tion. "What do you think Victor Grego's wishing, right now?"
Victor Grego replaced the hand-phone. "Leslie, on the yacht," he said. "They're coming in now. They'll stop at the hospital to drop Kellogg, and then they're coming here."
Nick Emmert nibbled a canape. He had reddish hair, pale eyes and a wide, bovine face.
"Holloway must have done him up pretty badly," he said.
"I wish Holloway'd killed him!" He blurted it angrily, and saw the Resident General's shocked expression.
"You don't really mean that, Victor?"
"The devil I don't!" He gestured at the recorder-player, which had just finished the tape of the hearing, transmitted from the yacht at sixty-speed. "That's only a teaser to what'll come out at the trial. You know what the Company's epitaph will be? Kicked to death, along with a Fuzzy, by Leonard Kellogg."
Everything would have worked out perfectly if Kellogg had only kept his head and avoided collision with Holloway. Why, even the killing of the Fuzzy and the shooting of Borch, inexcusable as that had been, wouldn't have been so bad if it hadn't been for that asinine murder complaint. That was what had provoked Holloway's countercomplaint, which was what had done the damage.
And, now that he thought of it, it had been one of Kellogg's people, van Riebeek, who had touched off the explosion in the first place. He didn't know van Riebeek himself, but Kellogg should have, and he had handled him the wrong way. He should have known what van Riebeek would go along with and what he wouldn't.
"But, Victor, they won't convict Leonard of murder," Emmert was saying. "Not for killing one of those little things."
"'Murder shall consist of the deliberate and unjustified killing of any sapient being, of any race,'" he quoted. "That's the law. If they can prove in court that the Fuzzies are sapient beings…"
Then, some morning, a couple of deputy marshals would take Leonard Kellogg out in the jail yard and put a bullet through the back of his head, which, in itself, would be no loss. The trouble was, they would also be shooting an irreparable hole in the Zarathustra Company's charter. Maybe Kellogg could be kept out of court, at that. There wasn't a
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