ght.

Then I took a second look at him. He might be happy, but he wasn't a
moron. He just looked like one. Natalenko's people often did, as one of
their professional assets.

I also noticed that he had a bulge under his left armpit the size of an
eleven-mm army automatic.

He was, I'd been told, a native of New Texas. I gathered, after talking
with him for a while, that he had been away from his home planet for
over five years, was glad to be going back, and especially glad that he
was going back under the protection of Solar League diplomatic immunity.

In fact, I rather got the impression that, without such protection, he
wouldn't have been going back at all.

I made another discovery. My personal secretary, it seemed, couldn't
read stenotype. I found that out when I gave him the tape I'd dictated
aboard the cutter, to transcribe for me.

"Gosh, boss. I can't make anything out of this stuff," he confessed,
looking at the combination shorthand-Braille that my voice had put onto
the tape.

"Well, then, put it in a player and transcribe it by ear," I told him.

He didn't seem to realize that that could be done.

"How did you come to be sent as my secretary, if you can't do
secretarial work?" I wanted to know.

He got out a bag of tobacco and a book of papers and began rolling a
cigarette, with one hand.

"Why, shucks, boss, nobody seemed to think I'd have to do this kinda
work," he said. "I was just sent along to show you the way around New
Texas, and see you don't get inta no trouble."

He got his handmade cigarette drawing, and hitched the strap that went
across his back and looped under his right arm. "A guy that don't know
the way around can get inta a lotta trouble on New Texas. If you call
gettin' killed trouble."

So he was a bodyguard ... and I wondered what else he was. One thing, it
would take him forty-two years to send a radio message back to Luna, and
I could keep track of any other messages he sent, in letters or on tape,
by ships. In the end, I transcribed my own tape, and settled down to
laying out my three weeks' study-course on my new post.

I found, however, that the whole thing could be learned in a few hours.
The rest of what I had was duplication, some of it contradictory, and it
all boiled down to this:

Capella IV had been settled during the first wave of extrasolar
colonization, after the Fourth World--or First Interplanetary--War.
Some time around 2100. The settlers had come f