Reward for Retief Read Free

remark, in a voice like air escaping from
a leaky bladder, "there's another Terry custom us boys picked up." He
was holding out four callussed, olive-green palms, making his meaning clear.
     
                "No fair," Magnan
muttered, reluctantly placing a base-metal demi-cred chip in each. "Back
home, they only have two, and usually only stick out one! Uncouth, I call
it!"
     
                "Still, they're quick
studies," Retief pointed out, greasing four palms of his own.
     
                "Hey!" Magnan's
recipient growled. "What are you, some kinda cheapie? Six bits, after I
maybe sprained a moobie-bone?" He threw the coins aside contemptuously.
"Oh, I musta dropped that, pal," he exclaimed, as if in ignorance of
his opening remarks, ducking to retrieve the cash. "That's OK," he
continued, "you can gimme a guck, and I'll forgit how you threw the
coppers at me."
     
                "I saw that!"
Magnan gasped. More baggage-smashers were gathering.
     
                "Better stay clear, Mr.
Magnan," Retief suggested.
     
                "Here, you!"
Magnan barked at his assigned porter, who had completed his devotions and was
sampling his client's facial creams with a blunt forefinger.
     
                "Needs salt," the
impudent fellow commented, as he tossed the near-empty jar in atop Magnan's
newly-tailored extra-super-top-formal dickey-suit.
     
                "Look what he
did!" Magnan moaned, leaping to rescue the pristine cellulon garment from
the oozing yellowish medicament. "You ought to be horse-whipped!"
Magnan declared, facing the upraised visage of the unabashed local.
     
                "Why?" the lout
demanded. "I ain't no editor."
     
                " 'Editor'?"
Magnan echoed. "Whatever connection does redaction have to the
brutalization of my effects?"
     
                "Don't ast, Ben,"
suggested Hy Felix, the dour Press Attache. "You oughta see what some o'
them boys done to some o' my most artistic prose."
     
                "That's not the
same!" Magnan insisted. "Personal effects and lit'ry effects are
quite different entities! But in any case, the cheeky fellow surely deserves
chastisement of the most explicit sort! Perhaps you should sock him on the
nasal orifice, Retief," he concluded, and offered his place to his junior.
     
                "Oh, going to do mayhem
to the person of an official of a friendly power in the performance o' his
duties and all, hey?" the 'pillar' challenged loudly, attracting more
locals to press in against the periphery of the crowd now surrounding the
personnel of the beleaguered Terran Mission.
     
                "Well," Magnan
said, eyeing Retief expectantly, as the latter made no move. "What are
you—I mean for what are you ..." His tone changed from snappish to
apprehensive as his voice trailed off.
     
                "Mister Retief!"
he spoke up with renewed vigor, speaking now to be overheard. "Must I
warn you again to respect local customs? Why, if this pious gentlebeing wishes
to sample my expensive and hard-to-find-on-a-frontier-world skin-food, can we
deny him that portion of his ritual?"
     
                "That's more like it,
chum," the pushy fellow commented, tossing aside an empty container
labeled Spanish Mane.
     
                "He'll find
it difficult to devour his next stolen fruit," Magnan confided to Retief,
"with hair growing luxuriantly from his esophagus. Serve the rascal right,
too."
     
                The local quickly recovered
the pilatory container, sniffed it suspiciously, swallowed nervously, then
squinted at the fine print on the inconspicuous label on the back of the jar.
     
                " 'Goose-poop
oil'!" he yelled and thrust the offending pot at a gape-jawed fellow union
member. "This here two-laiged foreigner done pizent me!" He paused to
run a finger down his