Free Tiger! Tiger! by Alfred Bester

lovely, and you nearly wrecked General Hospital getting the money and material together.' Dagenham counted fingers. `You looted lockers, stole from the blind ward, stole drugs from the pharmacy, stole apparatus from the lab stockrooms.'
     
    `Go to hell, you.'
     
    `But what have you against Presteign? Why'd you try to blow up his shipyard? They tell me you broke in and went tearing through the pits like a Comanche Indian. What were you trying to do, Foyle?'
     
    `Go to hell.'
     
    Dagenham smiled. `If we're going to chat,' he said, `you'll have to hold up your end. Your conversation's getting monotonous. What happened to Nomad?'
     
    `I don't know about Nomad, nothing.'
     
    `The ship was last reported over seven months ago. Then . . . spurlos versenkt. Are you the sole survivor? And what have you been doing all this time? Having your face decorated?'
     
    `I don't know about Nomad, nothing.'
     
    `No, no, Foyle, that won't do. You show up with Nomad tattooed across your face. Fresh tattooed. Intelligence checks and finds you were aboard Nomad when she sailed. Foyle, Gulliver: AS: 128/127:006, Mechanic's Mate, 3rd Class. As if all this isn't enough to throw intelligence into a tizzy, you come back in a private launch that's been missing fifty years. Man, you're cooking in the reactor. Intelligence wants the answer to all these questions. And you ought to know how Central Intelligence butchers its answers out of people.'
     
    Foyle started. Dagenham nodded as he saw his point sink home. `Which is why I think you'll listen to reason. We want information, Foyle. I tried to trick it out of you; admitted. I failed because you're too tough; admitted. Now I'm offering an honest deal. We'll protect you if you'll co-operate. If you don't, you'll spend five years in an Intelligence lab having information chopped out of you.' It was not the prospect of the butchery that frightened Foyle, but the thought of the loss of freedom. A man had to be free to raise money and find Vorga again; to rip and tear and gut Vorga.
     
    `What kind of deal?' he asked.
     
    `Tell us what happened to Nomad and where you left her.'
     
    `Why, man?' `Why? Because of the salvage, man.'
     
    `There ain't nothing to salvage. She's a wreck, is all.'
     
    `Even a wreck's salvageable.'
     
    `You mean you'd jet out a million miles to pick up pieces? Don't jokes me, man.'
     
    `All right,' Dagenham said in exasperation. `There's the cargo.'
     
    'She was split wide open. No cargo left.'
     
    `It was a cargo you don't know about,' Dagenham said confidentially. `Nomad was transporting platinum bullion to Mars Bank. Every so often, banks have to adjust accounts. Normally, enough trade goes on between planets so that accounts can be balanced on paper. The war's disrupted normal trade, and Mars Bank found that Presteign owed them twenty odd million credits without any way of getting the money short of actual delivery. Presteign was delivering the money in bar platinum aboard the Nomad. It was locked in the purser's safe.'
     
    `Twenty million,' Foyle whispered.
     
    `Give or take a few thousand. The ship was insured, but that just means that the underwriters, Bo'ness and Uig, get the salvage rights and they're even tougher than Presteign. However, there'll be a reward for you. Say . . . twenty thousand credits.'
     
    `Twenty million,' Foyle whispered again.
     
    `We're assuming that an O.S. raider caught up with Nomad somewhere on course and let her have it. They couldn't have boarded and looted or you wouldn't have been left alive. This means that the purser's safe is still - Are you listening, Foyle?'
     
    But Foyle was not listening. He was seeing twenty millions ... not twenty thousand ... twenty millions in platinum bullion as a broad highway to Vorga. No more petty thefts from lockers and labs; twenty millions for the taking and the razing of Vorga.
     
    `Foyle!'
     
    Foyle awoke. He looked at Dagenham. `I don't know about Nomad, nothing,' he said.
     
    `What the