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  A needle-barb appeared and disappeared from one of the Sanzairean's tendrils. That was his way of saying he accepted the order and understood it.

  The two mals rolled their ear tubes, and Hauser said: "We c'n do that, Gaines. But you'd better check Hook's story."

  Hook said: "We're space cutter Fantom. Inbound from Sparkholm Eleven. Traders. No trouble. From what Gaines says of Stellopolis they'll welcome us with open arms."

  Cher-charon flipped a tendril at this, a habitual response. What his transceiver had translated Hook's word into for his own comprehension might never be known by a human who had no cortico processes to parallel what went on in the Sanzairean's brain.

  "All the same, I'll be there when we get the port authority call."

  Gaines did as he had promised; but, as Hook had promised, the port authority of this star city made no trouble at all and were only too anxious to clear away the formalities as quickly as possible so that the enticing items quickly listed on the flash-out panel could be inspected. For a people living for pleasure the arrival of this kind of merchandise spelled excitement. In this Hook was quite right; he was to discover that other excitements existed that could not be so easily quantified. The space cutter swooped into the indicated entry port of the star city. Hook took her in with a quiet sobriety he knew would not attract unwelcome attention. He saw the way the four of them were twitching as they waited for the next second to bring a challenge, the statement "You are space cutter Spokane, stolen from Bandong. You are under arrest."

  No challenge blared at them from the speaker.

  "We're in, by Verthash!" said Happy Derning, delighted. The damage Hook had done to the controls of the cutter had been finely selected, and the over-ride he had had to bypass which would have automatically closeted off the danger area could still function with what he had left. He swept his hands across the board, shutting it down. That eternal thrilling subcutaneous trilling of the cutter's engine died. With a final shudder and tremble that unheard noise vanished.

  "We're in!" said Walton Gaines, as though he had done it all.

  Hook started to stand up. He rose from the pilot's throne. A shape, a shadow, a fleeting movement.

  He knew, in that flashing instant of time, he understood that he had made a mistake with these men, and now he had compounded that mistake. Forced to allow him to live whilst he brought them into Stellopolis safely, now they were here they had no further use for him. Fifty kilos of micro-recorded art sounded better to them split four ways than split five.

  And they were old comrades in the criminal way of life.

  Hook saw the steel bar slicing down towards his head.

  He saw that maniacal glare in Locum Hauser's dark eyes.

  The steel bar smashed into his skull.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The steel bar bounced.

  For any normal man that steel bar powered by all the dark ferocity of a homicidal maniac would have shattered his skull into bloody fragments. Blood and brains would have spurted past the splintered bones. But, then, Ryder Hook was not a normal man. He was not a superman. He had to tell himself that again and again, and — as now — he had to remind himself that he was merely an ordinary man to whom the machinations of RCI had given extraordinary powers.

  Hook reared up, snatched the bar from the abruptly nerveless fingers of Locum Hauser. The mal glared at Hook as though confronted with all the foul devils of his own mythologies made manifest in the flesh of the Earthman.

  "You gonil!" screamed Hauser. Hook saw with absolute clarity the way the mal's muscles tensed for the instantaneous drawing of the nasty little dis-gel gun tucked up his sleeve. With muscles that, although not in Boosted condition, were far more powerful, far faster, far more subtle than anyone had any right to expect, Hook continued with the swing of the bar. He swung it down and around and up and the end took Hauser's hand from beneath and smashed it upwards. The dis-gel discharge splattered the overhead, and both Homo sapiens and mal moved instinctively aside so as not to be spattered by so much as a single drop.

  Only then, and not before, did Hook bother to hit the mal. Hauser went down.

  A voice lifted from the cabin area abaft the pilot's compartment.

  "Hurry up, Locum! The enforcers will be aboard soon."

  Hook took out the Tonota Eighty. The gun was ridiculously big for onboard work, and if fired would take most of the hull plating away with it in the direction of its blast. But Hook wouldn't mind that. These three curds needed to be overawed instantly. He stepped into the cabin.

