“Which bears out what I said.”

  Heim put the drink orders into French.

  “Please, don’t argue any more. I told you I have accepted your fait accompli.” Peretz leaned forward. “But may I ask something, Gunnar? I see why New Europe did what it did. But you yourself—You could have come home, been a world hero, and a billionaire with your prize money. Instead you take citizenship here—well, blaze, they are nice people, but they aren’t yours!”

  “They are now,” Heim said quietly.

  He took out his pipe and tamped it full. His words ran on, almost of themselves:

  “Mixed motives, as usual. I had to stay till the war was over. There was a lot of fighting, and afterward somebody must mount guard. And…well…I’d been lonely on Earth. Here I found a common purpose with a lot of absolutely first-class men. And a whole new world, elbow room, infinite possibilities. It dawned on me one day, when I was feeling homesick—what was I homesick for? To go back and rot among my dollars?

  “So now, instead, I’m New Europe’s minister of space and the navy. We’re short of hands, training, equipment, everything; you name it and we probably haven’t got it. But I can see us grow, day by day. And that’s my doing!”

  He struck fire and puffed. “Not that I intend to stay in government any longer than necessary,” he went on. “I want to experiment with pelagic farming; and prospect the other planets and asteroids in this system; and start a merchant spaceship yard; and—shucks, I can’t begin to tell you how much there is. I can’t wait to become a private citizen again.”

  “But you do wait,” Peretz said. Heim looked out a window at sea and sun and sky. “Well,” he said, “it’s worth some sacrifice. There’s more involved than this world. We’re laying the foundations of—” he hunted for words—“admiralty. Man’s, throughout the universe.”

  The maid came in with her tray. Heim welcomed her not only for refreshment, but as an excuse to change the subject. He wasn’t much of a talker on serious matters. A man did what he must; that sufficed.

  The girl ducked her head. “Un voleur s’approche, Monsieur,” she reported.

  “Good,” Heim said. “That’ll be Endre Vadasz and his wife. You’ll like them, Moshe. These days he’s giving his Magyar genes full rein on a 10,000 hectare ranch in the Bordes Valley—but he’s still one solar flare of a singer. You may already have heard his ballad about Admiral Cynbe.”

  “No. About who?”

  A brief bleakness crossed Heim’s eyes. “I’ll tell you later. Someone Endre and I both thought should be remembered.” He raised his glass. “Skaal.”

  “Shalom.”

  Both men got up when the Vadaszes entered. “Bienvenu,” Heim said, shook his friend’s hand with gladness and kissed Danielle’s. By now he’d learned how to do that with authority.

  It was a surprise, he thought as he looked at her, how fast a certain wound was healing. Life isn’t a fairy tale; the knight who kills the dragon doesn’t necessarily get the princess. So what? Who’d want to live in a cosmos less rich and various than the real one? You commanded yourself as you did a ship—with discipline, reasonableness, and spirit—and thus you came to port. By the time he fulfilled his promise to stand godfather to her firstborn, why, his feelings toward her would be downright avuncular.

  No, he realized with a sudden quickening of blood, it wouldn’t even take that long. The war was over. He could send for Lisa. He had little doubt that Jocelyn would come along.

  THE ADVENTURE OF THE MISPLACED HOUND

  Whitcomb Geoffrey was the very model of a modern major operative. Medium tall, stockily muscular, with cold gray eyes in a massively chiseled, expressionless face, he was quietly dressed in purple breeches and a crimson tunic whose slight bulge showed that he carried a Holman ray-thrower. His voice was crisp and hard as he said: “Under the laws of the Inter-being League, you are required to give every assistance to a field agent of the Interstellar Bureau of Investigation. Me.”

  Alexander Jones settled his lean length more comfortably behind the desk. His office seemed to crackle with Geoffrey’s dynamic personality; he felt sure that the agent was inwardly scorning its easygoing sloppiness. “All right,” he said. “But what brings you to Toka? This is still a backward planet, you know. Hasn’t got very much to do with spatial traffic.” Remembering the Space Patrol episode, he shuddered slightly and crossed his fingers.

  “That’s what you think!” snapped Geoffrey. “Let me explain.”

  “Certainly, if you wish,” said Alex blandly.

