Happiness: A Planet Read Online Free Page B

related here. To give a blow by blow account of the prosecution of that fraud, although interesting in itself, would unnecessarily complicate this story. Suffice to say that throughout the subsequent events on Happiness the Inspector, the highest ranking police officer on XE2, was preoccupied elsewhere with his own detection work.)
    The other police ship was on a regular patrol of outstations, would not return for another nine days. No-one knew when the Inspector’s ship was likely to return. Munred registered an official protest at the station being left without a police ship at his disposal.
    During the following nine days the message on Munred’s central screen was updated to ‘Action Required Happiness.’
    During those nine days Munred asked for any other message concerning Happiness to be directed to him. None came by either radio or by ship. Neither could any ship that had recently been to Happiness, within the last two months, be traced. But nothing unusual or sinister in that. Those ships could all, by now, be beyond all adjacent Departments; only where their paths crossed those of other ships bound for XE2 would XE2 learn of them.
    So for nine more days the crisis developed unchecked. The only other crisis that Munred had had to deal with on XE2 had come from a woman begging to be taken off an outstation because of the violent behaviour of a drunken technician. Munred had had them both removed, had replaced them with a competent recluse.
    “Why,” Munred had asked the recluse during his interview, “do you dislike people so much?”
    “They disappoint me,” the technician had replied, and had refused to elaborate.
    For those nine days Munred had fretted and fumed at the planet called Happiness and its uncommunicative inhabitants. He had called them many derogatory names, gave full vent to his prejudices against those who chose to live on dusty unstable planets.
    Munred’s prejudice was not untypical. Probably because like many another he felt insulted by the settlers dismissing as cheap all that Space holds dear, by their voluntary relinquishment of all the beauties and benefits of Space for a grubby existence on a hazardous planet. Planetary inhabitants, incidentally, think of this prejudice as Space snobbery.
    While for the rest of us the perverse values of planetary inhabitants are largely an academic affront, in Munred’s instance the prejudice had a more personal foundation, for he had interviewed two prospective emigrants to Happiness. He had concluded that interview with the distinct impression that it had been they who, regarding him with the contempt of neophytes, had patronised him. Hence his dislike of them all, intensified by their now causing him so much needless anxiety and threatening his prospects of promotion.
    So Munred sat sideways on to his desk and, though he was deliberately not looking directly at it, was acutely aware of the message’s insistent flashing. The day before the message had been updated to ‘Priority Happiness.’ Tomorrow afternoon the police ship returned from its regular patrol. The ‘priority’ signal gave Munred the authority to dispatch it immediately to Happiness. The round trip would take four days. Two days to reach there, a day to get the transmissions restarted, seven days for those transmissions to reach XE2 and cancel what would be by then the ‘Urgent Happiness’ signal, leaving him just five days to get to the interview. Atight schedule. And nothing he could for another nineteen hours but wait.
    Folding his body out of the chair, he stood, grunted once at the ‘Priority Happiness’, and went home.

Chapter Four
     
    Petre Fanne lay on the floor, one foot held close to her face. To the count of three she pressed her big toe against her cheek, released it, then arched herself into a bridge and, flipping her legs over her head, landed on her feet. Arms spread she rocked back on her heels, then did a a forward flip. This was as much gymnastic tumbling