Leslie Fish's Blog, page 5

The Reason for Sinema's Defection

    Why did Senator Sinema break from the rest of the Democrats and vote against abolishing the filibuster?  Because she's a Senator from Arizona, and she knows something of Arizona history, that's why.

    Look, we all know that the point of getting rid of the filibuster was to allow the Democrats in the Senate to pass HB-1, which would have put the federal government in charge of all elections rather than allowing the states to continue conducting their elections by themselves.  Never mind that, if passed, HB-1 would certainly be found unconstitutional;  the Democrats, and particularly those advising Biden, badly want to get it passed in time to apply it to the 2022 and 2024 elections before it gets knocked down in court.  The motive for this is pretty obvious, given Biden & Co.'s plummeting popularity ratings.  Their usual claim to support the proposed law is that, if election conduct is left up to the states, then of course the "red" -- i.e. majority- Republican -- states will cheat.  

    Nothing is said about majority-Democrat states cheating, even though Democrat states and municipalities have been notorious for election-fraud since at least the days of Boss Tweed.  Over more than a century and a half of such cheating, the Democrats have become quite good at it -- much better than the Republicans.  Having grown up within walking distance of Newark, New Jersey, and having lived for a dozen years in Chicago, I can attest that the old cliche' is true;  Republicans cheat by pushing people off the registration rolls, while Democrats cheat by stuffing the ballot-boxes.  I can tell you in some detail how this is done.  If somebody registers to vote (any party) and then misses one election, s/he will automatically be "purged" off the registry in a Republican state and will  have to register again to vote in the next election.  In a Democrat state, s/he will find that s/he's still on the rolls, but his/her party registration has changed to Democrat -- and somehow somebody with that registration will always vote in all elections thereafter. 

    In the hoo-raw that followed the 2020 elections, a good number of states decided to overhaul their election systems.  These reforms included demanding voter identification for state and federal elections;  now registering voters have to show proof that: a) they are who they say they are, b) they live where they say they live, c) they are at least 18 years old, and d) they are American citizens.  The Democrats, who famously solicit votes among not-necessarily-legal immigrants, refer to this as "voter suppression".  Note that New York City this year passed a law blatantly allowing non-citizens to vote in local elections, and so have eleven towns in Maryland and two in Vermont.  The federal law, if passed, would not require strict voter identification for federal elections, such as the state laws do;  the opportunities for fraud are obvious.

    So why would the Senator from Arizona be especially opposed to this?  Consider our state's history.  Back in the 1970s, the ACLU and SPLC were busy ruthlessly applying the punitive portions of the Civil Rights Act to states with bad records of keeping Blacks from voting.  In Arizona, they managed to find one bigoted poll-captain who was caught "losing" non-White votes (most of them Navajo and Latino, Blacks being actually scarce in Arizona), and that was enough to put Arizona elections under federal control for the next 30 years.  For those three decades, it's not surprising, Arizona's votes faithfully paralleled those of the rest of the country. 

    This is odd, because Arizona's demographics are very different from the rest of the US.  Arizona is not a "red" state or a "blue" state;  it's a weird state.  For one thing, this is one state in the union where the Indians (ooh-ooh, Native Americans;  ooh-ooh, Aboriginal Peoples;  ooh-ooh, First Nations...  Ah hell, Indians) didn't lose, and Whites are not a majority.  Whites make up a little over 30% of the population, the assorted tribes of the Navaho Nation comprise a little under 30%, Latinos almost exactly 30%, Blacks a little under 5% and Asians a little over 5%.  The Indians also own outright a good one-sixth of the state's land, including some of the best silver mines, and they own and run all the legal casinos.  They're a formidable voting-bloc and have considerable clout in the state's economy.  This should have been reflected in the election results, but somehow it never was.  Finally, in 2003, the Navaho (when they say their lawyers are real Apaches,  they mean it) hauled their case to the Supreme Court, which finally knocked down the federal government's control of Arizona's elections and handed it back to the state.  In the years since, Arizona's election outcomes have differed noticeably from those of other states.  It's common knowledge here that if you want to succeed in politics, you do not annoy the Indians.  

    Arizonians in general, and the Indians in particular, do not want the federal government running our elections again.  

    So it's not surprising that Sinema voted against ending the filibuster and passing HB-1.  Democrats and their media pundits, who don't understand Arizona at all, mutter darkly that Sinema must have been bribed by Big Pharma.  This is odd, considering that there are very few pharmaceutical companies in Arizona, all of them small and specialized, and none of them have anything to lose or gain if HB-1 passes or not.

    I can think of another reason, much closer to home.

    --Leslie <;)))>< Fish               

Depression: Causes and Cures

Warning: I don't have any kind of medical degree.  I was raised in a family of dentists, most of my family's friends were doctors of some sort, I took a couple basic courses on Psychology in college, and I got a quick course on general First Aid for civilians;  everything else I picked up at random -- sometimes by odd pathways, such as studying Witchcraft, if you please.  Still, I have a knack for seeing patterns, and I've seen this one repeat enough times to have something of an informed opinion..
"Depression" is a doctor's -- and pharmacist's -- dream disease, because the patients don't die and rarely get better;  they just keep coming back for more appointments and more pills.  I haven't looked at the figures lately, but it's safe to say that there are millions of people diagnosed with Depression, and they spend billions of dollars on treatments every year, with no end in sight.  I find this annoying, to say the least, especially when I've seen that there really are cures for it -- and quite often they're cheap.
Now obviously to cure an ailment you must know what causes it, and from what I've seen there are six common causes for what's generally called Depression, each with its own cure.
The first, and all too often overlooked, is just plain self-indulgence.  There is a class of people wealthy enough to feel entitled, and they raise their children to feel the same.  We used to call such kids spoiled brats, but it's Politically Incorrect to use that term these days.  It's currently fashionable to coddle their own and their kids' every emotion, no matter how childish, and to value feelings as much as physical facts.  This is where we get cases of "emotional distress" used to demand ridiculous repayments, or really stupid laws passed, or downright dangerous political actions.  When you hear people claim that having to argue a point with someone causes them "Depression", this is what you're dealing with.  
When you have a gang of such "victims" acting together, the immediate solution is to arrest them -- preferably on a late Friday night, so they can't reach their lawyers until Monday morning and have to spend the weekend in crowded holding cells.  Forty-eight hours or more of real misery should give them the beginnings of a sense of perspective.  The long-term cure is to take each coddled individual and sentence him/her to a long stint at a hard, simple, physical and preferably "dirty" job.  I'd recommend Farm Hand;  it's clearly necessary work, will get your terribly-sensitive "victim" out of convenience-filled cities and away from supportive crowds, will give them healthy exercise and even teach them a useful trade.  It's hard to be self-indulgent when there's no indulgence to be had, and with competence comes confidence -- and maybe even maturity, as viz. Kipling's poem, "The Prodigal Son."
The second common cause is simple real-world sorrow: loss of a loved one, a home, a career, and so on.  Everyone meets trouble and sorrow in life, and the solution is well known: slog on.  Don't be ashamed to ask reliable friends for help, comfort and advice, and don't be too proud to accept their help.  Cherish what you still have, and make a realistic plan to regain something of what you've lost.  There's always something valuable to be done, and something to be gained, even at death's doorway.  Consider the man who was dying of colon cancer and had a last-minute inspiration to donate his body "to science";  he then learned that his still-healthy heart, liver, and kidneys would save the lives of three children, and he died happy.
Third, there's serious -- such as third-stage diabetes, or Addison's Disease -- glandular problems.  A complete endocrinological work-up will reveal this, and there are real, physical solutions.  This is where pills and more pills will actually make a difference.  Cure the glandular ailment and you'll definitely feel better.
Fourth is flat-out neurosis, such as Body Dysphoria.  Nowadays it's fashionable to treat this with offers of hormone and surgery -- even for children as young as four!  A  far more sensible treatment is serious psychoanalysis.  Find out just why the patient hates his/her own body before doing anything drastic to change it.  A complete physical is in order here, including a thorough gene-test.  If little Johnny thinks he's really Jennie, it could be that he has a real genetic anomaly, which must be dealt with.  If there's no genetic or physical problem, it might be that he just envies his sister's doll collection, or really doesn't want to grow up to be a Marine drill-sergeant like his daddy.  In any case, a psychological problem needs a psychological solution, not just a prescription for cheer-up pills.
The fifth common cause is simply pain: nagging, constant, inescapable pain.  It need not be severe, -- just inescapable -- to ruin your day, and your night's sleep, which is guaranteed to make you Depressed.  The obvious cure is to first find out what's causing the pain and repair it -- but if the repair doesn't stop the pain immediately, the victim will definitely need pain-killers and possibly for a long time. 
The problem with applying this cure is the current medical/political fashion for withholding effective pain medication because of The Opioid Crisis.  This "crisis" simply means that politicians looking for useful Causes have discovered that there are a lot of junkies in the world.  In fact, there have been junkies for a very long time, and when you factor out the stresses of the Covid mess, there is no reason to assume that there's a greater percentage of them in the population than there ever was.  Why people become junkies is a whole other question in itself -- one which, curiously, few people are willing to tackle in public -- but the Opioid Crisis is primarily the result of a change in markets.  
It used to be that junkies would contrive to get morphine from amenable doctors or else visit the pusher in the alley to get dirty and overpriced heroin, whose ultimate source was the poppy-fields of southern Asia.  Shifting wars and politics in Asia reduced the supply, at about the same time that the pharmaceutical companies developed new-and-improved painkillers such as oxycontin and hydrocodone, and people inclined to be junkies decided that the official product was cleaner, stronger, and cheaper than street heroin, so they went searching for amenable doctors.  Eventually the police noticed the shift in product and duly reported it to the politicians, who realized that there was gold in them thar ills: a whole new Cause to campaign on.  The political solution was to lean on any amenable doctors, thereby making it difficult for them to prescribe the synthetic opioids to patients who actually needed them.  
This leaves a lot of people stuck with their pain and the resulting depression thereof.  Fortunately, at the same time, the decades-long grassroots campaign to re-legalize marijuana began making serious progress, so that now most states legally allow marijuana for medical and even recreational use.  Marijuana isn't much as a painkiller, but it is a euphoric and tends to put the pain "at a distance", so that the sufferers can at least get decent sleep.
But the sixth cause of Depression, and legally/medically the hardest to deal with, is rage -- hopeless rage, which cannot strike its target so it turns back on its source, which is the victim him/herself.  The way out of this trap is the way you came in;  acknowledge and admit your rage, determine what causes it, and find a way to satisfy it.  The problem with satisfying rage is that strong emotions require physical involvement;  when we're sad we cry, when we're happy we laugh, and when we're angry we want to hit something.  This can cause legal problems, which is why most doctors shy away from this cure.
Here's where a knowledgeable witch can be more helpful than an official doctor.  No law forbids anyone from dancing around a campfire chanting curses while stabbing a voodoo doll, but such can be emotionally very effective.  I've prescribed that technique myself a few times, and it does indeed provide relief.  Besides, if the sufferer has any psychic talent, the ritual may actually strike at the target of his/her rage and exact some satisfyingly real vengeance.
I recall a case of a friend (no names) who was depressed because her daughter was being miserably oppressed by her ex-husband, who was trying to keep all the money, all the property, and all the children.  Since they lived in a different state, making it impossible to get hair or clothes or fingernail-parings from the ex-husband, I got my friend a man-shaped black candle (available at occult shops or online), and had her rub strong-scented oil into the candle for three nights while thinking hard about the nasty ex so as to "identify" him with the candle.  Then I set a fire in a small barbecue-grill in the back yard on the night of the night of the full moon (dark of the moon would have worked as well), and had her dance around the fire, holding the candle and thinking really hard about the Nasty Ex and how much she hated him and stabbing the candle, while my CD player played "March of Cambreadth" (check that one out on YouTube).  When her fury reached a fever pitch, she threw the candle into the fire and watched it burn while the smoke rose -- and, curiously, drifted away in the direction of the state the Nasty Ex lived in.  When the candle burned away and I turned off the CD player, she sat down feeling much better.  
Interestingly enough, she soon learned that the Nasty Ex had gotten good and drunk and drove his car into a ditch, totally wrecking it, and getting himself locked up for drunk driving.  Thus he was in jail during the next court hearing, and the judge -- not being impressed on learning where the absent Nasty Ex was, and why -- awarded custody of the children to their mother.  When my friend heard about this, her depression vanished completely.
It was a lot safer, cheaper, and more effective than Zoloft.
--Leslie <;)))><  )O(   
  
  
           
                      

New Album!

News flash:  my latest album is out now:
https://www.prometheus-music.com/product/sea-of-dreams-leslie-fish/  
Enjoy!

Filk Fragments

In the jolly chaos following the holidays and the new year's paperwork (we changed health insurance companies, among other things), and the usual piled-up medical appointments (including some expensive ones for my cat Silverdot), I haven't had much time for writing.  ...Except, that is, for finishing off a short story intended for the next Darkover anthology, which I just sent off (cross fingers).

However, I did manage to make it to yesterday's LAFA filk -- thanks greatly, Lee and Barry.  It was really nice to do some singing again, with live feedback, even via Internet.  And in between songs we caught up on news, gossip, the usual stuff everybody's been missing during the damned lockdown.

