Oh, I am no altruist: I intended to get paid for my exper-tise. That was one of the reasons that I let Bunny put the line at the bottom of my card. I had found out a long time ago that people don't prize what they don't pay for. If I of-fered my services for free, I'd be looking for lost firecats and missing spectacles from now until the end of time. I wanted meaty problems, the kind I could really sink my mental teeth into. I loved a challenge. Now was the time to see if I could handle one. And if I didn't, well, I was young. I had time to make a lot more blunders in my lifetime.
I have to admit that it really bothered me that Aahz hadn't been in the Bazaar when I arrived. After all, he had been the one who really taught me about the important things. Not just magik and business, but what's importantin spite of what he would say if I told him. I worried for a moment about his mother, the Duchess. I had met her a while back2; she was a real eccentric, but if Aahz needed any help handling a situation, he knew where to get in touch with all of us.
One of the reasons I had agreed so readily to come out of retirement was Aahz. I missed him. Oh, sure, having a Pervect for a friend wasn't easy. He could be crude, harsh, selfish, greedy, insulting, overbearing, and rude, but he was my best friend. If it hadn't been for him, well, I would still be back in the woods on Klah, trying to eke out a liv-ing asI admit itone of the most inept thieves ever to cut purse strings. Thanks to him I'd rediscovered some basic honesty and decency. Though he was tight with a coin and a sharp bargainer who saw no problem with shaft-ing the other guy, I observed that it was easier to leave a little money on the table because it was a small universe, and you never knew when you were going to be allied with the very person whose shirt you were trying to take the previous day. Without him M.Y.T.H., Inc. would never have been as successful as it was. I should have assumed that once I stepped out of the picture he would take over as president. He was a natural leader. Most of the others had known him long before I came along. I hit myself in the forehead. Why didn't that dawn on me before I blundered into the office and made an idiot of myself?
I wished that he had been around. I would have appreci-ated his input. Maybe he would have been able to smooth out the awkwardness I had caused.
Maybe not. Aahz had never been good at letting anyone else's mistakes go unnoticed. I probably would have been in for a lecture. I deserved one, but I had already given myself a stern talking-to.
2. See that encounter in Myth-Nomers and Im-Pervections in your local bookstore So,Iwasonmyown.
That was okay, I assured myself. I had to take my own baby steps, right? I vowed not to undercut my friends. I was going to stick to what I planned to do, nothing else.
A roaring noise interrupted my thoughts. “Look out!” Bunny called. “Get it, Skeeve!”
I ducked just in time. A huge, striped insect the size of my two fists zoomed overhead. In spite of its bulk, it banked like a swallow off a wisp of air and veered around in a sharp U-turn. I threw a ball of fire at it, but the insect took the full blast of the flame and kept going. Its armored shell would have been the envy of any army in any dimen-sion. No matter what I threw at it, it kept going. It vanished into a hairline
crack in the wall. I ran after it, trying to capture it with a rope of magik. Before I could blink, it was out of reach.
“Gone,” I said grimly. Bunny shook her head. I dashed out the rear door of our tent, stepping into the dimension into which our office extended, and examined the walls. No sign of the Humbee, or a single crack through which it could have escaped. I felt the side of the clapboard house, which was this dimension's face of my building. The walls were only an inch thick, too narrow to conceal the bulky bug. Where had it gone?
One more thing Catchmeier had failed to mention about the new tent was the infestation of Humbees. No one knew where the pesty insects had sprung from, but they were overrunning the Bazaar. Deveel merchants had jumped on the bandwagon already, so to speak, with Humbee repel-lents, traps, and insecticides. As far as I could tell from questioning friends of mine, none of them worked. Hun-dreds, if not thousands, of people were trying to find out what dimension they had come from and who was respon-sible for importing them to Deva. That person, unsurpris-ingly, was lying low, fearing the inevitable lynch mob. The beetles were a nuisance. A blow from a passing Humbee could
