HAUTLEY QUICKSILVER, who was among the most celebrated and certainly the most distinguished of all the Licensed Legal Criminals and Confidential Agents in the Near Stars, lived with all the luxurious refinements and civilized comforts available to those who have achieved the ultimate peak of their profession.

He had a castle of organic pink quartz on the planetoid Carvel in that asteroid belt known as The Chain of Astarte. It had been designed to his specifications by none other than Smingoth Whibberley, the most noted, controversial, and widely imitated architectural philosopher of the 36th century A.C. There Hautley lived alone with his quaint hobbies, his curious pets, and his truly extraordinary collection of hand weapons culled from 1,376 different planetary cultures. No less than sixteen hundred varieties of weapon were represented in his arsenal�among them devices designed to stab, slice, puncture, detonate, envenom, stun, paralyze, render immobile, implode, decapitate, unlimb, eviscerate or otherwise render hors de combat an unwary opponent With each of these, Quicksilver had made certain he acquired a thorough professional competency upon which depended (and not infrequently) the adroit performance of his occupational duties, if not indeed continuance of life itself.

Quicksilver's castle clung to a sheer crag of dark green coral which rose from a sea of heavy opal smoke. This vaporous ocean entirely mantled the surface of the planetoid and the pinkly alabastrine hue of his castle formed a delicate aesthetic contrast against the melting and changing hues of the heavy vapor, the rough emeraldine coral, and the tea-rose sky, with the sullen disc of Astarte a smouldering ruby on the dim horizon.

This horizon looked to be far more distant than it actually was. Carvel was a terraformed planetoid with a diameter of only forty-nine kilometers. A permanent and artificial magnetic field, generated by certain ingenious devices situated at the core of the worldlet, continuously distorted the gaseous molecules of which the atmosphere was composed, lending the optical effect of a stupendous lens. This created the illusion of vast distances, pleasing to the eye.

The coral peak to which clung the pink quartz buildings was but one among a scattered forest of similar monoliths which rose from the opal sea at irregular intervals over the entire surface of Carvel. Carvel itself was one of several thousand similar worldlets that encircled the otherwise planetless star�a dying red Supergiant with an M1 spectrum, comparable to Antares but somewhat less in magnitude. This chain of tiny planetoids,�in which Carvel was but a minor gem, encircled the russet star like a necklace of jewels around the throat of some dusky queen; and among the whirling myriads, Carvel was lost and hidden.

The very nature of Hautley's profession was such that extreme privacy was eminently desirable. And he had many enemies. His versicle upon this topic was pointedly clear:

QUICKSILVER removed a slim green tube from the bloodwood case on the desk before him, set it between his lips, and inhaled thoughtfully until the autoigniter tip flared. A pungently stimulating vapor permeated the tower chamber wherein they sat. He smoked his aromatique meditatively in silence for a few moments, watching the slight tense movements of Pawel Spiro's hands with lazy impassive face and mirror-bright eyes whose detailed scrutiny was scalpel-sharp.

This Quicksilver, foremost Licensed Legal criminal and Confidential Agent in half a galaxy was a lean, lithe, agile young man of only seventy-six, patently of homonid stock, although, perchance, admixed with a touch of anthrofelinesque blood inherited from a paternal great-grandmother.

From throat to and heel he was clothed in sprayed satin of seven subtly differing shades of black. His face was dyed mahogany, the features hard, ascetic, with prominent cheekbones, feline jaw, and a broad and high forehead which plainly denoted an astonishing calibre of intellectual capacity. His hair, falling in meticulous antique locks over his brow, was colored pewter-grey due to a cosmetic endocrine adjustment currently in mode. A characteristically whimsical light flashed in his oblique mirror eyes (from which affectation, as well as his alert and mercurial temperament, he derived his suragnomen).

"This headpiece"�he spoke abruptly, shattering the silence �"is popularly called The Crown of Stars is it not? And I believe it is venerated and guarded by a fanatic cult who have sworn death to the interloper and crown-lifter�death according to indescribably bizarre and barbaric torments�am I not correct, Learned Spiro?"

Flustered, Pawel Spiro stammered inarticulately for a moment, then cleared his throat with another of those annoying, phlegmy little coughs Quicksilver found so distasteful.

"Er ... ah ... hem! I believe that is, ah, correct, Ser Hautley ..." he admitted.

"Yes�?"

"It, er, the cult object is worshiped by the Neothothic Priesthood ... fourteenth-generation descendants of the original settlers. They have, ah, evolved a form of ancestor worship in regard to the so-called Cavern Kings, a mysterious race which flourished, decayed and became extinct on Thoin IV some centuries before the first Survey Service ships arrived from Galactic Center, during, I believe, the semi-legendary reign of the Galactic Imperator Drongerghastus the Inimitable, the 'Opener of the Starways' ..."

"What exactly were these Cavern Kings?" Hautley inquired.

"A race of, ah, highly intelligent beings evolved from the lizard, as we are from the simians. To be precise: from the order Sauria, family Lacertidae, genus Lacerta; a species somewhat similar to C. niloticus, and resembling to some degree the common 'monitor^ or the familiar 'gecko'�... ah, extraordinary creatures of unusual culturaldevelopment, although of pre-Space andprobably of pre-Electric technology. Their curious architecturalmonuments, amatter of tapering towers awry-tilted and of only quasi-Euclidean geometry, and peculiar in that the cities are subterranean�..."

"Underground towers? An unique concept," Hautley said gravely. Caught up in that technical enthusiasm to which the Validian Scholar is ever susceptible, Pawel Spiro nodded several times, flushing pinkly with intellectual excitement.

"Decidedly unique, Ser Hautley! Ah ... unfortunately, naught remains of their cultural artifacts save for these curiously subterranean urban structures (which clearly argue the racial heritage of the lizard!), and which remain to this day among the most notable archeological enigmas of the entire Cluster ... and, of course, the ... Crown of Stars."

Quicksilver extinguished his aromatique in the nearby vacuum trap, and regarded the client with a slight quizzical smile.

"Any relic so rare must be worth ... a fortune?" he queried gently.

The Learned Pawel Spiro looked decidedly unhappy.

"Ah ... yes, I believe so ..."

The quizzical smile deepened, gaining an overtone of ironic mockery.

"It is�is it not, in point of fact�completely priceless�in fact, beyond price?"

Spiro's unhappy expression intensified into one of positive gloom.

"Well . . . yes!"

"In such a case, then," Quicksilver said smoothly, "my usual fees would be ... doubled.''

PAWEL�SPIRO blinked, winced, coughed softly, fluttered his plump white hands, straightened the notched lapels of his conservative maroon oversuit, and said faintly:

"But, Ser Hautley, you will understand, ah, the cult object is prized more for its scientific value than the, er, merely monetary worth of ..."

Hautley elevated an amused eyebrow mockingly.

"It is studded with rare jewels, is it not, Learned? Hence, I believe, the name�Crown of Stars?"'

�Er ... well, yes ..."

"It is, is it not, a superb work of the goldsmith's art�open-scrolled goldwork, rather akin to the High Phriote style, and set with one hundred fifty-seven precious and semi-precious jewels, among which are the only known specimens of no less than thirteen otherwise completely mythical varieties of gemstones?" Hautley pressed.

Pawel Spiro wilted like day-old spaghetti.

"... Yes."

�Then the double fee is invoked, as is customary when I deal in such rarities."

Spiro looked at him with a trace of keen suspicion�in his watery, lackluster eyes.

"You seem ... familiar ... with the Crown, Ser Hautley."

The most celebrated Confidential Agent among the Near Stars laughed sardonically.

"But of course, Learned, in my craft as a licensed and legal thief, assassin, spy, murderer, pirate, I have a certain professional interest in outstanding items of rare jewelry!"

"Of course," Spiro said sadly.

"Then you agree to the fee?"

"Ah, yes, I believe I can justify it to my senior colleagues." Quicksilver regarded him with a meditative eye. The fee, ordinarily large, thus doubled became quite exorbitant. There was something that did not quite ring true about this Pawel Spiro. What museum could afford to pay a doubled Quicksilverian fee?

He permitted another aromatique to ignite itself, and lazily lay back in his luxurious pneumo-lounger whose extensible components automatically compensated to his relaxed position. Through the vast crystalline panes, the dull light of sinking Astarte cast a sullen shaft of rubied luminance across the bloodwood desk. In the hard, straight chair directly opposite the desk, the little man fidgeted uncomfortably.

And coughed discreetly.

"You will, ah, accept our commission then, Ser Hautley?"

"There is one further item that somewhat intrigues me," Quicksilver drawled casually.

"What, ah item?"

"Why?"

Spiro blinked: "Why what ... I do not understand ..."

"Nor, to be honest, do I!" Quicksilver fixed him with a glittering eye. "Why do you want the Crown of Stars at such a cost? While due to the peculiar nature of my Charter, it is perfectly legal for me to appropriate a valuable object from its present owners�so long as I do so upon duly contracted commission�it is illegal for you or the Museum to display or even possess stolen property."

WITHOUT FURTHER discussion or ceremony, Quicksilver curtly ushered his flustered client out and saw to it that the radiobeacon guided his modest little runabout back through the protective "moat" of spinning planetoids.

He then repaired with alacrity to the chamber wherein this lengthy interview had taken place, and adroitly detached the minicamera from its hiding place among the ornamental moldings on a tall display case bearing his brilliant collection of Diophrasian crystalloid formicles, arranged as to the thirty-one possible permutations of hexagonal matrices.

Retiring to an adjoining laboratory, he swiftly ran the reel of photo-sensitive tape through a Mark XII developmat and selected nine of the finer prints from the series.

He returned to his chamber and dialed the offices of the Boghazy-the-Great Memorial Museum at Tavory on Alcazar III in the Biallo-Perseids.

Securinng the appropriate extension, Quicksilver glibly talked his way up the chain-of-seniority until he reached the Chancellor of the Department of Derghiz Archeology�Pawel Spiro's ultimate superior�that is, if the pallid, mousy little man Quicksilver had interviewed was, indeed, whom he had claimed to be!

In a moment, the phone's screen was filled with the skeet-paneled interior of a stately office, showing a desk cluttered with papers and scholarly journals in neat reel boxes, and a litter of photonic implements, stereo copies of artifacts, and other materials. It shortly filled with the likeness of the Chancellor, a portly, pink-faced Cartouchan with truly enormous ultra-marine moustachios (obviously the result of decades of loving cultivation). Barely visible amidst this wealth of hirsute adornment, a snapping green eye curtly inspected him. The Chancellor impatiently demanded�his business.

No more glib tongue nor facile set of wits existed among the Near Stars, than those of Hautley Quicksilver�

"Very Learned, I am hight Thomas Jefferson Pouchier, Senior Staffwriter for Star magazine. In the very near future, we contemplate devoting considerable space to a featured article on the very brilliant work your Department is performing in the inadequately recognized field of Carina-Cygnus prehistory and neoculture.�

The fat pink face beamed. The curtness evaporated like hydrogen ice in a nuclear oven, and was replaced by the very essence of chuckling geniality.

"Well, well, well! Yes, and, ah, Ser Thomas, of what assistance may I be to your superb periodical, which my staff and myself peruse at frequent intervals, ha ha?" the Chancellor wheezed good-humoredly.

"Why, Very Learned, my call in fact concerns a member of your staff, in point of fact. Yes ... I am assigned to compose a few brief paragraphs of the body text on one of your underlings, ah ..." pausing to glance at a scrap of paper, Hautley returned to the jovial visage: "... one Learned Pawel Spiro," he concluded, deliberately mispronouncing the surname.

The quivering moustachios wavered slightly; the hearty warmth cooled a bit in eye and smile.

"Umf. Yes, yes, fine man. His�specialty�Thothic archeology, you know�dead end, of course. Exhausted, what? Ehh ... my own field, now, hrumph! The famous Monolith Builders of Delta 10334 ... ah ... ?"

Hautley allowed admiring envy to tinge his features.

"Fascinating field, Very Learned ... spectacular! But ... alas! ... my superior, Senior Full Editor, the Lord Daughtmer Rohm, is preparing the central section, dealing with your own magnificent if not fully appreciated accomplishments in that field. Rank hath its privileges, you know, ha ha! But," Quicksilver interposed smoothly, "I have a choice of several photos of Learned Spiro, simple two-color monodimensionals, nothing more, of course�far removed from the tridimensional full-spectrum center-spread Lord Daughtmer plans for you�and I wonder if you would be kind enough to advise us on the Spiro spots? Tell me, then, are any of these particularly good likenesses of your underling?"

He fanned out the prints and held them before the receiver of the phone. The Cartouchan ran a disinterested eye over the set.

"Ehh ... good likenesses, all, yes, yes. Mmmf. That one of Spiro picking his nose�very good, quite characteristic. Hmf. But ... ah ... tell me, Staffwriter, the section on myself, now, are you certain it's the center�"

"Lord Daughtmer will very shortly be contacting you for an extended personal interview, of course, Very Learned, so I'd best clear the extension. Oh, one more question, if I may trouble you just a bit more. Is this Spiro at the Museum now, or do you know where I could contact him?"

The Chancellor whooshed thoughtfully through his amazing moustachios, like a walrus coming up for air.

"On a sabbatical at present. For a month, I believe�due back the 15th of Jones, or somewhere thereabouts. One of my secretarial assistants could most probably�"

"Of course! But have you any idea where he went?"

The fat pink cheeks puffed out.

"Hrgm . . . The Hub Stars . . . yes, yes. Gesualdo V. Probably find old Spiro pottering away in the Empress Pavalia the Amiable Memorial Librareum. Yes."

Quicksilver thanked him fulsomely, rang off, and phoned the Librareum at the center of the galaxy. He was informed by the robot communication-monitor that the Hub-channels were currently busy, due probably to the coding nuptials of the Prince-Heir to the Galactic Throne, and it would take an hour for his call to be connected. He gave the robot his unlisted and ever-changing phone frequency and asked to be called as soon as the spaceways were clear.