I forget who brought up the subject of the Garbage Crisis, but I knew something about how to deal with it.  I've been doing some Internet searches, and learned a bit about Catalytic Depolymerization -- which is the best way to deal with trashed plastics.  Basically, it's a heat-and-chemistry process that breaks down any polymer -- and all plastics are polymers -- into fuel-oil and pure minerals.  This process could clean up the oceans and the surface of the Earth in ten years or less, making profits all the way, but there's some unseen economic war being waged against it here in the US.  I mean to do my part in the battle by advertizing the process so that as many people as possible know it, and I thought that a great way to do that would be to write a song about it.  

The problem, as I explained to my fellow LAFA filkers, is that "catalytic depolymerization" is hard to rhyme and harder to scan.  We tossed the idea around a bit, and came up with a possible tune -- "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious", from the Mary Poppins movie --  provided you stretch one syllable for two beats.  I managed to work out a chorus of lines: 

"Search out  Catalytic De-polymerization. 

It can clean the garbage up, in this or any nation.  

It can make a million jobs and hammer back inflation, 

So look up Catalytic De-polymerization."

That works, sort of.  Now I've got to figure out the verses, and that will be a problem because descriptions of the process, and the politics surrounding it, are even harder to scan or rhyme.  So, that's as far as I've gotten it, and I'm asking for help finishing the song.  Does anybody out there want to volunteer?  All suggestions welcome.
While I'm at it, I've got a tune for my Usual Warning too, but I can't think of any further verses for it, so I suppose I can use some help here, too:  (The tune's my own.)
"I'm a toddler on the Information Highway,And I do not know computer stuff at all.Where other people zip around the Internet,The best that I can manage is a crawl.I know nothing of programming;I don't even know the terms.Can't do a thing with Viruses,With Spyware or with Worms.I'm a toddler on the Information Hi-i-ighway,And I need a live-in Wizard really bad." 
(For proof of the above, note how I managed to get this song-fragment in single-spaced lines, but can't do a thing to single-space the previous song.)  Again, suggestions for further verses would be welcome.
And again, as I was slathering Calamine Lotion on Rasty's nose this afternoon, I came up with a relevant verse about that ancient and honorable remedy, to the tune of "Little Darling":
"Oh little darling, how much you've helped me -- Saved me from bug-bites scores of times --But not so much with mold infections,Little darling, Calamine."
Feel free to have fun with this one.  No, I don't have any problem with multiple-author creations;  it's also called the Folk Process, and has made many a fine song -- including more than a few in the Filkmusic informal archives.  Go to it, fellow-Fen!  
--Leslie <;)))><  

    

Video for Xmas

 Hi, friends!  My book-publisher K. J. Joyner was in town, and she showed me how to make quick one-shot videos (and of course I couldn't keep track of the instructions at all, but I can always call her up for help), and we made a short music video for the season -- and the cats.  I've got it up on my Facebook page and my brand-new Rumble channel.   

I hope to make many more such videos for your enjoyment. I'm posting a link below so you can find it and see easily.

Meanwhile, Happy Hannukah, Jolly Solstice, Merry Christmas, Happy Sir Isaac Newton's Birthday, Joyful Eidh-al-Fadr, Merry Ganesha's Birthday, Happy Bodhi Day, Jolly Boxing Day, Lusty Saturnalia, Merry Ada Lovelace Day, Jolly Hogmanay, Happy New Year, Jolly Twelfth Night -- and a partridge in a pear tree!

https://rumble.com/vr7g2c-leslie-fishs-one-shots-kitty-cats-xmas.html

Kitty Cat's Christmas

****

Civilian, Thou Shalt Not Chase

In the last week two significant -- and strangely similar -- court cases were decided:  Kyle Rittenhouse and Ahmaud Arbery.  Fortunately, both cases were televised so that the whole country, and world beyond, got to see all the evidence, hear all the witnesses, and see the antics of the lawyers involved.  Most enlightening shows they were, too.  
In both cases, I'd say that justice was well served and an important point of American law was clarified.
They both started in a similar fashion: with repeated crimes in the neighborhood.  In Arbery's case there had been a lot of break-ins lately, and Arbery -- who liked to jog around the area after dark -- was a suspect.  The neighbors set up an unofficial armed watch system to defend their property.  In the Rittenhouse case, there had been three nights of rioting in the town, wherein a number of businesses were smashed, looted and burned, and the citizens set up a civilian armed watch system to protect their property from more of the same.  Rittenhouse, whose father and grandmother lived in the neighborhood, came to help. He did not in fact bring a gun with him, but bought a long-barreled hunting rifle there in town.  In both cases the police knew about the impromptu civilian watch groups guarding the properties. 
From that point the cases take two different courses. 
On the night in question, Arbery was seen (and videotaped) going into a house under construction and then running out of it.  The videotape didn't show him taking anything out of the house, but one of the neighbors reported the "possible break-in" to the police and to the rest of the neighborhood watch, whereupon three of those neighbors took off after him in a truck. During the chase, the three men called out to Arbery: "Stop, stop.  We want to talk to you."  When he didn't stop, they pulled the truck in front of him and stopped, and the youngest of the three got out and approached Arbery with a shotgun.  Arbery then made the mistake of attacking the man and (fool's move!) grabbed the shotgun by the muzzle and tried to pull it away from him.  The man then shot Arbery, killing him.  The other two called the police to report the shooting.  No weapon was found on Arbery by the police afterward.
Rittenhouse and the other neighbors in the volunteer watch were approached by a crowd of "demonstrators" who chased them -- and particularly Rittenhouse -- away from the property and down the street. Though Rittenhouse repeatedly called "Friendly!  Friendly!" three of the pursuers converged on him shouting "Kill him!  Get him!" One of the three hit Rittenhouse in the neck with a skateboard, knocking him down, and kicked him in the face.  Rittenhouse then shot him, killing him.  The second man (same fool's move!) grabbed Rittenhouse's gun by the muzzle and tried to pull it away from him.  Rittenhouse then shot him, killing him.  The third man ran up and pointed a pistol at Rittenhouse's head, and Rittenhouse shot him, wounding him in the arm.  Rittenhouse then got up and hurried toward the police down the street, where he reported the shooting. 
The survivor of the three men Rittenhouse shot tried to claim, or at least the prosecutor did on his behalf, that they'd thought he was an "active shooter" and went after him to disarm him.  That claim didn't work for them, and it didn't work for the three who chased down and shot Arbery.  Rittenhouse was found innocent, and the three men who killed Arbery were found guilty. 
The usual race-hustlers threatened demonstrations/riots in "revenge" for Arbery, but all that materialized were a celebration of the verdict and some speeches.  The same agitators threatened riots after the Rittenhouse verdict, even though the three "protesters" he shot were White.  They raised only small and sporadic riots -- a group of 200 in Portland, another 200 in Brooklyn, 100 in Chicago, fewer than 100 in Los Angeles, Oakland, San Diego and Kenosha itself -- and all of them were quickly contained by the police.  Apparently the facts and the law in the Rittenhouse case were too clear for even the most passionate Antifa/BLM propaganda to deny.  
Yes, there is an undeniable legal right to self-defense -- but it has spatial limits, at least for civilians.
In both cases, the verdicts showed that it's one thing for civilians to drive an attacker off their property, but another thing entirely to keep chasing him thereafter.  Those who pursue -- unless they're police -- have no right to claim self-defense if their prey fights back, but the prey can legally claim it.
There's even a parallel for this in warfare.  On driving off an attacking army it's usually a good idea to counter-attack and chase the fleeing enemy -- but be careful not to chase too far lest the retreat turn out to be a fake, intended to draw your troops out into an ambush.  This even applies to police tactics, and police can be expected to control the ground well enough to prevent ambushes.
So as the law stands now, you can drive off an attacker -- but don't pursue very far.  And, if you're the pursued (and you're not committing any crime at the time), you can shoot back.
It's good to have that stated, plain and clear.  
--Leslie <;)))><      
              

Not Quite Sundown

 

The other day I came across a long (5 hours!) YouTube video that's a string a lectures by, and a tribute to, James Loewen -- sociologist, historian and author, who died last August.  The lectures were about his three most famous books: "Lies My Teachers Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong", "Lies Across America: What Our Historic Markers And Monuments Get Wrong", and "Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension To American Racism".  Listening to only part of it, I could readily tell that Loewen was an earnest modern Progressive who was mostly concerned with "the concealed history of racism", not the forgotten history of anything else.  I could also tell that he was guilty of the same sin as the textbooks and monuments he was complaining about -- lying by omission to make his ideological point.  

In "Lies My Teachers Told Me", for instance, he mentions a briefly mentioned and whitewashed incident wherein the US Army attacked an Iroquois settlement, killed some 900 of them and drove the rest out of the county so as to give the land to White farmers.  I happen to know something about that incident -- through histories told, written, and sometimes published (but never used as school textbooks) by my Meti and Chippewa relatives, and the truth is a good bit more complex than Loewen said.  The raid was performed not at the request of White farmers but because of complaints by the Chippewa, neighbors of the Iroquois, who were quite tired of being raided and oppressed by them.  Whatever they may be today, the Iroquois of two centuries ago were not nice people;  they were robbers and opportunistic cannibals who much preferred raiding their neighbors to farming or hunting for themselves.  The Chippewa, who had had dealings with White men (the Vikings) centuries earlier, were quite willing to make a deal with the English/American White men for the same purpose;  stomping the troublesome Iroquois.  The Native Americans had a long and complex history both before and after the founding of the American colonies, and this did have considerable impact on subsequent American history.  For example, Hianwatha (a real person), tiring of the endless tribal wars around the Great Lakes, made peace between the tribes and founded the Assiniboian Confederacy -- whose constitution so greatly impressed Thomas Jefferson that he included some of its features into his proposals for the Constitution of the United States.  Loewen made no mention of any of that.

In "Lies Across America" he complains about historic markers and monuments that omit or prettify or outright lie about historical incidents of slavery and White racism, but he doesn't mention monuments to Black settlers or pioneers, or Asian entrepreneurs, Native American achievements, or markers telling of battles during the Labor Wars which stretched from the 1870s to the 1950s.  Possibly this is because, during and after World War Two, the working classes of western Europe and America made great enough financial and political gains (largely due to those Labor Wars) that they were no longer seriously oppressed by the middle-to-upper classes -- thus putting an end to all the hopes of the Marxist intelligentsia for a Class Revolution that they could ride to power as Lenin did in Russia.  Rather than give up their dreams, the Marxist intellectuals -- particularly one Herbert Marcuse -- abandoned the working class that had been their original excuse and went looking for another oppressed class to propagandize and exploit.  They found it in the "colonialized races".  Marcuse called this the "Critical Theory", and originally applied it to various Marxist rebellions in Africa, Asia, Central and South America, and of course to the Vietnam War.  When the war wound down, his followers decided to apply his opportunism to Blacks in the United States, so they re-named their campaign the "Critical Race Theory" -- the claim that race is everything and everything is racist -- and have been applying it, particularly in the schools, ever since.  Loewen seems to have swallowed it hook, line, and sinker. 

I had a particularly good giggle over his complaint that the state of New Jersey had somehow lost the list of its state historical monuments and markers, and so he didn't go looking for them.  If he had, he might have learned that the New Jersey troops made a poor account of themselves during the Revolution, that they were known as the "two-shot runaways" because that was generally what they did, and that George Washington made use of this proclivity to draw British troops into an ambush at one particular battle.  Loewen might also have learned that the principle conflict in pre-20th-century New Jersey was between the English settlers and the Dutch, who owned much of the best land and often refused to learn English up until World War One.  

In "Sundown Towns" he claims that, for reasons never made entirely clear, the US turned its back on the gains made during the Civil War and began driving non-Whites and even Jews out of some 10,000 towns and small cities, pushing them into the larger cities, by use of variously-worded "sundown" laws.  These, supposedly, forbade non-Whites -- particularly Blacks, of course -- to stay in town after sundown.  He links this to the continued existence of "White only"  towns, which manage to exist despite the Civil Rights Act and multiple lawsuits that followed it.  

This theory overlooks one obvious problem;  how were the wealthier families in those towns to keep their non-White servants (and entertainers) after dark?

As it happens, I have an answer for that.  The town I was born in, one of the Oranges of New Jersey, had been a "sundown town" until World War Two.  The weasel-worded local statutes did not say exactly that all non-Whites had to be out of town by sundown;  only that they were not allowed in public, on the street after dark.  "Servants", live-in or hired for the occasion, could remain in town as long as they stayed indoors, behind drawn curtains, and couldn't be seen from the street until dawn.  The bigger and obviously wealthier the house, the less it was likely to be examined or questioned by the police.  This also applied to certain businesses, including the local theater -- which could hold "minstrel shows" with real Blacks, so long as the performers would spend the night in the building.  I suspect that this is how a lot, if not most, of those "sundown towns" operated, right up until the war obliged them to change.

