The Thief of Thoth

25

DUGAN MOTLEY gargled down his brew with snorting appreciation, and wiped the back of his hand across his whiskery mouth.

"Pfthaa! Hot damn and by dog, now, but that has the genuine old-fashioned Moxie, or am I be-lying in my molars, heh? Heh!" he belched.

"Excellent," Hautley commented. Judiciously he swizzled the palid sparkling wine about the outer rim of the goblet with a practised twist of the wrist. He threw back his head to languidly savor the bouquet with first the left nostril, then the right, and then with the left again, as it was particularly sensitive.

"A charmingly unpretentious little wine," he pronounced, after sampling it thoughtfully. "Ever so cautiously verging on audacity, but sweetly retiring from the brink, blushing, as it were. But pleasant, very ... ah ... humble, but touched with an amusing degree of self-confidence."

"Hot damn," Dugan Motley rumbled, admiringly. Hautley inserted the very tip of his tongue into the fluid and sipped frowningly.

"Hmm ... from the, ah, the west side of the vinyard, I should say," he continued. "More sun in the afternoons, you know," he improvised, at Dugan's gape of non-comprehension. "Brings out the tannic acid in the soil, of course. Yes ... on the whole, a very hospitable little wine. Very."

Dugan's huge red face split in two with a grin that revealed a display of ivories that would have quickened the heart of a pianist.

"Ho, it is the true connoisseur, this Quicksilver, by hot damn and hot dog! What expertise and know-how, not to mentioning the savvy too! Oh, the joy it is to an old lonely sick man's heart, the very sight of you is bringing,—the great Quicksilver!"

"Happy to meet you, too," Hautley said. "I've always been an admirer—"

Dugan's cement-mixer voice roared on over Hautley's polite interpolation like a bulldozer sliding over a cabbage patch. "Upstairs—! can show you!—I am keeping scrapbooks full of you, yes! That time on Zanuck 3 when the ruby eye from the idol of N'gumba-Yoh-Yoh the Corn Goddess you are the stealing of! What finesse! And the timing, how smooth!"

"Tut, now!" Hautley said modestly.

"And the kidnaping for the huge ransom of that Prince from Niekas 12—how you are, with the adroits and the subtles, too, hoy! And him the Prince, too, a forty-foot Crocodile Man! Oh, the marvelousness of it all! To an old man's heart it is like a breath of the good old days ..."

Against his innate sense of modesty, Quicksilver could not help but bask before the warmth of this praise like earth poet of pre-antiquity Walter Savage Landor before the fires of life.

"Old!" he protested, rallying the old bandit. "Why, Dugan you sound like a real old-timer, but from the looks of you, I'd swear you're not a day over two hundred! Come on, now, I'd thumbprint an oath to the fact."

"Oh, har har har!"

They joshed back and forth over the sparkling wine, as two veteran professionals will upon their first meeting. But it was grim business that had brought Hautley speeding to this quaint backwater of a planet, and he was impatient to get the social amenities out of the way so that he could get down to the brass tacks of business, as it were. He had no slightest doubt in mind, that Dugan Motley would refuse to give him the inside information he required. For, as yet, he had not found a chance to reveal to the bluff, swaggering old space-pirate the disquieting news that the evil forces against whom Hautley was opposed in a duel of wits had ruthlessly murdered in cold blood Dugan's old partner in crime, helpers, inoffensive Shpern Hufferd.

For a brief while, however, he delayed passing on that unhappy news, and the two supercriminals toasted each other in the sparkling beverage and recounted old exploits, lovingly discussed the fine points of technique, and fingered over with the appreciation some of the mightiest deeds in the annals of criminality. But, then, once the social amenities were exhausted, the Master Burglar came swiftly to the point.

"So." Fixing Hautley with an inquiring eye. "Now, not for the compliments exchange are you visiting old Dugan Motley, eh? No. Nor for the reminiscence doing, eh? Quicksilver, my friend, you have business in mind, right I?"

"Right," Quicksilver agreed.

"Then shall we to it, pell-mell?"