needed because
The Eel had pleaded guilty.

But he knew very well he would not be executed by the Agskians; he
would instead be set free (presumably with a broken heart) to be
handed over to the next claimant--and that, the Council had decided,
would be Medoris. Since Medoris always kills its criminals, that would
end the whole controversy.

So the Eel was quite aware that his conviction by Agsk would be only
the preliminary to an exquisitely painful and lingering demise at the
two-clawed hands of the Medorans. His business was somehow to get out
from under.

Naturally, the resources of the Galactic Police had been at the full
disposal of the officials of Agsk.

The files had been opened, and the Agskians had before them The Eel's
history back to the day of his birth. He himself had been questioned,
encelographed, hypnotized, dormitized, injected, psychographed,
subjected to all the means of eliciting information devised by all
eight planets--for the other seven, once their first resentment was
over, had reconciled themselves and cooperated whole-heartedly with
Agsk.

Medoris especially had been of the greatest help. The Medorans could
hardly wait.

* * * * *

In the spate of news of the trial that inundated every portion of the
Galaxy, there began to be discovered a note of sympathy for this one
little creature arrayed against the mightiest powers of the Galaxy.
Poor people who wished they had his nerve, and romantic people who
dreamed of adventures they would never dare perform, began to say that
The Eel wasn't so bad, after all; he became a symbol of the rebellious
individual thumbing his nose at entrenched authority. Students of
Earth prehistory will recognize such symbols in the mythical Robin
Hood and Al Capone.

These were the people who were glad to put up when bets began to be
made. At first the odds were ten to one against The Eel; then, as time
dragged by, they dropped until it was even money.

Agsk itself began to be worried. It was one thing to make a big,
expensive splurge to impress the Galaxy and to hasten its acceptance
into full membership in the Federation, but nobody had expected the
show to last more than a few days. If it kept on much longer, Agsk
would be bankrupt.

For the trial had foundered on one insoluble problem: the only way The
Eel could ever be punished by their laws was to kill the person he
most loved--and nobody could discover that he had e