-handed."

"Your objection has been noted," the IC man said, "and will be included
in the official report. Now come along or we'll be in the middle of a
jurisdictional hassle when the native cops arrive. The corporation
doesn't like hassles. They're bad for business."

* * * * *

The two IC men herded him into a waiting ground car and drove away. It
was all done very smoothly, quietly and efficiently. The guards were
good.

And so was the local detention room. It was clean, modern and--Albert
noted wryly--virtually escape-proof. Albert was something of an expert
on jails, and the thick steel bars, the force lock, and the spy cell in
the ceiling won his grudging respect.

He sighed and sat down on the cot which was the room's sole article of
furniture. He had been a fool to let his anger get the better of him. IC
would probably use this brush with Shifaz as an excuse to send him back
to Earth as an undesirable tourist--which would be the end of his
mission here, and a black mark on a singularly unspotted record.

Of course, they might not be so gentle with him if they knew that he
knew they were growing tobacco. But he didn't think that they would
know--and if they had checked his background, they would find that he
was an investigator for the Revenue Service. Technically, criminal
operations were not his affair. His field was tax evasion.

He didn't worry too much about the fact that Shifaz had tried to kill
him. On primitive worlds like this, that was a standard procedure--it
was less expensive to kill an agent than bribe him or pay honest taxes.
He was angry with himself for allowing the native to trick him.

He shrugged. By all rules of the game, IC would now admit about a two
per cent profit on their Antar operation rather than the four per cent
loss they had claimed, and pay up like gentlemen--and he would get
skinned by the Chief back at Earth Central for allowing IC to unmask
him. His report on tobacco growing would be investigated, but with the
sketchy information he possessed, his charges would be impossible to
prove--and IC would have plenty of time to bury the evidence.

If Earth Central hadn't figured that the corporation owed it some
billion megacredits in back taxes, he wouldn't be here. He had been
dragged from his job in the General Accounting Office, for every field
man and ex-field man was needed to conduct the sweeping investigation.
Every facet of the sprawlin