Well, it was lunch time anyway. A good morning's work! Hautley rose, stretched, and dialed a nourishing lunch on the autochef. Nothing heavy, as the afternoon might be busy�a light repast�brisket of sea-serpent with Arcadian mint-sauce and a bracing pot of steaming, fragrant, freshly brewed stimulac. As the chef ticked away, Hautley mused that his tenuous suspicions regarding the validity of Pawel Spiro seemed ill-founded. Pending development from the Librareum, it seemed that the little scholar was the genuine article ... ah, well, as he had once observed in a pithy versicle:

Beware: the "fake'' that you

Swiftly detect is very often�true!

APTER A BRISK LUNCH, Quicksilver skimmed swiftly through his voluminous files, which covered in exhaustive detail every major, and a considerable portion of minor, crimes committed or attempted within the Near Stars during the past hundred lustrums. These files were microized and computer-stored in a handy desk-top file no larger than a modern plixiter. Setting the index-auditor to its fullest selectivity, he rapidly punched out the code that stood for "Crimes of extraplanetary origin/Location: p Thoin�IV, cl Derghiz, g-a Car-Cyg, quad One /First priority: attempted theft," and sat back, sipping his stimulac and savoring its robust caffein flavor while the file clittered and tinkled to itself.

Later, smoking an after lunch aromatique of his own private blend, he glanced over the reports.

They were very interesting.

No fewer than eleven attempts had been made to acquire the coveted Crown of Stars by semi- or quasi-legal means, varying from legitimate purchase through blackmail, extortion, hypno-conditioning, political influence, economic pressure, mindwashing, psychohyastalic implementation, and such. The highest price that had been offered for honest purchase was a truly cosmonomical sum set forth by King Oswal the Pious of the Altair Regnum. The royal collection of antiquities was justly famed as the finest private museum�in all of the Carina-Cygnus galactic arm; his offer had been curtly refused So much for pseudo-legal attempts on the Crown.

Thus far, exactly thirty-nine serious attempts at theft had been perpetuated. All had been foiled, and, with one single exception, the would-be thieves had been executed in an ingenious variety of methods by the grimly fanatic Neothothic Priesthood. This lone exception was the Master-Burglar of Capitan, the widely notorious Dugan Motley, now in retirement.

Quicksilver took his half-emptied cup of stimulac over to the liquor panel and filled it to the brim with cr�eme de schmaltz '67. Then he dialed Information/Central and crisply entered an eleven-word request. While the stupendous computer-directory that occupied the planetary cores of Nycon I, II and III hummed and chittered madly to itself, he drank the stimulac royale and meditated on Neozen philosophy. All too soon the directory informed him that no Dugan Motley, formerly of Capitan in the Deltabelta Cluster, was listed in any of the three galactic arms.

Listed or unlisted, Hautley must find him. Only Dugan Motley of all the thieves to attempt seizure of the Thothic cult object had survived the merciless punitive efforts of the pseudo-ancestor-worshiping priests. Therefore, only Motley could reveal in explicit detail the means and methods by which the Crown was hidden and guarded. Motley he must locate!

Hautley thought for a moment; then with a crisply decisive motion he called Information/Central again. The former Master-Burglar of Capitan had worked with a lifelong confederate who rejoiced in the name of Shpern Hufferd. Motley's unavailability did not necessarily extend to his old comrade, or so Quicksilver hoped. Happily, his hopes proved true. Shpern Hufferd still resided at Thieves' Haven, the outlaw planet in the Gap.

Quicksilver phoned him, but there was no answer. Restlessly, he tossed down the last of his brandy-laced stimulac and went into an adjoining tower. From a glass-barred cage, a footlong mini-dragon with canary-yellow body scales and batwings that deepened into orange emitted a friendly jet of steam. Freeing his pet, which swiftly scrambled to a position atop his right shoulder, Quicksilver paced moodily, caressing the dragon's wrinkled snout with a forefinger.

He resolved to pay a personal visit to Hufferd; perhaps the confederate could be persuaded, either through a proffered sum of munits or a clever gambit, into revealing the current whereabouts of his former partner. Anyway, Hautley's mercurial moods chafed at extended inaction.

Before he could leave, however, the signal flashed above the wall phone. An incoming call ...

NO SOONER had the supercilious monarch exited, and Hautley retured to his tower chamber for an intensive perusal of the Thothian dossier, than his phone flashed. It was the followup: his call to the Librareum was now ready to be put through: would Ser Hautley accept it? Ser Hautley would.

Quicksilver spoke to a prim woman of indeterminate but well-preserved age, modestly attired in a black spray gown with opal-dusted sternum and exquisitely coiffed hair of a delicate selection of thirteen contrasting shades of off-grey.

Passing himself off as the Very Reverent Abdul Nagoob von Kessel, a peripatetic Pseudobaptist evangelist checking the moral behavior of his recent converts, Quicksilver deftly inquired of the recent comings and goings of Pawel Spiro. Modestly shielding her opal-dusted sternum with a sheaf of overdue notices, in deference to a Man of the Cloth, the Librarian was able to give some very interesting information.

"The Learned has been in residence at the Librareum for some months now, Padre, engaged in research towards a monograph on, ahem, nuptial customs of the Y'harqakukluk III Owl People," she replied with a reverent flutter of her lashless lids.

"Bless you, sister," Hautley said benignly. "You are positive, then, that Brother Pawel has not gone off planet? The opportunities for moral transgression in so sophisticated a region of the galaxy as The Hub ... fleshpots, scarlet women, the loathsome juice of the grape, even (Allah, Buddha and Father Sigmund preserve us!)�spiritous beverages of fermented liquors�!"

The Librarian-General rolled up her eyes in an extremity of horror. "Oh, no, Father�I mean, yes, Father, I am quite certain. I see the Learned every day; I am convinced he has not left the planet for an instant.''

Hautley expressed his appreciation in a lengthy blessing on the Librarian-General's ka which, had it been effective, should have spared her some millenia in Purgatory, concluding with an extempore rendition of appropriate texts from The Nine Gospels which added measurably to his monthly phone bill. He rang off and sat back, stroking with an idle forefinger, the little canary-yellow dragon which clung cozily to his left shoulder.

So ... Pawel Spiro, it would seem, was a client of that rare variety called phonus-balonus. A fake. But a good one; very good;�in fact, professional class ... odd ...

And what about Heveret Twelfth? Was His Dignity also spurious, or the genuine article? Without delay, Hautley set about checking the bona fides of the Canopan monarch.

Directly in front of the door was a rather slippery place where the parquet flooring was polished with a frictionless compound. Part of the door's archway was a sleek panel of glossy chrome set at the average hand-height. To avoid falling on his imperial snoot, the Proprietor of Canopus had to grab this polished panel. Hautley snapped a photogram and ran it through the enlarger: sure enough, prints of the right hand, and beauties they were, clear as crystal.

Then he called the Royal Archives at Phungalumdum on Canopus II, securing no less elevated a personage than the Third Assistant Under-Archivist: a shriveled and vituperous gnome with a silvery spike of beard and snapping purple eyes, who testily demanded his business.

Hautley Quicksilver, Man of Two Thousand Faces, donned the vapid, sweatily eager persona of a Collector.

"My name is Feuvel Coradayne, the collector�perhaps you've seen my collection on the video?�No?�Well, ha ha, I have a modest little collection of Objects which have been in the possession of Royalty ... a fascinating hobby, you understand, fascinating!" he burbled.

"Yes, yes, get on with it," the Archivist snapped. "Never heard of you or your collection in me life: what do you want?"

"Well�I've recently been offered a crystal goblet from which I am told His Dignity Heveret Twelfth is believed to have imbibed a princely beverage. Naturally, I wish to have the Royal association confirmed, before adding it to my little things, ha, ha."

"Naturally. Well?"

Hautley held up the enlargement; the fingerprints clearly visible.

"These are presumably the prints of His Dignity's dexter digits. Could check them for me? You must have His Dignity's fingerprints in your files. I'd like to be certain of their validity."

"Of all the nonsense! Oh, very well."

The gnome vanished to stage left, returning a few moments later with a silver-mounted set of fingerprints. He peered closely at them, then at the enlargement Hautley was holding before the scanner.

"Absolutely identical; no question about it.�Is that all?�I'd like to get back to my quat wunkery, if you don't mind!"

Hautley was profuse in his thanks, which partly mollified the irate mood of the withered Archivist, who promptly faded from the picture.

So.

Heveret Twelfth would seem to be legit, if Pawel Spiro was not. Interesting�... very.

But enough of this pottering around with phone calls and fingerprints. The game's afoot, and Hautley felt the old familiar itch to be about it. A swift check�confirmed that his cruiser was in readiness for instant departure. Dugan Motley, the notorious Master-Burglar of Capitan must be located, and the only clue to his present whereabouts lay with his lifelong confederate, Shpern Hufferd, who dwelt at Thieves' Haven in the Gap. Hautley decided to enship without delay, before another confounded call came in to hold his investigations up further.

And then the phone flashed again.

It was another scintillating call. But this time there was a difference. It was on an official Imperial Galactic Government frequency, as his specially installed telltale informed him. It was, in fact, a police call.

Hautley sighed, but flicked the screen into life. After all, it could hardly be another client asking him to purloin the Crown of Stars from the Crypts of the Cavern Kings of Thoth!

THE SCREEN filed with a voluptuous specimen of femininity.

"Senior Inquiry Specialist Barsine Torsche, officially requesting instructions to land and deliver a Crown commission from the Carina Intelligence Depot. Priority prime/4."

It was with difficulty that Quicksilver repressed the pungent expletive that rose unbidden to his lips. He had worked with Senior Inquiry Specialist (or S.I.S.) Torsche on earlier occasions and, while she was a decorative creature and quite efficient, he found�himself uncomfortable in her presence for some inexplicable reason. Perhaps his reluctance to endure her proximity was mere masculine modesty�the pitiful girl was throughly smitten with his virile charm, was,�in fact, madly in love with him, an emotion he did not reciprocate. Or perhaps it was due to professional pride, for Hautley found her frequent caustic comments on his conduct of a caper difficult to endure with equanimity.

Whatever the deep-rooted source of his discomfort, he did not intend to be burdened with her in any case, as he was too intrigued with this matter of the Crown of Thoth to even entertain the notion of another commission. He resolved to fob her off with a mild subterfuge.

"Regret inability to accept," he said coldly. "I am otherwise engaged at present."

"Hi, Haut, is that you? Switch on your vision, you? I thought I was talking to that creepy butler you keep around.''

He complied, permitting her to observe the stem set of his visage, but repeated his refusal in obdurate terms.

"I am considering two commissions at the moment, S.I.S. Torsche," he said, eyeing her stonily. Then, adding a lie, continued: "And have in fact accepted a retainer on one. Hence I fear my schedule is too occupied at the moment to undertake any further�"

She shaped her warm pink mouth into a tiny moue.

"Oh, aren't we hoity-toity, Hautley! But this one will interest you. The Lord Commissioner of Internal Security himself!"

"I am busy!"

A stormy look entered her undeniably lovely eyes.

"Hautley," she said between her teeth, "busy or not and retainer or no, you can't refuse a commission from a member of the Crown Cabinet! You'll just have to set your other case aside for the nonce."

He ground his teeth sourly. She was right, of course; he couldn't rebuff a Crown commission. Article XIX of his Criminal Charter was quite explicit on the point. Hautley's Charter, by the way, which licensed him as a fully accredited brother in the thieves' Guild, was issued by the Alphard Chamber of Commerce. The Alphard Anarchate was, of course, the famous star system in whose culture criminality was fully legal and honest employment not only against the law, but punishable by disembowelment with electric needles. An interesting society,�in many ways�virtualy unique. The Anarchate had been, of necessity, recognized diplomatically by the Imperial Commonwealth a few lustra ago, when its cooperation became tactically valuable during the explosive Comalte Crisis.

Hautley viewed Barsine Torsche bitterly, his silvery pupils mirroring distaste. As the immortal Sherlock of legend had his feminine nemesis in Miss Irene Adler, so Hautley Quicksilver had his Barsine Torsche. It was a pity such a wench had to be so lucious a wisp of girlish charm�it would be easy to loathe a withered spinster given to orthopedic footwear and health tonics. It was distinctly not easy to react in any other than a glandular manner to the voluptuous Miss Torsche! She�had skin like magnolia petals and thick, silky, fluffy hair of metallic indigo, filled with tiny witch lights. Her lips and eyes were dyed a watermelon pink. And between the strategically arranged interstices of her frock (a wispy thing of floating gauze in melting opal hues), could be glimpsed firm curves of tender white flesh.

Well�... she had him.

"Oh, very well," be rasped harshly. "I suppose I'll have to take a look at the commission." His thin, superbly expressive lips creased in a sardonic, mocking grin. "Just what does the Lord High Panjandrum want me to do?" A short bark of dry laughter escaped him. "Steal the jeweled Crown of Stars from the Crypts of the Cavern Kings of Thoth, I suppose?"

He knew the jesting reference would elude her, since she had not been apprised of the two attempts in the past hour to secure his services for precisely that exploit. Hence he was unprepared for the violent reaction which met his gaze in the phone's screen.

Her dewy eyes widened incredulously. Her perfect lips parted in a strangled gasp of sheer amazement. Her pallid complexion paled to an ashen hue.

"Hautley ... have you been taking ESP shots, or have you always been telepathic? How on earth did you know what the Commissioner wanted?"

ONLY QUICKSILVER'S habit of iron self-control kept his jaw from drooping halfway to his knees. Luckily his disciplined features retained their accustomed impassivity, even though inwardly he blenched from the shock of astonishment. Mastering himself, he permitted one lean hand to trigger a proximity switch.