  “Thanks, I will,” said the other man. He caught himself, bit his lip, and glared. It was plain that he thought Alex much too young for the exalted position of plenipotentiary. And in fact Alex’s age was still, after nearly ten years in this job, well below the average for a ranking CDS official.

  After a moment, Geoffrey went on: “The largest problem the IBI faces is interstellar dope smuggling, and the most dangerous gang in that business is—or was—operated by a group of renegade ppussjans from Ximba. Ever seen one, or a picture? They’re small, slim fellows, cyno-centauroid type: four legs and two arms, spent years trying to track down this particular bunch of dream peddlers. We finally located their headquarters and got most of them. It was on a planet of Yamatsu’s Star, about six light-years from here. But the leader, known as Number Ten—”

  “Why not Number One?” asked Alex.

  “Ppussjans count rank from the bottom up. Ten escaped, and has since been resuming his activities on a smaller scale, building up the ring again. We’ve got to catch him, or we’ll soon be right back where we started.

  “Casting around in this neighborhood with tracer beams, we caught a spaceship with a ppussjan and a load of nixl weed. The ppussjan confessed what he knew, which wasn’t much, but still important. Ten himself is hiding out alone here on Toka—he picked it because it’s backward and thinly populated. He’s growing the weed and giving it to his confederates, who land here secretly at night. When the hunt for him has died down, he’ll leave Toka, and space is so big that we might never catch him again.”

  “Well,” said Alex, “didn’t your prisoner tell you just where Ten is hiding?”

  “No. He never saw his boss. He merely landed at a certain desolate spot on a large island and picked up the weed, which had been left there for him. Ten could be anywhere on the island. He doesn’t have a boat of his own, so we can’t track him down with metal detectors; and he’s much too canny to come near a spaceship, if we should go to the rendezvous and wait for him.”

  “I see,” said Alex. “And nixl is deadly stuff, isn’t it? Hm-m-m. You have the coordinates of this rendezvous?”

  He pushed a buzzer. A Hoka servant entered, in white robes, a turban, and a crimson cummerbund, to bow low and ask: “What does the sahib wish?”

  “Bring me the big map of Toka, Rajat Singh,” said Alex. “He’s been reading Kipling,” said Alex apologetically. It did not seem to clear away his guest’s puzzlement.

  The coordinates intersected on a large island off the main continent. “Hm,” said Alex, “England. Devonshire, to be precise.”

  “Huh?” Geoffrey pulled his jaw up with a click. An IBI agent is never surprised. “You and I will go there at once,” he said firmly. “Remember your duty, Jones!”

  “Oh, all right. I’ll go. But you understand,” added the younger man diffidently, “there may be a little trouble with the Hokas themselves.”

  Geoffrey was amused. “We’re used to that in the IBI,” he said. “We’re well-trained not to step on native toes.”

  Alex coughed, embarrassed. “Well, it’s not exactly that—” he stumbled. “You see…well, it may be the other way around.”

  A frown darkened Geoffrey’s brow. “They may hamper us, you mean?” he clipped. “Your function is to keep the natives non-hostile, Jones.”

  “No,” said Alex unhappily. “What I’m afraid of is that the Hokas may try to help us. Believe me, Geoffrey, you’ve no idea of what can happen when Hokas take it into their heads to be helpful.”

  Geoffrey cleared his throat. He was obviously wondering whether or not to report Alex as incompetent. “All right,” he said. “We’ll divide up the work between us. I’ll let you do all the native handling, and you let me do the detecting.”

  “Good enough,” said Alex, but he still looked doubtful.

  The green land swept away beneath them as they flew toward England in the plenipotentiary’s runabout. Geoffrey was scowling. “It’s urgent,” he said. “When the spaceship we captured fails to show up with its cargo, the gang will know something’s gone wrong and send a boat to pick up Ten. At least one of them must know exactly where on the island he’s hiding. They’ll have an excellent chance of sneaking him past any blockade we can set up.” He took out a cigarette and puffed nervously. “Tell me, why is the place called England?”

