"I don't intend to," said Lucky.
Conway's eyes narrowed. "Where's Bigman?"
"On Ceres. Don't worry. In fact," and a shadow crossed Lucky's face, "he should be here by now. The delay is beginning to bother me a little."
* * *
John Bigman Jones used his special pass card to get past the guard at the door to the Control Tower. He was muttering to himself as he half-ran along the corridors.
The slight flush on his pug-nosed face dimmed his freckles and his reddish hair stood up in tufts like fence pickets. Lucky had frequently told him he cultivated a vertical hair-do to make himself look taller, but he always denied that vigorously.
The final door to the Tower swung open as he broke the photoelectric beam. He stepped inside and looked about.
Three men were on duty. One with earphones sat at the sub-etheric receiver, another was at the calculating machine and the third was at the curved radarized visi-plate.
Bigman said, "Which one of you knotbrains called me Shortie?"
The three turned toward him in unison, their faces startled and scowling.
The man with the earphones pulled one away from his left ear. "Who in space are you? How the dickens did you get in here?"
Bigman stood erect and puffed out his small chest. "My name is John Bigman Jones. My friends call me Bigman. Everyone else calls me Mr. Jones. Nobody calls me Shortie and stays in one piece. I want to know which one of you made that mistake."
The man with the earphones said, "My name is Lem Fisk and you can call me anything you blame please as long as you do it somewhere else. Get out of here, or I'll come down, pick you up by one leg, and toss you out."
The fellow at the calculating machine said, "Hey, Lem, that's the crackpot who was haunting the port a while back. There's no point in wasting time on him. Get the guards to throw him out."
"Nuts," said Lem Fisk, "we don't need guards for that
guy." He took off his earphones altogether and set the sub-
etherics at automatic signal. He said, "Well, son, you came in here and asked us a nice question in a nice way. I'll give you a nice answer. I called you Shortie, but wait, don't get mad. I had a reason. You see you're such a real tall fellow. You're such a long drink of water. You're such a high-pockets. It makes my friends laugh to hear me call you Shortie."
He reached into his hip pocket and drew out a plastic container of cigarettes. The smile on his face was bland.
"Come down here," yelled Bigman. "Come down here and back up your sense of humor with a couple of fists."
"Temper, temper," said Fisk, clucking his tongue. "Here, boy, have a cigarette. King-size, you know. Almost as long as you are. Liable to create some confusion, though, come to think of it. We won't be able to tell whether you're smoking the cigarette or the cigarette is smoking you."
The other two Tower men laughed vigorously.
Bigman was a passionate red. Words came thickly to his tongue. "You won't fight?"
"I'd rather smoke. Pity you don't join me." Fisk leaned back, chose a cigarette, and held it before his face as though admiring its slim whiteness. "After all, I can't be bothered to fight children."
He grinned, brought his cigarette to his lips, and found them closing on nothingness.
His thumb and first two fingers still held their positions about three eighths of an inch apart, but there was no cigarette between them.
"Watch out, Lem," cried the man at the visiplate. "He has a needle-gun."
"No needle-gun," snarled Bigman. "Just a buzzer."
There was an important difference. A buzzer's projectiles, although needle-like, were fragile and nonexplo-sive. They were used for target practice and small game. Striking human skin, a buzz needle would do no serious damage, but it would smart like the devil.
Fisk's grin disappeared completely. He yelled, "Watch that, you crazy fool. You can blind a man with that."
Bigman's fist remained clenched at eye level. The thin snout of the buzzer projected between his two middle fingers. He said, "I won't blind you. But I can fix it so you won't sit down for a month. And as you can see, my aim isn't bad. And you," he called over his shoulder to the one at the calculator, "if you move an inch closer to the alarm circuit, you'll have a buzz needle right through your hand."
Fisk said, "What do you want?"
"Come down here and fight."
"Against a buzzer?"
"I'll put it away. Fists. Fair fight. Your buddies can see to that."
"I can't hit a guy smaller than I am."
"Then you shouldn't insult him, either." Bigman brought up the buzzer. "And I'm not smaller than you are. I may look that way on the outside, but inside I'm as big as you. Maybe bigger. I'm counting three." He narrowed one eye as he aimed.
"Galaxy!" swore Fisk. "I'm coming down. Fellas, be my witness that this was forced on me. I'll try not to hurt the crazy idiot too much."
He leaped down from his perch. The man at the calculating machine took his place at the sub-etherics.
Fisk was five feet ten, eight inches taller than Bigman, whose slight figure was more like a boy's than a man's. But Bigman's muscles were steel springs under perfect control. He awaited the other's approach without expression.
Fisk did not bother to put up a guard. He simply extended his right hand as though he were going to lift Bigman by the collar and toss him through the still open door.
Bigman ducked under the arm. His left and right thudded into the larger man's solar plexus in a rapid one-two, and almost in the same instant he danced out of reach.
Fisk turned green and sat down, holding his stomach and groaning.
"Stand up, big boy," said Bigman. "I'll wait for you."
The other two Tower men seemed frozen into immobility by the sudden turn of events.
Slowly Fisk rose to his feet. His face glowed with rage, but he approached more slowly.
Bigman drifted away.
Fisk lunged! Bigman was not there by two inches. Fisk whipped a sharp overhand right. It's thrust ended an inch short of Bigman's jaw.
Bigman bobbed about like a cork on rippling water. His arms lifted occasionally to deflect a blow.
Fisk, yelling incoherently, rushed blindly at his gnat-like opponent. Bigman stepped to one side and his open hand slapped sharply at the other's smooth-shaven cheek. It hit with a sharp report, like a meteor hitting the first layers of dense air above a planet. The marks of four fingers were outlined in red on Fisk's face.
For a moment Fisk stood there, dazed. Like a striking snake, Bigman stepped in again, his fists moving upward to crack against Fisk's jaw. Fisk went down into a half crouch.
Distantly Bigman
was suddenly aware of the steady ringing of the alarm.
Without a moment's hesitation he turned on his heel and was out the door. He wove through a startled trio of guards heading up the corridor at a clattering run, and was gone!
* * *
"And why," questioned Conway, "are we waiting for Bigman?"
Lucky said, "Here's the way I see the situation. There is nothing we need so badly as more information about the pirates. I mean inside information. I tried to get it and things didn't quite break the way I hoped they would. I'm a marked man now. They know me. But they don't know Bigman. He has no official connection with the Council. Now it's my idea that if we can trump up a criminal charge against him, for realism, you know, he can hightail it out of Ceres in the hermit's ship-"
"Oh, space," groaned Conway.
"Listen, will you! He'll go back to the hermit's asteroid. If the pirates are there, good! If not, he'll leave the ship in plain view and wait for them inside. It's a very comfortable place to wait in."
"And when they come," said Henree, "they'll shoot him."
"They will not. That's why he's taking the hermit's ship. They'll have to know where Hansen went, to say nothing of myself, where Bigman came from, how he got hold of the ship. They'll have to know. That will give him time to talk."
"And to explain how he picked out Hansen's asteroid out of all the rocks in creation? That would take some tall talking."
"That won't take any talking at all. The hermit's ship was on Ceres, which it is. I've arranged to leave it out there unguarded, so he can take it. He'll find the ship's home asteroid's space-time co-ordinates in the logbook. It would just be an asteroid to him, not too far from Ceres, as good as any other, and he would make a beeline for it in order to wait for the furor on Ceres to die down."
"It's a risk," grumbled Conway.