Free Adventures by Mike Resnick

into dollars inside my head—when a bunch of shots rang out and pretty soon we were surrounded by a dozen Arabs in full desert regalia. Now, I know that on the surface it seems kind of hard to envision twelve men surrounding seventy-one, but it's a lot easier than you might think when the twelve men have rifles and the seventy-one don't.
    Anyway, they motioned me to step aside, and herded the porters into a tight little circle, making them kneel down and raise their hands above their heads, a gesture I was not unacquainted with, but had previously seen only on Sunday mornings and in games of chance involving little white cubes with spots painted on them.
    “Not a bad haul,” said a familiar voice. “And ivory, too! Not bad at all, my friends.”
    Then a fat man in a soiled white suit stepped out of the shadows and nodded to me.
    “Dutchman!” I exclaimed.
    “Doctor Jones,” he replied with a smile. “What a pleasant surprise to see you once again, my good friend.”
    “What the hell is going on here?” I demanded.
    “I am afraid that you are responsible for my presence here, my dear Doctor Jones,” smiled the Dutchman, pulling out a handkerchief and wiping the sweat from his pudgy face.
    “Me?”
    “Indeed. You see, when Herr Von Horst made off with a certain shipment of, shall we say, perishable goods, purchasing them with funds that you freely gave to him, I found that I had to expand my primary business to make up for the income you had cost me. Regrettable, to be sure, but fitting in a way, would you not agree?”
    “I most certainly would not!” I snapped. “That ivory and them porters are mine! Though, of course, if you want to rent them from me once they deliver the tusks, I'm sure we can do a little business.”
    “Oh, no, my friend,” laughed the Dutchman. “I'm doing my business right now. You wouldn't happen to know your wrist and ankle sizes, would you?”
    “Surely you're not thinking about putting shackles and chains on a fellow white man, Brother Dutchman?” I said in horror.
    “What guarantee have I that you won't try to run away before we reach our destination?” he asked, putting a pudgy hand to his chin and eyeing me warily.
    “You've got my word as a Christian gentleman and a man of honor,” I replied.
    “Get the chains!” he called to one of his Arabs.
    “Brother Dutchman!” I cried. “It's inhuman to chain me like I was some black heathen on the way to market. Surely we can work out some accommodation that would be mutually acceptable.”
    “Oh, it's just for a little while, Doctor Jones,” he said. “Once we get into the desert, I'll be happy to release you.”
    “You will?”
    “Certainly. After all, I'll have the only water for hundreds of miles in any direction.”
    And so I was chained, hand and foot and neck, to my seventy porters. Out of deference to my race and my position, the Dutchman chained me first in line, which struck me as only just and fitting, until I figured out that the first man in line was also the first to step on snakes and scorpions and other foul denizens of the desert. And, of course, anytime one of the porters tripped or even slowed down, I usually found out about it in an exceptionally painful and undignified way.
    Then there was the matter of the ivory. The Dutchman didn't want to leave it behind, but it was kind of hard for the porters to carry, shackled up as they were, so we had to stop every half hour or so for them to shift the weight.
    Finally, on the second evening of my captivity, after our neck chains were unhooked for the night, I moseyed over to where the Dutchman was sitting alone by his fire.
    “Mind if I join you?” I asked, sitting down next to him as gracefully as my chains would allow.
    “As a matter of fact, I do,” he replied, taking a swig from a half-empty flask of something that sure didn't smell much like water. “After all, how will it look to the hired help? I don't even let them share my fire or my liquid