But Runcible would not merely lose his land. It would be a prison sentence for forty to fifty years, depending on the skill of the Estes Park Government’s attorneys before the Council. And the Precious Relics Ordinance, as the law was called, had been tested by a number of Yance-men various times; discoveries of magnitude which had deliberately gone unreported and then been found out—the council would throw the book at Runcible and he would be wiped out; the economic empire which he had built up, his conapts all over the world, would revert to public domain: this was the punitive clause of the
...more
Majenta liked this
