Space-Trap at Banya Tor

Exciting entertainment, these telecasts of dashing pirates, gorgeous victims and the always stupid Space Patrol, but Jeff Thorne, famed Derelict of Mars, was grimly bent on stopping them--in all their ghastly reality!

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1948. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

The three patrolmen leaped to their feet, saluting as they arose. Bannerman, the Superintendent, extended a hearty fist.

"Welcome, General Wheelwright," he exclaimed, clicking his polished heels.

"Glad to be aboard, gentlemen," rasped the Inspector-General of the Planet Patrol, returning the salute. His broad chest, scaled from throat to belt with the medals of twenty worlds, tinkled musically as he rumbled the brusque greeting. "At ease. Resume your game. Bannerman, a word with you, if you please."

As the Superintendent closed the black door behind them, he glanced apprehensively at his superior. The big man had slumped in limp exhaustion into the office chair before Bannerman's desk.

"Well, sir?" Bannerman finally asked. "Chain Lucas?"

"No," replied the General, hardly lifting his head. "Not yet." He stared fixedly at his glittering boots, cool runnels of light glancing along their polished curves.

"Senator Chanler is dead."

"Dead? Old Scrooge?" Bannerman's startled incredulity was tempered by a sudden enthusiasm he made no great effort to conceal. "Who poisoned him?" he inquired.

"Come now, Bannerman," replied Wheelwright, repressing a wan smile. "I grant you he was a parsimonious fool, but at least we managed to skin our appropriations through his committee one way or another."

"Skinned is certainly the word for it, sir," agreed Bannerman shortly.

"I'm afraid we'll remember Scrooge with regret," Wheelwright gloomily rejoined. "What the new Senator on the committee will do to the appropriation will ground half our ships."

"I had hoped for a relief," sighed Bannerman. "Who's the new man?"

"Chanler's daughter, Iris," replied Wheelwright. "Yes, yes, I know," he added testily as Bannerman's jaw fell open. "The girl's a reigning beauty, famous on half a dozen worlds. The World Council appointed her to fill the Senator's unexpired term. Just the usual courtesy, of course, but she flew back from Venus and threw herself wholeheartedly into the job."

"Has she long to serve?"

"She hadn't, but she knows publicity. Had enough of it, Lord knows. She ran for the next term and was re-elected."

"But she's wealthy in her own right, they say. Surely she didn't inherit Chanler's parsimony with his office?"

"Of course not, Bannerman. She's famous for her easy way with money, and her Chanler's daughter. Notorious, if you like. But the girl's a featherbrain, a romantic. Devotee of these gangster telecasts glorifying crime." Wheelwright's snort was eloquent of his disgust.

"I know. We get them here, too. Same old Formula Number One, the Robin Hood motif. Clean-living space-hawk raiding the lanes, confounding the stupid Planet Patrol, scattering his loot to the poor. Very true to life."

"It was corn five hundred years ago," scowled Wheelwright. "But it drags them in today." He pounded the arm of his chair. "Who believes crime does not pay when they can see for themselves on a hundred scanner-screens that it does pay, and handsomely? Of course it's fiction and they know it, but it tends to build up a subtle disrespect for law and the Patrol in their minds. What ruined the old Congress but the popular conception of them as a bunch of hick yokels stumbling over a job too big for their provincial minds? These gangster things run in cycles, of course, but I'd like to see this one run out right now."

"True enough, sir," nodded Bannerman, soberly. "I've noticed their effect on the inner worlds. And you feel they influence the new ... Senator?"

"I'd bet on it," growled Wheelwright. "When she was appointed, I slipped in operatives. You know how those household groups talk. And we know she had prejudices long before Chanler died. We've had to hold up two or three of her interplanetary junkets on that toy yacht he gave her, for her own safety, of course, but she's not forgotten. And she lived for years with Chanler's groans on the waste and inefficiency of the Patrol."

"Has she his power?"

"With her looks? More. She can block our whole appropriation or pare it to the bone."

"And you think she might?" Bannerman was grimly serious.

"She talks of cutting us down, trimming off the fat, she calls it. Back to the efficiency of the old pioneering days when men were men and rockets were really rockets." He grinned wryly. "Between the screens and Chain Lucas, she thinks it all a big, exciting game staked against the daring outlaw. Romantic," he added.

Bannerman cursed. "I wonder how romantic those poor women thought it was when they were tied up to the 'Orion's' dice bar and beaten to death with iron bars? Or the seven we found cut to pieces in the wreck of the 'Pantagruel?' And the pretty ballad of the 'Stargazer,' her whole crew and most of the passengers pushed through airlocks into the void?"

"Horror retailed from eighty million miles troubles no one," replied Wheelwright. "She's a wild and reckless girl drunk with her own beauty and this new power, Bannerman. Undisciplined, she means to discipline us. She'll push us fifty years back down our own trail. We can't risk it, Bannerman."