Sprague de Camp's New Anthology

In a calmer moment Godwin might have admitted that it was a silly thing to do. Although he had had occasion to learn boxing in the course of his employment, he was hardly in a position to land a real blow; nor was he, at 145 pounds, fairly matched with his vast opponent. But Claude Godwin was anything but calm.

Sven Kaalund moved his big head and raised his right shoulder so that Godwin's fist bounced off the deltoid muscle as off a truck-tyre.

"Yeow!" yelled Godwin.

A terrific pain had shot through his left wrist, doubling him up into a foetal position. It was gone in an instant, and Godwin relaxed. He now looked more closely at the other end of the handcuffs. Instead of a twin of his own cuff encircling Kaalund's wrist, the cable attached to his own cuff ended in a gadget something like a knuckle-duster, gripped in Kaalund's great fist. A guard ran across the back of Kaalund's hand, and on the other side of this object were buttons, on one of which Kaalund's thumb rested lightly.

"I told you to be good," said Kaalund in the tone of one reproving a child.

Godwin recognised the Kobik neuronic stimulator, the outstanding improvement in the art of inflicting pain since the time of Torquemada. Godwin almost wept with frustrated rage, but then pulled himself together.

"What are you?" he asked.

"Detective first-class of de police department of Julianehaab."

The door opened and a nurse said something.

"Han gar man inte aden Forskyndelse" said Kaalund. "Sage on Ophœveren at man kan ham snakkes."'

The nurse disappeared. Not knowing Danish, Godwin could not follow the conversation. He relapsed into glowering silence while an interne took his temperature and blood-pressure and other bodily indices. When the interne (who like most Greenlanders showed a mixture of Danish and Eskimo descent) finished his task and departed, Godwin asked his man-mountain: "What now?"

"You shall yust for de boss vait."

"Who's he?"

"Prime Minister Gram. I do not know vat about you so important is dat the head of de whole country is coming to see you, but dat is how it is."

Godwin stared out the big window at the bleak landscape, noting the dwarf willows and birches sparsely scattered over the craggy hills. The hospital must be located on the outskirts of Julianehaab, for there were only a few houses in sight. The melting of the ice-cap by the climatic engineers a century before, while it had made Greenland into a modern nation with a huge habitable area and a lusty and growing population, had not converted it from a miniature Antarctica into a tropical paradise. Instead the land had become something like a large insular combination of Iceland and Norway, with the damp climate of the former and the snag-toothed mountainous coast-line of the latter.

The door opened and in came a lean, dark, bald man with a long droopy nose. Sven Kaalund jumped up, saying:

"God Dag, Excellenz!"

The men replied in almost-perfect English: "Good-morning, Kaalund. Good-morning, Mr. Godwin. I am Anker Gram. How are you feeling?"

"Like plain and fancy mayhem," growled Godwin. "What is this? I'm an American citizen, and you can't go snatching me all over the world! I won't stand for it! My government will make a stink—"

"On the contrary, my dear Mr. Godwin, you will stand for it," said Anker Gram.

"Huh?"

Gram drew a brown paper envelope from the inside pocket of his jacket: an envelope of the sort that photographic service establishments send back prints and negatives in. Gram took out two prints and handed one to Godwin, saying:

"Does this look familiar?"

The print was obviously one of those that Westbrook Wolff had taken eight months previously of Godwin and the red-haired girl lying naked on the beach near Point Conception. The colour of her hair came out fine.

"Guk," said Godwin.

"And now this."

Gram extended the other print, a portrait showing the same girl, seated, clad in a shimmery evening-gown with a tiara on her hair. This picture was of the sort that actors like himself had made up in great numbers to send their fans, and true to form it bore in the lower right corner a facsimile of a longhand legend reading: "Hjertlige Onsker, Karen af Gronland."

"What does it say?" said Godwin.

"Best wishes from Karen of Greenland."

"You mean Karen's a name? That—uh—she's—"

"Certainly; it is the Scandinavian equivalent of 'Catherine'. And the young lady, if you have not yet realized the fact, is Princess Karen, the only child of our king, Edvard III of Greenland."