The irony is that, in my town at least, one of the biggest and most "respectable" of those homes was the town whorehouse.  It was a grand old mansion, owned by a wealthy (White) widow whose late husband had kept a large number of servants in the house.  Nobody thought to notice how, when her husband was dead, the widow replaced almost all of the male servants with pretty young women.  They were of all colors, and wore livery in the house that was oddly scanty, but they were quite well-behaved and nobody thought it odd that there were so many of them.  The widow was also reputed to give quiet formal dinners almost every night (never on Sunday) which lasted very late, so that often the attendees spent the night in the house.  When the servants appeared outdoors, it was always by daylight and they were always quite respectably dressed.  Apparently nobody either said or suspected a thing, not for a good twenty years, until the old widow died.  Her fortune, her house and her "business" passed to her heirs, who were quite scandalized when they learned what had been going on in there.  The heirs promptly dismissed the "servants", sold the house, and moved to another town.  The story broke in the local papers after they left, and it was a great joke for years afterward.  Thus did a "sundown" law lead to a House of the Rising Sun.

I wonder if Loewen would have appreciated the joke.

--Leslie <;)))><  

            

Banned From Argo -- Chapter 8

 

8.

 

Our helmsman loves exotic plants.  The plants all love him too.

                        He took some down on leave with him, and we wondered what they’d do,

                        ‘Til the planetary governor called and swore upon his life

                        That a gang of plants entwined his house – and then seduced his wife.

 

            “Fumigation, fumigation…” Lieutenant Sulu muttered to himself as he trudged back to his cabin for the third time.  “All crew quarters too, and no more room in the arboretum.  What am I going to do?”

            As his door closed behind him he paused to gaze fondly at the last flowerpot and its contents, standing placidly under the carefully calibrated growing-lamp.  It was a big pot, and a big plant: a mature Argelian Blue Velvet bush-orchid, nearly a meter tall, its delicate fronds spread out like dark-turquoise lace.  It was a prize specimen of an exquisite ornamental, valued all over the galaxy for its ethereal beauty, lovely even when not flowering, and devilishly hard to grow.  It was the centerpiece of his collection, and there was absolutely no room for it in the ship’s arboretum.

            “Sylvia,” he sighed to the adorable thing, “There’s no other solution.  I’ll have to take you with me.”

            That settled, his next problem was transportation.  He turned around, went back into the corridor and trotted off to ship’s supplies.  He came back ten minutes later with a small grav-cart, just big enough to carry the loaded flowerpot.  Sulu eyed the flowerpot and calculated that maybe five minutes’ careful work would get the pot onto the cart.  Then he could tow it to the transporter room and beam down…

            And what then? 

            He imagined himself beaming into the lobby of the Argo Stilton or some such, with Sylvia in tow, everyone noticing and remarking on her beauty: then the inevitable envy, then greed, then hordes of bureaucrats descending on him with tons of regulations about importing alien lifeforms, confiscation with no repayment, and Sylvia winding up in some greedy official’s home or office.  He’d seen such officious thievery before.

            The obvious solution was to beam into a wilderness area, leave Sylvia there…

            No, that wouldn’t work.  Argo lifeforms just might find Sylvia edible, and delicious.  He’d have to take her somewhere safe, cultivated – yet someplace where she wouldn’t draw attention.  Someplace like…

            Well, why not a botanical garden?

            The more he thought about it, the better the idea looked.  No one would question the presence of a rare and valuable plant in a place designed for rare and valuable plants.  If the caretakers noticed her, they’d just assume that some official had brought her there without properly informing them.  They’d take good care of her, probably even have the proper food for her symbiotes, the pale green Elf-Moss that grew at her roots…  No, one couldn’t count on that much.  He’d best feed them before he took Sylvia down.

            While he was dusting the moss-food around Sylvia’s roots, Sulu had another thought; what if the caretakers took her out of the pot and planted her?  He’d have the devil’s own time getting her back.

            Wait, there was a solution for that, too.  Another quick trip down to supplies brought him a small homing beacon and a soil-sampling probe.  With meticulous care, he inserted the beacon deep among Sylvia’s roots.  Now he could always find her again and beam her up, symbiotes and all.

             When he pictured beaming Sylvia out of her pot, then back in, he knew he was going to need expert help.

                                                            *           *           *

 

            “Psst!  Janice, do you have a moment to spare?”

            “I have hours to spare.  I’m going to be stuck up here for days.  What’s on your mind?”

            “A tricky piece of transporter work.  Are you interested?”

            “I’m interested in anything interesting, right now.  What’s the problem?”

            “See this map?  Here, where it says Anslinger Gardens: first, I have to find just the right spot in those gardens to hide Sylvia.  Then we have to beam her out of her pot and into just the right depth in the ground.  Once the ship-wide fumigation is over, we have to beam her back into her pot without damaging her roots.  Can you do it?  Is it even possible?”

            “Sulu, the latest development in transporter technology is applying it to microsurgery.  Yes, it’s possible, and yes, I can do it.  Now tell me why you’re going to all this trouble to keep your pet orchid from going through Customs?”

            “Thieves, Janice.  I don’t want to risk losing her to some greedy bureaucrat with convenient fine print in the regulations.”

            “Hmm, and according to what I’ve picked up from the local chat-lines, Argo bureaucrats are famous for that.  All right, I see your point.  Let’s have a look at that map.”

            “Here: these gardens in the fanciest part of town, right between all these big mansions.”

            “We’ll have to get a closer look.  Get over to Sensor Control, and I’ll meet you there in five minutes.”

 

                                                            *           *           *

 

            Three hours before sundown, a small patch of slightly-swampy soil near the easternmost wall of Anslinger Gardens was briefly lit by the blue glow of a transporter beam.  When the glow faded, the ground was more compacted and less swampy – thanks to the sudden addition of one cubic meter of finest-grade potting soil, which just happened to contain the roots of an Argelian Blue Velvet bush-orchid and its Elf-Moss symbiotes.  Although the transport was perfect, soil-surfaces matching exactly, Sylvia was shaken by the experience.  Her lacey fronds quivered, curled into tight little velvet fists, and waited several minutes before they uncurled again.  No one but a few resident birds saw the event, and in another moment the garden returned to its usual tranquility.

            What Rand hadn’t noticed, she not being a botanist, was that the surrounding soil was unusually high in nitrogen, phosphorus, and metal-salt content.

            What Sulu hadn’t noticed, he being distracted with other problems, was that the tight little knots at the tips of Sylvia’s main branches were not leaf or flower buds.  They were not buds at all, since Sylvia had passed her flowering stage.

            They were seedpods.

 

                                                            *           *           *

 

            Sulu, delighted at the successful piece of work, soundly kissed Yeoman Rand and then beamed down to a modestly-priced hotel.  Once there, he checked out the local listings of officially-sanctioned entertainments -- and was lucky enough to find an Ancient French-style fencing tournament. 

            While attending the tournament, he had the even better luck to meet an adventurous Argo girl named Doris, who liked spacers.  She invited him to an Underground party afterwards, where he completely lost track of time.  He certainly didn’t notice that a light rain fell on Argo Port Citybetween midnight and dawn.

 

                                                            *           *           *

 

            The rain filled the slight hollow by the wall, carrying the nitrogen, phosphorus and mineral-salt compounds to Sylvia’s roots, and up to the roots of her symbiotes.  The Elf-Moss feasted on the new food until it became as close to drunk as a plant could manage.  The merry Elf-Moss secreted new chemicals, complex and arcane, a part of its metabolic cycle which the botanists of Argelius had never noticed.

            Sylvia too gloried in the rich food, drawing it up and processing it hungrily.  In the tropical river-valleys of her original home, summer floods had brought these chemicals down from the hills every breeding-season, to be used up before the cool dry winter began, a phenomenon the local scientists hadn’t yet discovered, which explained why none had ever had much luck getting the bush-orchid to seed in captivity.  The sudden abundance of chemicals and water had come at just the right time; Sylvia had seedpods waiting for them.

 

                                                            *           *           *

 

            Next morning, Sulu and Doris awoke and ordered breakfast.  While munching on assorted fruits and crescent rolls, they turned on the vid-screen to look for anything interesting.

            What they got was an eyeful: news reporters, talk-show hosts and various officials – all carefully shown from the neck up – reporting on, commenting on, or denouncing the Present Transmission Problem.  It took them less than five minutes to determine just what that euphemism meant.  After that, they laughed until their sides were sore.  Doris came up for air long enough to whoop: “What a glorious joke!  I wonder who could have done it.”

            “I can’t imagine,” Sulu chuckled – and then stopped.  A sudden suspicion sneaked into a corner of his mind.  He knew what amazing things Uhura could do with any kind of communications gear.  Could she possibly…?  No, of course not!  Why should she bother?  How would she get into the system, anyway?  This had to be an inside job.  Some local must have done it.  Sure.

            But still…

            The thought nagged him at odd moments all morning.

                                                                                             

                                                            *           *           *

 

            The rising heat of day sent the Elf-Moss into full enzyme production.  The subtle chemicals worked through the soil to Sylvia’s roots.  She acknowledged the chemical signal, drew water up from the ground and even from her leaves, and sent it into the swelling seedpods.  The pods expanded with amazing, almost visible, speed.  The seeds ripened and the chamber at the base of each pod began to fill with water.  Minute by minute, the membrane dividing the lower chambers and the seed-chambers stretched, and the pod walls thinned.

 

                                                            *           *           *

 

            Sulu could never understand the passion some girls had for shopping.  Yes, it was interesting to see what the markets displayed, and it might be profitable to compare prices on things one really needed, but looking at goods and spending money had never struck him as a pleasure.  He waited politely, itchy with boredom, while Doris oohed and cooed over clothes and decorations that looked no different, really, from what she was already wearing.

            The fourth time that Doris asked him: “Which do you think would look better on me, this one or this one?” he simply pointed to the one on the right, excused himself to go check out the shop across the street, and made his escape.

            The shop specialized in cameras, video equipment, commercial-grade tricorders, and the like.  Much to his surprise, Sulu found a digital recorder that covered the full range of a tricorder and vid-camera besides.  It had remarkable storage and charge capacity, and the price was ridiculously low.  On examining it, he was delighted to see that the frequency selector could be adjusted to study any detail of any lifeform: as good as any of the portable tricorders in the Enterprise’s Biolab, except that the sensing distance was less than a hundred meters.  Hey, with this he could study plants right down to their molecules!  He paid for it fast, and didn’t bother to have it wrapped.

            A moment later, when Doris came trotting in with an armload of bags and bundles, he cheerfully waved the camera at her and told her to pose.  Dorisrefused, but she didn’t ask him to carry any of her bundles, either.  She took her purchases home in a ground-taxi, promising to meet him for dinner at “the infamous Baxter’s” that evening.

            At loose ends for the next few hours, Sulu strolled off to play with his new toy.  He tried it on buildings, busy streets, passing pedestrians and their pets, and finally thought of going to Anslinger Gardens to check on Sylvia.

 

                                                            *           *           *

 

            The morning sun soaked her in energy, and Sylvia’s branches strained under the weight of their burdens.  Her seed-pods were swollen to the size of fists: the seeds ready, their coats almost fizzing with growth chemicals waiting to be loosed, the lower chambers stretched and beginning to strain with built-up water pressure.  Her roots sucked more water out of the soil, digging so fiercely that the whole structure began to tilt toward the wall.  The hour of her release was near, and Sylvia’s normally hypersensitive leaves were too limp from their labors even to quiver at the sound of approaching footsteps.

 

                                                            *           *           *

 

            Sulu stared at Sylvia for a long moment, struggling to believe what his eyes told him.  Yesterday he hadn’t even seen the seedpods on her branches, but today they were bared, gleaming, enormous, and clearly ripe.  He’d always heard that Argelian Blue Velvet pods were small, and took forever to form…

            His first thought was that something was terribly wrong.  His second thought was to remember the multicorder in his hands.  He worked the frequency selector in a desperate hurry, turned it wide open, and pointed it at Sylvia.

            The multicorder whistled for half a minute before he felt that he had readings enough.  He reset the switch and pored over the readout on the screen.  Then he looked at Sylvia.  Then he looked at the screen again.  Then he let out a whoop that startled the birds off their perches.  Then he kissed the multicorder.  Then he almost kissed Sylvia.

            “I’ve got it!  I’ve got it!” he announced to the surrounding plants, birds and sky.  “Nobody’s ever seen this before!  Nobody’s even guessed.  Sylvia, you’ll make me famous!”

            The dutiful little machine explained it all: massive doses of nitrated minerals and phosphorus, the growth hormones from the symbiotes, the true natural breeding cycle revealed at last.  Sulu had it all, the complete data, everything explained.  He knew of half a dozen journals that would happily publish his findings.  Even Commander Spock would be impressed.

            “Got to get all this back to the ship,” he whispered to himself – looking around quickly to make sure that nobody else was near, nobody had heard or seen…  Did he dare leave Sylvia here, where someone else might see?  Yes, dammit: the fumigation.  But if he could publish first—

            Sulu all but ran out of Anslinger Gardens, looking for a communications center from which he could contact the Enterprise’s computer.

            Behind him, Sylvia continued to pump water into the lower chambers of her seedpods.  The pressure steadily grew.

 

                                                            *           *           *

 

            A frustrating half-hour later, Sulu gave up trying to upload his multicorder directly to the Enterprise, and simply asked Yeoman Rand to beam him up.  Ten hurried minutes after that; he had the data safely stored in the computer under his personal code.  It took him another hour to write his report on the true optimum breeding conditions of Argelian Blue Velvet and transmit it off to the Federation Journal of Botanical Sciences. 