''The b-beacon's on, Barsine. I'll guide you down."

While the radiobeacon piloted the police ship through the whirling meteor-moat of Quicksilver Castle, the lord of the manor tossed back a stiff snootful of Old Space Ranger and felt the knotted tension of his solar plexus dissolve as the potent beverage ricocheted off his tonsils and sloshed comfortingly into his abdomen. He had recovered his usual aplomb by the time Smeedley, the butler, ushered Barsine Torsche into his tower chamber.

Smeedley, nine feet tall, cadaverous and gaunt as a Zulu assegai, bowed creakily, and said in a rusty quavering voice of aristocratic accent: "Miss Torsche, Ser Hautley. Will there be anything further, Ser?"

"I think not, thank you, Smeedley. Wait. Yes. A drink, Barsine?"

She arched one eyebrow. �At nine o'clock in the morning? Oh, well. Why not?"

He deliberated. A connoisseur of the most discerning palate, he riffled through a mental selection of appropriate beverages, finally selecting a mild little liqueur, exotic but amusing.

"Two tots of Rissoveur '32, Smeedley, I think. The glasses to be chiled to 72� and the liqueur, of course, served at blood heat. A sprig of crabgrass, fresh cut, in�each glass."

A slight, approving smile spread Smeedley's bloodless lips In a rictus of admiration.

"At once, Ser."

The gaunt butler in formal black creaked his way out.

"Really hitting the old rotgut these days, aren't you, Haut?" Barsine cracked, distinctly unimpressed. "Doesn't it hit you in the old reaction time? Are you still the fastest gun in the Carina-Cygnus Arm, or getting trembly from the booze you slosh up?"

A pained expression flitted across Hautley's features.

"Please ... a morning tot of Rissoveur is a social ritual in the finest circles," he said. She grinned hoydenishly.

"Yeah. Where I come from, it's a straight gin! But never mind. To business, before that vampire butler of yours comes flapping in. I don't know how you stumbled on it, but the Commissioner picked you to lift Crown thing�I've got all the poop right here in this dossier.� She slapped it down on his desk, as it happened, right beside a similar dossier which Hautley had received only thirty-two minutes before from Herveret Twelfth.

"And, speaking of that, Haut�how the clabberdoxing scintillation did you know what the Commissioner wanted? You don't have an�Ear planted in the Depot offices, do you, or a spy-eye?"

"Of course not! It was�..."

"Well?" she demanded curiously. He smiled coolly.

"It was elementary, Barsine. Pure deduction. I couldn't explain how we professionals do these things�sheer intuition."

Her expression was skeptical but resigned. Her pink lips pouted and parted to ask another question, but just then Smeedley came wobbling into the chamber on insecure and doubtless arthritic joints, bearing two frosty drinks on an iridium salver. They toasted each other. Barsine, no epicure, tossed her drink down with a casual dip of the wrist, but Hautley savored the delicate bouquet with first the left tonsil, then the right, accepted four drops into his mouth to stimulate the salivary glands, then consumed the exquisite beverage with tranquil sips, meditating briefly on the Eleventh Proposition of Monsalietsin's Quantuum Philosophy.

Barsine watched him with a dubious look as he made a little ritual over drinking�the aromatic fluid. She looked adorably lovely in her lime-green boat-cloak and opaline frock, standing against the crystalline pane through which the ruddy skies of Carvel glimmered. Pity she was so insensible to the finer things in life, Hautley mused. Of course, the poor thing was obviously madly in love with him, and fighting it every inch of the way, which explained her rude remarks and pretense of impatience at his aplomb. Ah, well. Her affectation of dislike added a certain piquance to their relationship, but Hautley's keen eye clearly saw through the mask to the depth of her quite understandable passion for him.

This, as often happens, dampened whatever degree of ardor he might otherwise have felt for so delectable a morsel of warmly curvaceous girlflesh. By temperament he was opposed to an easy conquest and was attracted by a chill rebuttal, which always implies eventual conquest after a tempestuous seige. Or, as Quicksilver phrased it in one of his wittier versicles:

HE PUT�HIS EMPTY glass down with a click on the glass-topped desk beside the two file folders.

"Unless you want to gargle some more booze, Hautley, let's get down to business," Barsine proposed in her customary rude and abrupt manner. Hautley shot her a chill glance and riffled idly through the dossier, which contained substantially the same information as did that of the Proprietor of Canopus.

"Such a discussion is fruitless," he said suavely, "for, as I told you on the phone, I have accepted a retainer from another client."

"Hautley! Article of your Charter�"

"I have,'' he said, permitting the timbre of his voice to rise a mini-decible or two, drowning out her complaint, "a legal and binding obligation to my client. Were I to break the contract, why, by Onolk's iridium duodenum, Barsine, I could be sued for a fortune�and lose my scintillant Charter in a twinkling. You know that!" A feigned indignation seethed in Hautley's tone.

The girl regarded�him dubiously.

"When we talked on the phone,'' she said, eyeing him narrowly, "you said you were considering a commission and had accepted a retainer. Have you actually thumbprinted a contract, Hautley?"

Lying magnificently, Quicksilver acknowledged that he had in fact done so.

�I didn't mention it before because I was curious to learn why the Imperial government wants me to purloin this� whatzit�-Crown of Stars," he cleverly admitted, going on the premise that half a truth was better than none.

Her watermelon-pink lips tightened. "As to that, well, unless you're available for the job, I certainly can't give you classified information, you know ... but ... even if you are legally contracted to another client, perhaps he could be persuaded to waive your services for the moment, giving priority to the government?"

Quicksilver's mind worked with its customary speed. He could not tell Barsine the truth, i.e., that he suspected he could abscond with the Neothothic cult object within a day or two, as he did not wish to reveal to her the very interesting fact that others were in this chase for the Crown of Stars besides H.M. Government. Therefore ... To cover the pause, he poured her another dollop of Rissoveur '32 (even though the glasses had by now heated to room temperature and any connoisseur in the galaxy would have refused a tot of Rissoveur improperly chilled) and snapping open the box atop his desk, offered the girl a smoke, which she refused.

Hautley drew on his aromatique until it ignited, and pulled the pungent vapor deep into his lungs, deep in cogitation.

"And, of course, you'll understand I simply can't take your word alone, Hautley," she said primly. "I'll have to see your contract myself, in order to satisfy my superiors that you do in point of fact have a prior and legally binding contract."

"Of course,'' he murmured, mind racing. "I have it right here."

"How urgent is your client's job? Perhaps if an official of Cabinet rank ...?"

"Oh, very urgent, very urgent indeed," Hautley said firmly. "I doubt if my client could be persuaded by a mere government official ... royalty himself, you know�..."

�Well�may I see the contract, then?" she persisted.

He sighed, and snapped his aromatique in twain. From the severed unlit portion, a jet of lime-green gas erupted, wreathing Barsine's visage�in its vaporous veil. The young woman collapsed loose-jointedly on the wall-to-wall carpeting of deep-pile and priceless ormthak fur, and sprawled there for all the worlds like a marionette whose strings have suddenly been severed.

Hautley regarded the recumbent and deeply somnolent Miss Barsine Torsche with detached pity. He disliked playing such low tricks�his noble nature revolted at the necessity for subterfuge, particularly on an agent of the Imperial government�but, quite simply, he no choice.

Were Barsine's superior (a crusty and most irascible old curmudgeon named Lord Admiral Temujin J. Weatherwax III��Old T.J." to his staff) to be apprised that no less than two other parties were also after the Neothothic cult object, the entire Depot might panic, and impress their orders on Ser Hautley Quicksilver without delay. And that would never do. For always, and in every endeavor, Quicksilver chose to walk his own way, giving deference to none. As one of his more polished and lapidary versicles put the matter:

WORKING WITHOUT undue haste, but also without a single wasted motion, the cleverest agent in Near Space selected a blank contract from his file, inserted the document into the typovox and dictated eleven crisp sentences. Snapping it from the machine, he affirmed his thumbprint with practised dexterity.

He then chose, from the photograms he had taken of the digital impressions left by Heveret Twelfth on the doorjamb, a superb thumbprint. He photographed it again, reversed the negative, duplicated it upon a plastic cube in nitrate of impervium. From a pocket in his utility-girdle, which he customarily wore next to his epidermis beneath his garments, he withdrew a bulb of acid and sprayed the plastic cube with a corrosive mist.

An instant later he inked an excellent thumbprint to the contract with the plastic cube. The acid spray had eaten away the lucent substance from around the near-microscopic lines of impervium nitrate, making, in effect, a rubber stamp. The ink utilized in the process was a special mixture of his own; intermingled with the coloring matter with a chemical compound that exactly duplicated the sweaty oils which with the human shin was permeated.

He then placed the document in a sealed oven of peculiar design, concealed within a free form sculpture which stood a few feet away. This oven was a miniature gammatron accelerator, and would "age" anything placed within it by artificially induced radioactive impregnation. The document, when removed from the accelerator, would pass any carbon-14 test to which it could be put: every molecule, including the typovoxed matter and the two thumbprints, were exactly forty-seven minutes old.

The forged contract in his hand, he then bathed Barsine Torsche in a jet of counteractive gas, lifting her back into her chair.

She awoke instantly, unaware of any time lapse, due to the instantaneous action of both the narcotic vapor and its counter-agent. He proffered, with great aplomb, the fruit of his labors for her perusal. She read it carefully, not neglecting to check it for proper age with the carbon-14 meter unobtrusively attached to her left wrist, disguised as a mere bauble of gems. A tiny crease of exasperation formed between the twin indigo arches of her perfect brows.

"Well, you're right, Haut. You daren't break this one! Old XII sounds a perfect terror, and from what I've heard of his temper, I doubt if a round dozen Cabinet ministers could make him budge a millimeter. Oh, scintilance! 'Old T.J.' be frothing when he hears you are unavailable ... but about how long will it take you to vaporize this scut, anyway?" she asked, referring to the completely falacious caper outlined in the forged contract�a vital political assassination. Hautley shrugged.

"A solid month. I expect. His Dignity's enemy seems to have anticipated an attempt to scrag him. He's a clever devil," Hautley said, permitting a note of professional admiration to seep into the clinical detachment of his cool tones, as he extemporized with suave eloquence. "A surgeon has extracted the ulna bone from the right forearm. An aluminum tube has been inserted in its place, a tube packed with those new molecule-sized ultratransistors and micro-printed circuits. The miniscule gadgetry projects a field of force impervious to any material object larger than a proton�transparent, in fact, only to those more harmless octaves of the electro-magnetic spectrum such as normal gravity, average extremes of heat and light. This force shell completely armors his body�"

"Space! How does the poor bastard breathe?" Barsine asked, fascinated. Hautley's agile wits raced keenly.

"Air, within his self-imposed prison, is manufactured and re-processed by a tiny recycling plant concealed in the left tibia, which has also been replaced with an aluminum tube," he said glibly. She marvelled.

"Clever devil! With all that hardware clanking around in his innards, I should he'd be afraid of getting the hiccups and joggling something loose!"

He smiled at her jape.

"Or of taking a shower! Suppose he short-circuited the old tibia there, eh? Ha ha!"

"Ha," he joined her, "ha."

"So how do you plan to clobber ol' invulnerable�if you don't mind a mere amateur prying into, snort, snort, 'Professional' secrets?"

Did he detect a note of unseemly levity in her query?

Was it possible Barsine Torsche was not taken in?

He permitted a worrisome frown to crinkle the bland expanse of his mahogany-hued brow.

"Don't know. Studying the problem now. Rather busy, as I said before, Barsine ... �

She sighed. "Ah? So. Well, this�gal can�take a hint when she's not wanted.�

She rose lithely and went to the door. Pausing there, she turned�a keen glance on him.

"I hope you're not trying to put one over on me, Hautley Quicksilver!"

His mobile features assumed a hurt expression.

''Cause if you are, let me warn you, me bucko! 'Old T.J.' 's really boiling on this one. And Carina-Cygnus won't be big enough to hold 'Old T.J.' and you if he finds out ... well�... that's it, Quicksilver!"

A look of hurt innocence filled his mercury-colored eyes.

"Barsine! Really!"

She ground her teeth. "Oh, all right�... bye now, Haut. Got to buzz along and find your replacement�see you in the newsfax! No, don't call old Creepy�! know the way out."

And she was gone. To find a replacement for Hautley Quicksilver!

Leaning back�in the auto-adjusting pneumo, he permitted himself a small quiet smile of complacency. She would hunt far to find an agent of comparable talent�as his swift simulation of a legal contract and smoothly-concocted story gave full proof!

But now�to work. As an esteemed (and, no doubt purely legendary) pioneer of Hautley Quicksilver's profession was wont to put it�the game's afoot!

WOBBLING AND CREAKING on insecure joints, his butler and valet, Smeedley assisted him in donning working clothes, in this case what Hautley oft referred to as his "business suit." The rainment consisted of virtually a portable armory. The cuff buttons were incendiary grenades.

Each shoelace was a triplex nylon garroting-cord.

His belt buckle was a miniaturized radio transceiver whose aerial was a metallic thread indistinguishably woven through-out the warp and woof of his tunic. His shirt, of a thin but airtight fabric, was double strength, lined with a duplicate panel, inflatable, and made, in watery moments of need, an admirable life raft.

Ingenious compartments in boot heels and shoulder pads contained a variety of interesting substances and devices.

A flat flexible tube sewn into the lining of his jacket contained a virulent acid wherewith door locks could be eaten away.

One jewelled cuff link was a minute laser gun.

The other concealed a nuclear grenade capable of demolishing a medium-sized metropolis.

A back tooth, in actuality a hollow plastine receptacle, contained deadly poison.

