ate this tallow-wax racket of his."

"No. We have been looking for him for a long time. Fifteen years, and
I've been working on it that long. You might say, I have made a career
of him. Steve Ravick is really Anton Gerrit."

Maybe he was expecting us to leap from our chairs and cry out, "Aha!
The infamous Anton Gerrit! Brought to book at last!" We didn't. We
just looked at one another, trying to connect some meaning to the
name. It was Joe Kivelson, of all people, who caught the first gleam.

"I know that name," he said. "Something on Loki, wasn't it?"

Yes; that was it. Now that my nose was rubbed in it again, I got it.

"The Loki enslavements. Was that it?" I asked. "I read about it, but I
never seem to have heard of Gerrit."

"He was the mastermind. The ones who were caught, fifteen years ago,
were the underlings, but Ravick was the real Number One. He was
responsible for the enslavement of from twenty to thirty thousand
Lokian natives, gentle, harmless, friendly people, most of whom were
worked to death in the mines."

No wonder an Executive Special would put in fifteen years looking for
him. You murder your grandmother, or rob a bank, or burn down an
orphanage with the orphans all in bed upstairs, or something trivial
like that, and if you make an off-planet getaway, you're reasonably
safe. Of course there's such a thing as extradition, but who bothers?
Distances are too great, and communication is too slow, and the
Federation depends on every planet to do its own policing.

But enslavement's something different. The Terran Federation is a
government of and for--if occasionally not by--all sapient peoples of
all races. The Federation Constitution guarantees equal rights to all.
Making slaves of people, human or otherwise, is a direct blow at
everything the Federation stands for. No wonder they kept hunting
fifteen years for the man responsible for the Loki enslavements.

"Gerrit got away, with a month's start. By the time we had traced him
to Baldur, he had a year's start on us. He was five years ahead of us
when we found out that he'd gone from Baldur to Odin. Six years ago,
nine years after we'd started hunting for him, we decided, from the
best information we could get, that he had left Odin on one of the
local-stop ships for Terra, and dropped off along the way. There are
six planets at which those Terra-Odin ships stop. We sent a man to
each of them. I drew this prize out of the hat.

"When I landed