            After that he realized that he had skipped lunch, and was ravenously hungry.  Dinner with Doriswouldn’t be for hours, and the ship’s replicators were offline for inspection.  There was no help for it but to beam back down to the city.  Remembering to bring his wonderfully helpful little multicorder, Sulu strolled back to the transporter room to share his good news with Rand and ask for a beam-down to the nearest halfway decent restaurant.

            “Don’t ask me what’s a good place,” Randreplied.  “I’m not the Argo veteran in the crew.

You might ask Commander Scott; he’s holed up at the Hotel Avalon right now.  Hmm, for that matter, so is Lt. Uhura…”

            Sulu sighed, and tapped up the city map.  The guide index showed a respectable eatery in the city, almost directly below, near the groundside spaceport.  “This’ll do,” he said.  “I’d invite you along with me to celebrate, but—“

            “But I’m stuck here.  Enjoy lunch.”

            Two minutes after that, Sulu walked in the door of the Starburst Bar and Grill and asked for a seat by the window.  The only available table there was small and cramped, but he didn’t care.  He could aim his delightful little multicorder out the window and play with the readings while he waited for his order.

            “You and Sylvia, darlings,” he murmured to his toy, “You’re going to make me famous.”

            The diner was crowded, the waitresses hard-worked, and Sulu had gained no more than a cup of admittedly very good coffee when he noticed something odd in the street outside.  There was a cloud of dust – no, a large crowd of people – coming up the street, carrying signs and apparently chanting.

            Some kind of religious parade? he wondered, even as he lifted the multicorder and aimed it.

            As the crowd drew closer, he saw that there was nothing religious about it.  The words of the chant, as the multicorder faithfully analyzed them, were: “No More Raids!”.  The signs had more to say, and none of that was religious either.  This was a classic political protest, such as he hadn’t seen in years.  They’d no doubt parade through half the city advertising their grievance, gather at some socially significant spot to make long speeches detailing their grievance, hand around a petition for everyone to sign, then publicly present it to some government official.  The pattern was almost as formal as a classic Noh play, and would make for some interesting vids.  If he weren’t waiting for his lunch, he’d be tempted to follow them with the multicorder.

            Wait a minute.  There was something outside the classic pattern: a large group of armored ground-police coming up, forming a line across the street in the path of the marchers.  What in the worlds were they doing there?  Sulu turned the multicorder and aimed it at them.

            The next second, the police began firing stunguns into the crowd.

            Sulu stared, his forgotten multicorder still running, as the bodies began falling.  He saw the second line of marchers try to stop or turn and run away, but the sheer mass and momentum of the crowd behind pushed them forward. 

            Can’t the police see that? Sulu raged silently. Can’t they understand that those people can’t stop fast no matter what they do?

            Now the thrown bottles began flying, water splashing everywhere, one of the stunguns shorting out and taking its wielder with it.  More water sprayed from somewhere on the opposite side of the street – the fire-extinguishing system, Sulu guessed – making the stunguns useless.  The police line was backing up;  surely now they’d have the sense to back off and let the parade through.

            But no: they pulled out long metallized clubs and began striking at the marchers.  Sulu saw them lashing, hard, at people’s heads – and winced as he thought of what that kind of blow could do to a Human skull.  More marchers fell, but now the main mass of the crowd fell upon the police line, an avalanche of bodies pressing on the shields.  The first of the badgemen fell over, and was swallowed in the mass of flesh.  The rest turned and ran.  The crowd ran after them.

            Not quite believing this, Sulu swept his eyes – and his multicorder – over the litter of bodies left behind.  This was impossible.  The officials couldn’t just leave bodies lying in the street!  Somebody had to come and help them, someone—

            Then he saw a very old woman in a flower-patterned caftan picking her way among the bodies.  She was shaking her fists and, according to the multicorder, swearing a blue streak.  She raised one hand, which held a small bottle of some emerald-green fluid, and shouted after the departed police: “I’ll get you good!  I know where your water-distribution plant is!”

            Just then, the sound of sirens approached.  Thank all the gods of every species: that must be the ambulances coming.

            The old woman swore again and scampered off, quick as a cat, down a side street.

            A fleet of bulky groundcars came up the street and stopped at the intersection.  Strange, but the vehicles didn’t look like ambulances…

            They weren’t, and the troops jumping out of them weren’t medical personnel.  Sulu watched, multicorder running, as the police grabbed up bodies and threw them – actually threw them, like so many logs – into the gaping backs of the groundcars.  They showed no concern at all for how the victims landed.  Sulu wondered how many would have broken skulls, limbs or backs from this action alone.

            Gods and ancestors, one of those bodies looked exactly like Dr. McCoy!

            Sulu watched, trying to be sure, getting the odd impression that the victim was looking straight at him while the cops hauled his body to the groundcar.  The multicorder kept humming.

            It wasn’t until the last body was picked up, the vehicles closed, their police crews back on board, that Sulu realized his multicorder was still running.  He’d caught it all.

            Someone had to see this!!  Someone had to know.  Sulu thought of taking the news to the Captain, but had no idea where he was.  Rand might know; she knew where Scott and Uhura were, anyway…

            “May I take your order, sir?” a voice sounded in his ear.

            Sulu turned to see the waitress hovering by the table, stylus poised over her order-pad.  He realized that his appetite had utterly vanished.

Just the coffee,” he said, fumbling at his belt for a cred-chip.  He handed her a fiver and headed for the door, looking for a clear space from which to call Randand beam out, forgetting everything else.

            He had completely forgotten Sylvia, too.

 

                                                            *           *           *

            Sylvia was ready.  The tips of her seedpods split and gaped open, revealing the waiting seeds.  Spores from the flowering Elf-Moss below drifted up on the slight convection currents and settled on the exposed seeds.  The water-chambers of the pods bulged, the thin membranes straining to their limits.  Her leaves curled tight in expectation.

            A light breeze swept through the garden, barely enough to ruffle leaves, but enough to add the last needed stress.  The separating membrane between the seeds and the water-chamber of the topmost pod tore through.

            With a sound that older civilizations would have called gunfire, the seeds shot into the sky on a spray of water.  They shot high, higher than the garden wall, flew over it – then lost momentum and began to drop.  They landed on the fine-trimmed lawn of the yard beyond the wall, the grounds of a huge and well-kept mansion.

            The stress of that first shot was enough to rupture the membranes of the other pods.  In a rippling fusillade, much like an ancient machine-gun, Sylvia’s seeds flew to freedom – into the sky, over the wall, finally down into the welcoming topsoil—

            --onto the lawn in the back yard of the Argo governor’s mansion.

 

                                                            *           *           *

 

            Five minutes later, Sulu knocked on the door of room 612 at the Hotel Avalon.  The door opened to reveal Commander Montgomery Scott in an interesting state of civilian dress, or rather, undress.

            “Sulu, lad!”  His breath smelled noticeably of Scotch, but his eyes were keen as ever.  “Come on in.  Whot brings ye here?”

            For answer, Sulu walked in and held out his multicorder.  “This, sir,” he said.  “I think you should see this.  And I think Dr. McCoy may be in danger.”

 

                                                            *           *           *

 

            In the central Argelian jungles, life was wildly abundant and always hungry; nothing vulnerable would live long.  Through ages of high-pressure evolution, the seeds of the Blue Velvet bush-orchid had learned not to be vulnerable.  The moment they impacted with the soil, the shock of landing shook loose the row of folded leglets along their sides and stirred them to action.

            The leglets began to push, aiming blindly downward, toward the welcoming soil – and the spores of the Elf-Moss came along for the ride.  There were blades of grass in the way, but that didn’t matter; the seeds’ sharp noses pushed them aside.  Now a mat of grass roots blocked the downward path, but the seeds’ needle-noses pushed them aside too.  The leglets shoved harder.  Reluctantly, the roots parted or tore before that ruthless determination.  The seeds’ noses touched the blessed moist topsoil.

            At the signal of that touch, the seeds’ noses opened and folded back to reveal a different set of leglets.  These were sharp, sturdy, set in a ring, and designed for digging.  They burrowed into the ground like tiny drill-bits, tossing up little mounds of loosened dirt.  As the seeds buried themselves, the almost-microscopic spores of the Elf-Moss were stripped from the seeds’ skins, finding a home for themselves in the loose soil at the surface, while the burrowing bush-orchid seeds sank out of sight.

            Once the last of the seeds was buried, once air no longer touched them, the leglets withered and fell off, their duty done.  The seed coats absorbed water and minerals from the rich soil, softened and fell apart, releasing growth hormone into the dirt immediately around the seeds.  The liberated seeds thrust down their first roots and took firm hold of their new territory.  Devouring water and nutrients and growth hormone with almost animal speed, the roots pumped water into the seeds’ leaf-heads.

            The leaf-heads uncoiled, thrust upward, broke the surface again and raised themselves into the open air.  There they encountered the sweet blanketing sunlight.  The leaf-heads split apart and spread wide, stretching to catch every last photon.

            The tiny plant was still vulnerable, but not nearly so much as the seed.  Now the whole system was in place: roots, stalk, leaves and symbiotes.  Now the infant plants could eat, grow, put on thick bark, put out predator-sensitive leaves, and hold their own in a hungry jungle world.

 

                                                            *           *           *

 

            Governor Kingrich was locked in his office, yelling at his viewscreen.  His kids were supposedly off in school – but his wife Nargina knew that the boys had called in sick and then taken off, probably to go trawl for girls in the nearest shopping mall.  None of her family needed her, not for anything worthwhile, which meant that she had nothing worthwhile to do – again.

            Nargina was disgusted with the lot of them, disgusted with her life, disgusted with the world.  She sauntered through the mansion’s overstuffed clubroom in her Tourmaline spider-silk morning gown and considered opening up the wet-bar, pouring herself several tall cool drinks, and getting placidly drunk.  With Kingy busy on some crisis or other – or possibly talking some other maid into the coat-closet – the boys off skirt-chasing and the servants staying carefully out of the way, it was unlikely that anyone would bother her until dinnertime.  She could stay mildly plastered for that long.

            A passing glance around the room swept her eyes across the windows, giving her a view of the back yard.  It was a lovely day, and she might as well enjoy the weather.  She strolled out the back door and gazed aimlessly around the yard.  There was the wall that divided the yard from Anslinger Gardens – which she hadn’t visited in years.  There were the Earth rosebushes that she’d planted years ago – now sadly neglected.  There were the forgotten fruit-trees – whose fruit nobody bothered to pick and eat anymore.  Maybe she should get back into her gardening; she had enjoyed that, once.  There was nothing Politically Significant about gardening.  Kingy’s only objection to it had been the time it took, time which he thought could be better spent on her accompanying him to various public functions, being a good little ornament…

            Wait, what was that patch of spotty roughness near the wall, marring the perfection of the lawn?  Annoyed, she came down the steps and strode to the offending patch of strange vegetable color, bent down and looked closer.

            She stared for a minute, her brain trying to make sense of what her eyes saw.  Then she jumped up with a screech that could have made dogs howl.  She recognized those seedlings; any gardener, professional or amateur, in this entire quadrant would know what they were.

            “Argelian Blue Velvets, complete with Elf-Moss!” she dithered.  “Dozens of them!  Hundreds!  Oh my gods!”

            She turned around and ran for the gardening shed.  Ten minutes later, totally ignoring the now sad state of her dress, she came hurrying back with a shovel, a trowel, and as many flowerpots and bags of potting soil as her wheelbarrow could carry.

 

                                                            *           *           *

 

            There was no way to move the party, so the conspirators gathered in Uhura’s room down on the fourth floor.  Uhura had her communications gear spread out all over the desk, and was listening intently to her communicator.  Nurse Chapel was sitting on the couch, looking alternately amused and furious.  Chekov was hovering nearby, looking worried.  Sulu was holding his own communicator to his ear and arguing in whispers with Scott’s voice.  

“Nay, we doan’t call the Captain,” Scott hissed from the speaker.  “Dinna force th’ mon ta refuse or deny.  We handle it oorselves, so he can reprimand us later, if he must.”

“You think he’ll want to stay ignorant about this?”  Sulu whispered back.  “What if we can’t get Bones out?  The captain will have to know.”

“No’ ‘til then-- Wait, Rand’s got a fix on him.  Hold…  There he is!  Scott oot.”

            “They’ve got him!” Sulu announced gleefully.  “Dr. McCoy’s back on board!”

            “He’s sefe!” whooped Chekov.  “Eh, in det case, I cen go beck to de party – or meybe to de interesting Bolt-Hole.”

            “Go ahead,” said Chapel.  “Just be verycareful not to lose your communicator.  Hmm, and Heziah doesn’t seem to be in the hotel just now…”

            “I’ll call you if anything else happens,” Uhura promised, not taking her eyes off her screens.

            Whistling happily, Chekov trotted out the door.  Sulu started to follow him, then stopped and looked back at Uhura.

            Uhura, he saw, was looking from her minicomp screen to her laptop screen, comparing the news-camera versions of the Nude Riot with the readouts from Sulu’s multicorder.  “Interesting difference,” he noted.  “Somebody really had fun with Argo’s communication system.”

            Uhura gave him barely a glance, only went on looking at her screens.

            “You know,” Sulu went on, “Whoever did it knew a lot about communications hardware – and the odd uses of a tricorder.”