Other teeth contained: a sleeping powder of suffcient concentration as to thrust the entire population of a small town into the of Morpheus (if admixed with the local drinking water by tossing it into the reservoir); an incredibly minute reference library of scientific and technical works which could be viewed through the microscopic lens concealed beneath the nail on his left forefinger; a variety of poisons, truth drugs, and other potent fluids and concoctions�including, I should add, a potent aphrodisiac.

Be prepared, was the Quicksilver motto. For anything!

Once strapped and belted into this amazing assortment of gadgetry, Hautley Quicksilver was virtually a one-man army.

And now to depart, after final instructions to Smeedley.

"Return the library books due next Gormsday�... water the delphiniums ... feed the Venus' fly traps ... monitor all in-coming calls ..."

"Yes, Ser Hautley."

"And above all, Smeedley, for Onolk's sake don't forget to tend my prize Prince Rupert von Hentzau odontoglossums! I plan to enter the Sirian Sector Flower Show next month, and they're bound to carry off a silver ribbon."

"Oh yes, Ser Hautley!"

Instructions given, Quicksilver bounded into his sleek little cruiser�the fastest thing in space�and launched the vessel through a camouflaged exit disguised as a crater. Up from the surface of the planetoid Carvel he rocketed, threading his way through the whirling of tiny asteroids with the skilled dexterity and deft touch of a master pilot. With a precise twirl of the wheel he avoided two sizzling meteor storms, and thus gained space at last. The ship's computer brain was thoroughly familiar with the orbits of the eleven thousand four hundred and sixty-two bodies that made up the deadly "moat" of Quicksilver Castle, and could easily have assumed the responsibility of piloting the vessel, but Hautley liked to do it on manual controls "just to keep his hand in," as he put it.

Behind and to one side of the hurtling sliver needle that was Hautley's trim little craft, a sullen spark of somber crimson glowed like a dying cod. That was the aged red Supergiant, the star Astarte, wherefrom the system had originated in primordial times.

Thieves' Haven, the outlaw planet, lay some seventeen thousand light-years towards the galactic Hub. It was a lone and sunless world, deep sunk in the black and starless rift between the innermost galactic arm, that of Sagittarius, and the midmost, second arm of the galaxy, called Carina-Cygnus. This rift between the two arms�was called ''The Gap," and thence Hautley must wend his way.

It would of course, consume some milenia of time, were he to proceed for so vast a distance at the sub-photonic velocities attainable on mere planetary drive.

Hence, as he pointed the needle sharp prow of his lean and rakish craft Hubwards, he flicked the switch that would activate special mechanisms, thus transposing his craft into that mathematically-impossible, illusory and paradoxical quasicontinuum called pseudospace.

With a bone-shaking subsonic whine, the Bettleheim-Ortleigh-Robton Drive engines engaged. Their superbly counterpoised semigears clashing smoothly in custom designed cusps of synthetic rose diamond, the drive engines built about the hurtling little craft a magnetic field of enormous force, way up in the thousand-billion-gauss range�a cocoon of magnetic lines of force of such stupendous magnitude that they warped the very fabric of space itself, bending space until it "snapped," forming a bubble of closed three-dimensional space around the sleek cruiser�in effect, creating a private little universe to contain the ship.

Within this artificial mini-cosmos, light remained the limiting velocity as in the greater cosmos beyond�but the acceleration of photonic energy within the miniature universe was several million times swiftter than�in the outer cosmos of "normal" space-time.

HURTLING TOWARD THE GAP at a relative velocity of several thousand light-years per hour, Quicksilver relaxed and switched the ship's controls over to the automatic pilot which was a portion of the computer-brain. Now to assume one of the many disguises for which he was justly famed in criminous chronicles. These were a strict necessity, as without doubt many of the outlaws inhabiting the criminal planet would recognize Hautley at a glance�and the fewer individuals who were aware of his doings, the safer he would feel.

After all, if the scofflaw class were in any way involved in this three-way contest to purloin the Neothothic cult object, as was highly probable, Quicksilver saw no reason to advertise openly his own participation�in the struggle, until conditions suggested it might be advantageous to do so. Hence, he entered a small mirror-walled cubicle where reposed the Various materials from which he affected his seemingly miraculous disguises.

The small canary-yellow dragon he had permitted to accompany him thus far in his quest. Now he removed the little creature from its customary perch on his broad left shoulder, slipped it into an iridium wire cage and left it happily crunching away at a handful of iron pyrite crystals while he sat down at the cosmeticon.

Staring at his several reflections in the multi-angled mirrors, he began swiftly and smoothly to alter his appearance not only beyond all recognition, but also beyond any detection as well. A slightly radioactive hypospray was set against his head. Lightly pressed against his flesh, it squirted a pressure jet of radionic vapor painlessly through the cells of his flesh, entering his brain via the third intersticial suture of his skull. This harmless injection provided a temporary and minute stimulus to the cyno-pituitary gland, which would within minutes bleach the ordinary mahogany color of his skin to the hue of strawberry red.

Another innocuous and fast-acting chemical spray violently agitated he hair follicles of his scalp. As he watched in the mirror, the pewter grey of his meticulous locks assumed a satiny black coloration, darkening as the tide of artificial tint crept up from the chemically stimulated roots.

Next followed a facial spray. He bathed his features with astringent vapor from a pressure bulb, whose reaction was to crease the flesh of his face with a network of semi-permanent wrinkles, which added considerably to his apparent physical age. A touch of biostatic plasmoid deftly applied to he arch of his nose, the ridge of his brow and the line of his steely jaw altered his profile physiognomy subtly but surely. This synthetic and pseudo-living plasmoid flesh would stand up to anything less than an electro-microscopic analysis.

Then followed a few minor alterations in his costume. A loose-fitting singlet and padded hose of contrasting irridescents with slight and unobtrusive pads at shoulder and spinal curvature made Quicksilver appear somewhat stooped and hollow-chested, as well as lending a false slope to his brawny shoulders.

The man who now looked back at Quicksilver from the multi-mirror was an almost total stranger. The only thing about his face, physique, posture and seeming age which could remind one of Hautley Quicksilver was the mirror-bright eyes with which his pride and inborn love of tempting danger forbade him to tamper.

Only intimate physical examination by an experienced and suspicious surgeon could disclose the subtle cosmeticry used to mask his appearance. And as for the defensive gadgetry and miniature armory of weapons with which his "business suit" was invested, only a detailed search by an electronic expert and a clever tailor could uncover those.

Quicksilver was ready for action.

And even upon the moment, the automatic pilot chimed. The ship was nearing her destination.

NOW SEEMINGLY an older gentleman of scholarly and inactive habits, a citizen of the planet Rowrbazzle 12 from his strawberry complexion and ebon locks, Quicksilver closed up the cosmeticon cubicle and stepped before the glowing control console of the ship. He relaxed the powerful magnetic lines of force that enclosed the vessel, and, with yet another bone-shivering subsonic drone, it re-entered "normal" space near the edge of the Gap.

As the ship proceeded on normal planetary rocket drive, Quicksilver mused over the several curious aspects of the case his research has thus far uncovered.

Point # 1 : Three forces, seemingly independent of each other, sought possession of the Neothothic jewelled crown. The question was: why?

Granted, the Crown of Stars was a fabulously rare artifact, worth an immense sum of money either for its intrinsic worth as an item of jewelry or for its historic and archeological value as the only known non-architectural artifact of a mysterious planetary culture, the Cavern Kings of Thoth. But either of these values hardly seemed sufficient motive for the Imperial government, a planetary monarch, and an unknown masquerader pretending to be a famous scholar, to simultaneously develop an interest in purloining the object. Why were individuals from three such widely different areas of expertise suddenly displaying such an extraordinary desire in the Crown?

An unidentified individual posing as an archeologist, but perhaps more truly of a criminal profession, a supercilious planetary prince, motives unknown; an intelligence agent, acting under orders of the Emperor's Cabinet. What did these three have in common? Desire for wealth�power�knowledge? No, it was something else, some as yet unknown factor which Hautley Quicksilver's acute perceptions had yet to untangle from this raveled knot of mixed motives and unanswered questions.

A small vertical crease, indicative of intellectual tension, formed between his ebon arched brows.

This much at least hinted at the key to the puzzle: one of the three was known to be an imposter.

Although Pawel Spiro's story hung together, and his disguise was clever enough to fool the camera�and to elude detection by a known colleague, his esteemed superior�the real Pawel Spiro was busily at work in the center of the galaxy on anthropological-archeological research, while a phony Pawel Spiro, half a galaxy away, was holed up in a glossy tourist trap of a hotel, awaiting word from the foremost private investigator in Known Space.

Who was the pseudo Spiro? Why did he want the Crown? And, perhaps more importantly, whom did he represent?

And come to think of it, was the pseudo Spiro the only fake among Hautley's three would-be clients? What of Heveret Twelfth? True, his fingerprints seemed to match those retained in official Canopan records, but that was only proof to a degree.

Quicksilver smiled thinly.�In these days of advanced technology, the criminal mind had resources vastly superior to those of the good old days. It was no longer impossible to fake fingerprints. Indeed, without greatly taxing his imagination, the galaxy's ace investigator could easily bring to mind no less than eight different ways of so doing, to wit:

THE OUTLAW PLANET in the Gap was not very much larger than his own domain of Carvel in the Chain of Astarte. And unlike the Astartean system, this one consisted of a single minor planet, rather than a belt of asteriods, a system moreover devoid of even a parent star, for Thieves' Haven drifted alone in the blackness of the abyss-like rift between the two galactic arms. Rumor had it that the planetoid had once been a rogue world wandering space until it fell under the scrutiny of a band of master space-thieves who had the worldlet terra-formed at vast expense, triggering a nuclear "round-robin� effect in the planetoidal core for heat, and stimulating the ionic field about the new atmosphere for sunlight, or a near equivalent thereof.

Landing at the planet's only spacefield, Hautley locked his ship and consulted his timepiece. Less than two hours had elapsed since he had bade farewell to Pawel Spiro back on Carvel. The imposter would presumably suspend independent operations until receiving final word from Hautley Quicksilver, who had promised to either accept or define his contract within twenty-seven hours. Twenty-five hours remained before Hautley must make up his mind. And within this interval, he must accomplish a variety of routine tasks.

He must locate Shpem Huferd, and extract from the retired accomplice of Dugan Motley the current location and present pseudonym of the Master-Burglar of Capitan.

He must secure a personal interview with this Dugan Motley, and pump him of relevant information regarding Motley's famous attempt to steal the reptillian artifact, in particular, a description of the various measures taken by the Neotbothic priesthood to protect their jewelled treasure from thievery; and the means by which Dugan Motley, and Dugan Motley alone of all the criminals who had attempted to steal the Crown, had escaped from the grip of the fanatic Crown-guardians unharmed and unpunished.

He must furthermore decide which, of the three potential clients who had applied for his services, be would accept a contract from, and if at all possible, find out who or what was behind the imposter posing as Pawel Spiro.

Quite a list of things to be done within a mere twenty-five hours, but Hautley remained undaunted by the enormity of this caper. He proceeded about his business, having berthed his craft in a rented dock.

Emerging from the subterranean docking facilities to the upper levels of the outlaw world's one city, fittingly named Hideout, be took a glidewalk into the business district.

It was a fantastic metropolis, this capital city of Crime. Fabulous avenues lined with palaces of wine and gourmet foods, as well as most of the other pleasures which the flesh fell heir to (including thirteen totally new and original vices especially invented for Thieves' Haven by a team of galactically-famed psychologists, chemists and anatomical specialists retained by the local planetary government, known as The Syndicate, a generation earlier at incredible fees). Quicksilver had never before had occasion to land on the outlaw planet in the Gap in all his excitement-packed career, and he looked forward to a tour of the incredible City of Criminals.

While he gapped and gawked at the sights, the swiftly moving power-driven glidewalk carried him through a whirling panorama of storefronts and neon illuminated signs indicative of the pleasures that awaited within.

Others rode the glidewalk besides him, of course. And there was one of these that kept an unobtrusive eye on the stoop-shouldered form of the disguised Hautley Quicksilver.

This individual, a bald-domed, grey-complexioned Orgotry in fluorescent scarlet tights slashed with dead-black piping and puckered ruffs, ostensibly coughed into a cupped hand. Actually, between hacking spasms of glottal throat-clearing, the Orgotyr whispered into a ring-radio:

"It's Quicksilver, chief. What are my instructions?"

Although Hautley knew it not, yet another, a fourth claimant was interested in the Crown of Stars!

ALL ABOUT THE GLIDEWALK whereon the disguised Hautley Quicksilver rode, closely shadowed by an unknown observer narrowly watching his every move, towered the glittering facades of gaming houses and gambling palaces wherein were installed no fewer than eleven thousand, four hundred and sixteen different games of chance devised and maintained for the sole purpose of parting a man from his munits.

For those whose tastes demanded a different sort of stimulus, there were establishments catering to bizarre tastes where�for princely fees, one could titillate even the most jaded palate by torturing an android, or synthetic human female to death, or where one could indulge in an astounding variety of narcotics, including eleven brand new ones the chemists of Thieves' Haven had invented. For those habituates so saturated with over-use of narcotic stimulants, and who thus required something rather special to send them off to Cloudcuckooland, other houses of pleasure proferred "super-boilermakers" in which thirty or forty different drugs were expertly blended, compounded and homogenized, and then injected directly into the living brain tissue.

Yet other stores offered quiet nooks where one could spend a tranquil and contemplative hour or two of quiet meditation in the racks of the galaxy's most celebrated and inclusive pornographic, necrophiliac and homophagic library, with adjacent film�collection for those troubled by a meagre vocabulary.

Against the velvet backdrop of the Gap-black sky, phantasmal illusion-signs outblazed the stellar skies of other planets with multi-hued advertising spectaculars.

