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Updated: May 21, 2025
King Jacaro was a lord of racketeerdom. While Tommy inspected the Tube anxiously, a certain chief of police in a small town upstate was telling feverishly over the telephone of a posse having killed a monster lizard by torchlight, having discovered it in the act of devouring a cow. The lizard was eight feet high, walked on its hind legs, and had a collar of solid gold about its neck.
He plunged forward, and Tommy seized his arm. "They'll go through your Tube," he said curtly. "It looks like the one they came through. They'll think it is. Let 'em!" Smithers tried to tear free. "But they'll get back to Earth!" he raged. "They'll get off clear!" The sharp, cracking sound of a gun-cotton explosion came out of the doorway into which Jacaro and his men had dived.
One of them was half naked and savage, with the light of madness in his eyes. A Ragged Man. The other was lean and desperate, despite the colored tunic of a civilized man that he wore. "Hello," said Jacaro blandly. "We come up to talk things over." Tommy gave him the briefest of nods. He looked at Denham who was deathly white and grim and the bearded Councilor.
But the snarl encouraged Tommy, because it proved Jacaro less confidant than he tried to seem. His next change of tone proved it. "Aw, hell!" he said placatingly. "This is what I'm figurin' on. These guys ain't used to fighting, but they got the stuff. They got gases that are hell-roarin'. They got ships can beat any we got back home. A couple big Tubes, that'll let a ship maybe folded go through.
But I'm sayin' it again we got the women. Your girl, for one! Now, how about throwin' in with me, you an' the professor?" "No," said Tommy. "In a coupla months, Rahn'll be runnin' this planet," said Jacaro blandly, "and I'm runnin' Rahn! I didn't know how easy the racket'd be, or I'd 've let Yugna alone. I'd 've come here first. Now get it!
One King Jacaro, lord of Chicago racketeers, was convinced by him of the existence of the golden city of that other world, and that it was full of delectable loot. He offered a bribe past envy for the secret of Denham's apparatus. And Von Holtz had removed the apparatus for Denham's return before working the catapult to send him on his strange journey.
In any case Tommy and Evelyn were isolated upon a strange planet in a strange universe. To fall into the hands of the Ragged Men was to die horribly, and the Golden City would not now welcome inhabitants of the world Jacaro and his men had come from. To the civilized men of this world, Jacaro's raids would seem invasion. They would seem acts of war on the part of the people of Earth.
"I' been givin' 'em the dope," said Jacaro easily. "We got the whip hand now. We got gas masks, we got guns just the same as you have, an' we got the women." "You haven't ammunition," said Tommy evenly, "or damned little. Your men brought down one ship, and stopped. If you had enough shells would you have stopped there?" Jacaro grinned. "You got arithmetic, Reames," he conceded. "That's so.
He hardly looked up as at some signal one of their own ornithopters slid below and the three ambassadors of Rahn prepared to go over the side. But Jacaro snarled out of one corner of his mouth. "These guys are takin' each other's words. Maybe that's all right, but I'm warnin' you, if there's any double-crossin'...." He was gone. The Keeper of Foodstuffs touched Tommy's shoulder.
Yugna pays food and goods and women or it's wiped out by gas. Further, it surrenders its aircraft to make further collections easier. Rahn refuses to die, though it's let in the jungle. It's turned pirate stronghold. Fed and clothed by a few other cities like this one, it should be able to hold out. It's a racket, Evelyn. A stick-up. A hijacking of a civilised city. Sounds like Jacaro."
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