            Now Uhura gave him a full-faced look.  “The technology’s available right here in town,” she said, pointing significantly to Sulu’s new multicorder.  “If you had set the frequency on that thing just a little higher…”

            “Yes, I suppose a local could have done it.  I mean, what motive would an offworlder have for playing a prank like that?”

            “What indeed?” Uhura smiled.

            Sulu gave the laptop’s viewscreen a long, significant look.  It showed what was unmistakably Dr. McCoy being thrown into a paddy wagon.  “Right,” Sulu smiled.  “Well, I’d best be off.  I have a dinner-date.”

            “Good luck, then,” Uhura called after him, “D’Artagnan.”

            Sulu caught that, and laughed.  He waved her a knowing salute as he strolled out the door.

            He was halfway down the corridor before he remembered Sylvia.

 

                                                            *           *           *

 

            Nargina’s morning gown was muddy up to the shoulders, and the skirt was hopelessly shredded.  Her slippers had long since disappeared in one of the mud-holes now dotting the lawn.  Sweat gleamed on her skin, under splotches of dirt, and her hair had come loose and was clinging to her neck.  She looked like a classic Shakespearean madwoman, and didn’t notice. 

            She had a good three dozen of the precious little Velvets potted and stacked in the greenhouse, and she was filling the wheelbarrow with another half-dozen filled pots.  She glanced at the sinking sun and shoveled faster; at this rate she’d get the last of them safely into the greenhouse by twilight, and she didn’t want to miss any of them in the dark.

            “Faster, faster,” she muttered, jabbing her spade into the soil.

            “Nargina!” yelled a familiar voice from the back door.  “Nargeeeeeena!”

            She flinched automatically – but only for an instant.  Forget him, she decided fiercely.  This is important!

            “Nargina,” snapped Governor Kingrich, marching up to her.  “What the bupfrack do you think you’re doing?”

            “Shoveling,” she snapped back, not bothering to look at him.

            “Shoveling what?” her husband yelped, his voice climbing an octave higher.

            “My fortune!” she roared.  “Credits by the shovel full!  My future by the wheelbarrow-load!  Now get out of my light!”

 

                                                            *           *           *

 

            Sulu stared at Sylvia, not quite believing what his eyes and the multicorder showed him.  Seedpod to seeded out, in less than 24 hours: the Journal would have a conniption fit.  Sylvia drooped, exhausted, almost visibly panting like a tired dog.  Every seedpod was shriveled, empty, falling away.

            And where were the seeds?

            There wasn’t seed nor seedling to be found, and Blue Velvet seeds were famed galaxy-wide for their sprouting-speed.  Something should have showed above the ground by now, somewhere nearby, unless…

            Sulu looked closer at the angle of Sylvia’s trunk.  Wasn’t it just a few degrees out of line?  If those seedpods had discharged with enough force send the seeds flying – and flying far enough – they would have gone clean over the wall.

            “Into somebody’s back yard, I’ll bet,” Sulu groaned, slinging the multicorder back on his shoulder.

            The wall had originally been rough stone, and years of weathering had worn handholds in it that an experienced Starfleet explorer could use.  Besides, there was a nice thick Barnard’s Ivy growing all the way to the top.  Sulu gritted his teeth and climbed.

            He was nearly at the top of the wall when he heard the voices below.

 

                                                            *           *           *

 

            “No, I am not going to stand in the background while you make another grzekking speech!  This is a thousand times more important!”  Nargina hadn’t yelled this loud in years, and it felt surprisingly good.  “You caused that riot, you and your heavy-handed Respectability laws: you go deal with it.”

            “This is a Major Political Crisis, and all you care about is a bunch of plants?!”  Kingrich was actually hopping up and down, like a small child in a tantrum.  “Have you gone out of your mind?”

            “No, I’ve finally found it – and watch your feet!”

            “I’ll—I’ll have the Surgeon General examine you!”

            “I’ll tell his wife first.  She’s a gardener too.”

            “I’ll divorce you!”

            “Fine!  You can keep the children!”

            Sulu, looking down from the wall, had no idea whom this squabbling couple could be, but he recognized the gardening tools.  He could see, from the carefully packed flowerpots, that the lady with the shovel was another plant-lover who knew the value of Argelian Blue Velvet.  At least Sylvia’s children would have good homes.

            He could also see that the red-faced bouncing man was about to step on one of the seedlings.

            “Hey, you oaf!” he yelled down.  “Watch your feet!  You’re about to trample that seedling!”

            Startled, the battling pair turned to look at him.  The man’s foot was still dangerously close to the seedling.

            “That’s an Argelian Blue Velvet, you idiot!” Sulu howled.  “Don’t you know what they’re worth?”

            The woman grinned, recognizing another gardening fanatic.

            Governor Kingrich stared at the interloper, and recognized the uniform.  He remembered that those damned plants came from another planet.  Suspicions clicked.  With the sure instinct of a politician, he pointed a thick finger at the stranger and yelled: “You!  It’s all your fault!”

            He stamped his foot for emphasis.

            It came down on the seedling.

            Nargina screeched like a banshee and charged at him, swinging the shovel.

            Kingrich did what any sensible politician would do.  He ran for his office.

            Nargina followed him, shovel at the ready.

            “Oops,” said Sulu, watching the chase.  It occurred to him that now would be a good time to get out of here.

            He scrambled back down the wall, realizing that his sudden appearance just might cause people to come searching the garden.  That meant somebody might find Sylvia.  It was time to get both of them out of here.

            He hit the ground and grabbed his communicator.

            47 seconds later, Sulu and Sylvia materialized in the Enterprise’s transporter room, both looking the worse for wear.

            Yeoman Rand took in Sylvia’s drooping fronds, Sulu’s rumpled uniform and the stray ivy leaves in his hair.  For a moment a really wild speculation played through her imagination.

            “I really don’t want to know,” she said, “What you two did on shore leave.”

            Sulu puzzled over that, then let it go.  “Let’s just say it was lively,” he admitted. “Can you find me another botanical garden, in another city?  Better yet: on another continent.”

            It took a good half hour to find a suitable spot in a small city at the other end of the main continent.  Randhad just finished beaming Sulu and Sylvia away when the urgent/civilian-channel/ground-to-ship message came in.

            At first Rand thought it was a joke.  Then she realized that this really was the planetary governor screaming hysterical accusations.  The man was so furious that he’d forgotten about the Communications Decency Problem, and was visible from the knees up.

            Rand took care to record the message, in full detail.

 

 

 

Banned From Argo -- Chapter 7

7.

 

Our doctor loves humanity.  His private life is quiet.

The Shore Police arrested him for inciting nudes to riot.

We found him in the city jail, locked on and beamed him free,

Intact – except for hickeys and six kinds of STD.

 

 

            Dr. Leonard McCoy spent a frustrating afternoon trying to find out where the Argo Portjoy-houses were, getting nothing but polite denials from the hotel bartenders, and by that evening he was desperate enough to call up Commander Scott and ask for advice.

            “Eh, lad,” Scott chuckled in answer to his question.  “Come right up here ta th’ Hotel Avalon.  We’re a’ on the sixth floor, havin’ oorselves a wee party.  Bring a couple o’ bottles, an’ join us.  I’m in room 612.”

            McCoy didn’t need to be asked twice.  Half an hour later, laden down with several assorted bottles, he knocked on the door of 612, Hotel Avalon.

            The door opened, revealing the front room of a large suite, a very rumpled Chief Engineer, and several giggling young women in bizarre dress.  All of them welcomed him in, and were especially pleased by the bottles.

            “Real Scotch!  And Ekosian Moon wine!” Scott chortled.  “Aye, Bones, ye’re a treasure.  Maryanne, my lovely, come show the doctor some gratitude.”

            A sweet-faced redhead in a minuscule silver dress trotted up, gave McCoy a beaming smile, and led him off to one of the bedrooms.

            What McCoy remembered most, afterward, was that her bed was full of teddy-bears.

            “I’ll probably have little paw-prints on my neck for days,” he told her, then took care to add: “They certainly do add to the charm.”

            “Oh yes, I just love my little bears,” said Maryanne, pulling a lock of red hair out of her eyes.  “It was so kind of Commander Scott to get them back for me.”

            “Back for you?  How did you lose them?”

            Maryanne spent the next twenty minutes telling about the raids, and the reason for them.  When she finished, McCoy was wide awake and doing some fast thinking.

            “Let me get this straight,” he said.  “The governor’s afraid the vote will swing to the open-port faction, because he got caught in the coat-closet with the maid?”

            “By an Open-Port senator, no less,” Maryanne added.  “Ooh, the juicy scandal!”

            “Right.  So he tried to make up for it by bringing in Starfleet’s money and cleaning up the port.  Now, this might at least get rid of the nasty problem with the Orions, but—“

            “I don’t think so,” Maryanne sniffed.  “Orion ships can still come through the sky-port without inspection.”

            “Hmm, Starfleet could do something about that.”  McCoy made a mental note to suggest it to the Captain.  “But meanwhile, the spacers want the joy-houses and bars and gaming-dens and everything else.  The trade won’t go away;  it’ll just go further underground.  That means it’ll be uninspected, unhealthy, and downright dangerous.  In other words, a health-hazard.”

            “Tell me about it,” grumbled Maryanne.  “Why, we couldn’t even get regular doctors’ visits at our place;  most doctors were nervous about being seen with us.  I guess it’ll be worse now that we’re scattered.”

            McCoy felt his alarm-bells go off, and made a red-flagged mental note to beam back to the Enterprisein the morning and give himself a thorough checkup.  “Hypocrisy kills,” he muttered.  “I can make a report to Starfleet…”

            “But what good will that do?”  Maryanne sighed.  “The Feds can’t interfere in local planetary matters.  All they can do is pull Starfleet out of Argo Port, take away the money, and maybe that will oust the governor and his rich-purist faction, but maybe it won’t.  In any case, that’ll just bring the Orions back – or worse.”

            “Worse?”

            “With the new truce working, Klingon ships have been coming by.  They haven’t sent their crews down here yet, but soon enough they will.”

            “Oboy,” murmured McCoy, thinking that over.

            A nice mess the Argoans had gotten themselves into with their hypocrisy and greed.  Either they dealt with Starfleet or made their money off the local interplanetary trade.  Local trade meant Orions, and possibly Klingons, unhampered by anything but Argo’s own inadequate space-force and police.  Starfleet meant money and protection, but its personnel would also demand services that the Argo government didn’t want to admit existed.  That façade of Respectability would create a huge criminal underclass, with all that implied.

            The only possible solution was to get rid of the hypocrisy, blast the façade of Respectability to smithereens, make Argo publicly face its realities.

            Of course, nobody from Starfleet could do that for them; it would be a breach of the Prime Directive.

            But the natives themselves could pull it off, if they had the right tactics…

            McCoy fell asleep pondering tactics.

            In the morning, he woke up with an idea.  He went to find Scott, and had a long talk with him.

 

                                                            *           *           *

 

            The first step in the plot required calling up everyone Scott knew in the Undernet, and there they got a surprise.  Every live visual transmission on Argo showed people with their clothes missing: nothing else, just the clothes.  Everyone in the Undernet Underground knew about it – even hinted that they knew who had done it – and took care to appear on-screen only from the neck up.

            The rest of Argo was just waking up to the phenomenon, and reactions were spectacular.  News reporters (visible from the neck up) chattered endlessly about the ‘prank’.  Public officials (from the neck up) thundered outrage about the ‘sabotage’, threatened ferocious punishments for the ‘subversives’, and promised arrests ‘at any moment now’.  Talk-show hosts (carefully posed behind large viewscreens and desks) invited comments from listeners, and got an earful.

            The officials were horrified, but plainly the rest of the Argoans were laughing their heads off.  As cultural sabotage, it was a howling success.

            “Weel, Bones,” said Scott, turning off his screen, “It appears ta me thot we’d best strike while th’ iron is hot – I mean, today.”

            “Right,” said McCoy.  “Once we’ve talked to everyone we can reach, we’ll have the girls call their friends, and—” Just then he was struck by a vision that made him laugh so hard he almost fell off his chair.

            “Eh, are ye a’right, Doctor?” Scott worried.

            “I’m fine.  *Hyuck!*  I just thought--  Heh!  Scotty, imagine how this is going to look on the news reports!”

            Scott thought about that for all of five seconds before he started laughing too.

 

                                                            *           *           *

 

            The word went out: from Maryanne and her friends to all of their friends, to the Bolt-Hole and everyone anyone in the Bolt-Hole knew, from an anonymous caller to the Althashayn and from there to friends on other orbiting ships, to the Flower Market, to the survivors of Baxter’s, to the Undernet and everyone on it and all of their friends.  Massive numbers of students called in sick and were absent from school.  Disturbing numbers of adults called in sick and were absent from work.  News media commented briefly about a new but mild virus making the rounds. 

            At half an hour before noon, all the telemedia stations in Argo Port City received anonymous calls advising them to have camera crews at the east side of the port by noon.  Several stations were curious enough to send reporters and cameras.

            At noon, the crowd assembled on the east side of the port was enormous, milling about, uncertain what to do next.  At various spaces were piles of picket-signs.  Maryanne and her friends were having second thoughts.