  A mal mouth and a Homo sapiens mouth dropped open, and a Sanzairean mouth tendril curled abruptly, like a sensitive frond of an Earthside fern.

  Hook showed them the gun.

  Not that they were likely to miss the thing; but Hook was a man who liked to copper-bottom his bets, a man who would never take a chance unless that chance represented the best course in the circumstances. Then, of course, they took insane risks that left other people shivering with awed fright.

  "Tell me," Ryder Hook said to them. "Why I should not kill you now?"

  Gaines and Derning gobbled out words at once, together, backing away, holding their hands palms outwards before them, shaking with a fear that had no power to move Ryder Hook.

  Hook's eyes regarded them with that intense brown gaze that, so he had been told — surlily — seemed to drill through a man. He remained perfectly aware of The Sanzairean, Cher-charon, who wriggled into an S-shaped bend, his body undulating with beautiful symmetry. His tendrils were now all folded, his mouth tubes tucked out of the way.

  At last Gaines managed to bellow louder than Happy Derning.

  "What are you playing at, Hook? We didn't know Locum was going to try to kill you! He was on his own! You've no cause to shoot me!"

  Hook didn't bother to sigh over the clumsiness of it. He didn't even bother to say: "How do you know what Hauser was up to in the control cabin — out of your sight?"

  Instead he wheeled, moved back a pace, his Delling snapped into his left hand and fired.

  Cher-charon's fluidly beautiful body snapped through the air, the sinuous S-shape straightening and lengthening into a bar of scaled flesh and blood and bone. The tendrils sprang in time with the leap. Had Hook remained where he was he would have been impaled by a dozen needle-barbs.

  The Delling's discharge squirted dis-gel over the forward parts of Cher-charon.

  Now the Sanzairean made a sound.

  His transceiver bubbled and squawked — and Cher-charon screamed.

  His body melted.

  From his tendrilled foreparts with their needle barbs, past his mouth tubes, past his upper body and the whole sinuous length of him, the dis-gel ate its way. The alien deliquesced.

  Around his thorax area where he kept his hearts and lungs the melting power of the jelly slowed, flowed around and on down. Cher-charon had plated his scales in that area with a solution of armour-metal, a similar mix to the dip given to armour-plate-fab clothes, and Hook guessed he'd had no time to refurbish the rest of his scales before they'd pulled their robbery on Bandong. No doubt Cher-charon had figured on completing the job here in Stellopolis.

  All that remained of that long and beautiful body lay puddling on the deck. It oozed between a cracked plate. It slopped over a former and dripped down between the treads. A being had been melted into a pool of foul scum.

  Hook said: "So now you know what to expect."

  Man and mal, they goggled at him, the breath caught in their throats.

  "You two. Take your trousers off."

  A single admonitory wave of the Tonota sent them into a frantic series of quick-strip hoppings. The Delling had vanished again up Hook's sleeve.

  From the control section forward a voice spoke. It was not Locum Hauser. Besides being able to hear when the mal moved himself, Hook also had a fair idea of how long a person would be unconscious after he had hit him.

  The voice said: "This is Stellopolis P.A. Open up your airlock or don't you
want to berth here? What's keeping you?"

  Hook waved the gun at the two trouserless and sorry specimens before him.

  "In that locker, the spare oxy-bottle one. That's right. Squeeze in."

  He slammed the door on them. The catch thunked satisfactorily.

  He put his mouth against the smooth surface.

  "If you bang or make a noise I'll see what a Tonota will do to quieten you."

  He took himself off to the control section and, stepping over Hauser, who lay breathing in a charmingly stertorous way, thumbed the airlock release.

  He would have fifteen minutes, terrestrial.

  Enough.

  Like many planets and star cities of the galaxy, Stellopolis had streamlined its disembarkation procedures. The Customs Officials ran their instruments over the ship. Down between the treads the last of Cher-charon quietly flowed and melted away. Nothing was left of him by the time the quarantine check robot trundled past above. Had the customs people put a forensic sniffer into action, now, the story would have been different ...

