 What crime has Zeckler committed to warrant imprisonment?
Meyerhoff followed the huge, bear-like Altairian guard down the slippery flagstones of the corridor, sniffing the dead, musty air with distaste. He drew his carefully tailored Terran-styled jacket closer about his shoulders, shivering as his eyes avoided the black, yawning cell-holes they were passing. There was a startled gasp from within, and a skinny, gnarled little man suddenly appeared in the guard's light, like a grotesque, twisted ghost out of the blackness. Why, I've been in here for years—" "Look, Zeckler, the name is Meyerhoff, and I'm not your pal," Meyerhoff snapped. I sent an appeal to the Terran Consulate the first day I was arrested. I've got three million credits sitting in the Terran Consulate on Altair V, just waiting for me to walk in and pick them up. Zeckler stood up shakily. "You've committed the most heinous crime these creatures can imagine, and they're going to get you for it if it's the last thing they do. Zeckler fished in the other man's pocket, extracted a cigarette, and lighted it with trembling fingers. But occasionally a situation arose where the civilization and social practices of the alien victims made it unwise to tamper with them. Altair I had been recognized at once by the Trading Commission as a commercial prize of tremendous value, but early reports had warned of the danger of wildcat trading on the little, musty, jungle-like planet with its shaggy, three-eyed inhabitants—warned specifically against the confidence tactics so frequently used—but there was always somebody, Meyerhoff reflected sourly, who just didn't get the word. Zeckler puffed nervously on his cigarette, his narrow face a study in troubled concentration. You'd have found out that they're marsupials, and that two out of five of them get thrown out of their mother's pouch before they're old enough to survive. They've built up the most confusing and impossible system of barter and trade imaginable, aimed at individual survival, with land as the value behind the credit. Lying is the time-honored tradition, with their entire legal system built around it." They have only the haziest idea what truth represents, and they've shrugged off the idea as impossible and useless." Encroachment on private property is legal grounds for murder on this planet, and twelve of them descended on the same chunk of land at the same time, all armed with title-deeds."
 fraud
 embezzlement  fraud  encroachment  indecent exposure