SHPERN HUFFERD lived in a ramshackle development between the Diomazian Sulphur Works and the Autophan Sewage Canal, a region that could with admirable accuracy be described as odoriferous. In this section of town none of the immense and immensely expensive illusion-display signs lit up the velvet darkness of night. The dilapidated rows of prefabricated hovels were drowned in purpureal gloom, an omnipresent pall broken only by the occasional, fitful and sputtering light in crude primary colors, of a few antediluvian and malfunctioning "neon signs" which blazoned forth such curt legends as JOE'S EATS; O'LEARY'S BAR & GRILL; WUN LONG PAN'S HAND�LAUNDRY; MAXIE'S SODA-LUNCH; ZELIM QUANG'S ELITE OVO-SNAVE, and similar inscriptions.

Quicksilver left the slideway and perambulated the few remaining blocks to his goal by the time-tested expedient of shank's mare. His interchangeable followers vanished. The streets were fashioned entirely of antiquated qwikplast, much stained and splotched by age and neglect. Filthy water gurgled in noisome gutters. Sagging housefronts sagged at odd angles above the street, shadeless windows leering emptily like the vacant eyesockets of human skulls�a distinctly foetid and rundown neighborhood. That a once celebrated criminal of the calibre of Shpem Huflerd should have sunk so low as to inhabit a swinish hovel of such squalor as these ...

Sidestepping adroitly in order to avoid the rotting carcass of a starved housecat, Hautley found himself before Shpem Huflerd's address. According to the directory, the former criminal rented the first floor flat of the decayed two-story Living Home, a prefabricated hovel manufactured at a pittance by Prefabricated Hovels, Inc.

There were no lights in the bleared and grease-filmed window.

Nor did Hautley extract any reply when he sounded the buzzer. On the off chance that its mechanism might be inoperable, Hautley resorted to a manual signal and knocked, again eliciting a negative response.

Presumably, Shpern Hufferd was not at home.

Hautley glanced about him, taking in the ill-lit and dubious condition of the neighborhood. Directly across the street was another two-story building, its bottom level devoted to an establishment purveying doubtful liquors, the upper story seemingly residential in character. A few mangy local citizens lounged about under a buzzing street light, or slouched moistly in the gurgling gutters, seemingly victims to the inebriating beverages on sale in the street-level bar.

If Shpem Hufferd were out, there were no way of forming an accurate estimate as to the time of his arrival home. And Hautley distinctly did not wish to remain standing in front of his residence all night. For one thing, the neighborhood was clearly disreputable. For another, he did not wish to thaw attention to the fact that someone wished to interview the former associate of Dugan Motley.

The best idea would be to simply wait inside. Hautley bent to examine the lock. It was an antique electronic-key model, which could be opened only by the appropriate wave length to which it was attuned.

Hautley dipped one hand beneath his garments and withdrew a cunningly devised and miniature all-purpose electronic key from one of the innumerable pockets and pouches of his "business suit."

He pressed the tubelike end of this small device against the keyhole and spun the dockets. The instrument rapidly ran through several thousand frequencies in less than 1.07 seconds, eventually striking upon the precise frequency to which the lock was attuned.

The door iris dilated and Hautley stepped quickly into a pitch-black room, illuminated only by fitful flashes of neon through the grease-smeared windowpanes, through which the illuminated sign of the bar across the street shone as it flashed on and off.

Hautley felt certain none of the dilapidated loungers loitering about the street had noted his swift and unobtrusive entry into the flat.

Standing motionless in the dark room, he quested about with keen-honed and delicate senses. The air of the long-closed room was stifling. A variety of odors assaulted his nostrils with outrageous impact. There was the scent of a certain brand of rotgut brandy known as Ol' Space Marshall. Added to which was the overwhelming reek of boiled cabbage, a lingering taint of garlic, and more than a wisp of overripe garbage. Hautley's soul, that of an esthete shrank from malodorous ambush, and all but wilted before the barrage.

He turned from the door, reaching for a light switch, when, as it so very often does in Quicksilver's perilous line of work, the totally unexpected sneaked up and caught the galaxy's ace investigator flatfooted.

To be precise�lights flared, dazzling his eyes, and when his vision cleared he found himself staring directly down the cold grim throat of a General Nucleonics Mark IV coagulator pistol ...

A rasping voice sounded in his ears from behind the weapon. "One quiver of yer pinky finger, me line bucko, an' I'll zap ye down where ye stand, puttin' a foine big blood clot two seconds from yer black heart! Freeze now, blast ye, or�"

Needless to say, Quicksilver froze.

WITH A SWIFT all-encompassing glance, Quicksilver noted his immediate surroundings, including the man who stood behind the pistol. A small dingy room and a small dingy man. His opponent was old, balding, well past the 150 mark, and rapidly going to seed. Also to pot, Quicksilver noted, as he eyed the other's quivering paunch and drooping jowls.

However, the hand that gripped the coagulator was steady as a rock.

The little old man peered fiercely at him with rheumy, bloodshot little eyes. He cackled harshly, exposing a gaping maw wherein the worn stumps of two or three greenish teeth wobbled insecurely.

"That's it, me lad! Not a quiver o' yer eyelid, or I'll curdle yer red stuff to blood puddin'," he wheezed. Hautley complied with unruffled demeanor.

Hufferd, if indeed it were he, and Hautley suspected such was the case, looked�him up and down curiously.

"Never saw ye before in all me days, so I'll be askin' yer name, me lad, before I clot ye. Speak up! Who th' divil be ye, heh?�

Quicksilver's mind raced at flashing speed, weighing psycho-semantico-emotional factors, and spoke in a curt clipped voice of steely sternness.

"Captain Rex Dangerfield!" he snapped.

His verbal blockbuster had the desired effect. At the unexpected and shocking news that he held the most feared crime-fighter in the entire galaxy at gun point, Hufferd gaped, gasped, and gagged. His gun hand flinched and wavered, no longer pointing straight at Hautley's heart.

Quicksilver's right leg flashed out in a neo-karate stroke. The coagulator went flying, clattering into a corner amidst broken crockery and noisome garbage. Hautley dove on his paralyzed prey, and it took him only 1.04 seconds to secure his aged opponent in a hammerlock.

"C-captain D-dangerf-field!" Shpern Hufferd spluttered, writhing feebly in Quicksilver's iron grip. "B-but wh-what the d-divil 'ud ye be wantin' wif an ol' duffer th' loikes o' me? I haven't tipped me fumbly ol' mitt in twenny-foive year or more, I b-been livin' the peaceable loife o' a retoired, lawr-abidin' citizen an' tax-payer, I have! Thar wuz I, takin' a li'l nap in t'other room, when I heard ye unlock me door�wot was I to think, I asks ye!�so natcherly I gits me gun and comes t' see what scut be pussyfootin' aroun' me quarters. What c'd the loikes o' yez, Cap'n, be wantin' from the loikes o' me ..."

"Just one thing, Hufferd. The present whereabouts of your former partner-in-crime, the notorious Dugan Motley. Quick! Speak up, and I'll not run�you in," Quicksilver deadpanned in a level voice.

Hufferd goggled incredulously.

"Th' boss? Why, Cap'n, it's been many th' long year since I�"

His quavering voice broke of on a querulous note, and the fat little bandit sagged limply in Quicksilver's steely arms. Had he fainted from the unaccustomed shock of this encounter? Hastily, Hautley stretched him out on the dusty floor and tried to arouse�him from his swoon. Then his hands grew still, and his bright mirror-eyes narrowed to glinting icy alits ...

Shpern Hufferd would never awaken from this swoon.

A tiny poison needle bristled from behind one sagging jowl. The little old man's eyes were glazed in sudden death.

Hautley recalled the faintly audible hiss of compressed air his sensitive ears had noted a split second before the little gnome had slumped lifeless in his embrace. A needle gun! Fired from somewhere beyond the window, perhaps in the street outside ...

He sprang lithely to the rectangle of grease-smeared plastic set in the street wall of the hovel. Sure enough, a minute hole punctured the pane.

Mind flashing into high gear, Quicksilver calculated the angle of fire from a swift mental reconstruction of the position of Shpern Hufferd's body at the moment it was struck, and the angle of the needle when it entered his flesh. The shot had come from a second-floor window of the building directly across the street. Keeping well out of the line of fire, Quicksilver peered at the structure opposite. As he had already noticed, prior to entering the flat, the first floor was a bar, the second floor seemed to be of a residential nature. The upper windows were unlit, seemingly unoccupied. But the murder shot could have come from no other position.

Hautley cursed briefly in three different languages. If only Hufferd had not switched on the room lights when he bad Quicksilver at gun point! If the room had remained in darkness, the unknown assassin across the way would have had to fire blindly, and the chances were that Shpern Hufferd would be alive this moment. But now he would never speak to reveal the hiding place of the Master Burglar of Capitan ...

Quicksilver exploded into a whirlwind of action. There was little if any time to be wasted. Valuable intelligence could be wrung from the unknown assassin, but Hautley must be swift to capture the villain before he eluded pursuit by mixing with the crowd.

The galaxy's ace criminal ground his weight upon one certain edge of his left bootheel, wherein a hollowed compartment contained a micronegagrav of his own exclusive design. The cunning device engaged, nullifying the gravitational forces about Hautley's body.

He hurtled into the air in a long spring of uncoiling power. The window of Shpem Hufferd's flat splintered into a cloud of gritty particles as Hautley's body zoomed projectile-like through the aperature�arched into mid-air above the foetid street�flipped head over heels�and came crashing through the window of the room above the bar.

Hautley landed in a fighting crouch, gun at the ready, amidst a litter of shattered plastic.

But the room was empty!

A BROKEN-DOWN BED slumped in one comer of the room, and against the further wall, the remains of a cheap pneumo sagged. Cheap garish 3D girlie prints hung on the walls. The floor was uncarpeted, sheathed in wear-resistant plastic, and liberally sprinkled with dust, aromatique butte, and even a used ovo-snave wrapper or two. It stank of mildew, of old meals, cheap booze, and smoke.

But it was empty. The assassin, or assassins, had fled. Hautley sprang to the door and tried it, but it was locked. The murderer of old Shpern Hufferd must have left only an instant or two before, for the chemical stench of a needle-gun still hung on the stale, vitiated air.

Hautley darted one hand into his "business suit," and withdrew a slim silvery tube which he pointed at the door. Time was of essence; he could easily pick the lock with his all purpose electronic key, but precious seconds were a-wasting. The silver tube flashed blindingly. The plastic door sagged, its center panel sprawling limply like wet tissue. The door frame around the lock dribbled down in rivulets of smoking, stenchful stuff that puddled the floor and left the metalic lock still fastened, hanging onto the wall's edge. Hautley sprang through the smoking gap into a dusty ill-lit hall. Empty.

At the end of the hall was a staircase which led down to the bar on the first floor. Quicksilver went down into a large room crowded with shabby loungers inbibing pungent fluids, smoking noisomely, filing the air with a concatenation of odors and gabble. He caught the eye of a huge red barkeep in a checkered apron, chewing on the stump of an aromatique. He beckoned the fellow over with a hick of his fingers.

"What's yers, bo?'' the oaf growled around the much-chewed stump of his smoke.

"Information," Quicksilver said crisply, showing him a bright iridium coin in the palm of his hand.

The fellow leered inquiringly, revealing an uneven row of muss-green molars.

"Ask ahead, sport," he invited.

"The rooms upstairs�any of them taken?"

"Mmph. Lessee now. Yer can take yer pick, bud. De Mozart Room, de John Philip Sousa Room. de Oiving Boilin Room, dey is all free. Oney one taken is de Meredith Wilsson Room, what is let to a party till 2:30."

Quicksilver smiled thinly. "Cultural, aren't we!"

"De ol' songs are de best, kid," the scarlet-visaged barkeep leered, chewing on his smoke.

Quicksilver cast a swift eye about the crowded noisy saloon. It was a motley horde, the spewings of the gutters of a hundred worlds. But nowhere amidst the seedy loungers did his keen orb perceive a grey-complexioned Orgotyr�in fluorescent scarlet tights slashed with dead-black piping and puckered ruffs, a kindly-faced Wollheimian in severely-tailored spray-on slacks with triple-gathered dockets down the cuff, a plum-skinned Schloim from Pazatar 9, or a white-furred and dual-headed entity from Wolverine 3. (May your historian point out that Hautley Quicksilver had known he was being followed all the time? I just wanted to call to your attention.)

Hautley showed the barkeep the coin glinting in his palm again, then asked who had taken the Meredith Wilsson room for those hours. The barkeep spat into the sawdust-strewn floor, and shrugged with a mountainous heave that set his various bellies and chins bobbling gelatinously.

"Jeez, mac, I dunno who he is. Stranger�in town, never sawr him before . . ."

"Can you describe him, my good man?"

"Mmmf," the barkeep mused, dubiously, rubbing one ham-sized hand over his stubbled jowls as if to massage into heightened activity some dormant organ of recollection.

"Yeah, I guess so . . . lessee ... he was a grey-complexioned Orgotyr in flourescent tights slashed wid dead-black pipin' an puckered ruffs. I t'ink!"

"I thought so. And for what reason did he retain the accommodations of your upstairs suite?"

"Said he had a game goin'."

Hautley's mirror-bright eyes flashed like chips' of ice.

"And so he did, my man. The kind of game you hunt with a gun."

Hautley tossed the fellow the coin and returned to search the Meredith Wilsson Room swiftly but efficiently. He had not thought to be so lucky as to actually discover a clue, but the Gods of Chance were with him for a change. Near the shattered window he came across a curious talisman whose nature he could not at the moment recall. It was a bit of odd purple metal, no larger than a humanoid thumbnail, worked into the likeness of a hollow ellipse with a smaller circle contained within it�a symbol seething like an eye. Strange. He could not recall having ever seen its like. He nonetheless slipped it into a pocket for a closer examination at a later time.

