The Thief of Thoth

18

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.

AH PONG'S DE LUXE DREAMARIUM

Murder! Rape! Torture! Mass Atrocities!

Even Suicide For The Ultimate

In Thrills!

Have Your Kicks In The Finest Man-

Made Synthetic Dreams & Illusions

PEG-LEG FAUNTLEROY

PRESENTS: "MANHUNT"

Track Down And Kill Your

Enemies! Satisfaction Guaranteed!

Risks Eliminated!

Why Pay a Psychosurgeon??

Our Androids Guaranteed to Simulate

Mom, Dad, the Wife, or Anyone Else You Hate!

So Work Off Your Frustrations

The Fauntleroy Way!

(Genuine Blood Supplied by

Hemoglobin Associates, Ltd.)

ONE-EYE GROGAN'S HOUSE

OF TEN THOUSAND GAMES

"Lose Yer Shirt in Surroundings

Of Palatial Elegance

And Class!"

MADAME FAFH'S PALACE OF JOY

Women of a Million Worlds,

Specially Trained to Serve You!

Also, For

Them As Likes,

Boys, Men,

Neuters, Albino Hermaphrodites

And Highly Talented Dogs!

As he rode along, ostensibly gawking at the sights, Quicksilver tuned his wristphone to the planetary wavelength, and consulted the Central Directory of Thieves' Haven for the address of Shpern Hufferd. He promptly learned that the former professional associate of the now retired Master Burglar of Capitan now resided in a somewhat decayed suburb of the planetary capital. From this informative item, Quicksilver swiftly deduced that Hufferd now dwelt in somewhat reduced circumstances, despite a highly profitable career in galactic crime.

It reminded Quicksilver of one of the less philosophical and more practical versicles of his own composition, which went something like this:

Resolved: for crime to pay its best

Your loot you wisely shouldst invest.

However, it also indicated that, being low on funds, old Shpem Hufferd might be induced to part with Dugan Motley's current address for a small exchange of monetary units.

Waiting for the next intersection, Quicksilver stepped off the express glidewalk onto a sideway and headed towards the less populous suburbs of the city of Hideout.

Behind him, the bald-domed, grey-complexioned Orgotyr in the scarlet fluorescent tights slashed with dead-black piping and puckered ruffs stepped off the moving walk, and was replaced by a kind-faced individual in severely tailored spray-on slacks with triple-gathered dockets down the cuff; from his sandy hair-tufts and pallid visage, an inhabitant of Wollheim 4.

Through the gaudy neon-illuminated night hurtled Hautley and his accompanying shadow.

Quicksilver treaded gingerly between the maze of intersecting slideways and glidewalks, moving from strip to strip according to the precise directions he had received from the Central Directory of Citizens (a tourist service of Thieves' Haven Chamber of Commerce).

As he negotiated the moving roads, the position of his "tail" (if this historian may, for the moment, lapse into the criminous jargon of the era) was taken by a variety of individuals, including a plum-skinned Schloim from Pazatar 9, a white-furred and dual-headed entity from Wolverine 3, and, as the sequence returned to his original shadow, the bald-domed, grey-complexioned Orgotyr showed up again.

Thus kept under continuous surveillance, Quicksilver made the trip from the downtown business section of Hideout to the remote and rather decayed suburbs wherein he hoped to locate Shpern Hufferd.