It wasn’t necessary. The coach lost pace, stopped (with its bonnet a yard from the waiting file. Its driver peered out the side of his cab. Other faces snooped farther back.
Composing himself and determined to try the effect of fraternal cordiality, Bidworthy went up to the driver and said, “Good morning.”
“Your time-sense is shot to pot,” observed the other. He had a blue jowl, a broken nose, cauliflower ears, looked the sort who usually drives with others in hot and vengeful pursuit. “Can’t you afford a watch?”
“Huh?”
“It isn’t morning. It’s late afternoon.”
“So it is,” admitted Bidworthy, forcing a cracked smile. “Good afternoon.”
“I’m not so sure about that,” mused the driver, leaning on his wheel and moodily picking his teeth. “It’s jusf another one nearer the grave.”
“That may be,” agreed Bidworthy, little taken with that ghoulish angle. “But I have other things to worry about, and—”
“Not much use worrying about anything, past or present,” advised the driver. “Because there are lots bigger worries to come.”
“Perhaps so,” Bidworthy said, inwardly feeling that this was no time or place to contemplate the darker side of existence. “But I prefer to deal with my own troubles in my own time and my own way.”
“Nobody’s troubles are entirely their own, nor their time, nor their methods,” remarked the tough-looking oracle. “Are they now?”
“I don’t know and I don’t care,” said Bidworthy, his composure thinning down as his blood pressure built up. He was conscious of Gleed and the patrol watching, listening, and probably grinning inside themselves. There was also the load of gaping passengers. “I think you are chewing the fat just to stall me. You might as well know now that it won’t work. The Earth Ambassador is waiting—”
“So are we,” remarked the driver, pointedly.
“He wants to speak to you,” Bidworthy went on, “and he’s going to speak to you!”
“I’d be the last to prevent him. We’ve got free speech here. Let him step up and say his piece so’s we can get on our way.”
“You,” Bidworthy informed, “are going to him.” He signed to the rest of the coach. “And your load as well.”
“Not me,” denied a fat man, sticking his head out of a side window. He wore thick-lensed glasses that gave him eyes like poached eggs. Moreover, he was adorned with a high hat candy-striped in white and pink. “Not me,” repeated this vision, with considerable firmness.
“Me, neither,” indorsed the driver.
“All right.” Bidworthy registered menace. “Move this birdcage an inch, forward or backward, and we’ll shoot your pot-bellied tires to thin strips. Get out of that cab.”
“Not me. I’m too comfortable. Try fetching me out.”
Bidworthy beckoned to his nearest six men. “You heard him—take him up on that.”
Tearing open the cab door, they grabbed. If they had expected the victim to put up a futile fight against heavy odds, they were disappointed. He made no attempt to resist. They got him, lugged together, and he yielded with good grace, his body leaning sidewise and coming halfway out of the door.
That was as far as they could get him.
“Come on,” urged Bidworthy, displaying impatience. “Show him who’s who. He isn’t a fixture.”
One of the men climbed over the body, poked around inside the cab, and said, “He is, you know.”
“What d’you mean?”
“He’s chained to the steering column.”
“Eh? Let me see.” He had a look, found that it was so. A chain and a small but heavy and complicated padlock linked the driver’s leg to his coach. “Where’s the key?”
“Search me,” invited the driver, grinning.
They did just that. The frisk proved futile. No key.
“Who’s got it?”
“Myob!”
“Shove him back into his seat,” ordered Bidworthy, looking savage. “Well take the passengers. One yap’s as good as another so far as I’m concerned.” He strode to the doors, jerked them open. “Get out and make it snappy.”
Nobody budged. They studied him silently and with varied expressions, not one of which did anything to help his ego. The fat man with the candy-striped hat mooned at him sardonically. Bidworthy decided that he did not like the fat man and that a stiff course of military calisthenics might thin him down a bit.
“You can come out on your feet,” he suggested to the passengers in general and the fat man in particular, “or on your necks. Whichever you prefer. Make up your minds.”
“If you can’t use your head you can at least use your eyes,” commented the fat man. He shifted in his seat to the accompaniment of metallic clanking noises.
Bidworthy did as suggested, leaning through the doors to have a gander. Then he got right into the vehicle, went its full length and studied each passenger. His florid features were two shades darker when he came out and spoke to Sergeant Gleed.
“They’re all chained. Every one of them.” He glared at the driver. “What’s the big idea, manacling the lot?”
“Myob!” said the driver, airily.
“Who’s got the keys?”