            “Honestly, I’ve never done anything like this before,” Maryanne was babbling tearfully, “And neither has anybody else, and I just don’t know if I can go through with it.  I honestly don’t know what to do.”

            Seeing that somebody would have to take the next step, McCoy drew a deep breath and picked up one of the picket-signs.  “Just do what I’m doing,” he said, and stepped out into the street.  Maryanne and friends hastily followed suit.  Everybody else followed them.  Out they marched, into the main road leading toward City Hall.

            At first the crowd was quiet, save for the low thunder of thousands of marching feet and the mutter of quiet voices.  Then an incredibly old woman, recognizable only to patrons of the Flower Market, began chanting: “No More Raids!  No More Raids!”  Everyone could agree on that, and thousands of voices took up the chant.  By the time the crowd reached the first intersection – and the first of the news cameras – the sound of their voices was shaking windows a block away.

            Impressed, the reporters trained their cameras on the picket-signs, noting the slogans: “No More Hypocrisy!”  “Open Port!”  “Legalize the Joy-Houses!”  “Legalize Safe Drugs!”  “No More Censorship!” and, most telling of all: “Tell Starfleet the Truth!”

            For obvious security reasons, most reporters in the field – even knowing about the Nude Problem with video transmissions – carried transmitting, not recording, cameras.  The whole jolly parade was transmitted live to the nearest repeater-antenna.  From there, the transmissions went to recorders at the various media stations – and also to anyone who tuned in directly on that frequency.  Viewers groundside and in space were treated to the sight of a parade of thousands – all of them stark naked. 

Only a few of the marchers remembered to hold their picket-signs low enough to screen their bodies from the cameras.

            McCoy, worried about legal repercussions and the Prime Directive, held his sign high enough to hide his face and nothing else.

            Maryanne and her friends proudly held their signs high.

            Within ten minutes, everyone on the planet who had any kind of video receiver was tuned in to the parade.  So, for that matter, was everyone in local space.  Countless receivers and computer-banks recorded the event for posterity.

            It took another fifteen minutes for the Argo government to recover from its collective fit of apoplexy, and respond.

            McCoy, seeing that the march was well under way and would continue under its own power, was about to reach for his communicator, step to one side and beam safely away, when he saw another crowd running into the street ahead of him.  It took him a second to realize that this crowd was made up of city police, armed with clubs and stunguns, covered with shields and body-armor.

            Why armor? was McCoy’s first thought.  Nobody here is armed…

            Then the police fired into the crowd.

            McCoy yelled in shock as he saw Maryanne go down.  He dropped his sign and crouched beside her, checking for vital signs.  Above him, the crowd screamed and milled about, and the stun-beams whistled.  One of them grazed his back, dropping him, conscious but paralyzed, to the ground.  He had a good view of what came next.

            The front line of marchers went down, bodies dropping all over the street, but the massive crowd behind only heard the noise and pressed ahead faster to see what was happening.  The sheer mass of flesh was too big, and coming too fast, for the stun-beams to stop.  Worse, as people saw their friends being shot down, they began to throw things.  Most of what they threw were bottles of water, or other drinks, that they’d brought along for the march.  Most of the bottles were open, and their contents spewed all over the police and the ground in front of them.  The first stungun shorted out before the crowd reached the police line, neatly zapping the cop who held it.

            Then some quick-thinking Argoans got to a fire-extinguisher outlet, and opened it.  Water sprayed out all over the street, the cops and the charging crowd.

            At that point the police had the sense to holster their stunguns and pull out their clubs.  They laid about wildly, not bothering to aim for safe targets, and McCoy winced as he heard the sound of metalized plastic hitting bone.

            Even so, the crowd was simply too big to stop.  Outraged marchers jumped over the bodies of the fallen, threw themselves three-deep at the police shields, and bore the badgemen down by sheer weight.  After that, the noise changed to the sound of metalized clubs striking police helmets.

            The remaining police backed up, backed some more, then turned around and ran.  The crowd ran after them, closed in behind, and dragged them down like wolves chasing deer.  The rest of the crowd paused to strip the fallen police of shields, stunguns, clubs, armor, helmets, wallets and boots before hurrying on.

            McCoy, still lying helpless among the limp bodies in the street, couldn’t help sympathizing.  He also noticed the camera crews, still on their feet, transmitting all of this before they ran on, following the crowd.

            How long before the stun-shock wears off? he wondered, vainly trying to make his paralyzed hand reach into his pocket for the hidden communicator.

            Crowd and camera-crews were gone now, and a few of the former marchers were dragging off their stunned friends, when squealing tires and sirens came sounding up the cross-street.

            Ambulances?McCoy hoped.

            No, it was a fleet of Argo Port Citypaddy-wagons.  They came whooping to a stop, their doors opened, and out sprang several more local badges.  They began grabbing up the fallen bodies and throwing them into the waiting wagons.

            Dammit, that’s dangerous! McCoy thought, watching them.  These people were limp and helpless; they could be badly injured being thrown around like that.  He wished there was just one reporter left, recording this.  Someone had to get proof, show it to the world.

            As two badges picked him up by the arms, McCoy got a quick glimpse of the building across the street.  The windows were packed full of watchers, several of them with cameras.

 

                                                            *           *           *

 

            The stun-shock didn’t wear off until McCoy was inside a cell, along with several other limp bodies, many of them female and familiar.  McCoy shook the last pins-and-needles feeling out of his hands, and went to examine the wounded.  He saw bruises, cuts, swellings, possible broken bones, probable concussions, and muttered some unprintable things about the Argo police. 

            His communicator was gone, and his wallet too.  He remembered a pudgy badge at the station patting over the bodies as they were unloaded, removing any goodies he found, including jewelry and money – and McCoy took care to remember his face.  He had a sore shoulder himself, from where he’d landed hard on the floor, and he wasn’t going to forget that, either.

            Meanwhile, nobody except possibly Scotty even knew he was here.

            Maybe that thieving badge would see his Starfleet ID, get worried, and report it to his superiors.  Then again, maybe not; how would the man explain getting the wallet in the first place?  McCoy’s best hope was that stripping prisoners of their valuables was standard legal practice here, so the badge would have to share the wealth, and somebody would see the Starfleet ID.  If not, he’d have to trust that Scotty would come looking for him.

            At any rate, what he had to do now was tend the wounded.  Some of them were beginning to wake up, and were groaning with pain.  McCoy tried yelling for a guard, but none came.  With an oath, he made his way to the crowded cell’s lone faucet, hoping at least to wash the wounds clean.  He had nothing else to work with, and too much to do.

 

                                                            *           *           *

 

            As soon as Scott materialized, he hurried off the transporter platform and went straight to the console.  Yeoman Rand made way for him.

            “Lass,” he said, working the viewscreen controls, “Did ye see whot hoppened doon at th’ portside?”

            “You mean the riot?” said Rand.  “Sir, I not only watched; I recorded it.”

            She jabbed buttons on the console.  The small screen blossomed into a professional- cameraman’s-eye-view of the march – and then the attack.  Whatever had been done to Argo’s communications system to make clothes vanish, it didn’t include the metallized plastic of police armor.  To the camera’s eye, armored police had fired into a crowd of naked – and obviously unarmed – civilians.

            Scott stared, his jaw dropping, as the scene unfolded.  He saw nude bodies falling, then others fighting back – and winning – with nothing but water and the weight of their bare bodies.  It occurred to him that, taken purely as a battle scene, this was a legend in the making.

            Just then a light on the small comm-board flashed.  “Incoming call, sir,” said Rand, pressing another button.

            “This is Commander Thelin, of the Althashayn,” said a vaguely familiar voice.  “Enterprise, who’s receiving?”

            “Er, Commander Scott here.”

            “Ah, Kirk’s friend.  Sir, have you received the current news broadcast from Argo Port City?  Have you seen what I’ve seen?”

            “Aye, seen it a’,” said Scott, snapping back to his immediate problem.  “Mr. Thelin, there’s no Communications Officer aboord.  I’ll need yer help analyzin’ a’ th’ broadcasts ye can find.  I’m tryin’ ta locate an’ individual fro’ ma crew…”

 

                                                            *           *           *

 

            Everyone in the cell was awake now, and in the adjoining cells as well.  The background chorus of groans and curses made McCoy think of the waiting room of Hell.  Thanks to the number of prisoners, there was at least one person with some medical training in each cell; McCoy communicated with them by shouting into the corridor.  Nobody had anything more to work with than water and spare clothes, but at least none of the injured was getting any worse at the moment.

            “But some of them will get worse without treatment,” McCoy muttered angrily.  “How long before they send food, supplies, a doctor, anything?”

            His temporary assistant, an Argo woman with training as a shipyard nurse, crouched over one of the patients and peered worriedly into the man’s eyes.  “Doc,” she said, “I’m worried about this concussion.  His eyes are still wrong.”

            “Keep him warm and still.”  McCoy ran a distracted hand through his hair.  “Has anyone here ever been in this hellhole before?”

            Maryanne, holding her sprained wrist in her lap, raised the other hand.  “I have,” she said.  “The guards come at regular times, about four hours apart.  With this big a crowd, though…  I just don’t know.”

            “Four hours?!  These people need help right now!”

            “Hey, we’ll last, Doc,” mumbled one of the concussion cases.  “Hell, I’ve taken worse’n this in bar-fights.  I ‘member one time—“

            “Shh.  Not now.  Rest,” the nurse shushed him.

            “Hey, Doc,” Maryanne smiled hopefully at him, “It was worth it.  We wanted to make a big public stink, and we sure did.”

            “Yes, we did,” McCoy had to agree.  “Bigger and much badder than I expected.  But who would have thought civilized people would react like this?  It’s barbaric!”

            Right then, a familiar blue glow formed around him.  McCoy gasped in recognition, barely had time to hear the startled shouts around him—

            --and then he was standing on the Enterprise’s transporter pad, looking straight at Scotty and Yeoman Rand behind the console.

            “Are ye a’ right?” Scott called hurrying toward him.

            “Nothing worse than bruises,” snapped McCoy, hopping off the platform.  “But I’ve got to get to Sickbay, fast.  Keep those coordinates, and try to locate the other cells.  I’ve got to beam them some medicine, bandages—“

            “Bones, I dinna think thot’d be a guid idea.”

            “What do you mean, not a good idea?!  There are injured people down there!”

            “Weel, I mean, we beamed ye oot on th’ sly.  ‘Tisna exactly legal ta slip prisoners oot o’ planetary jail, ye know.  If we sent supplies doon, someone official might see it an’ make a guid guess.”

            “They already know they caught a Starfleet officer, unless that badge kept my wallet for himself.  We send the supplies.  Yeoman Rand, can you come along and help me?”

            “Yessir.  Uh, Mr. Scott, I guess you have the console.”

            McCoy didn’t exactly run all the way to Sickbay, but Randhad to trot to keep up with him.  Once there, McCoy began hauling containers out of cabinets and loading a grav-cart with them.  He was bending over to reach into a lower shelf when Rand saw the bruise on his head.

            “Sir, you have a head-wound,” she pointed out.  “It’s not bad; it looks no worse than a hickey.”

            McCoy patted his head and found the bruise.  “I didn’t even notice it before,” he marveled.  “Too busy, I suppose.”

            “Sir, shouldn’t you check yourself further before handling the sterile bandages?”

            That made McCoy stop and think.  “You’re right, I should.  Hmm, I’ll step over here under the scanner, you poke that button and then hit ‘hold’ when the words stop showing up on the screen.”

            Yeoman Rand dutifully did so, and frowned at what the screen displayed.  “Sir,” she said carefully, “I really think you’d better look at this.”

            Puzzled, McCoy got up and peered at the screen.  He stared.  Then he howled.

            “Ye gods, all that and lice too?!  Dammit, Maryanne!”

            He dived for another cabinet and began pulling out more containers.

  

Banned From Argo -- Chapter 6

 

6.

 

Our Lady of Communications won a ship-wide bet
By getting into the planet's main communications net.  

Now every time someone calls up on an Argo telescreen

The flesh is there, but the clothes they wear are nowhere to be seen.

 

            Her room at the DeFarge Hotel was quietly elegant, but Lt. Nyota Upenda Uhura was more concerned with its datanet linkage.  For one thing, the room had its own private comm-line, with a meter that counted and billed only for time used, which meant that if she wished she could spend hours net-surfing without anyone from the main desk calling up to ask questions.

            She lay sprawled on the big bed, wearing nothing but a soft caftan, with a whole potful of hot chocolate sitting on the bed-table nearby, her heavy-duty laptop comm-board linked up and screen scrolling.  Paradise!  Nothing to do for days and days but indulge in her pet pastime, and if it cost a month’s pay it would be worth it.  Datasurfing out in space was like searching for pearl oysters in an often deep and empty sea, but surfing planetside was more like strolling across a lush tropical island looking for the best in coconuts.

            Well, there were plenty of coconuts to choose from.  She watched the datalines scrolling up the screen, and flagged the ones that looked interesting.  Hmm, there was an intriguing title: Realm of the Midnight Marauders.  It sounded like a bunch of kids swapping vid-games, probably worth a brief look.  She poked a button, reflecting that this was really more direct, more realistic, than talking to a comp-voice – not to mention quieter, just in case anyone should pass by in the hallway outside.

