Enigma from Tantalus
'We won't be landing anywhere just yet', Waters said to the other passengers on the spaceship Fulmar. 'I was pretty mystified by this story of mechanical breakdown, so I've been checking up.' He hefted his little box. 'I've spent the past half hour successfully tapping your subspace circuits, Captain, so I know the truth and I propose to share it with everyone. We're not to land. We're to orbit in space, indefinitely.'
Beloved Sister Dorcas's screams pierced the quiet.
'You see,' Waters continued, holding up his hand for silence, 'this is being done on the direct orders of Master Brand . . . you don't know the name?' He glanced inquiringly around. 'No? Well, he happens to be one of the powers of Earth, and there is nobody in the galaxy to overrule him.'
The Repairmen of Cyclops
The Corps Galactica, the Galaxy's police force, had pledged itself to a policy of non-interference with the backward Zarathustra Refugee Planets.
Langenschmidt, the Corps chief on the planet Cyclops, was content with this ruling. After all, if the refugee planets could form their own civilizations from scratch, logically they would come up with cultures suited to their own needs.
However, when the case of Justin Kolb came to his attention, Langenschmidt was forced to rethink the problem. Kolb's accident with the wolfshark revealed to the Corps' medicos the leg-graft that had been performed on him. It was a perfect match - only its gene-pattern wasn't Cyclopean, and limb-grafting wasn't practised on Cyclops.
Where had the leg come from, who had been the unknown repairmen, and wasn't this something that might be violating galactic law?