Baxter’s Injunction. The Injunction, as Mr. Shelby indicated, is an ingenious kind of legal device or weapon. It is made out of words but backed by force, in the form of policemen or private detectives or sometimes armies. By means of the Injunction a man or a hundred men or a whole Territory at once may be compelled to do something or not to do something or to do nothing at all, by order of the Law. There are towns out on the Rim whose whole existence is mandated and measured out day-by-day by Injunctions backed by the Law of Jasper, or the Northwest Territory, or Harrow Cross. Injunctions have broken Baronies and strangled the Keaton City Labor movement and built fortunes out of nothing. I am not a scholar of the law but so far as I know there is nothing the Injunction cannot accomplish. Under the terms of the Injunction Mr. Baxter had conjured up against me I was forbidden to work on the Process or claim it as mine, and I was forbidden to do about a thousand other things. Mr. Baxter was not kidding about any of it.
