“He sent a totally unnecessary message to a man I’m never going to see again,” said Virtue earnestly, staring in awe at the huge corpse of ManMountain Bates.

“Cain?” he asked.

She turned to him and smiled.

“Who’s Cain?”

18.

Simple Simon met a pieman going to the fair;

Simple Simon killed the pieman on the thoroughfare.

Simple Simon likes the taste of his new outlaw life:

It’s not for pies that Simon needs his shining steel knife.

He never used a knife; that was just a case of Black Orpheus practicing a little poetic license.

And he was anything but simple.

In fact, he had degrees in mathematics and laser optics and two or three of the more esoteric sciences, and he taught at one of the larger universities on Lodin XI for the better part of a decade. He was heavily invested in the commodities market when a bumper crop of kirtt, the Lodinian equivalent of wheat, sent prices plummeting down and wiping out his life’s savings. It was shortly thereafter that he decided a professor’s salary would never buy him all the things that he wanted.

So he left the Democracy and set out for the Inner Frontier, where he embarked on a new course of studies, which included a major in murder and a minor in bigamy. He killed his first four wives and managed to collect the insurance on three of them before it occurred to him that there was a lot more money to be made if he didn’t limit his killing to his spouses.

He forthwith became a free-lance killer for hire. Because he had a scientific turn of mind, he favored laser weapons of his own creation; and because he had a healthy respect for those with greater physical skills than himself, he tended to specialize in meticulously devised deathtraps rather than in personal confrontations.

His new profession forced a certain degree of modesty upon him, so much so that he took on the protective coloration of the scientific illiterate. Orpheus saw right through him, of course—seeing through facades was one of the things he did best—and named him Simple Simon as a private joke. The name stuck, and before long Simple Simon’s holograph was gracing the walls of the Inner Frontier’s postal stations.

The Angel stood in the spaceport’s post office, glancing briefly at Simon’s face while checking to see if there were any new fugitives worthy of his attention, while Virtue, her satchel slung over her shoulder, stood in the doorway and waited for him.

“I thought you were closing in on Santiago,” she said as he rejoined her. “Why bother studying a bunch of second-rate villains?”

“Force of habit,” he replied, heading off down the corridor that led to his spaceship. “Besides, for all I know Cain or somebody else has already killed him—and I’ve still got a planet to buy.”