  “Well—” Alex drew a long breath. “Out of maybe a quarter million known intelligent species, the Hokas are unique. Only in the last few years have we really begun to probe their psychology. They’re highly intelligent, unbelievably quick to learn, ebullient by nature…and fantastically literal-minded. They have difficulty distinguishing fact from fiction, and since fiction is so much more colorful, they don’t usually bother. Oh, my servant back at the office doesn’t consciously believe he’s a mysterious East Indian; but his subconscious has gone overboard for the role, and he can easily rationalize anything that conflicts with his wacky assumptions.” Alex frowned, in search of words. “The closest analogy I can make is that the Hokas are somewhat like small human children, plus having the physical and intellectual capabilities of human adults. It’s a formidable combination.”

  “All right,” said Geoffrey. “What’s this got to do with England?”

  “Well, we’re still not sure just what is the best starting point for the development of civilization among the Hokas. How big a forward step should the present generation be asked to take? More important, what socio-economic forms are best adapted to their temperaments and so on? Among other experiments, about ten years ago the cultural mission decided to try a Victorian English setup, and chose this island for the scene of it. Our robofacs quickly produced steam engines, machine tools, and so on for them…of course, we omitted the more brutal features of the actual Victorian world. The Hokas quickly carried on from the start we’d given them. They consumed mountains of Victorian literature—”

  “I see,” nodded Geoffrey.

  “You begin to see,” said Alex a little grimly. “It’s more complicated than that. When a Hoka starts out to imitate something, there are no half measures about it. For instance, the first place we’re going to get the hunt organized is called London, and the office we’ll contact is called Scotland Yard, and—well, I hope you can understand a nineteenth-century English accent, because that’s all you’ll hear.”

  Geoffrey gave a low whistle. “They’re that serious about it, eh?”

  “If not more so,” said Alex. “Actually, the society in question has, as far as I know, succeeded very well—so well that, being busy elsewhere, I haven’t had a chance to keep up with events in England. I’ve no idea what that Hoka logic will have done to the original concepts by now. Frankly, I’m scared!”

  Geoffrey looked at him curiously and wondered whether the plenipotentiary might not perhaps be a little off-balance on the subject of his wards.

  From the air, London was a large collection of peak-roofed buildings, split by winding cobbled streets, on the estuary of a broad river that could only be the Thames. Alex noticed that it was being remodeled to a Victorian pattern: Buckingham Palace, Parliament, and the Tower were already erected, and St. Paul’s was halfway finished. An appropriate fog was darkening the streets, so that gas lamps had to be lit. He found Scotland Yard on his map and landed in the court, between big stone buildings. As he and Geoffrey climbed out, a Hoka bobby complete with blue uniform and bulging helmet saluted them with great deference.

  “’Umans!” he exclaimed. “H’I sye, sir, this must be a right big case, eh what? Are you working for ’Er Majesty, h’if h’I might myke so bold as ter awsk?”

  “Well,” said Alex, “not exactly.” The thought of a Hoka Queen Victoria was somewhat appalling. “We want to see the chief inspector.”

  “Yes, sir!” said the teddy bear. “H’Inspector Lestrade is right down the ’all, sir, first door to yer left.”

  “Lestrade,” murmured Geoffrey. “Where’ve I heard that name before?”

  They mounted the steps and went down a gloomy corridor lit by flaring gas jets. The office door indicated had a sign on it in large letters:

  FIRST BUNGLER

  “Oh no!” said Alex under his breath.

  He opened the door. A small Hoka in a wing-collared suit and ridiculously large horn-rimmed spectacles got up from behind the desk.

  “The plenipotentiary!” he exclaimed in delight. “And another human! What is it, gentlemen? Has—” He paused, looked in sudden fright around the office, and lowered his voice to a whisper. “Has Professor Moriarty broken loose again?”

  Alex introduced Geoffrey. They sat down and explained the situation. Geoffrey wound up with: “So I want you to organize your—CID, I imagine you call it—and help me track down this alien.”

  Lestrade shook his head sadly. “Sorry, gentlemen,” he said. “We can’t do that.”

  “Can’t do it?” echoed Alex, shocked. “Why not?”

  “It wouldn’t do any good,” said Lestrade, gloomily. “We wouldn’t find anything. No, sir, in a case as serious as this, there’s only one man who can lay such an arch-criminal by the heels. I refer, of course, to Mr. Sherlock Holmes.”

  “Oh, NO!” said Alex.

  “I beg your pardon?” asked Lestrade.

