)
Under NO Circumstances
will
DUPLICATOR
or
MATTER TRANSMITTER
Be Tolerated
With magnificent sophistry, Kingman was within the letter of the law that did not permit false representation of contained merchandise. For he, a human being, was a certified unique, he having never been under the beam of the integrator scanning beam of the matter duplicator or transmitter. Nor had any other living human, for that matter. The identium protection was insurance on all such cargoes; it prevented some overly—or underly bright clerk from slipping the package into a duplicator to make shipping easier. Identium exploded rather violently under the impact of the scanner beam, it will be recalled.
Along with Kingman was a small battery-powered duplicator, and a set of recordings. The duplicator produced fresh air as needed, water, food, and even books, games, and puzzles for solitary entertainment. Waste material went into the matter bank, proving the earlier statements that with a well-equipped duplicator and a set of recordings, any man can establish a completely closed system that will be valid for any length of time desired.
When the ship landed, Kingman tossed all the loose material into the duplicator and reduced it to nonhomogeneous matter in the matter bank. Then he turned the duplicator-beam against the side-wall of the huge box and watched the side-wall disappear into the machine.
He stepped out through the opening, which was calculated to miss the concealed plates of identium installed to prevent just this very thing. Kingman, of course, had planned it that way.