  "Art recordings, you said?"

  "That's right." Hook did what was necessary with his face to make the man think he was smiling at him. "Fifty kilos. Thereabouts. All high-quality material. Sparkholm Eleven are going through a censorship phase, when the bluenoses get through with their burnings and destructs they'll wind up with a planetary cluster without culture."

  "It happens. But it's good fortune for us." The Port Authority man was just that, a man, a member of Homo sapiens. There clung to him an aura of effeminacy, an air of refined decadence contributed to by his clothes — long flowing draperies with gold lace and plastic inserts of various glow-colours that subtly changed as he moved — and by the pallor underlying the normal cheerful copper colour one might expect in a galaxy where interbreeding had gone on for so long. However much of a dilettante he might appear, filling in his work quota in the Port Authority, Hook did not miss the gun strapped to his waist.

  The gun snugged in a plax holster and was strapped down.

  Hook fancied it was a Krifarm, probably a model nineteen; but he wouldn't bet on it. He admitted to a fascination for weapons of all kinds; he never allowed that fascination to develop into an obsession. Knowledge of weapons was essential to a man without a wrist credit card.

  In addition, and without a credible doubt, the P.A. man would have some form of dis-gel gun coupled into his muscular and neural circuits and hidden beneath the flowing sleeve.

  That would be on his right wrist.

  That immediately brought up the thought that Hook would have to go through the tiresome business of accustoming these people to the amazing fact that he did not own a credit card.

  He caught that one by the tail at once.

  "I'd like payment in money metal, if it's all the same to you. That is, if the cargo is up to your requirements. I'm not overly particular —"

  "Please, Taynor Hook! We on Stellopolis are always in the market for cultural artefacts. We hold these things in high esteem. Please do not consider spacing out until you have given us every opportunity to strike a bargain."

  This wasn't the way the sharp operatives of the business galaxy talked; but then, Stellopolis was cut off from the main galactic current. It held undeniable attractions for men like Gaines and his crew, attractions that had brought him here in the first place. Hook fancied that even if the people of Stellopolis had been alerted by a call from Bandong, and knew that fifty kilos of art micro-recordings had been stolen from there, they'd be too anxious to lay their hands on the loot to report its discovery.

  Hook was quite happy to play it along that way.

  Robots detached the cargo pod from the cutter and quickly thereafter samples of the merchandise were run through screening scanners. Hook broke open a bottle and the P.A. man who was called Inlander, quaffed a glass in his languid way as the initial reports came in.

  Eleven minutes had passed.

  Inlander smiled and swung back from the screen.

  "Excellent, — dear Taynor Hook! Quite exquisite. Work we have heard of and have long desired to see. There will be no difficulty in selling this package to us. You will sell it all?"

  "Of course, Taynor Inlander."

  "Fine, fine. Then I suggest you accompany me to the P.A. office. Business details are so tiresome. But we can complete this deal swiftly." A hint of a frown marred that languid expression. "You are sure you wish money metal?"

  "Money metal will be admirable."

  "As you wish."

  There would be some sizeable bills to cover fifty kilos of this high-class merchandise. It was more than likely that this star city ran its own credit system, and only meshed with the great interstellar combines when it had to. Mind you Hook felt a genuine distaste for talking about the glorious work of men's minds and hearts, all the culture and art and beauty of a hundred stellar systems, the wealth of wonder contributed by men and women out of a desire to achieve a scrap of beauty against the great dark, as mere merchandise. But once a work of art was on the market — it did perforce become merchandise, to be haggled over.

  That was the way of the galaxy.