            There: Realm of the Midnight Marauders.  Its logo proclaimed it to be A Gamers’ Forum and Defense Committee – huh? "'Defense' committee"? – and the entry protocols were surprisingly fierce.  Some really smart kid had set them up;  she had to work hard to get through them.  What in the worlds…?

            Once she broke through to the discussion-threads menu, the mystery became a little clearer.  ‘Games, Suppression of’, ‘Holovids, Suppression of’, ‘Legal Resources’, ‘Political Resources’ – exactly what was happening on Argo?  What gang of idiots was trying to suppress common entertainment, and why?  Uhura picked ‘Games, Suppression of’ and punched in.

            “—fear of ‘escapism’,” rolled across the screen, attributed to a correspondent named ‘Clarion’.  “Why should anyone fear ‘escapism’?  Because it implies that society is worth escaping from!  It’s fear of a slave revolt, plain and simple.”

            Uhura gave herself the title of ‘Dark Lady’, and cut in.  “Excuse me, I’m new here,” she tapped.  “Just what’s being suppressed, by whom, and why?”

            There was an instant’s pause, and then the screen began lighting up with hit-indicators.  In five minutes, the screen noted 34 new messages, and Uhura hadn’t read through more than three of them.  She spent the next hour getting a fascinating picture of Argo society – legal and electronic.  It was an impressive insight. 

            “Quite simply,” ‘Clarion’ summed it up, “The Argo government is trying to limit the amount of time anyone can spend, per day, either watching holovids or playing computer games.  Full-Virt holosuites are limited to adults only, training programs only.  Holovids are inspected and strictly censored before being released for public viewing.  The government is trying to find ways to censor the entire datanet, having little luck as hackers evade them, and they’re threatening really outrageous penalties for anyone they manage to catch.”

            “I’ve seen this before, on other worlds,” Uhura answered.  “It’s usually a precursor – or a clear indication – of tyranny.  Does the Argo government know that suppression of this kind could cost it membership in the Federation?”

            That set off a fresh flurry of comments and questions.  The datatraffic grew so thick that the sysop was obliged to cut in with the request that people take this topic over to ‘Political Resources’ where it belonged.  The screen quickly emptied as the discussion moved to its proper zone.

            Uhura considered joining them, poured herself a fresh cup of hot chocolate, then got another idea.  She pulled out of the thread, punched back to the menu, and tapped in: “search: Protest, electronic”.

            Whoa, that one had entry protocols and watchdogs she couldn’t believe!  Uhura threaded her way through them, even ducking down into the procedural sub-basement routines a couple of times, before she got to the subject proper. 

            The first entry was comparatively harmless: instructions on how to ‘not spam but blizzard’ the net with short protest messages, such as “Sign Petition 233: Stop Censorship”, entered by ‘SewerRat’.  The second entry, by ‘NightFlight’, described procedures for leaving messages with every elected official on the planet.  A third, from ‘Bar Sinister’, told how to hack into the controls for the light-strip around one of the larger commercial buildings downtown so as to add the message: “Sign Petition 233”.

            “This is basically harmless stuff,” she punched in, using her code-name ‘Dark Lady’.  “So why the ferocious secrecy on the information?”

            Right away the screen flashed back: “Who are you, and how did you get in here?” – signed only by ‘Sysop’.

            “I’m the Dark Lady of Communications,” she typed back, a little annoyed, “And I know my business.  How about answering my question?”

            She could almost see the anonymous readers pausing to think that over.  Then another message stitched itself across the screen.

            “Are you the Dark Lady of the ship that just came in today?” asked someone named ‘Cassowary’, “And is your middle name Upenda, and do you have an unreal lion’s tooth pendant?”

            Right there, Uhura guessed who it was.

            “I sure am,” she typed back.  “And is your middle name Dover, and didn’t we meet on Argelius Four last year?”

            “Yes, yes and yes!  J”  came back at her.  “Don’t say another word.  We must meet.  You say where.”

            “No, your choice,” she typed back.

            After a moment, an address appeared, and a time.

            “A date already, and I wasn’t even trying,” Uhura chuckled.  She typed in her acknowledgement and promised to be there in two hours.  Then she signed off, closed the computer and got up to look over her wardrobe.  Ray Dover Carlotti, as she recalled, was well worth dressing up for.

 

                                                            *           *           *

 

            Uhura took care to arrive early and look over the environment.  The address turned out to be a wine-garden of the kind frequented by the musical and theatrical set.  It was elegant, quiet and discreet, and Uhura picked out a seat at what she considered the best place.  It was a small round table in a corner, half-screened by a graceful potted mimosa tree, and lit only by the candle in the amber glass on the table’s center.  The light reflected subtle metallic gleams from her satin red-bronze-and-gold caftan, and glimmered from her bone-bead necklace and bracelets.  She had ordered a local gold-colored wine in a balloon glass, and as she heard footsteps approach the mimosa tree she lifted the glass to her lips.  It caught the candlelight at just the right angle, and looked as if she were drinking molten gold.

            Ray Carlotti, pushing his way past the mimosa tree, was momentarily turned to stone at the sight of her – just as Uhura had intended.

            “Ray,” she smiled, setting down the glass, “Come, sit.  It’s been entirely too long since we last met.”

            “Uhh, oh, yeah.”  Ray stumbled over his own feet, and almost fell into the table’s only other chair.  Half his navigation problem was that he couldn’t take his eyes off Uhura.

            She grinned.  The passing years hadn’t made him any more graceful, or subtle.

            Ray Carlotti was tall, gangling, built like a string bean, with hands and feet too big for his body.  He’d left adolescence behind ten years ago, but still looked like an oversized teenager.  Corrective surgery had cleared up his nearsightedness, but he still held his big dark eyes open wide, as if he’d been peering at a computer screen too long – which he probably had.  He fit the centuries-old stereotype of a classic Computer Nerd to perfection, even unto holding down a six-figure job as an independent computer consultant.  Starfleet had tried to recruit him, and so had several Starfleet-supplying companies, but he refused to have anything to do with them – and made a fortune anyway.

            “Duhh, hello, Nyo,” he managed to say, still staring at her.  “Uh, are you still working for the Agents of Oppression?”

            “Sure thing,” she smiled back at him.  “Are you still an unregenerate Anarchist?”

            “Now and forever.”  He managed to wrench his eyes away from Uhura long enough to signal to the waiter.  “And my current job has only further convinced me that I was right in the first place.  Uh…”  He changed gears, looking harmless, as the waiter strolled up.  “I’ll have an Eirse Coffee, thank you – extra sugar.  So, how’ve you been, Nyota?”

            “Doing quite well, really.”  Uhura watched as the waiter moved away.  “So, what in the worlds are you doing on Argo?”

            “Arrrgh, sabotaging my own work!”  As he warmed to his subject, Ray’s gawkiness faded away.  “The local government hired me to update their system, ‘broaden’ it, they said.  What they really wanted was some way to listen in on every electronic conversation on the planet!  I couldn’t believe it, told them they were in danger of violating their Federation charter, all that.  They said to steer as close to the edge of the law as I could without stepping over it – at least, not in any detectable way.  Detectable!  Right there, I knew what I was dealing with.”

            “But why, Ray?” Uhura marveled.  “That’s what puzzles me about all of this: the censorship, the rationing of entertainment, now the spying on their own people – it’s not as if they were fighting a war, or even expecting one.  So why?”

            “’Tis the nature of the beast,” Ray sneered.  “Some people need war for an excuse, and some people don’t even need an excuse.  You’ve noticed that Argo’s very big on Respectability?”

            “I’ve heard a few things.”

            “Well, that’s just the tip of the iceberg.  Respectability, control, strong central government –- oh hell, they’re into corporate feudalism, and you know where that leads.”

            “Oh no,” Uhura groaned.  “I thought everybody had learned better, centuries ago.”

            “You forget,” Ray glowered, “Argo is a very old colony, one of the first.  When all the old Centralists and Corporate Feudalists and Neo-Puritans got thoroughly discredited on Earth, where do you think they went?”

            “That explains a lot,” Uhura murmured, remembering Federation history.  In the first century after the development of cheap stardrive, every religious cult, political faction, philosophical school and even artistic movement had gone out to colonize new worlds and put their ideas into practice.  A few had been spectacular successes, some less successful, and many had failed outright.  The failures had usually fallen back on the general culture of the burgeoning Federation for support, but others had mutated as necessary in order to survive.  Some had mutated extravagantly, others not very far – just enough to look acceptable to the Federation Membership Board.  “So, under the skin of Respectability, there lies…”

            “—A nasty little oligarchy.”  Ray made a face, then smoothed it out quickly as he saw the waiter returning.  Ray took his Eirse Coffee and thrust a handful of local currency at the waiter, who gawked at the amount, then retreated quickly before Ray could change his mind.

            “So anyway,” Ray resumed, “What I wound up giving them was a sort of emergency override, so they could break in on communications all over the planet to give warning if they had some world-wide emergency.  That much I had to let them do.”

            “Was this before or after the cultural censorship started?” Uhura asked.    

            “During!  That’s been going on for quite a while.  Being Neo-Puritans, they secretly believed that anything people enjoy is somehow evil.  They especially hate anything the kids enjoy; they’re desperate to brainwash the kids into being good little employees and taxpayers before they’re old enough to get the vote – and, with it, what little independence an adult here can get.  They especially don’t want the kids to see, hear or do anything that might encourage them to think for themselves – and maybe think of breaking the corporate mold.”

            “That explains the hatred of ‘escapism’.”

            “Right,” Roysmiled.  “That’s also why I’ve been taking my time setting up the new system for them, so I have an excuse to stay on-planet.  I spend my spare time setting up the underground computer networks and giving them all sorts of useful information.”

            “’Information is the door to freedom’,” Uhura quoted, grinning back at him.  She could almost picture the scene: the stuffed-shirt bureaucrats versus the scruffy techno-anarchist.  She could almost pity the stuffed shirts.  Almost.  “It still doesn’t quite add up, Ray.  Does Argo have any neighbors close enough to conquer quickly, and is the planetary government building up its military?”

            “No, and no.”  Ray slurped his coffee with a brief expression of bliss.  “Before you ask, yes, I thought at first that they were doing all this social-control crap because they planned to go out and start an empire; that’s the usual way such societies go.  But for one thing, that would turn the rest of the Federation against them, and even the craziest power-junkie wouldn’t be that stupid.  Second, no, there’s nobody close enough to go out and conquer quickly and efficiently.  Hell, I think the nearest inhabited planets are the Andorian colonies, and nobody with any sense wants to tangle with them.  No, there’s something else going on.”

            “If they’re not setting up for conquest, then why are they doing this?”

            “The next best reason: money.”

            “They’re enslaving their own people for money?!”

            “Think: Argo’s been trying to get the best of both worlds: keeping a money-making wide-open trade port up in orbit, and their safe, controlled, cultural ‘purity’ groundside at the same time.”

            “Quite a balancing act.  How successful have they been?”

            “Not very.  Now they have two political factions – call them the Middleclass and the Rich.  The Middleclass want a wide-open groundside port city too, and free trade, and they’ve been growing in political power lately – especially since that scandal about the planetary governor and the maid in the coat-closet.  There’s a forced election coming up, and it looked as if the Middleclass party might win, for once.”

            “Hmm,” Uhura considered.  “The obvious move is for the Rich party to make some trade concessions fast: take the wind out of the open-city faction’s sails.”         

            “That, and give up some of their control over the spaceport.”  Ray took another hit off his coffee.  “In other words, make a deal with Starfleet.  How many fortunes have been made selling munitions to armies?  Or, in this case, shipyard and shore-leave facilities to navies.  That would make up in money what they lose in control of the port.  But in any case, the space-trade exposes their people to dangerous ideas about freedom and self-reliance – so it’s censorship time, with a vengeance.”

            Uhura rubbed her forehead and thought about that.  “But something still doesn’t make sense here,” she said.  “I saw stories all over the net about the government ‘cleaning up’ the spaceport.  If the Rich Respectables have been running the port, what is there to clean up?”

            “Some very dirty money.”  Ray licked coffee-foam off his lip.  “For decades the Rich party has been putting up this big ‘respectability’ front to its citizens, while secretly running the port as a red-light district – and collecting fat bribes to let the ‘illegal and immoral’ trade go on.  There are even rumors about them letting Orion slave-traders come through.”

            “Ye gods!” Uhura gasped.  “If Starfleet Command knew—“

            “Right.  That would shatter the whole deal.  Goodbye big money and power.  Hmm, in fact, you’ve already thrown a small monkey-wrench into the works – your ship, I mean.”

            “Us?  How?”

            “You came ahead of schedule, with very little advance warning.  The Argo government had to clean up the dockside fast, before your crew could see anything that wasn’t Respectable.  That’s why they’ve been raiding the shipyard end of Port City all day, and it’ll probably go on all night.  At least that will keep them too busy to chase computer-freaks for awhile.”

            “You know,” said Uhura, eyes narrowing, “I hate hypocrisy almost as much as I hate censorship.”

            “Nyota Upenda, I know that look.  What do you have in mind?”

            “…So the kingpin is this false front of Respectability, is it?  Well, nothing punctures a stuffed shirt like a good dirty joke.”

