The Kiddie looked more frightened than ever; he was practically trembling. Mac was encouraged, but surprised by the reaction to his threat—it shouldn’t have been so great. He lived to regret the fact that he didn’t find out just why the Kiddie was so affected by the threat of imprisonment.
“All right,” he went on. “Suppose I let you keep the metal. Suppose I pay you well, get you lots more. Gold and silver dollars. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
From the Palladian’s sudden attitude of doglike devotion, it was more than clear that he would.
“Okay,” Mac said. “I’ll pay you one hundred dollars in silver quarters, if—”
The Kiddie was ablaze with interest. Not taking his eyes off Mac, he scuttled crabwise over to a tablette, snatched up a notebook and scrawled: “Il do anyhin wat do yu wan.”
Mac grinned. “Fine. Listen carefully now. I’m looking for an Earthman. He’s somewhere on this planet, but I wouldn’t know him if I saw him. He is about two inches taller than me; weighs maybe two hundred pounds—a little fatter than I am. He’s blind, practically, in one eye. That’s all I can tell you, because those are the only things he can’t disguise.”
The Kiddie seemed suddenly reluctant, but was persuaded by a gesture of Mac’s—a gesture that cost him dear, as it turned out.
“Here,” he said, to seal the bargain. “Here’s an advance for you.” Dexterously he flipped his knife from some recess of his shirt and presented it to the Kiddie.
Ecstasy was clearly shown by that Kiddie. His glow-glands fairly spat large orange sparks of joy. The tempered bronze—it was made of that metal only to avoid magnetic spotters—wasn’t much good for cutting, but it certainly was a conductor of electricity.
“Well?” MacCauley said, growing impatient. He tapped the engrossed Kiddie and repeated the question. The asterite bobbed his head and pressed a stud on his pad. The writing vanished, and he was scribbling again.
“Hello there!” boomed a new voice from the doorway. “What’s going on?”
MacCauley whirled. Kittrell was standing there, beaming broadly. “Hi,” Mac said. “We were wondering—Hey! What the hell!”
Kittrell’s eyes had narrowed and a snarl flashed out on his face. With the fastest draw MacCauley had ever seen, he snapped out his gun and blasted—
Not MacCauley. There was a stomach-squeezing hiss of sizzling flesh behind Mac. He spun again, to see the Kiddie, his shoulder and half his neck gone, slumped to the floor.
Mac knelt swiftly beside him. Dead as a Ganymedan Secessionist. “Now what the hell did you do that for?” Mac demanded. “I was on the trail of something hot.” He stared at the pad and stylus that had dropped from the dead asterite’s limp hand.
“I kni the man yu wan he is th.” That was all it said.
“That’s a big help,” said MacCauley, confronting the other man, who was strangely tense. He thrust the tablet at him. “Now what do I do?”
Kittrell scanned it briefly, and relaxed a bit. “It looked bad to me,” he explained. “There was that damned Kiddie with a knife in his hand. He had it up to throw at you—or me. Can’t take chances.”
Mac sighed, resigning himself to continued hard luck. “We all make mistakes, I guess,” he said. Then, hardening: “But you’ve made your last boner on this case. From now on stay the hell away from me. I don’t like you and I don’t like the way you do things.” He moved toward the door. Kittrell, lounging across it, obstructed his path—just enough to stop him.
“Where’re you going?” the bigger man asked.
“To report this,” Mac snapped. “You’ll get out of it all right.”
“Don’t report it.”
“Why not?”
Kittrell grimaced distastefully. “Too much red tape. What the devil, who’ll know we were here?”
Mac snorted and filled his lungs preparatory to telling Kittrell just what he thought of him. There was a sweetish, balsam-like taste to the air, like the smell of a fir forest.
Or like the smell of narcophene.
He had picked up the knife; still had it in his hands. While he was still figuring things out, his hand swept up with the knife still in it, pressed against Kittrell’s abdomen. Kittrell’s draw had been fast. Maybe he was naturally gun-slick—fast enough, maybe, for a lightning draw like that to be natural to him. Maybe he was, but maybe he was just burning up the years of his life twice as fast as normal under the influence of the drug.
“If you don’t want your gut slit, Kittrell, keep your hands where they are!” Mac grated, his voice suddenly gone flat and hard.
Kittrell’s hand had fluttered toward his shoulder holster; it stopped as Mac spoke.
“I don’t know whether you’re really Kittrell or not—probably you are,” Mac muttered. “But if you’re in T.P.L. now, you’ll be out pretty soon. As soon as I tell them you’re a hophead.”
Kittrell’s face had gone white. Other than that there was no change as his bleak eyes bored steadily into MacCauley’s. “What are you talking about?” he said evenly. “Take that thing out of my stomach.”
“Oh, no!” Mac shook his head decisively. “You killed one of my witnesses; you’ll take his place. You’re going to tell me how to find the guy that sells you the narcophene.”
“Sorry,” said Kittrell, tautening still more, “but I can’t.” At the last possible second his eyes flicked behind and over Mac’s shoulder.
The thing that hit MacCauley on the back of the neck first didn’t quite knock him out. He was stunned, but in the half-second before the next blow jolted him into complete darkness, he heard Kittrell conclude, most casually: “You see, I am the guy who sells the narcophene.”
A shiver rippled along Mac’s spine, and another one. That was his first waking impression. He was cold, frozen stiff, he decided next, when his limbs failed to react