  On fourteen minutes Inlander, smiling, ushered Hook out of the space cutter and down the ramp leading onto the metalloy-hard decking the berthing area. Hook followed along, and found his right hand trailing quite naturally close to his holstered gun butt. Inlander chattered on, and Hook took a long look at the reception area. He'd visited star cities before and had found they came in all sizes and varieties. Stellopolis, judging from what he saw, was a fair-sized representative of the breed. From space the construction gave the random appearance of a gigantic collection of old boxes and domes and towers and linking ways with no centric thought to appearance. From time to time sections of the city might be detached to go about their own purposes, and sometimes another star city might happen by and the two join up to their mutual advantage. Indeed Stellopolis rivalled many a planetary city in extent, and in addition the three-dimensional aspect of the place gave a cubic capacity far beyond a normal planetary city, even those who towered miles into the air. Hook had no intention of hanging about here, for he would deal with Gaines and what was left of his criminal crew and then space out. But, in the unwelcome event he was forced to spend time here in star city he knew he could keep out of sight and remain undiscovered for as long as it might take — or so he read the signs.

  He heard the chatter of annunciators heralding the arrival of starships as he passed through the glassite corridors of the Port Authority. There would be many berthing ports of this nature all around the irregular periphery of star city. Ships moved in and out constantly.

  "Yes, Taynor Hook, we keep busy," said Inlander, ushering him into a palatial office with window-pics of exotic recorded animated views of planets star city had visited in its long travels among the stars. At the moment the city circled in orbit around a planet called Voyden, a world circling a nice gentle G-type star called Purlon Major. That sunshine flooded in through ports and windows, controlled and directed, mellow and pleasing. There might be inhabitants of the planet and no doubt the people of star city had set up the usual business arrangements with them. Many planets welcomed the arrival of a star city in orbit about them; others objected. It all depended on the psychological makeup of the parties concerned.

  "I'd like to space out as soon as possible," said Hook.

  "Of course — if you wish. But, my dear Taynor Hook, we Curlmen are proud of our city and can offer tremendous pleasures. We believe in luxury as a right of all men. And —" Here he laughed very pleasantly, displaying white teeth in what was for him a grandiose gesture. "— and we see to it that our life here is made as comfortable and luxurious as human ingenuity can contrive."

  "You are very kind, Taynor Inlander."

  Inlander busied himself at his computer terminal and Hook sat in the lounger waiting for the slot to disgorge crisp new money metal. Forgery of money metal was not unheard of; but in general to duplicate t
he complex atomic structure of the galaxy-wide money metal came as expensive as the face value of the final product. Hook had no real fears of being cheated.

  Around now Hauser would be regaining consciousness and after a little fuzzy-headed cursing he'd wander around and then let out Gaines and Derning. What they would do then held the fascination of character prediction for Hook. Whatever they did, he felt with some confidence, he would still be able to re-enter the cutter and leave this star city. If they were left behind Hook felt that to be an amusing coda to the whole business.

  If they came with him, of course, their whole relationship would have changed.

  On balance, he decided, he'd prefer them not to accompany him.

  They spelled trouble.

  Lights glowed into patterns on Inlander's console and with a brief apologetic word to Hook, Inlander answered. He nodded.

  "Taynor Hook, we have to clear the berthing area for the arrival of a Top-Star. We shall have to move your cutter, temporarily, of course, until berthing is completed."

  There was nothing Hook could say to that. A Top-Star, as a starship of prime importance carrying passengers or freight rating the highest possible priority, took precedence over most traffic on the general interstellar runs.

  "Certainly, Taynor Inlander. Do you wish —?"

  "That is perfectly all right. The handling staff can move your vessel out of the way. Pray, do not disturb yourself. I have ordered refreshments to be served here."

  It might have been beautifully old-fashioned and elegant, and that always attracted Ryder Hook; he could not sniff any scent of a plot here. If these Curlmen of Stellopolis wanted to steal his cargo they could do it in any of a hundred different ways. He had no reasons to suspect them of harbouring any such nefarious designs.

  A red light lit up on the console.

  Inlander frowned.

  A service robot entered, soundless on the air-cushion carpet, trundled across bearing a silver tray loaded with refreshments. Hook helped himself to a cup and the robot poured tea. Fancy cakes and sandwiches and rocolans on porcelain presented a tempting array, and Hook helped himself. Inlander was speaking hurriedly into half a dozen microphones at once. More red lights went on. Hook sipped tea and took an interest in what the P.A. man was getting himself into.