fresh crime, but now it was obvious that this had notbeen necessary. He had been too clever to pick any planet wherevisitors from Earth were not a common sight, and he had been tooinsignificant for anyone to pay attention to him.
* * * * *
The criminal code of Agsk is unique in the Galaxy, though there arerumors of something similar among a legendary extinct tribe on Earthcalled the Guanches. The high priest is also the chief executive (aswell as the minister of education and head of the medical faculty),and he rules jointly with a priestess who also officiates as chiefjudge.
The Agskians have some strange ideas to a terrestrial eye--forexample, suicide is an honor, and anyone of insufficient rank whocommits it condemns his immediate family to punishment for hispresumption. They are great family people, in general. Also, theynever lie, and find it hard to realize that other beings do.
Murder, to them, is merely a matter for negotiation between themurderer and the relatives of the victim, provided it is open andwithout deceit. But grand larceny, since property is the foundation ofthe family, is punished in a way that shows that the Agskians, thoughtechnologically primitive, are psychologically very advanced.
They reason that death, because it comes inevitably to all, is theleast of misfortunes. Lasting grief, remorse and guilt are thegreatest. So they let the thief live and do not even imprison him.
Instead, they find out who it is that the criminal most loves. If theydo not know who it is, they merely ask him, and since Agskians neverlie, he always tells them. Then they seize that person, and kill himor her, slowly and painfully, before the thief's eyes.
And the agreement had been that The Eel was to be tried and punishedby the laws and customs of the planet to which he was awarded.
The actual trial and conviction of The Eel were almost perfunctory.Without needing to resort to torture, his jailers had been presented,on a platter as it were, with a full confession--so far as theparticular robbery he had committed on Agsk was concerned. There is aprovision for defense in the Agskian code, but it was unneeded becauseThe Eel had pleaded guilty.
But he knew very well he would not be executed by the Agskians; hewould instead be set free (presumably with a broken heart) to behanded over to the next claimant--and that, the Council had decided,would be Medoris. Since Medoris always kills its criminals, that wouldend the whole controversy.
So the Eel was quite aware that his conviction by Agsk would be onlythe preliminary to an exquisitely painful and lingering demise at thetwo-clawed hands of the Medorans. His business was somehow to get outfrom under.
Naturally, the resources of the Galactic Police had been at the fulldisposal of the officials of Agsk.
The files had been opened, and the Agskians had before them The Eel'shistory 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 alleight planets--for the other seven, once their first resentment wasover, had reconciled themselves and cooperated whole-heartedly withAgsk.
Medoris especially had been of the greatest help. The Medorans couldhardly wait.
* * * * *
In the spate of news of the trial that inundated every portion of theGalaxy, there began to be discovered a note of sympathy for this onelittle creature arrayed against the mightiest powers of the Galaxy.Poor people who wished they had his nerve, and romantic people whodreamed of adventures they would never dare perform, began to say thatThe Eel wasn't so bad, after all; he became a symbol of the rebelliousindividual thumbing his nose at entrenched authority. Students ofEarth prehistory will recognize such symbols in the mythical RobinHood and Al Capone.
These were the people who were glad to put up when bets began to bemade. At first the odds were ten to one against The Eel; then, as timedragged 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 acceptanceinto full membership in the Federation, but nobody had expected theshow to last more than a few days. If it kept on much longer, Agskwould be bankrupt.
For the trial had foundered on one insoluble problem: the only way TheEel could ever be punished by their laws was to kill the person hemost loved--and nobody could discover that he had ever loved anybody.
His mother? His father? He had been an undutiful and unaffectionateson, and his parents were long since dead in any case. He had neverhad a brother, a sister, a wife or a child. No probing could find anywoman with whom he had ever been in love. He had never had an intimatefriend.
He did nothing to help, naturally. He simply sat in his chains andsmiled and waited. He was perfectly willing to be escorted from thecourt every evening, relieved of his fetters and placed in his pit. Itwas a much pleasanter existence than being executed inch by inch bythe Medorans. For all he cared, the Agskians could go on spendingtheir planetary income until he finally died of old age.
The priestess-judge and her co-adjutors wore themselves out indiscussions far into the night. They lost up to 15 pounds apiece,which on Agsk, where the average weight of adults is about 40, wasserious. It began to look as if The Eel's judges would predecease him.
_Whom_ did The Eel love? They went into minutiae and subterfuges. Hehad never had a pet to which he was devoted. He had never even loved ahouse which could be razed. He could not be said to have loved theimmense fortune he had stolen, for he had concealed his wealth andused little of it, and in any event it had all been confiscated and,so far as possible, restored proportionately to those he had robbed.
What he had loved most, doubtless, was his prowess in stealingunimaginable sums and getting away with it--but there is no way of"killing" a criminal technique.
* * * * *
Almost a year had passed. Agsk was beginning to wish The Eel had neverbeen caught, or that they had never been awarded the glory of tryinghim.
At last the priestess-judge, in utter despair, took off her judge'srobes, put on the cassock and surplice of her sacred calling, and laidthe problem before the most unapproachable and august of the gods ofAgsk.
The trial was suspended while she lay for three days in a trance onthe high altar. She emerged weak and tottering, her skin light blueinstead of its healthy purple, but her head high and her mouth curvedin triumph.
At sight of her, renewed excitement surged through the audience.News-gatherers, who had been finding it difficult of late to getanything to report, rushed to their instruments.
"Remove the defendant's chains and set him free," the priestess-judgeordered in ringing tones. "The Great God of the Unspeakable Name hasrevealed to me whom the defendant most loves. As soon as he is freed,seize him and slay him. For the only being he loves is--himself."
There was an instant's silence, and then a roar. The Medorans howledin frustration.
But The Eel, still guarded but unchained, stood up and laughed aloud.
"Your Great God is a fool!" he said blasphemously. "I deny that I lovemyself. I care nothing for myself at all."
The priestess-judge sighed. "Since this is your sworn denial, it mustbe true," she said. "So then we cannot kill you. Instead, we grantthat you do indeed love no one. Therefore you are a creature so faroutside our comprehension that you cannot come under our laws, nomatter how you have broken them. We shall notify the Federation thatwe abandon our jurisdiction and hand you over to our sister-planetwhich is next in line to judge you."
Then all the viewers on tridimens on countless planets saw somethingthat nobody had ever thought to see--The Eel's armor ofself-confidence cracked and terror poured through the gap.
He dropped to his knees and cried: "Wait! Wait! I confess that Iblasphemed your god, but without realizing that I did!"
"You mean," pressed the priestess-judge, "you acknowledge that youyourself are the only being dear to you?"
"No, not that, either. Unt
il now, I have never known love. But now ithas come upon me like a nova and I must speak the truth." He paused,still on his knees, and looked piteously at the priestess-judge."Are--are you bound by your law to--to believe me and to kill, insteadof me, this--this being I adore?"
"We are so bound," she stated.
"Then," said The Eel, smiling and confident again, rising to his feet,"before all the Galaxy, I must declare the object of my sudden buteverlasting passion. Great lady, it is you!"
* * * * *
The Eel is still in his pit, which has been made most comfortable byhis sympathizers, while the Council of the Galactic Federation seeksfeverishly and vainly, year after year, to find some legal way out ofthe impasse.
Agsk, however, requests all Federation citizens to submit solutions,the grand prize for a workable answer being a lifetime term aspresident of the planet. A secondary contest (prize: