salvage.”
“C’mon, I paid nearly five hundred trubux for those out on Tarragon only a few-”
“Groutcrap. You swiped them off a drunken snergherder in a flophouse on the planet Esmeralda six months ago,” the floating terminal informed him. “To the abundance of snergdroppings already encrusting the footwear you’ve since added-”
“Okay, but what about the shot in the arm?”
“That was intended to sober you up. Which it appears nearly to have done. Sit down. You can call me Whistler.”
Smith, reluctantly, sat again in the slingchair. “Why exactly have you…whoa now!” He popped to his feet, pointing an accusing finger at the gadget. “That’s Whistler as in Whistler Interplanetary Investigation Agency, isn’t it?”
“Very perceptive, Smitty.”
“I don’t want to have a damn thing to do with you guys,” Smith told Whistler. “Thanks for lending me a hand in that frumus, and, if you can hustle me up some new boots, I’ll bid you fond farewell and go on about my-”
“Afraid to work for us?”
Smith shook his head. “Listen, my foolhardy days are a long time over.” He glanced around for a way out. “I’ve done some risky jobs, but I’m not dim or desperate enough yet to go to work for the Whistler Agency. You must know the nickname your outfit has all across the-”
“Suicide, Inc.,” replied the floating terminal. “Nice zing to it, but it’s an exaggeration. We aren’t foolhardy either, far from it, and we’ve never undertaken any job that promised to be completely-”
“Suicide, Inc. Sure, you heartless sons of bitches send operatives and investigators out to the worst pestholes in the Barnum System,” Smith accused. “And even to the planets in the Heliquad and-”
“The Trinidad System, too.”
Smith sat. “Anyway, I don’t intend to take a job with you guys,” he said. “If that’s what the kidnapping was all about.”
The night rain hit gently on the roof. A soft wind rattled unseen tree branches and foliage out in the surrounding dark.
“You were born on the planet Zegundo in the Trinidads,” said Whistler.
“Far as I know.” He shifted in the chair. “I’d just as well not talk about that.”
“You grew up in the Selva Territory, at a place called Horizon House,” continued the terminal. “That was a shelter for displaced children who-”
“Who is the real Whistler anyway? You guys call yourself the Whistler Agency, yet nobody seems to know for certain if Whistler’s a person, an android or just a computer who-”
“Not important,” cut in the Whistler terminal. “Has nothing at all to do with the problem we want you to-”
“What I want to do is exit.” He rose, slowly, to his feet. “You going to let me?”
“Not just yet, no.”
“I won’t,” he reiterated, “work for Suicide, Inc.”
“You served two years with the Interplan Law Service, then three with the Political Espionage Office,” said Whistler. “That was after coming here from the Trinidad System, where you’d worked in the Territorial Police in Selva.”
“And even earlier I used to play with toy rockets and skycars,” said Smith. “But I’ve grown older since, it happens to most everybody, and given up a lot of youthful crap.”
“You were an exceptional lawman and investigator,” said the terminal, “until about two years ago.”
“I keep getting older. I just matured to the point where I no longer saw any sense to any of it.”
“Was it because of that incident out on Peregrine or was it because of the marriage of-”
“Wasn’t any one thing.” He took some steps in the direction of the door he’d spotted.
“Do you really enjoy your present life?”
Smith laughed. “You are versatile,” he observed, grinning. “You can teleport yourself into alleys, cold-cock rowdies
“We happen to have, Smith, an assignment you’re suited for.”
“Nope, no. You don’t.”
“But in order to handle it, and boss the crew we’re putting together, you have to be sober,” the terminal told him. “And you have to be willing to go back to Zegundo.”
Smith watched Whistler for several silent seconds. “Tell me,” he requested finally, “some more about the job.”
CHAPTER 2
Cruz was already out in the Trinidad System when the Whistler Agency approached him.
He was way up in the bell tower of a glaz and metal cathedral, concentrating on holding off an irate husband who was intent on doing him several kinds of bodily harm. Unfortunately, Cruz, a large, dark man of thirty-five, had left his right arm downstairs in the stark white bedchamber of the wife of the Most Reverend Charles Waldenbrook. So he was forced to defend himself one-handed and with only the dinky stungun he’d managed to grab from the lovely young Mrs. Waldenbrook’s purse as he went hurrying out the window.
This was in the heart of Metropolis Territory’s second largest city, on the planet Primero. It was midway through a hazy Sunday morning.
“You sure better get all this folderol taken care of by eleven,” warned the small roundshouldered birdman who sat hunched over the console of the tower musicizer. “My eleven o’clock bell concert is the real high-point of the day and I don’t want any distractions.”
Cruz was crouching behind a huge imitation bell that sat on the plaz flooring of the open air tower. Some fifteen yards away Reverend Waldenbrook could be seen peering around the half-open neowood door to the stairwell. He held a stungun in his left hand, a lazgun in his right and a kilgun between his teeth.
“It was pure chance brought me up here,” Cruz assured the green and scarlet birdman. “When I came popping out of the window of the fair Cleo Waldenbrook’s chamber, this seemed a closer refuge than the nearest pedramp six stories below. So I climbed upwards.”
“That woman’s insatiable.” The birdman’s beak clicked disapprovingly.
“On the contrary,” said Cruz, eyes on the stairwell. “I had the lady completely sated and was about to take my leave when the rev returned home a good hour ahead of time.”
“Well, sure, that’s because he’s on reruns all this month,” explained the musician. “Always runs holograph vidtapes of his tedious sermons this time of year. His dippy wife ought to’ve remembered that simple fact.”
“Apparently, in the heat of passion it slipped her peasized mind and so-”
“You may as well come out, you vile fornicator!” boomed Reverend Waldenbrook.
“Is he alluding to me, do you suppose?” Cruz narrowed his left eye and tried to get the outraged cleric lined up in his gunsight.
“Slimy lustridden wretch!”
“Yep,” said the birdman with a nod, “he’s sure enough addressing you.”
“Hell, I’m simply an incurable romantic,” explained the crouching Cruz, “and not the least bit slimy.”
“Would that you had heard my sermon this day, you foul fleshly homewrecker! For in it I vilified your very own loathsome type. I said, if I may quote myself, ‘Dearly beloved parishioners, although we dwell in a vast city reeking with technological evils and sicklied over with the taint of wickedness, yet we may still…’”
“Is this a pretty fair example of his rhetoric?” Cruz asked the bellringer.
His feathery head bobbed. “Sometimes it’s duller even.”
“Can’t figure why there’s any call for repeats.”
“…fight off the filthy lustful impulses which seek…’”
“Reverend, old chum,” called out Cruz, cupping his only hand, “might I suggest a truce?”
“Truce?” bellowed Waldenbrook, thrusting his plump pinkish face again into the open. “There can be no truce, my good man, only swift and sure retribution.”
