Lizard O'Neal leaned back on his straw chair, folded his dirty hands across his grubby shirt, and surveyed his empire.
The empire, such as it was, extended for some 200 feet in all directions from him, as he sat at its very epicenter. To the right were six small huts, each and every one (or so he liked to tell his customers) serviced by a reborn virgin; no one had ever asked exactly what a reborn virgin was, so he hadn't quite gotten around to defining it yet. To the left was the bar, a huge tree trunk imported ("at considerable expense") from the forest some 60 yards away, framed by wanted posters of the most notorious outlaws of the Rim, each of them personally autographed. Behind him was his royal palace, all two rooms of it, kept together by spit and bailing wire and held in place by pile upon pile of unwashed laundry. In front of him was the Royal Spaceport, a burnt and blackened strip of ground barely large enough to hold six two-man ships at a time, and right next to it was the Imperial Fuel Station.
Beyond the perimeter of his empire there were forests and mountains, rivers and streams and ultimately the enormous ocean that made his world glow like a blue gemstone in the night sky. There were also placid furry aliens who might or might not be intelligent. Word had it that there was even a desert out there, waiting for someone even crazier than him to try crossing it.
O'Neal ran his fingers through his thick, uncombed shock of red hair, stretched, sighed, and finally turned to the carefully-groomed man who looked so out of place in these surroundings.
"You've got your answer," he said, flicking a blue-and-gold insect away from his neck. "What are you waiting for?"
"The answer is unacceptable," replied Reinhardt.
"So is your proposition."
"Mr. O'Neal, the Alliance absolutely must have--"
"Look around you," interrupted O'Neal, "and tell me what you see."
"Absolutely nothing," said Reinhardt contemptuously.
"Right," agreed O'Neal. "No banks, no lawyers, no tax collectors, no police--and no Alliance," he added pointedly.
"That's precisely why the Alliance needs this planet," insisted Reinhardt, wiping a little trickle of sweat from his left cheek.
"Well, this planet doesn't need the Alliance. We're 75,000 light years from Tau Ceti. We mind our own business, we enjoy ourselves, we get a lot of sun and sex and fresh air, and nobody is bothering us--except for you, of course."
"The fact that you're in a totally unpopulated area of the galaxy is precisely why we must have the use of your world for a few weeks."
"No."
"I could order you to acquiesce to my demands."
O'Neal shrugged. "Whatever makes you happy."
"This planet is within the Alliance's sphere of influence," noted Reinhardt.
"This planet declared independence five years ago," replied O'Neal.
"There is no record of that."
"Maybe you don't have a record of it, but we do." He gestured to the huge cash box behind the bar. "It's in there somewhere with the receipts."
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