"Relax, old-timer!" he said in a mollifying tone.
"Relax, is it?" the Master Burglar roared
"Sure. Be smart. They've got us zaxed like a couple of chowders in a second-rate Chowdery! Be smart, ease off, and watch your arteries.”
Grey-complexion grinned nastily at this, but old Dugan was trembling with infuriated rage.
"By dog and hot damn, my arteries can go plax themselfs! Had the ruddy little blighters ripped out last year and replaced with spliced plastex tubing, fore an' aft, did I! But I am boiling with the insultedness! To a guest in mine home, the sticking-ups should happen! An old fat man, sick and lonely, I still have my prides! Me, me, on whom in my days none ever got the droppings! OOOOoooo—the shame of it all!"
He broke off, to fix the grinning quartet with a glare of sufficient wattage to boil aluminum.
"Kill me quick, you scuts, before I am dying of the galloping embarsments—Akk. Gukk ..."
"Always happy to oblidge, Fats," leered the kindly-featured Wollheimian in severely tailored spray-on slacks with triple-gathered dockets down the cuff. Leveling his cross-compensating neuronic paralyzer tube, he sprayed Dugan Motley with a pale lavender ray-beam.
Dugan sagged, limbs and paunch flopping in several different directions simultaneously. The effect was that of a half a ton of monkey-blubber suddenly freed of its casing.
Rapping a hard oath, Hautley whirled into violent action.
One hand plucked a slim, deadly little needier from his tunic, as he whirled—
—But, even as he whirled, a hissing, crackling noise of ray gunfire exploded behind him with all the vehement sound effects of twenty pounds of frozen, oily bacon quick-fried in a berserk shortwave-oven.
"Al right, Quicksilver," an icy female voice redolent of ill-repressed wrath seethed behind him. "You'e safe enough now, but not when I get my hands on you, you trickster you!"
He whirled to see the unexpected figure of Barsine Torsche behind him, standing victoriously with a smoking pistol astride the recumbent bodies of the four intruders, who lay rigid as tent poles, blue sparks snapping from their finger tips.
28
"I WONDER, Barsine, if you realize how lovely you look when you are angry," Hautley purred, with that suave self-possession that seldom deserted him, even under the most horrendous of circumstances.
She snorted.
"Thought you could fool me, did you? Phooey!" she crackled. "I had a hunch you had something up your sleeve beside your So I hid off-planet at the edge of your meteor-moat and waited to see if you would come hightailing out of there—which you did!"
"Barsine, I—"
"You buzzed off Carvel before I could even finish having a smoke! So I just followed along after you. If I'd stopped to think what I would do if I were Ser Smart-Nose H. Quicksilver, C.A., I'd have thought of checking up on old Shpern Hufferd, former confederate of the notorious Dugan Motley—which is just what you did."
"Barsine ... !"
"Well?"
"So I went to check up on Shpem Huffered: what, may I ask, does that prove? I told you I was on a job for His Dignity the Proprietor of Canopus—perhaps I wanted to hire Hufferd for the job of scragging Heverefs political foe?"
Her adorably small jaw settled grimly.
"Won't do, Quicksilver! I checked the records. You did not register any contract with anybody this whole entire week, for any caper. So ... either you were lying, and flashed a phony contract under my nose, or you've been cheating on your income tax by not reporting commissions—which is it?"
Hautley was not trapped into a disclosure that easily.
"How could you possibly follow me through pseudospace?" he scoffed shrewdly. "When a ship is under Bettleheim-Ortleigh-Robton Drive transposition it is, by very definition. undetectible, even by gazdar ...”
She smirked triumphantly.
"Simple, you simpleton. When I left your flashy villa, I stuck a 'tracer' on your hull. Now, let's stop shilly-shallying. Who was it who hired you to go after the Crown of Stars, and what did you learn from poor old Dugan Motley—"
Hautley jumped, and turned to bend over the recumbent body of their host.
"Yes, by Arnam's Beard! I knew I'd forgotten something—what about poor old Dugan? They zapped him down, just as you came crashing the party. I wonder if the old walrus is still with us, or ... ?"
He made a swift examination of the body with his pocket medikit. Face cast in an expression of unusual solemnity, he rose slowly upon completion of the task.
"Well?” Barsine inquired anxiously. "Is the old geezer okay, or did they ... ?"
"No, not with the coagulator, thank Space. They zapped with the neuronic paralyzer."
She relaxed. “Thank the Plenum! He's an old rum-guzzling reprobate, but I'd hate to see him fried. If it's only an n-gun, the effects wear off—”
"In fifty-six hours!" Haudey grated tautly. "I can't wait that long for the information I need, and I didn't get one erg of intelligence regarding Thoth from before the Baddies zapped him down. No, there's no point in hoping for help from quarter. His brain'll be in stasis where I can't question it. Damn! Now what'll I do!"
"What about these four scuggers?'' Barsine indicated the four tent poles, still faintly sparking from their finger tips. “Maybe they know something?" Quicksilver eyed them disdainfully.
"Not them—mere hirelings. Turn 'em over to the local native police, will you Barsine, while I—"
"Oh no you don't, Hautley Quicksilver! I know you and your tricks! You'll buzz off in your speedster the microsec my back is turned if I don't keep you in sight! No siree, from here on we work together, or you don't work at all!"
He sighed, but complied. "Well, at least help me drag them into the front hall. You hit them with such a charge, they're beginning to singe Dugan's priceless Artemisian tapestry-carpet"
While Barsine had Dugan's robutler phone for medical aid, and then summoned the local police to pick up the unconscious scuggers, Hautley searched the spark-discharging bodies with swift but microscopic care. He found—nothing.
Moments later they were winging back to downtown Brasilia in Dugan's own aircar. Within moments they were in the sleek cabin of Quicksilver's slim speedster, the fastest thing in space, and the quaint old planet Earth was fading behind them into the sunset.
"So. What's your—our—next move?" Barsine demanded, while making certain subtle repairs in her facial cosmetics.
"Next, my lass, I make a try at lifting the Crown of Stars," he said grimly.
29
AN HOUR LATER they circled in orbit about the planet Thoth. The trip from Sol III to Thoin IV in the Derghiz Cluster had been rapid and uneventful, consuming a half-hour at most. As they emerged from pseudospace into the normal continuum, Hautley, having donned yet another of his remarkable disguises, deftly removed the Triple-X Spasmodic Frammistator from the drive engine, replacing the delicate component with an identical, though severely fractured, duplicate.
His callboard whistled for attention. Wiping graphite from his hands with a scrap of waste, Hautley thumbed the switch to Receiving and delivered a bland smile into the irate features of a Neothothic Archimandrate.