IV
"Obviously," Street said, "this is no more than a folk legend."
"Are you sure?" the director of the ETI asked, fingering the report.
"It can't be anything else. Granted that all the other events were true, I would know Baker was still alive—only one, because neither could stand the threat of the other, to his ego. You see, the case would never have come to trial. It would have been immediately dismissed."
"Why?"
"My dear fellow, both Bakers could not have been put on trial for the same murder, as any student of law would know. This would have violated the basic protection of double jeopardy."
V
A fast spaceship to put him well ahead of the law, and a place to hide out until things simmered down, that was all Baker wanted and it was what he had. He was too hot for more. ("This is how we reconstruct it from our informant's version," the ETI chief said.)
For the hundredth time, he located Wister VI on the star map. It had been discovered by the Gordon-Poul expedition half a century before. Few people ever knew about it, and most of those had forgotten it. He would never have known about it himself if it hadn't been on the credentials of that bank official.
With those papers he was set to spend several profitable years in the Great National Bank. He would be an alien, but somehow aliens always seemed to have more money than natives on any given planet.