Soon the wooden hall floor creaked and rattled. The door rolled up. Lights blinded me. Three striped toothies streaked for their holes.
"Search him and the room," ordered a Dominant, apparently the man who originally arrested me.
"You don't get much sleep, do you?" I asked.
"Silence!" he said. "Ordinance 55: Criminal—"
I took up the refrain. "—aliens shall never speak, unless so ordered."
The Dominant created fuming noises. The guards searched futilely. In frustration, the Dominant said, "Where is the weapon she gave? Speak."
I said, "I have no weapons, but I'd like to tell you how Galactic Government will react when—"
They walked out and rolled down the door. I flopped on the bed and perspired and brooded.
On Henderson's Globe of Spica, I had planned to terminate my present career with this hunt. I had never especially enjoyed the hazards of hunting, which had cost me a hand, much blood, and large areas of skin. Doreen, Laurinda, Celestine, and I had decided to emigrate to Mother Earth. Game wardens, foresters, and gardeners were needed for the century-old project of reclaiming that world. There I would find work more pleasant than pursuing things with tentacles, fangs, and maws. Of course, if I failed to earn a large fee from this hunt, we would be unable to go.
My principal difficulty was that Maggie was private. GG had no authority except to send inspection parties. A private planet could not attempt inter-planetary or interstellar flight without GG supervision, nor could it own weapons other than those required for defense against native life. Most private planets had been settled two centuries before, when there were individuals wealthy enough to undertake stellar colonization. Few who tried succeeded. The fifteen or twenty private planets in the Explored Galaxy were all eccentric. Some even advocated capital punishment, an archaic system of killing mental defectives.