We compromised finally by listing Joey for proxy sale, and I took him out of Cargo Declarations to clear the air. He would be safe in the _Annabelle's_ cabin because no one who got close enough to steal him would have the heart to do it, and I'd have time while the bids rolled in to sample a pitcher or two of yellow Martian skohl down at the Argonaut Club. Joey was safe enough, but I wasn't. I hadn't walked more than forty yards from the _Annabelle_ after putting Joey away when I bumped into Captain Giles of the spaceport police. "Wait up," the Captain said. "I'll warn you this time before it happens, Bailey. If you start another riot at the Argonaut Club--" Captain Giles was a rail-thin six-footer with a dour hatchet face burned to leather by Martian sun and wind, a hard-boiled but conscientious patrol officer who had missed his calling. He should have been a missionary, being as chaste as a Cosmicist monk and twice as stern. I heard variations of his ultimatum every time I put down at Areopolis. But this time I had the answer to it. "Will you step over to the _Annabelle_ with me, Captain?" I asked. "I'd like your opinion on the cargo I brought in." He went, glowering and suspicious. Sixty feet from the _Annabelle_ we walked into Joey's euphoric aura, and his grumbling was shut off as if somebody had turned a spigot. "I don't understand this," the Captain said, giving me a saintly smile that would have sent his hard-boiled crew into a mass faint. "But it's really rather wonderful.... Let me beg you again, William, to shun that disreputable Argonaut Club. Some day--" "I know," I finished for him. "Some day your patrolies will sweep me out of there in small, unidentifiable fragments. A dirty job." I left him there with his bright new smile wearing strange creases in his hard hatchet face and walked down from the landing apron to the street. That was when I learned that I wasn't as safe as Joey. The instant I set foot in the street a couple of professional uglies closed in on me, a sharp-faced Earth homo and a cat-whiskered yellow Martie in bright Terran clothing. The two of them were armed with bell-mouthed freeze guns, and they were bent on business. I never had a chance. They ushered me into a waiting sand-car and took away the Quantrell blaster I wore buckled over my coveralls. "We hear you got a smiley for sale, chunk-hopper," the sharp homo said while the Martie started the sand-car. "Well, we got you a buyer for it." They didn't really need the car except for privacy. Our trip took us only half a block down the street where we stepped out at the last place I'd have expected to market a smiley--at the palatial office building of Solar Shipping, a billion-credit corporation headed by one Hume Shanig, space-line tycoon and crooked financier extraordinary. * * * * *