At practically
any instant his brilliance would be discovered and he'd be well-to-do,
his friend Derec would admire him, and even Nedda would probably decide
to marry him right away. She was the delightful girl. Such prospects
made for good sleeping.

And Walden was a fine world to be sleeping on. Outside the capital city
its spaceport received shipments of luxuries and raw materials from
halfway across the galaxy. Its landing grid reared skyward and tapped
the planet's ionosphere for power with which to hoist ships to clear
space and pluck down others from emptiness. There was commerce and
manufacture and wealth and culture, and Walden modestly admitted that
its standard of living was the highest in the Nurmi Cluster. Its
citizens had no reason to worry about anything but a supply of
tranquilizers to enable them to stand the boredom of their lives.

Even Hoddan was satisfied, as of the moment. On his native planet there
wasn't even a landing grid. The few, battered, cobbled ships the
inhabitants owned had to take off precariously on rockets. They came
back blackened and sometimes more battered still, and sometimes they
were accompanied by great hulls whose crews and passengers were
mysteriously missing. These extra ships had to be landed on their
emergency rockets, and, of course, couldn't take off again, but they
always vanished quickly just the same. And the people of Zan, on which
Hoddan had been born, always affected innocent indignation when
embattled other spacecraft came and furiously demanded that they be
produced.

There were some people who said that all the inhabitants of Zan were
space pirates and ought to be hung and compared with such a planet,
Walden seemed a very fine place indeed. So on a certain night Bron
Hoddan went confidently to bed and slept soundly until three hours after
sunrise. Then the police broke in his door.

* * * * *

They made a tremendous crash in doing it, but they were in great haste.
The noise waked Hoddan, and he blinked his eyes open. Before he could
stir, four uniformed men grabbed him and dragged him out of bed. They
searched him frantically for anything like a weapon. Then they stood him
against a wall with two stun-pistols on him, and the main body of cops
began to tear his room apart, looking for something he could not guess.
Then his friend Derec came hesitantly in the door and looked at him
remorsefully. He wrung his hands.

"I had t