The Thief of Thoth

22

THE SHABBY APARTMENT had, quite literally, been turned upside down. Everything had been sifted through, including Hufferd's garbage. The room looked as if a double-barreled cyclone had held a track meet in it for a Boy Scout troop of midget tornadoes. Even the rotting furniture had been tom apart. Hufferd's ragged clothing had been torn up the seams; the grease-flecked, fly-spotted stikfast plastic wallpaper had been ripped off the wails in sheets.

It looked completely hopeless. The enemy would surely not have left any clues to the whereabouts of Dugan Motley laying around for Quicksilver to find, after this kind of a ransacking. Hautley's only hope for locating Dugan Motley, now that Shpern Hufferd slept in Abraham's bosom, lay in finding a due amidst the rubble. So he swiftly but minutely searched the wreckage.

Twenty minutes later he found the clue for which he searched. He was leafing rapidly through the books in Hufferd's small collection, when he noticed that one of the titles was, by a suspicious coincidence, the memoirs of Dugan Motley himself, a colloquial and not-unflavorful tome called Crime Does Not Pay (Much), disseminated by the Brasilia Press, Sol III, Centaurus Sector, Quadrant II. A passing glance at the title page revealed something stamped with smudged red ink above the publisher's address: a series of code-numbers.

107-A-s/M.

He looked at the cryptic inscription thoughtfully. It seemed to be nothing more than one of those public library subject codes so enigmatic to the layman. The only difference was that Hautley Quicksilver was no layman! Among his enormous fund of miscellaneous expertise, was a thorough familiarity with the common subject codes used through the civilized galaxy—the Fenster-Cosgrove Decimal System—and this was not it. The Fenster-Cosgrove code was numerical only, and this included alphabetical symbols.

Quicksilver's lips twisted grimly in a quirk of humor. It would have fooled most searchers—the book itself was certainly battered and thumbed enough to pass for an ex-library copy—and the stamped row of symbols was so ordinary, most people would not have thought twice about them. But Hautley Quicksilver was not "most people," and most people were not Hautley Quicksilver!

It was a clever gambit, hiding a clue to Motley's habitat on the one thing in the whole apartment which had the name of Dugan Motley printed all over it ... but what did the symbols mean? 107-A-s/ M. It was not a phone number, that was obvious: they had sixteen digits. Nor was it a homing system wave length, and certainly not a set of galactographic coordinates. What, then. could it ...

A street address!

Of course! His admiration for old Shpern Huflerd's intelligence multiplying by quantum-jumps, Quicksilver swiftly committed the number to memory. The old purloined letter trick! Leaving the "concealed" information right smack out in the open for anyone to trip over it! He grinned. and looked at the title page again. In full, it read:

CRIME DOES NOT PAY (MUCH)

The Memoirs of

the Master-Burglar

of Capitan

Dugan Motley

107-A-s/M

Brasilia, Sol III

Quadrant II

BRASILIA PRESS / Centaurus Sector, / BRASILIA PRESS

Quadrant II

He widened his smile perceptibly. Once you spotted the trick, it was actually almost impossible to miss the clue! Just letting your eye slide down the center of the page, you saw this:

Dugan Motley

107-A-s/M

Brasilia, Sol III

Centaurus Sector,

Quadrant II.

He pulled out his personal phone and called the public library of Thieves' Haven, asking for the custodian of the planetary directories division. Brasilia turned out to be the capital city of the planet, Sol III, and there was only one street in the alien metropolis which could match the initials "A-s/M"— Avenida san Miguel—so his bunch had proved right, and he was one jump ahead of Grey-Complexion & Company! It seemed obvious they had missed the clue in their search of the flat, for surely they would never have left it intact for Hautley to find, but would have seared the title-page to ash, or carried the book along with them when they left.

He took the slideway back to the spaceport, fully expecting armed interception at every moment of the trip, but the journey, although a trifle tedious, was uninterrupted.

His slim little speedster, the fastest thing in space, was seemingly untampered with, but just to be certain no nasty explosive devices had been planted aboard her, be went over the graceful little craft with great care, and found nothing. Either the forces of Grey-Complexion & Company had not tried, or they had tried to get into the ship but were unable to penetrate the several electronic guardians he bad activated before quitting the craft a half an hour earlier.

The speedster flashed into deep space. With a bone-shivering subsonic drone the Bettleheim-Ortleigh-Robton Drive engaged, and soon Quicksilver was hurtling towards the distant planet of Sol III at seven hundred and fifty-seven light-speeds per hour.