The Thief of Thoth

27

OF THE FOUR intruders, he noticed that one bore a General Nucleonics Mark IV coagulator. The second fiend was armed with a Cariocan boomerang-dirk of razor keen-edge knife-wood. The third aimed a deadly little ionic flasher the size of his little finger, but potent enough in destructive potential to reduce this princely structure to smouldering cinders.

The fourth hefted a cross-compensating megawatt neuronic-paralyzer tube with sawed-off muzzle and a Freggley-Smythe-Wickett Model Alpha-12 robot-aimed radar-sighted spotter.

Here’s a deadly crew, Hautley sighed.

Still seated immobile, he delicately and unobtrusively began shifting his weight in such a manner as to exert particular pressure on his left boot-heel, which was hollowed and contained therein a pressure-sensitive charge of flash-powder. Using the subtle arts of muscle-control Hautley had learned as a wee lad from the Adepts of New Tibet, or Blavatsky 3, as it was known to the tourism guide-books, he allowed the exertion of extraordinary thrust to build up—using, of course, only those sinews from kneecap to heel, the rest of his body lax as flaccid wax.

But this time, to no avail ...

"Plax off, hubby!" the grey-complexioned one snarled, lifting one cruel lip in a nasty sneer. "Forget all about the charge of pressure-sensitive flash powder in the left boot heel, or I'll air-condition your liver and your duodenum!"

Hautley sighed, but complied, permitting the thrust to slacken. Of course, the grey-complexioned Orgotyr in fluorescent scarlet tights slashed with dead-black piping and puckered ruffs had completed his natty sartorial ensemble with a set of X-ray contact lenses—how could Hautley have overlooked so obvious a gambit?

You’re getting mighty lax, he told himself severely.

Purpling with indignation, Dugan Motley huffed and wheezed like a beached Ore. Apoplectic fury seethed in his stout old heart. Incoherent with boiling rage, he rumbled and snorted sulphurously. Hautley keenly realized that any moment now the old war-horse would do something foolish, like charging the four intruders like a bull walrus in mating season. He must do something quickly, to stave off this suicidal outburst on the part of his fat old host, whom he had unmeaningly embroiled in a private feud.

"Relax, old-timer!" he said in a mollifying tone.

"Relax, is it?" the Master Burglar roared

"Sure. Be smart. They've got us zaxed like a couple of chowders in a second-rate Chowdery! Be smart, ease off, and watch your arteries.”

Grey-complexion grinned nastily at this, but old Dugan was trembling with infuriated rage.

"By dog and hot damn, my arteries can go plax themselfs! Had the ruddy little blighters ripped out last year and replaced with spliced plastex tubing, fore an' aft, did I! But I am boiling with the insultedness! To a guest in mine home, the sticking-ups should happen! An old fat man, sick and lonely, I still have my prides! Me, me, on whom in my days none ever got the droppings! OOOOoooo—the shame of it all!"

He broke off, to fix the grinning quartet with a glare of sufficient wattage to boil aluminum.

"Kill me quick, you scuts, before I am dying of the galloping embarsments—Akk. Gukk ..."

"Always happy to oblidge, Fats," leered the kindly-featured Wollheimian in severely tailored spray-on slacks with triple-gathered dockets down the cuff. Leveling his cross-compensating neuronic paralyzer tube, he sprayed Dugan Motley with a pale lavender ray-beam.

Dugan sagged, limbs and paunch flopping in several different directions simultaneously. The effect was that of a half a ton of monkey-blubber suddenly freed of its casing.

Rapping a hard oath, Hautley whirled into violent action.

One hand plucked a slim, deadly little needier from his tunic, as he whirled—

—But, even as he whirled, a hissing, crackling noise of ray gunfire exploded behind him with all the vehement sound effects of twenty pounds of frozen, oily bacon quick-fried in a berserk shortwave-oven.

"Al right, Quicksilver," an icy female voice redolent of ill-repressed wrath seethed behind him. "You'e safe enough now, but not when I get my hands on you, you trickster you!"

He whirled to see the unexpected figure of Barsine Torsche behind him, standing victoriously with a smoking pistol astride the recumbent bodies of the four intruders, who lay rigid as tent poles, blue sparks snapping from their finger tips.