Space Lawyer by Mike Jurist

their breaths. When Old Fireball heard of this, there would be fireworks. Would Mr. Foote care to tell for publication what he had paid? Why, of course, boys. He showed them a canceled check, made payable to bearer. The check was for one hundred thousand dollars. He didn't tell them, naturally, that this was the price for highjacking Captain Ball.
    When the news hit old Simeon, he was stunned. So stunned that for an unprecedented five minutes he lost all flow of language. Sally couldn't understand his reaction. He hadn't told her about the Flying Meteor's secret mission; nor that part of his reasons for coming to Planets had been to be on the spot for first news of the venture. She herself bad wandered around the roaring town, feeling curiously empty and unsatisfied. Several weeks had passed and there had been no report from the salvage ship, Flash, nor from its owner-captain. Why she was staying on she didn't know. Yet every time she determined to take ship back to Earth her will gave way and she weakly remained.
    "Why, what's the matter, dad?" she exclaimed anxiously. She was alarmed over her father's sudden choked, empurpled silence. "Just because that man, Foote, hints his reputation is better than yours is no reason for you to risk apoplexy. Everyone knows—"
    Simeon found part of his voice. "It isn't that, Sally," he said hoarsely. "It's about Ball and the Flying Meteor."
    "What about them?"
    He told her then; of the dying prospector and his half-delirious story, of the secret expedition of the Flying Meteor. "That there asteroid to which that swamp snake, Foote, got an assignment is the very same one that Ball went after. And Ball should 've been back by now. There's funny work afoot, and I mean Foote."
     
    How funny the work was, showed up three days later in the form of a long spacegram from Ball on Ganymede City, relayed from Earth. There were two portions to the spacegram, and both of them unsealed all of the explosive possibilities that dwelt under Simeon's mild-seeming exterior.
    Even Sally had never heard him go on like this. For a solid half-hour he coruscated and sizzled. His epithets were triumphs of twisted word compounding’s. For five minutes he'd devote himself to the slimy, subterranean, hell-spawned Foote. Then, for five minutes more he'd devote himself with equal expertness to a certain ding-dinged, balloon-headed, smart-alecky young feller by the name of Kerry Dale. Then he'd return to his characterizations of Foote.
    Sally knew her father; knew it was no use to try and stop him when he was in this vein. Instead, she read the code spacegram that had touched him off. It spoke for itself. Hot fury assailed her at the first part; puzzlement at the second. It wasn't like Kerry. From what she had seen of the young man he didn't do things out of sheer nastiness. Always he had gained by his tricks.His was a hard, realistic code of ethics; but so was her father's. They each recognized in the other an antagonist worthy of his steel; and secretly, she had no doubt, they admired and respected each other.
    But this stunt of hauling the Flying Meteor to Ganymede instead of to Planets and thereby ruining whatever slim chance there might have been of bringing the highjackers to justice didn't make sense. Neither did his waiver of the substantial salvage fees to take up an assignment of a claim that he surely must have known wasn't worth a cent.
    Old Simeon finished with a resounding burst of oratory that started curls of smoke in the cushioned sofa. He picked up his walking stick—a flexible, ornamented piece of duraluminum shouted to his daughter: "Send a spacegram to Roger Horn to come here right away. Tell him to charter a boat; a whole fleet of boats, if necessary. It's about time that stuffed windbag starts to earn the fees I'm paying him." Then he was gone.
    He met Jericho Foote in the hotel lobby, surrounded by reporters, still hot on the scent of the story.
    "Oh, oh!" murmured one of them to his fellows.