'What land of a good deal?' Alex asked.
The Quiet Man told him, and they began their bargaining. They ended it a good half hour after the bar was officially closed, but since Alex was willingly paying liquor prices for fruit juice, all that was legal after hours, the bartender was happy to have him there. The staff cleaned up around them, until he and the Quiet Man shook hands on the deal.
'These aren't exactly ancient artifacts,' the Quiet Man had admitted under pressure from Alex, 'They can be doctored to look like 'em with a little acid-bath, though. They're, oh, maybe eight, nine hundred years old. Come from a place colonized by one of the real early human slowships; colony did all right for a while, then got religion and had themselves a religious brawl, wiped each other out until there wasn't enough to be self-sustaining. We figured the last of them died out maybe two hundred years ago. Religion. Go figure.'
Alex eyed his new acquisition with some surprise. 'This's human-made? Doesn't look it.'
The Quiet Man shrugged. 'Beats me. Bosses said the colonists were some kind of artsy-craftsy back-to- nature types. Had this kind of offshoot of an earth-religion with sacramental hallucinogenics thrown in to make it interesting, until somebody decided he was the next great prophet and half the colony didn't see it that way. I mean, who knows with that kind? Crazies.'
'Well, I can make something up that sounds pretty exotic,' Alex said cheerfully. 'My clients won't give a damn. So, what do you want to do about delivery?'
'You hire a lifter and a kid from SpaceCaps,' the Quiet Man said instantly. 'I'll do the same. They meet here, tomorrow, at twelve-hundred. Your kid gives mine the credit slip, mine gives yours the box. Make the slip out to the bar, the usual.'
Since that was exactly the kind of arrangement Alex had made for the gross of funeral urns, with only the time of delivery differing, he agreed, and he and the Quiet Man left the bar and went their separate ways.
When he returned to the ship, he took the stairs instead of the lift, still trying to remember where he had seen the style of the tiny vase.
'You look cheerful!' Tia said, relief at his safe return quite evident in her voice.
'I feel cheerful. I picked up some artifacts on the black market that I'm sure the Institute will be happy to have.' He emptied his pockets of everything but the 'perfume bottle' and laid out his 'loot' where Tia could use her close-up cameras on the objects. 'And this, I suspect, is stolen,' He unwrapped the kachina. 'See if you can find the owner, will you?'
'No problem,' she replied absently. 'I've been following your credit chit all over the station; that's how I figured out how to keep track of you. Alex, the two end skulls are forgeries, but the middle one is real, and worth as much as everything you spent tonight'
'Glad to hear it' He chuckled. 'I wasn't sure what I was going to say to the Institute and Medical if they found out I'd been overtipping and buying rounds for the house. All right, here's my final find, and I have a load of them coming over tomorrow. Do you remember what the devil this is?'
He placed the warped little vase carefully on the console. Tia made a strange little inarticulate gargle.
'Alex!' she exclaimed. 'That's one of 'Sinor's' artifacts!'
He slapped his forehead with the heel of his hand. 'Of course! That's why I couldn't remember what book I'd seen it in! Spirits of space, Tia, I just made a deal with the crewman of the ship that's running these things in for a whole load of them! He said, and I quote, 'the bosses only wanted the bigger stuff. They're not really artifacts, they're from some failed human art-religious colony'.'
'I'm calling the contact number Sinor gave us,' she said firmly. 'Keep your explanations until I get someone on the line.'
Tia had been ready to start sending her servos to pick lint out of the carpet with sheer nerves until she figured out that she could trace Alex's whereabouts by watching for his credit number in the station database. She followed him to three different bars that way, winding up in one called 'Rockwall', where he settled down and began spending steadily. She called up the drink prices there, and soon knew when he had made an actual artifact purchase by the simple expedient of which numbers didn't match some combination of the drink prices. A couple of times the buys were obvious; no amount of drinking was going to run up numbers like he'd just logged to his expense account.
She had worried a little when he didn't start back as soon as the bar closed, but drinks kept getting logged in, and she figured then, with a little shiver of anticipation, that he must have gotten onto a hot deal.
When he returned, humming a little under his breath, she knew he'd hit paydirt of some kind.
The artifacts he'd bought were enough to pacify the Institute, but when he brought out the little vase, she thought her circuits were going to fry.