Returning to the street by way of the noisy saloon, he reentered Huflerd's flat by means of the electronic key. Even though the former confederate of the Master Burglar of Capitan was defunct, Hautley hoped to find something in his quarters which might reveal the present location of Dugan Motley. Anything would do�an address book perhaps, or an old letter.

The light was burning. As soon as Hautley entered the room, he stopped dead ...

The assassin, whether it was the grey-complexioned Orgotyr in fluorescent tights slashed with dead-black piping and puckered ruffs, or one or another of his compatriots, had been busy while Quicksilver had interrogated the crimson-faced barkeep.

For the flat had been ransacked. It was a shambles; And any clue to Dugan Motley's hiding place that Shpern Hufferd might have had hidden away, must certainly have been discovered during such a thorough search.

Once more the Opposition had scored. Lips tightened grimly, eyes cold as intergalactic space, Hautley vowed silently that this would be their last coup at his expense.

But be was wrong ...

THE SHABBY APARTMENT had, quite literally, been turned upside down. Everything had been sifted through, including Hufferd's garbage. The room looked as if a double-barreled cyclone had held a track meet in it for a Boy Scout troop of midget tornadoes. Even the rotting furniture had been tom apart. Hufferd's ragged clothing had been torn up the seams; the grease-flecked, fly-spotted stikfast plastic wallpaper had been ripped off the wails in sheets.

It looked completely hopeless. The enemy would surely not have left any clues to the whereabouts of Dugan Motley laying around for Quicksilver to find, after this kind of a ransacking. Hautley's only hope for locating Dugan Motley, now that Shpern Hufferd slept in Abraham's bosom, lay in finding a due amidst the rubble. So he swiftly but minutely searched the wreckage.

Twenty minutes later he found the clue for which he searched. He was leafing rapidly through the books in Hufferd's small collection, when he noticed that one of the titles was, by a suspicious coincidence, the memoirs of Dugan Motley himself, a colloquial and not-unflavorful tome called Crime Does Not Pay (Much), disseminated by the Brasilia Press, Sol III, Centaurus Sector, Quadrant II. A passing glance at the title page revealed something stamped with smudged red ink above the publisher's address: a series of code-numbers.

107-A-s/M.

He looked at the cryptic inscription thoughtfully. It seemed to be nothing more than one of those public library subject codes so enigmatic to the layman. The only difference was that Hautley Quicksilver was no layman! Among his enormous fund of miscellaneous expertise, was a thorough familiarity with the common subject codes used through the civilized galaxy�the Fenster-Cosgrove Decimal System�and this was not it. The Fenster-Cosgrove code was numerical only, and this included alphabetical symbols.

Quicksilver's lips twisted grimly�in a quirk of humor. It would have fooled most searchers�the book itself was certainly battered and thumbed enough to pass for an ex-library copy�and the stamped row of symbols was so ordinary, most people would not have thought twice about them. But Hautley Quicksilver was not "most people," and most people were not Hautley Quicksilver!

It was a clever gambit, hiding a clue to Motley's habitat on the one thing in the whole apartment which had the name of Dugan Motley printed all over it ... but what did the symbols mean? 107-A-s/ M. It was not a phone number, that was obvious: they had sixteen digits. Nor was it a homing system wave length, and certainly not a set of galactographic coordinates. What, then. could it ...

A street address!

Of course! His admiration for old Shpern Huflerd's intelligence multiplying by quantum-jumps, Quicksilver swiftly committed the number to memory. The old purloined letter trick! Leaving the "concealed" information right smack out in the open for anyone to trip over it! He grinned. and looked at the title page again.�In full, it read:

WHILE EN ROUTE, Quicksilver again altered his outward appearance. Blue facial pigmentation, a scalpwig of scarlet bristles, a padded pneumatic suit, and he was now one of the Blue Nomads of Cordova 6, Aristocrat Class, and obviously a tourist from his ritual accouterments.

The ship's computer brain spoke through the wall-vox, reminding of the time. He ordered a snack.

Over a luncheon of boiled wyvern tongue and diced karoly, Quicksilver consulted the ship's small but remarkably comprehensive reference library. Ordovik's Galactic Religious and Related Symbolism gave the answer to the question of the Purple Eye he had found in the Meredith Wilsson Room above the bar.

The metallic token stood for the planet Thoth itself. And there could be little question that was more than mere coincidence. Obviously, Grey-Complexion and his pals were also after the Crown of Stars, which made yet a fourth entry in the race for the enigmatic cult object! Hautley read the relevant information in Ordovik, to see if he could learn anything else of value.

The circle within the ellipse represented the planet, which, as it happened, was ringed with a whorl of phosphorescent purple vapor. This particular form of the symbol identified its possessor as a member of the Neothothic Priesthood. Were the fanatic cultists aware their treasure was the object of plots? Or was the Eye what might be called a purple herring, planted to confuse and mislead him?

Time (as the ancient maxim ran) would tell.

Next he checked his library for information on Sol III, a planet with which he was not familiar. He learned the planet was an oblate spheroid of medium size with an oxygen-base atmosphere and one grav. Its native culture was very old indeed, although somewhat backwards technologically. The native name for Sol III was �Earth��quaint conceit, that!�and the Centaurus Sector lay in the Orion Spur, that minor archipelago of suns that jutted rimwards from the Carina-Cygnus Arm of the galaxy.

The leading native language was called Portingee or Portuguese or something like that. Sampling it, Hautley grimaced delicately: an uncouth, barbarous jargon, but he supposed he must subject himself to it. He unfolded the hypnopedia from the wall; dialed the appropriate file number, and settled down before whirling lights for a brief snooze from which he would awaken within an hour or less, his mind artificially "imprinted" with a complete colloquial familiarity with the local native langauge, social customs, cultural mores, etc.

When he awoke, the ship bad already emerged from the mathematical paradox in which it traveled at ultraphotonic velocities, and it was with a slight headache and a sour eye that Quicksilver viewed the muddy looking planet that swam up towards him in the viewplate.

Only one moon�how bizarre!

He spiraled down into a soupy atmosphere and hung in mid-air while the sphere revolved beneath him, until the continent called South America slid beneath him. He touched down at Brasialia, and emerged from the ship.

Now to find Dugan Motley! He hoped it would not take long. As be selected an aircab�there were no glidewalks to be seen, and you could not get anywhere in the capital city of Brasilia unless you want to hoof it on the city's odd mosaic-paved stationary ways�be wondered why, of all the planets in the civilized galaxy, Dugan Motley would have chosen so remote and stagnant a backwater as this little planet, a stellar mediocrity if ever he saw one.

Probably nothing had happened here since Time began.

His aircab ascended into the steamy drizzle. The driver was surly and sullen�at first anyway. Once he sized up Quicksilver as a free-wheeling Galactic tourist with a pouch full of munits, be became more cooperative. Judging from this specimen, the Earthmen were slim, brown-skinned little people with straight black and ebon eyes. And to judge from their general demeanor, it seemed they still harbored a grudge-feud against Galactics. As the wheezing little aircab clove the rainy sky on its sputtering rotors, Hautley idly wondered how long it had been since Galactic Imperial forces had opened up quaint portion of the Orion Spur to the civilizing influences of a superior culture. A modest inquiry directed at the swarthy little driver, elicited, interspersed amongst some foul language and a number of pungent epithets, the information that the Conquest had occured way back in A.D. 1968, according to the local calendar. From the lowness of this numerical designation, Hautley assumed "1968"' must have been at the very dawn of Earthling civilization. In all the millenia since passed, the Earthlings did not seem to have improved their technological levels with particular alacrity, he noted, appraising the aircab itself, virtually a museum-piece, with its ungainly nuclear power-pack, which must have occupied a good cubic foot of space ...

Puttering along at a dismally slow crawl of 500 m.p.h., the cab left the city of Brasilia proper, and entered into airspace above its several suburbs. Before Hautley bad completed smoking his second aromatique, they were above endless squares of suburban homes, amusing antiques with their biodomes which thermostatically simulated a perfect Nordamericano climate and each with its identical elm tree on the front yard and a two-'copter garage�in the rear. Now they were over the fashionable Matto Grosso suburb.

The farther they flew, the higher the fare mounted, and the higher the fare mounted, the more sizable grew the potential tip in the driver's expectant mind, and the more sizable proportions the tip assumed, the more affable grew the surly little cabby. He became, in fact, downright cordial, and, as they began to near their destination, he bad unthawed to the degree of volubly pointing out the local sights. Such as the marina at the mouth of the Orinoco River, Blasco Ibanez National Park, and the replica of the Lost City of "Z" for which a local folk hero called "Colonel Fawcett" had been searching when he met a grisly and enigmatic end somewhere in the trackless and swampy wilds of the great Amazonian jungle whose matted wilderness had once sprawled in oozy grandeur where now block after block of suburban homes marched in stereotyped squalor. (This exact-size duplicate of the City, Hautley learned from the now loquacious cabby, gratuitously passing on quaint nuggets of local color, had been coustructed entirely from tens of thousands of "Mr. Frosty" sticks contributed by the schoolchildren of the Earth. Sadly, for antiquarians such as Quicksilver, the Lost City of �Z" had been torn down some centuries ago so that a fly-in video theatre could be constructed on its site by an enterprising realty entrepeneur.)

Ah! progress! thought Hautley, wryly.

ONE HUNDRED AND SEVEN Avenida san Miguel proved to be a palatial mansion whose stately lines reflected the well-aged patina of an aristocratic colonial culture. It was prefabricated entirely out of pastel nonresinous plastics, in a style which nostalgically reminded Hautley of childhood visits to grandma's farm. This imposing structure rose amid flowering parks with gracefully meandering walks and a clutter of greenhouses and comparable outbuildings of similar nature. The old boy (Quicksilver mused) has certainly done all right for himself!

Hautley's driver landed the aircab with a bounce and a thump that must have loosened half the nuts and bolts holding the craft together. Hautley, however, was grateful to have come down�in one piece. From the sounds it had made in flight, the antiquated vehicle either had a bad case of asthma, or could be expected to blow a gasket or lose a venturi at any moment during flight. Quicksilver paid the exorbitant fare, added a gratuity whose sheer opulent munificence made the cabby's toes curl with ecstacy; and rang the doorbell.

He proffered his card to the robutler, eschewing, for just this once, a nom de plume, and while waiting, glanced about him curiously. Everywhere was rose-marble from far Capuchine and grillwork of fine Phriote craftsmanship, chastely ornamented with a zircon-studded chromium relief illustrative of various culture heroes from the local religion (Juarez, Mickey Mouse, Fidel Castro, Zorro and Joan Blondell, to be precise.) Hautley's sardonic brows mounted. What luxury! What taste! Dugan Motley, it seemed, had certainly invested his criminously-gotten gains wisely and well ...

A deep-chested foghorn voice in full-throated bellow interrupted these cultural musings.

"By dog, the great Quicksilver himself landing on mine doorstep, it is! Scintillate me for a no-good, a joy it is for you to meeting up with me�no?�

Surging mountainously in advance of the prim and staid robutler, came Dugan Motley himself, all seven foot-three inches and 325 pounds of him, dwarfing the automataton as he waddled into the hall. A gigantic, fiercely-bristling piratical beard of flaming crimson, twinkling eyes merry and bright and blue as the earth sea, Caribbean, he lumbered forward, his immense paunch of heroic, nay! mythological proportions swinging from side to side as he strode, with one fat iridium ring glittering from his left earlobe.

Beaming smiles and thundering forth articulate welcomes and little goat-cries of enthusiasm, he bore down on the startled Quicksilver like a super-dreadnaught descending in full force upon a tiny rowboat, enveloping him in a vast, bonecrunching bear bug, thumping him on the back with pats of spine-pulverizing impact; and firing off floor-shaking salvos of hearty booming laughter that caused the bric-a-brac to jingle, several alabaster busts to quake on their fluted pedestals and aroused seismic waves of tinkling among the crystal chandeliers.

The Master Burglar ushered Quicksilver into a first-floor den only a few microns smaller that the Grand Imperial State Audience Chamber itself. Pushing his guest into the seductive embrace of a cozy pneumatique that instantly adjusted to his contours and began a subtle massage job on his shoulder muscles, Dugan waddled over to the wall and thumbed a dial.

The wall sank into the floor soundlessly, revealing to Hautley's stunned gaze the most astounding collection of cut-crystal decanters filled with potables of every hue in the spectrum�an alcoholic's dream of the Land of Oz.

Roaring with Falstafian joviality, Dugan Motley grinned through the bristling bush of his bright beard.

"You, my friend, the great Quicksilver of about whom I have so much heard, you will drink�what?" He gestured expansively, using for the gesture a hand only slightly smaller than a medium-sized ham.

"Your choice you will taking, please, of two hundred and eleven thousand, four hundred thirty-six different varieties of booze, rotgut and panther's sweat (as the earthly Ancients would say, ho ho). So what is it you are choose? Or to the smoking perhaps-maybe? Sniff? Inject? Nasal-spray? Nerve center electrostimulus? Ovo-Snave? You ask�I got!" he boomed, crimson with the flash of hospitality.

"In other words�name my poison, eh?" Quicksilver smiled. For once his aplomb was overwhelmed by the sheer prodigality of the Master Burglar's generosity. He assumed a judicious air and pondered the row of sparkling decanters.

"Well. . . Chateau Moskowitz, Dugan, if you have it."

"If I am having it�to laugh, to laugh it is! Seventeen more bottles I am' having than the Emperor himself in the Imperial booze collection, har-har." Dugan slapped his wobbling paunch with one massive hand, a wallop that would have staggered a bullock. ''The bottles, the drinking, it is a lonely, sick old man's only joy," he snorted. "But no, yes�scut me for a snazzer, I having the same, by dog!" Waddling over to the wall of spirituous beverages, the fat man selected a crystal bottle.

"Vintage of '022, is okay being by you, mine boy? Heh?" he rumbled inquiringly.