  “Nothing,” said Alex, feverishly wiping his brow. “Look here—Lestrade—Mr. Geoffrey here is a representative of the most effective police force in the Galaxy. He—”

  “Come now, sir,” said Lestrade, with a pitying smile. “You surely don’t pretend that he is the equal of Sherlock Holmes. Come, come, now!”

  Geoffrey cleared his throat angrily, but Alex kicked his foot. It was highly illegal to interfere with an established cultural pattern, except by subtler means than argument. Geoffrey caught on and nodded as if it hurt him. “Of course,” he said in a strangled voice. “I would be the last to compare myself with Mr. Holmes.”

  “Fine,” said Lestrade, rubbing his stubby hands together. “Fine. I’ll take you around to his apartment, gentlemen, and we can lay the problem before him. I trust he will find it interesting.”

  “So do I,” said Alex, hollowly.

  A hansom cab was clopping down the foggy streets and Lestrade hailed it. They got in, though Geoffrey cast a dubious look at the beaked, dinosaurian reptile which the Hokas called a horse, and went rapidly through the tangled lanes. Hokas were abroad on foot, the males mostly in frock coats and top hats, carrying tightly rolled umbrellas, the females in long dresses; but now and then a bobby, a red-coated soldier, or a kilted member of a Highland regiment could be seen. Geoffrey’s lips moved silently.

  Alex was beginning to catch on. Naturally, the literature given these—Englishmen—must have included the works of A. Conan Doyle, and he could see where the romantic Hoka nature would have gone wild over Sherlock Holmes. So they had to interpret everything literally; but who had they picked to be Holmes?

  “It isn’t easy being in the CID, gentlemen,” said Lestrade. “We haven’t much of a name hereabouts, y’know. Of course, Mr. Holmes always gives us the credit, but somehow word gets around.” A tear trickled down his furry cheek.

  They stopped before an apartment building in Baker Street and entered the hallway. A plump elderly female met them. “Good afternoon, Mrs. Hudson,” said Lestrade. “Is Mr. Holmes in?”

  “Indeed he is, sir,” said Mrs. Hudson. “Go right up.” Her awed eyes followed the humans as they mounted the stairs.

  Through the door of 221-B came a horrible wail. Alex froze, ice running along his spine, and Geoffrey cursed and pulled out his raythrower. The scream sawed up an incredible scale, swooped down again, and died in a choked quivering. Geoffrey burst into the room, halted, and glared around.

  The place was a mess. By the light of a fire burning in the hearth, Alex could see papers heaped to the ceiling, a dagger stuck in the mantel, a rack of test tubes and bottles, and a “V.R.” punched in the wall with bullets. It was hard to say whether the chemical reek or the tobacco smoke was worse. A Hoka in dressing gown and slippers put down his violin and looked at them in surprise. Then he beamed and came forward to extend his hand.

  “Mr. Jones!” he said. “This is a real pleasure. Do come in.”

  “Uh—that noise—” Geoffrey looked nervously around the room.

  “Oh, that,” said the Hoka, modestly. “I was just trying out a little piece of my own. Concerto in Very Flat for violin and cymbals. Somewhat experimental, don’t y’know.”

  Alex studied the great detective. Holmes looked about like any other Hoka—perhaps he was a trifle leaner, though still portly by human standards. “Ah, Lestrade,” he said. “And Watson—do you mind if I call you Watson, Mr. Jones? It seems more natural.”

  “Oh, not at all,” said Alex, weakly. He thought the real Watson—no, dammit, the Hoka Watson!—must be somewhere else; and the natives’ one-track minds—

  “But we are ignoring our guest here, whom I perceive to be in Mr. Lestrade’s branch of the profession,” said Holmes, laying down his violin and taking out a big-bowled pipe.

  IBI men do not start; but Geoffrey came as close to it as one of his bureau’s operatives had ever done. He had no particular intention of maintaining an incognito, but no officer of the law likes to feel that his profession is written large upon him. “How do you know that?” he demanded.

  Holmes’ black nose bobbed. “Very simple, my dear sir,” he said. “Humans are a great rarity here in London. When one arrives, thus, with the estimable Lestrade for company, the conclusion that the problem is one for the police and that you yourself, my dear sir, are in some way connected with the detection of criminals, becomes a very probable one. I am thinking of writing another little monograph—But sit down, gentlemen, sit down, and let me hear what this is all about.”