            “Nyota…”

            Uhura pulled her minicomp out of her voluminous sleeve and began jabbing its buttons.  “I’ve worked on tricorders,” she muttered.  “Just a few minor additions, just a few little adjustments…  There.”  She shoved the minicomp at Ray so he could see its screen.  “First, can you get me those parts?  Second, can you get me into the main communications complex?”

            Ray looked at the list, and his eyes grew very wide.  “Uh…yeah,” was all he said.

            “How soon?”

            “Tonight.”  He snickered.  Then whooped.  “Oh yes, tonight!  They’ll be too busy with their raids to notice.  But once you’ve hooked it up, what will you do with it?”

            She told him.

            He laughed so hard he fell off his chair, startling the waiter.

 

                                                            *           *           *

 

            With her makeup washed off, hair pulled tight under a close-fitting turban and eyes hidden behind tinted engineer’s goggles, draped in a shapeless tan-colored technician’s jumpsuit, Uhura was unrecognizable.  Ray had to look twice to realize that the approaching tech with the battered toolkit was indeed his co-conspirator.

            “Did you get everything?” she whispered, glancing up at the neon-tinged midnight sky.

            “Oh yes,” he grinned, tapping the larger and even more battered case in his arms.  “Pray step into my beat-up groundcar, m’lady, and we’ll go infiltrate the enemy’s lair.”

            “How did you get it all so fast?” she asked, wriggling her way into the cramped vehicle.  The seat, she noted, was littered with technical manuals.

            “Through the Undernet, of course.”  He snickered as he slid into the driver’s seat.  “My friends were happy to help.”

            “Your friends?”  Uhura sat up.  “How many friends, and how much did you tell them?”

            “Oh, just three or four.”  He started the engine.  “Hey, they won’t tell anybody – at least not until we’ve finished and got away clean.”

            “How much do they know, Ray?” she insisted.

            “Hey, no more than they could guess by looking at the parts I asked for.  That’s why I had to talk to four of them, so nobody would get the whole picture.”

            “But they all talk to each other, don’t they?” said Uhura, seeing all hope of secrecy go down the drain.

            “Oh no!”  Ray gave her an indignant look as he swung the car out onto the road.  “They don’t even know each other.  They’re not all in the same news-groups, or even in the same town.  Why, a couple of them are on ships in orbit.  There’s no way—“

            “What ships?”

            “Well, the Althashayn…”

            “That Andorian scout?  Ray, you know how Andorians gossip!  What’s the other ship?”

            “Uh, well, the Enterprise.”

            “Myship?!”

            “Hey, don’t worry!  My contacts won’t talk.”

            “Just who are your contacts, Ray,” Uhura growled.

            “My lips are sealed,” he said, steering onto a darkened service road.

            “Ray…”

            “Uh, well, you know Commander Thelin’s a really serious computer-gamer…”

            Uhura relaxed slightly.  She knew Thelin.  The Andorian was of clan Norothriv: old aristocracy, used to politics and intrigue, knowing when to keep their antennae curled and their mouths shut.

            “And who from my ship?”

            “Uhm, you know Janice Rand?  She spends a lot of time on the discussion boards.”

            “Yes, I know her.”  Uhura slumped in relief.  Randwas a friend, and wouldn’t go spreading tales.  “How much further?”

            “Huh?  Oh.  Right up here at the end of the road.”

            Sure enough, ahead lay a sprawl of buildings.  From the center of them sprouted a huge transmission-mast.  The parking lot below it was almost empty, and most of the building’s windows were unlit.

            “See?  Nobody here but a skeleton-crew,” said Ray, pulling into the parking lot.  “We’ll walk right through them.”

            “Hmm, just one thing you haven’t explained,” Uhura considered as the engine thumped to silence.  “When the solid-waste impacts the rotor-blades, the officials will hunt frantically for someone to blame.  They won’t know me, but they’re bound to identify you.”

            “No they won’t,” Ray preened, handing her an identification badge.  “My ID’s as false as yours, and the only guy inside who could recognize me is the friend who’s letting us in.”

            “An inside man, Ray?”

            “Hey, where did you think I got the last bit of equipment?  The Undernet Is Everywhere!”

            “Good thing I brought my communicator; we just might need an emergency beam-up.”

            “Then good thing your friend’s minding the transporter.  Now look normal.”

            Wondering what Ray’s idea of ‘normal’ was, Uhura followed him across the parking lot and into a side door of the main building.  Sure enough, the door’s scanner recognized their badges and let them in. 

            Beyond the door lay a corridor, with lights at energy-saving dimness and numbered doors to either side.  Halfway down it stood an open cargo elevator.  Inside that was a simple badge-reader and keypad.  It accepted Ray’s badge without comment.  He pushed buttons, the doors closed and the elevator sank toward the basement.  They’d seen no one so far, and Uhura couldn’t believe their luck would last.

            It didn’t.

            When they stepped out of the elevator, they all but ran into a uniformed security guard.  He was late-middle-aged, noticeably overweight, with a uniform that was gaudy with decorations and tailored to disguise his paunch.  The minute he saw them, he struck a menacing pose and twiddled his fingers around his stungun.

            Ray, with studied nonchalance, started to walk past him as if he were part of the scenery.

            It didn’t work.

            “Who’re you?” snapped the guard, stepping in front of him.  “And whatcha doing here at this hour?”

            “Inspection and maintenance,” Ray growled back, flapping his badge.  “We gotta get Subsection 21-B cleared before morning.”

            “Inspection?  At this hour?”  The guard glowered accusingly, hitching up his shoulders to look taller – which only made his belly look bigger.

            “Of course at this hour,” Ray retorted, sounding just the right shade of impatient and annoyed.  “Low-traffic hours, low power-draw, no busy bureaucrats to get in the way.  You mind?”

            “Yeah, I mind,” huffed the guard, sticking his elbows out and twiddling showily with his stungun.  “Nobody told meabout any inspection.”

            “Yeah?  Well, Third Engineer Dusenberg told meto get it done tonight,” Ray snapped back.  “You wanta call him, he’s up in 387 right now, going over the readouts.  Maybe he’ll be happy to get yanked away from his boards for diddly-squat, and maybe he won’t.  Go on and call him.”

            Challenged, the guard pulled out his clunky communicator and played with it, looking to see if Ray looked worried.  Ray only looked expectant and gleeful.

            Inspired, Uhura said to him – loud enough for the guard to hear: “How long is this going to take, Harry?  Remember, we’ve got to get down to the sewage plant sometime tonight.”

            Ray caught the hint and ran with it.  “Hey, don’t worry,” he chortled.  “If we don’t make it, he’ll catch the flak.  We get double-time-and-a-half, no matter what.”

            That decided the guard.  “G’wan, get outta here,” he growled, stepping toward the elevator doors.  “And don’t try any cute stuff.”

            “’Cute stuff’?” Uhura couldn’t help adding as they strolled off down the corridor.  “What’s cute about a grade-2 inspection?”

            “Who knows?  Who cares?” said Ray.

            The elevator doors whooshed shut behind them.

            “Typical,” Ray added.  “This culture breeds bullies.”

            “What will happen to your friend Dusenberg when the guard gets questioned?”

            “Heh!  Dusenberg’s not in tonight.  My buddy’s got a bypass on 387, so any calls up there tonight go to him.”

            “Neat.  Where are we really going?”

            “Not to Subsection 21-B.”

            In fact, they went to Subsection 41-A, which was down the corridor, around a corner, down a shorter corridor, around another corner, and at the end of a short passage.  Ray used his badge to open the door, revealing a bank of connections and relays.

            “There you are, milady,” he said with a flourish.  “I think bank number 14 is what you want.”

            “You stand watch,” said Uhura, peering at the spaghetti-tangle of cables.  “This may be easier than I thought.”

            She took the two cases, laid them flat on the floor and opened them.  Ray edged to the corner of the passageway and stuck his nose, one eye, and one ear around it.  Uhura eyed the bank of connections once more, then reached for a tool and a module.

            Looking back, she remembered that there had been times when she’d worked faster – but there hadn’t been many of them.  Ten minutes of cutting, splicing and calibrating was all it took.

            “Done,” she whispered, carefully closing the door.  “Let’s pack up and get out of here.”

            “Shh,” said Ray, closing the cases.  “We’ll have to at least pass Subsection 21-B, just in case we run into that lout again.”

            Actually, it was a different lout they ran into: a Mark 3 roving robo-camera whining up the corridor toward them, lenses jiggling. They were just past Subsection 21-B when they encountered it, so their alibi looked good.

            “Piece of cake, like I said,” Ray drawled to Uhura, pretending to ignore the little robot.  “Didn’t really need anything but dusting.”

            “We get the double-time-and-a-half anyway,” Uhura replied. “And you know something would go wrong if we didn’t inspect.”

            They walked around the robot as if it were an inconveniently-placed potted shrub, and strolled on down the corridor.  The elevator door was about fifty meters away.

            The robot turned around and followed them, hooting plaintively.

            Ray and Uhura traded glances, and then looked for hidden security-sensors.  They didn’t see any signs of them, but there was still a chance of someone watching and listening – through the robot, at least.  They couldn’t ignore the thing’s hooting.  They stopped and turned.

            “Hey, we got an escort,” said Ray, trying to sound amused.

            “They want us to inspect that, too?”  Uhura did her best to sound tired and indignant.  “That’s not in our work-order.”

            “Maybe it’s a warning or something.  Won’t hurt to look.”  Ray squatted beside the machine and peered at it. 

            On the robot’s housing sat a small screen and keyboard.  On the screen flashed the tiny words: HOW’S IT GOING, RAY?  --SUPERGLUE

            ‘Superglue’?Uhura wondered.

            Ray smothered an oath, and tapped on the keyboard: WENT FINE.  LET US OUT, CLEAN AND FAST.

            Instead the screen displayed a new message: DID IT WORK?

            Ray frowned and tapped back: CALL AND FIND OUT AFTER WE’VE LEFT, DAMMIT.

            I’VE GOT A LOT OF MONEY RIDING ON THIS, replied the screen.

            Uhura gave the machine a slit-eyed glare, getting some nasty ideas.

            DOUBLE YOUR BET.  NOW GO HOME, Ray tapped.

            The robot obediently turned around and went back the way it had come.

            “Just as I thought,” Ray said clearly, for the benefit of any hidden sensors.  “Set to infra-red, and following our heat-signature.”

            “Enough free repairs,” Uhura matched him. “Come on, our next job’s waiting.”

            Nothing else followed them.  Nothing kept the doors from opening for Ray’s badge.  Nothing stopped them from strolling across the parking lot, getting into the groundcar, driving out the gate and away.

            Only when they were safely on the road did Uhura bring up the idea she’d been chewing on for the last several minutes.

            “’A lot of money riding on this’, Ray?”

            “Uh, yeah.”  Ray squirmed a bit in his seat.  “Ol’ Superglue likes to make bets on everything.  It’s just his style, nothing to worry about.”

            Uhura could think of plenty to worry about.  “Just what bet did he make, Ray?  And with whom?”

            “Why, he bet we’d succeed, of course.”  Ray grinned nervously.  “Bet nearly 500 creds.  So did I.”

            “With whom, Ray?”

            “Uh, well, Thelin set it up.  Us against his whole crew.”

            “’Us’?!  You mean, you and me and all your suppliers against his crew?  You said you didn’t tell anyone what we were up to!”

            “I didn’t!  I mean, I didn’t mean to.  He figured out most of it, and wouldn’t give me the receiver-heads until I told him the rest of it.  Then he set up the bet.  But hey, don’t worry; Andorians are really honorable about gambling, and none of them would try to sabotage the mission.”

            “So a whole scout-ship full of Andorians knows who we are and what we did!  How long do you think they’ll keep the secret, Ray?”

            “Hey, forever!  You know how Andorians are about honor.  At any rate, the word will never get back to the Argo government.  And besides—” He gave her a desperate smile.  “Think of the money we’ll make.  I’ll cut you in for half the profits, of course…”

            “Damn right, you will.  And drive faster.  I need to clean out my hotel room and beam back to the Enterprise, ASAP.”

            “Huh?  Why?”

            “Because, any minute now, one of those jolly gamblers is going to make a ship-to-shore call, just to see if we succeeded.  How long do you think it’ll be before the word spreads?”

            “Oh.”

            Ray put his foot down, and the groundcar leaped ahead.

 

                                                            *           *           *

 

            All of ten minutes later, Uhura had herself and her gear beamed up to the Enterprise.  Yeoman Rand met her with a wide and knowing grin.  At the very least, she suspected something.

            “Thanks,” said Uhura, deciding against a change of clothes, only pulling off her turban and goggles.  “Now could you please beam me and my gear to…  What was that hotel Scotty mentioned?”

            “The Hotel Avalon,” Rand chirped.  “And congratulations, Lieutenant.  Your hack went perfectly.  Want to see?”

            “You were in on it too?” Uhura groaned.  Nonetheless, she stepped toward the console to peer at its viewscreen.  “How much did you make on the bet?”

            “A good 200 creds.  Come and look.”

            Uhura looked at the screen.  Sure enough, there stood an Argo Port Citybureaucrat, droning off a list of repair-schedule updates.  Only an experienced communications expert would have noticed the slight rippling in the air around him which signified tricorder emissions at work.  From his slightly bored expression, he saw nothing amiss in his immediate world.

            But as far as the screen showed, he was completely naked.