Hautley nodded. "A good year, I believe, yes."

Dugan slopped the priceless beverage into two diamond-studded cups and they toasted each other.

"To crime," Quicksilver proposed aptly.

"Too crime, har har!"

They drank.

DUGAN MOTLEY gargled down his brew with snorting appreciation, and wiped the back of his hand across his whiskery mouth.

"Pfthaa! Hot damn and by dog, now, but that has the genuine old-fashioned Moxie, or am I be-lying in my molars, heh? Heh!" he belched.

"Excellent," Hautley commented. Judiciously he swizzled the palid sparkling wine about the outer rim of the goblet with a practised twist of the wrist. He threw back his head to languidly savor the bouquet with first the left nostril, then the right, and then with the left again, as it was particularly sensitive.

"A charmingly unpretentious little wine," he pronounced, after sampling it thoughtfully. "Ever so cautiously verging on audacity, but sweetly retiring from the brink, blushing, as it were. But pleasant, very ... ah ... humble, but touched with an amusing degree of self-confidence."

"Hot damn," Dugan Motley rumbled, admiringly. Hautley inserted the very tip of his tongue into the fluid and sipped frowningly.

"Hmm ... from the, ah, the west side of the vinyard, I should say," he continued. "More sun in the afternoons, you know," he improvised, at Dugan's gape of non-comprehension. "Brings out the tannic acid in the soil, of course. Yes ... on the whole, a very hospitable little wine. Very."

Dugan's huge red face split in two with a grin that revealed a display of ivories that would have quickened the heart of a pianist.

"Ho, it is the true connoisseur, this Quicksilver, by hot damn and hot dog! What expertise and know-how, not to mentioning the savvy too! Oh, the joy it is to an old lonely sick man's heart, the very sight of you is bringing,�the great Quicksilver!"

"Happy to meet you, too," Hautley said. "I've always been an admirer�"

Dugan's cement-mixer voice roared on over Hautley's polite interpolation like a bulldozer sliding over a cabbage patch. "Upstairs�! can show you!�I am keeping scrapbooks full of you, yes! That time on Zanuck 3 when the ruby eye from the idol of N'gumba-Yoh-Yoh the Corn Goddess you are the stealing of! What finesse! And the timing, how smooth!"

"Tut, now!" Hautley said modestly.

"And the kidnaping for the huge ransom of that Prince from Niekas 12�how you are, with the adroits and the subtles, too, hoy! And him the Prince, too, a forty-foot Crocodile Man! Oh, the marvelousness of it all! To an old man's heart it is like a breath of the good old days ..."

Against his innate sense of modesty, Quicksilver could not help but bask before the warmth of this praise like earth poet of pre-antiquity Walter Savage Landor before the fires of life.

"Old!" he protested, rallying the old bandit. "Why, Dugan you sound like a real old-timer, but from the looks of you, I'd swear you're not a day over two hundred! Come on, now, I'd thumbprint an oath to the fact."

"Oh, har har har!"

They joshed back and forth over the sparkling wine, as two veteran professionals will upon their first meeting. But it was grim business that had brought Hautley speeding to this quaint backwater of a planet, and he was impatient to get the social amenities out of the way so that he could get down to the brass tacks of business, as it were. He had no slightest doubt in mind, that Dugan Motley would refuse to give him the inside information he required. For, as yet, he had not found a chance to reveal to the bluff, swaggering old space-pirate the disquieting news that the evil forces against whom Hautley was opposed in a duel of wits had ruthlessly murdered in cold blood Dugan's old partner in crime, helpers, inoffensive Shpern Hufferd.

For a brief while, however, he delayed passing on that unhappy news, and the two supercriminals toasted each other in the sparkling beverage and recounted old exploits, lovingly discussed the fine points of technique, and fingered over with the appreciation some of the mightiest deeds in the annals of criminality. But, then, once the social amenities were exhausted, the Master Burglar came swiftly to the point.

"So." Fixing Hautley with an inquiring eye. "Now, not for the compliments exchange are you visiting old Dugan Motley, eh? No. Nor for the reminiscence doing, eh? Quicksilver, my friend, you have business in mind, right I?"

"Right," Quicksilver agreed.

"Then shall we to it, pell-mell?"

"DUGAN, OLD BOY," Hautley began without preamble, "you are the one man in the galaxy who tried to turn the Crown of Stars trick and came back with his throat uncut, even though you didn't manage to snaffle the gemmy thing. What I want to know is very simple. To Wit:

OF THE FOUR intruders, he noticed that one bore a General Nucleonics Mark IV coagulator. The second fiend was armed with a Cariocan boomerang-dirk of razor keen-edge knife-wood. The third aimed a deadly little ionic flasher the size of his little finger, but potent enough in destructive potential to reduce this princely structure to smouldering cinders.

The fourth hefted a cross-compensating megawatt neuronic-paralyzer tube with sawed-off muzzle and a Freggley-Smythe-Wickett Model Alpha-12 robot-aimed radar-sighted spotter.

Here�s a deadly crew, Hautley sighed.

Still seated immobile, he delicately and unobtrusively began shifting his weight in such a manner as to exert particular pressure on his left boot-heel, which was hollowed and contained therein a pressure-sensitive charge of flash-powder. Using the subtle arts of muscle-control Hautley had learned as a wee lad from the Adepts of New Tibet, or Blavatsky 3, as it was known to the tourism guide-books, he allowed the exertion of extraordinary thrust to build up�using, of course, only those sinews from kneecap to heel, the rest of his body lax as flaccid wax.

But this time, to no avail ...

"Plax off, hubby!" the grey-complexioned one snarled, lifting one cruel lip in a nasty sneer. "Forget all about the charge of pressure-sensitive flash powder in the left boot heel, or I'll air-condition your liver and your duodenum!"

Hautley sighed, but complied, permitting the thrust to slacken. Of course, the grey-complexioned Orgotyr in fluorescent scarlet tights slashed with dead-black piping and puckered ruffs had completed his natty sartorial ensemble with a set of X-ray contact lenses�how could Hautley have overlooked so obvious a gambit?

You�re getting mighty lax, he told himself severely.

Purpling with indignation, Dugan Motley huffed and wheezed like a beached Ore. Apoplectic fury seethed in his stout old heart. Incoherent with boiling rage, he rumbled and snorted sulphurously. Hautley keenly realized that any moment now the old war-horse would do something foolish, like charging the four intruders like a bull walrus�in mating season. He must do something quickly, to stave off this suicidal outburst on the part of his fat old host, whom he had unmeaningly embroiled in a private feud.

"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.

"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.

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.

"Identify yourself at once! Screech, crackle. No ship permitted on or about, whee, ziggle, this planet by Section 12, Paragraph Z of our Charter of Planetary Sovereignty with your zeek, wheetle, Imperial government!" the irate Archimandrate sizzled, obviously having worked up a fine, ecclesiastical frenzy.

"Hi, there!" Hautley beamed jovially. "Sorry, friend, but I can't budge. Cracked my only Spasmodic Frammistator right smack in two coming through a nasty gravity-vortex a parsec back. Lucky to be able to transpose into Normal so near a fine inhabited-type planet like yours!"

"What? Zeek, week, weezle. What ship are you?"

"HMS Pinafore, out of New Poughkeepsie, Altair, bound for Y'ha-nthlei in the Askham Cluster, friend. I am the Most Honorable John Jacob Jingleheimer-Smith, second son of the Duke of Poughkeepsie, owner and pilot, and this is my ... ah ... secretary, Miss Ethel Glutz. Request-permission-to-land-for-emergency-repairs."

The irate Archimandrate burst into a superb torrent of profanity (revolving on rather recondite mythological Is symbolism derived, no doubt, from the Neothothic cultus). While he seethed and bubbled sulphurously,�in bets between zeek wheetles, Hautley kept a bland, faintly embarrassed expression in place, but studied the Thothite narrowly. The people of Thoin�IV were descended from nine-point-nine homonid norm stock, but the preponderance of monoatomic fluorhydrates in their soil and atmosphere had, over the fourteen-generation timespan since Frist Landing, embued their features with a delicate and not unattractive shade of mingled puce and mauve. Solar radiation from their primary (a Blue Giant), filtering through the weird ring of purple neon which encircled the planet, had tinctured their facial hair a peculiar rare shade of canary yellow. Hautley thought the combination a not unpleasant one; rather decorative, actually.

He had read about this planet's ring of purple gas: it was a galactic rarity. At one time, Thoth had a moon, but the planet being a very old one, its sole satellite had eventualy reached Roche's Limit and had disintegrated some centuries before. Since the satellite had been a solid globe of neon-ice, perhaps the debris of some comet's tail, a plume of free gas which condensed aeons ago into the ice ball, the kinetic energy released by the moon's destruction had produced heat, returning the ice-sphere to neon gas again. The vaporized ice-moon find formed extraordinary ring of violet gas through the simple action of centrifugal force.�So rare and extraordinary was it, that this natural feature was listed in the Tourists Guide to Centrci Derghis (117th Edition) as one of the Seven Hundred Wonders of the Universe.

While these thoughts had passed through Hautley's mind, the Archimandrate, having temporarily exhausted his supplies of religious invective, broke off, wheezing.

Hautley amiably took up the burden of the conversation.

"Sorry, Padre," he grinned amiably, "but we have no choice�nor do you. According to the first article of the Universal Space Emergency Act of 11,493 Imperial Calendar, as ratified by the entire Imperial Enclave and countersigned by His Supreme Intelligence the Emperor Emil�Fotheringay XIV�and I quote�'No planet may refuse shelter, haven, aid or sustenance to a Distressed Spaceman, as defined herein, under�full penalty of economic sanctions.� End quote. And I might also call your attention, padre, to the Humane Activities Act of 11,483, Article Seven, paragraphs 3, 12, 27, and Appendix F�"

"All right, all right!" Under the barrage of expertise, the stiff-necked ecclesiastic wilted. �You and Miss Glutz may descend in your dinghy, but be certain your pile is on 'neutral' and your craft in a stable orbit. And don't cal me 'padre'!"

Curtly the Archimandrate gave detailed landing instructions. It would seem that Hautley and Barsine could not just land any old place, but must follow very specific directions and descend in one certain area. Hautley recorded the landing instructions and broke the connection.

Barsine was still sizzling. "Miss Ethel Glutz, am I" she said with a certain touch of coldness in her mellow mezzo-soprano. "No doubt that ridiculous name reflects your true feelings for me, you louse. Listen here, Hautley�"

He stemmed her flow of invective with a lifted palm.

"Please," he said, with a pained expression. "There just might be an audio spy beam fixed on us from Thoth. So remember, I am Ser John or Very Honorable. And no temper. We are working now�Ethel."

She went into a chill silence, which was exactly what he had wanted. He was not really worried about the possibility of any converse between them being carried to listening ears below via aural scrutiny. A planet whose inter-world communications rig was so antiquated (zeek, zizzle) would hardly have installed anything so sophisticated as an audio-conductor beam ...

They cast off the dinghy and drifted down Thothwards.

THOTH, OR THOIN IV, was a small, cold, windy ball of rock. Bleak, barren, devoid of tree or leaf�a wilderness of stone stretching off on every side. No wonder the ancient and extinct Cavern Kings had constructed their unique civilization underground.

They were met at the landing stage and escorted from their craft by a silent group of priests in lizard-suit regalia, including dragonish false heads with eye-holes th the throatplates and imitation claws. Hautley's bland attempts to chafer with the ecclesiastics was severely rebuffed. One and all, the priests virtually radiated disapproval on all wave lengths.

The portly Archimandrate conducted them personally to the quarters apparently set aside for uninvited guests. The trip was short and swift, but Hautley did manage to observe something of the remarkable architectural style for which the extinct super-reptiles were widely known: a subtle matter of sloping walls, multiplanal ceilings and chambers of dodecahedral rather than cubicular format. Oddly impressive, in a non-Euclidian sort of way.

The Spartan simplicity of their quarters was depressing, to say the least. Two narrow cots with a privacy partition set between. Beside each cot stood a berrywood stool, a small three-legged tabouret for personal effects, and a washbasin. The walls themselves, eye-wrenchingly leaning awry at bewildering angles, were devoid of ornament or color. They were left to their own. devices as soon as they had reached the cell. The only reply to Hautley's amiable flow of chatter had been a curt, snappish remark to the effect that their dinner would be served in two hours, while Temple artificers wrought repairs in the fractured Spasmodic Frammistator. The lock clicked in the door and they were alone.

Hautley stretched out on the lumpy cot and smoked. It would seem that the frequent and aimless attempts to steal the Crown of Stars had developed within the breasts of the Neothothic priesthood an unhealthy degree of suspicion towards chance droppers-in. He had no doubt their quarters were bugged as thoroughly as Thoth's limited technology permitted. This was, in fact, more than Hautley's hunch. While being whisked via various shortcuts to their present abode, Hautley felt the warning tingle of a penetrascope which must have been in one or another of the chambers adjoining the corridor. This brief but penetrating subelectronic tickle was the response of his sensitive nervous system�to the bath of theta-beams emitted by the scope, as they searched his physical structure down to the molecular level. He remained unruffled by the occurance. Anticipating a penetrascope, he had abandoned his customary "business suit" this once, and the equipment he did carry was completely unobservable by any, even sophisticated, means.

Using the eye-blink code devised by Imperial Intelligence, Hautley conveyed this and other relevant warnings and information to Bansine, while carrying on, at the vocal level, with a brainless stream of bright chatter. When dinner arrived it was spooned out by a grumpy old frater who ignored Hautley's cheery greetings as pointedly as he was swift to pocket the tip. D�jeuner by the way, was not exactly up to Hautley's accustomed level of gustatory expertise�a soppy affair of lukewarm gruel and buttermilk. No doubt healthy enough, but hardly Hautley's idea of an ideal din-din.

