II

handing it to him. He was blind as a riveted bulkhead, his gullibility had me humming with delight. The tip I gave him more than made up the loss since I only do this sort of petty business to break the monotony.

There was a robot clerk behind the ticket window, he had that extra third eye in the center of this forehead that meant a camera. It clicked slightly as I purchased a ticket, recording my face and destination. A normal precaution on the part of the police, I would have been surprised if it hadn’t happened. My destination was inter-system so I doubted if the picture would appear any place except in the files. I wasn’t making an interstellar hop this time, as I usually did after a big job, it wasn’t necessary. After a job a single world or a small system is too small for more work, but Beta Cygnus has a system of almost twenty planets all with terrafied weather. This planet, III , was too hot now, but the rest of the system was wide open. There was a lot of commercial rivalry within the system and I knew their police departments didn’t cooperate too well. They would pay the price for that. My ticket was for Moriy, number XVIII , a large and mostly agricultural planet.

There were a number of little stores at the spaceport. I shopped them carefully and outfitted a new suitcase with a complete wardrobe and travelling essentials. The tailor was saved for last. He ran up a couple of traveling suits and a formal kilt for me and I took them into the fitting booth. Strictly by accident I managed to hang one of the suits over the optic bug in the wall and made undressing sounds with my feet while I doctored the ticket I had just bought. The other end of my cigar cutter was a punch; with it I altered the keyed holes that indicated my destination. I was now going to planet X , not XVIII , and I had lost almost two hundred credits with the alteration. That’s the secret of ticket and order changing. Don’t raise the face value⁠—there is too good a chance that this will be noticed. If you lower the value and lose money on the deal, even if it is caught, people will be sure it is a mistake on the machine’s part. There is never the shadow of a doubt, since why should anyone change a ticket to lose money?