Night fell. Here in the underground city it might have been hard to tell, except that about seven o'clock the lights went out automatically. This was what Hautley had been waiting for. Within split seconds of the falling of abrupt darkness, Quicksilver made his move. His equipment for this caper was merely two simple articles: a self-inflating balloon dummy of approximately Hautley's bodily dimensions, which under cover of darkness he whisked from behind the portable light-baffle he had carried invisibly into the citadel, thence whisking himself out of sight behind the second of the two articles, the light-baffle itself. This was accomplished within split seconds. He presumed that even if their quarters were under infra-red surveillance during the hours of darkness, the lethargic fraters would need at least a few seconds to make the change-over from visible light surveillance to the nightsight variety. During those few precious mini-seconds, he became hidden from any form of vision behind the baffle, while the rubber dummy took his place in the cot, with the covers drawn up over its head.

At Barsine disrobed on the other side of the partition, they exchanged a few final phrases, then settled down, ostensibly, to sleep ...

In a flash the invisible Quicksilver was out of the room, having picked the lock by an ingenious system of conflicting magnetic currents. The corridors were poorly lit by a system of night lights. Hautley moved through their coiling maze without faltering. His studies of Neothothic architecture had suggested to him that the treasure vault wherein the cherished cult object was kept would be concealed most probably in a circular sub-basement directly below the main body of the cavern-city, which was the only settlement on the inhospitable little world.

He wove his agile path past formidable barriers�guards, light-traps, alarm-triggered cameras and automatic self-sighting disruptor cannons (all of which he eluded, since the light-baffle rendered him completely invisible). The usual death-traps and poised weights were child's play to avoid. Fierce watchdogs he simply strode past, having temporarily paralyzed their keen sense of smell with a potent deodorant spray. This unimpressive gamut run, he found himself within the lowest sub-basement within less then 22 minutes. This was it: the sanctum sanctorisimus of the whole shebang! Beyond that door, if his careful calculations proved correct, he should find the fabulous Crown of Stars itself! He manipulated magnetic forces,�and the door swung open ...

Utterly appalled to the roots of his being, Hautley reeled in mind-numbing shock!

Of course, he had suspected something like this. Some sort of incredibly ingenious, supra-humanly clever, diabolical method by which the Crown would be protected from the touch of desecrating, light-fingered hands ...

But not for something like this!

Rising in thirty-seven tiers of stone like narrow shelves around the curved walls of this circular adytum, stood the fantasticaly valuable Crown of Stars itself�hopelessly lost somewhere amid seven hundred and seventy-six exact, precise, microscopically-detailed DUPLICATES.

Sternly repressing a cold shudder at the damnable, fiendish simplicity of it all, Hautley was ironically reminded of one of his own versicles, to wit:

THE DESK CLERK at The Imperial House, Chitterling, Vassily II, was a feather-headed young Birdwoman, obviously an Aurochnoid from one of the Gryx planets. She impartially distributed a glassy, professional smile midway between Hautley Quicksilver and Barsine Torsche.

"May I render assistance, Ser and Madame?"

"Yes. The name's Quicksilver. Is Doctor Smothly in?"

"One moment please." She turned to the communicator console that winked and twinkled, sending flickers of multi-hued light across the gleaming marble floor of the hotel lobby. Addressing her attentions to a whisper-mike, she then turned another antiseptic smile in their general direction. "Room 11, 209-Q. Go right up, Ser Quacksalver, Dr. Smothly is expecting you."

"That's Quicksilver. Thanks."

The grav tube whisked them to the 11,209th floor with pneumatic efficiency. Hautley, his mahogany features and mirror-bright eyes impassive, as were, indeed, his meticulously arranged pewter-grey locks, palmed the door which slid open before him. Barsine Torsche, who had accompanied him, was now inexplicably nowhere to be seen. He stepped into the room.

"Ah, Ser Hautley!" Pawel Spiro, nervous, even flustered, approached him. "I had been expecting you to phone shortly, not to come in person, and the twenty-seven hour delay you requested is not yet transpired! May I assume that your call indicates your decision to accept my retainer on your professional, ah, services?"

"You may," Hautley said with his accustomed suavity. He viewed the little mouse of a man with quiet pride, smiling benignly. Spiro ran a plump soft hand nervously through his salmon-tinted hair and cleared his throat with that tentative little glottal noise Hautley had found so annoying a few hours earlier.

"Then, ah, you appropriate the cult object for the Museum ... ?"

Hautley's modest smile broke loose of its moorings.

"Leaned, you have retained the services of no mere fumble-fingered scugger, but of Hautley Quicksilver himself. With such as I, to think is�to act. Behold!"

With his left hand, he disengaged the light-baffle he had been unobtrusively carrying, revealing to sight�

"AH!"

Spiro's sharp, involuntary indrawal of breath was almost a cry of pain. For there, dangling from the outstretched fingers of Quicksilver's right hand was the Crown of Stars itself! Its incredible frosting of curious gems glittered and Dashed and sparkled�in the indirect ceiling-illuminants. The lacy, open-scrolled goldwork gleamed with satiny highlights along the coiling arabasques of precious metal. Not only was the Crown a stunning work of the goldsmith's art, but a fascinating aura of antiquity and alienage clung about it as well. Automatically, Pawel Spiro extended one hand to grasp the cherished object. Quicksilver's smile hardened.

"Not�quite�yet, I think! First we have to settle the little matter of�..."

"The price? Of course!" Pawel gabbled. Perspiration dribbled down his pudgy features. He clawed within his jerkin for a checkbook, but Hautley's eyes caught and held his with the bright glitter of fractured ice.

"A matter of professional pride, rather than price," he purred. ''For I am unaccustomed to consummating a contractual agreement with a client hiding his true name and identity under the veil of a pseudonym!"

Spiro's reaction was delicious. His jaw dropped. His eyes goggled incredulously. Then Quicksitver dropped the bombshell.

"Yes, I mean you�Captain Rex Dangerfield!"

Silence echoed crashingly through the palatial suite. Hautley's voice turned to a smooth, ironic purr.

"I suspected, of course, as soon as I discovered you were not the true Pawel Spiro. Your 'cover' was good, very good; highly professional, even, comparable to my own disguises. Everything dovetailed�appearance, mannerisms, motive, timing. I deduced from the polished performance you could only be another professional such as I."

Pawel was watching him with dull glazed eyes like blunt pebbles in a face devoid of expression or mobility. Hautley expanded, basking in the drama of the revelation.

"While enroute from Thoth to your hotel here on Vassily II I dialed your Personnel Computer at the Carina-Cygnus Intelligence Depot, your official headquarters. It was not difficult to obtain a print of your dental history. My mirror-eyes, in this instance, contain X-ray contact lenses. Your fillings and bridgework�alas!�we have come so far technologically, but the age-old problem of dental caries is still with us! The moment you greeted me I X-viewed your dental structure, compared it mentally with the records, and as I had suspected for some time, you are none other than the galaxy's most feared and feted crime-fighter, Captain Rex Dangerfield!"

Quicksilver smiled with cool mockery. "As a Confidential Agent myself, I rarely go through the difficult, time-consuming work of altering my own dental structure to conform to a new disguise. And I doubted if even so famed and fearless an Agent as yourself, my dear Dangerfield, would do so either. Those in our profession will go to every conceivable length to alter fingerprints, retinagraphs, even palm and footprints, but when it comes to making a special visit to Painless Potter the friendly neighborhood dentist, ah! That's too much to ask in the cause of duty!" He chuckled. Dangerfield remained impassive, one hand hooked within his jerkin, doubtless clutching a checkbook as a drowning man clutches a straw. Then he spoke.

His voice was calm and conversational. Dangerfield said: "The ornamental buttons on my surcoat are shock-projectors, two-dimensional microminiaturized printed-circuit models activated on the psionic level. I am standing facing you in full. My upper button is aimed at the clump of muscles directly above your heart. If you attempt to draw a weapon or make a sudden move I will fire a paralyzing shock into your heart muscles and you will die instantly of psionically-induced heart failure! Now toss the Crown of Stars over here."

Hautley's air of unruffled aplomb was never more unshaken. He smiled and continued: "In a moment, surely. But don't you want to know how I figured you for the most celebrated crime-fighter in the galaxy, even before comparing your pearly white choppers to the dental records? It was very, very simple and will only take a moment. The level of your disguise's artistry was such that only four men in the galaxy, including myself, could have accomplished it with such a degree of finesse. The other two men are known to me; we have worked together on one occasion or another. That left only Captain Rex Dangerfield, master of disguise. You and I have never met before. I doubted very much if my four friends would dare the risk of attempting to pull off an imposture under my very nose. That left only you, Captain."

"You are very intelligent, Quicksilver," Dangerfield said tonelessly. "Too intelligent for your own good ..."

"Now," continued Quicksilver smoothly. "As to your motive: there could be only one motive. In the course of an official investigation, I presume, you stumbled across some evidence that the Neothothic cult object contained some extraordinarily valuable 'thing.' Something so valuable as to thrust even the Crown's own intrinsic or historic value into the pale. You have had a busy and long career, Captain; many temptations have come before you, as they have come before me. But here you are, risking your professional reputation, your name and career, your very life�the value of the 'thing' must be truly inestimable. Thus, I suspect it to be a technological secret."

"You are quite correct, damn you," Dangerfield said in cold tones quite unlike the hesitant, wavering voice of Pawel Spiro. "The Cavern Kings of Thoth were not, as has been universally believed, of 'pre-space' technology. In fact, they possessed an amazing variety of energy weapons, a science of armaments many millenia in advance of our own level of military technology. A man who had control of such secrets could conquer the galaxy, master the Empire itself, rule the entire Universe! I learned of all this from a renegade-Neothothic priest, defrocked, exiled, and eager for revenge. He revealed under the psychoscope that one of the gems in the Crown is an energy-retaining galina crystalloid upon which is molecularly recorded in universally comprehendible mathematical terminology the entire weapons technology of the extinct race of lizardmen!"

"But he had already blabbed the same info elsewhere, hadn't he?" Hautley deftly interposed. ''To Heveret Twelfth of Canopus, for one�Heveret, whose royal predecessor, Heveret Eleventh, was one of the most ambitious warlords of the last century. Number 12's greatest desire was to outdo the exploits of his Pop, and as soon as he got the word, he began getting ideas. But your talkative ex-frater also sold the news to two other blokes as well�one of them a gangland chieftain on Thieves' Haven, who sicced a passel of Bad Guys on the trail of the lore; the second, some official less corruptible than you of the Imperial government, who triggered an official Intelligance survey of the problem of purloining the Crown and the whole technology, a survey which ultimately led to the government's attempted retaining of my own services in that capacity. Ah, it's been quite a round-robin, hasn't it, Rex, old boy?''

"Well, the party's over as of right now, Quicksilver," Dangerfield sneered. "Just toss the Crown over to the sofa; gently now, no tricks! Don't try any games like pitching it at my head or kicking it into the pit of my stomach, or I'll give you a coronary on the spot!"

"Right-o, gently it is. Now, Barstine."

The heart-stopping buttons on Dangerfield's surcoat vaporized in a searing puff of metallic steam.

In the other comer of the room, Barsine Torsche stepped from behind the light-baffle which had enabled her to enter the room directly behind Quicksilver under full invisibility, and to record every word of this conversation on her ringrecorder. In her right hand she held a multigun, whose nondirectional ionic-blast component had just disintegrated the deadly buttons with a curved beam. Now the neuronic stungun component felled Dangerfield like a disrooted kazolba tree, and stifened him out safely in stasis.

"Captain Rex Dangerfield, I arrest you under the provisions of Public Criminal Code A-12, Sub-section 4, on the charges of Illegal Use of Official Secrets, Criminal Impersonation, Conspiracy Towards Violating Planetary Sovereignity, and General Knavery," she intoned formally above the recumbent figure, just to complete the record. Then, deactivating the recorder, she turned to the bland. smiling Hautley.

"Okay, toss over the junk jewelry, Quicksilver, c'mon!" she snapped "Your government needs that technology."

"No government needs so deadly a weapon as an advanced energy-weapons science," he laughed lightly. "Especially, considering the fact we have no enemies. Or if the government does, then it's up to them to find someone smarter than me to do�the job!"

"You mean�..." she gasped.

"I mean. No, Barsine, your simple, childlike faith in me is touching, but even the one and only Hautley Quicksilver couldn't figure out a way to tell the one true Crown of Stars in that warehouse full of phony copies. I didn't even try, frankly. All I needed for my purpose was to snag just one of 'em, to confront 'Pawel Spiro' with. If your boss, 'Ol' T.J.,' wants the Crown, he'll have to steal it himself!"

Her lovely eyes glowed with dawning comprehension, then flashed with fury.

"Oh! Hautley. Quicksilver. You. Beast!" she hissed between clenched teeth (which is a difficult trick to perform: try it yourself and see). "All the scintillating way from Thoth to the hotel you've been refusing to tell me how you picked the right Crown, and I've been wracking my brains till they're as limp as day-old asparagus, trying to figure out how you did it! Now it turns out you didn't do it, at all! You are the most insufferable, superior, supercillious, smug grulzak in the Known Universe. I hate you!"

He reached out a casual arm and pulled her into a smothering embrace.

"That is inaccurate. You utterly adore me, and you know it . . . poor child!" he commented. Then he kissed her with such expertise that her toes curled up and her kneecaps wilted like day-old asparagus, to match the above-described condition of her intellectual equipment. Then he made the mistake of releasing her.

KRAK!

Her palm connected with his cheek stunningly. Crimson with fury, she slapped a gravity-neutralizer on Dangerfield's forehead and towed him out of the room like a suitcase. Hautley sighed, gingerly touching his stinging cheek.

"Such passion," he yawned, boredly. "Why does she keep up this dull pretence of fighting it? The girl's mad for me, obviously."

He had a versicle expressive of this amorous ennui: