The Thief of Thoth

31

THE DESK CLERK at The Imperial House, Chitterling, Vassily II, was a feather-headed young Birdwoman, obviously an Aurochnoid from one of the Gryx planets. She impartially distributed a glassy, professional smile midway between Hautley Quicksilver and Barsine Torsche.

"May I render assistance, Ser and Madame?"

"Yes. The name's Quicksilver. Is Doctor Smothly in?"

"One moment please." She turned to the communicator console that winked and twinkled, sending flickers of multi-hued light across the gleaming marble floor of the hotel lobby. Addressing her attentions to a whisper-mike, she then turned another antiseptic smile in their general direction. "Room 11, 209-Q. Go right up, Ser Quacksalver, Dr. Smothly is expecting you."

"That's Quicksilver. Thanks."

The grav tube whisked them to the 11,209th floor with pneumatic efficiency. Hautley, his mahogany features and mirror-bright eyes impassive, as were, indeed, his meticulously arranged pewter-grey locks, palmed the door which slid open before him. Barsine Torsche, who had accompanied him, was now inexplicably nowhere to be seen. He stepped into the room.

"Ah, Ser Hautley!" Pawel Spiro, nervous, even flustered, approached him. "I had been expecting you to phone shortly, not to come in person, and the twenty-seven hour delay you requested is not yet transpired! May I assume that your call indicates your decision to accept my retainer on your professional, ah, services?"

"You may," Hautley said with his accustomed suavity. He viewed the little mouse of a man with quiet pride, smiling benignly. Spiro ran a plump soft hand nervously through his salmon-tinted hair and cleared his throat with that tentative little glottal noise Hautley had found so annoying a few hours earlier.

"Then, ah, you appropriate the cult object for the Museum ... ?"

Hautley's modest smile broke loose of its moorings.

"Leaned, you have retained the services of no mere fumble-fingered scugger, but of Hautley Quicksilver himself. With such as I, to think is—to act. Behold!"

With his left hand, he disengaged the light-baffle he had been unobtrusively carrying, revealing to sight—

"AH!"

Spiro's sharp, involuntary indrawal of breath was almost a cry of pain. For there, dangling from the outstretched fingers of Quicksilver's right hand was the Crown of Stars itself! Its incredible frosting of curious gems glittered and Dashed and sparkled in the indirect ceiling-illuminants. The lacy, open-scrolled goldwork gleamed with satiny highlights along the coiling arabasques of precious metal. Not only was the Crown a stunning work of the goldsmith's art, but a fascinating aura of antiquity and alienage clung about it as well. Automatically, Pawel Spiro extended one hand to grasp the cherished object. Quicksilver's smile hardened.

"Not—quite—yet, I think! First we have to settle the little matter of ..."

"The price? Of course!" Pawel gabbled. Perspiration dribbled down his pudgy features. He clawed within his jerkin for a checkbook, but Hautley's eyes caught and held his with the bright glitter of fractured ice.

"A matter of professional pride, rather than price," he purred. ''For I am unaccustomed to consummating a contractual agreement with a client hiding his true name and identity under the veil of a pseudonym!"

Spiro's reaction was delicious. His jaw dropped. His eyes goggled incredulously. Then Quicksitver dropped the bombshell.

"Yes, I mean you—Captain Rex Dangerfield!"

Silence echoed crashingly through the palatial suite. Hautley's voice turned to a smooth, ironic purr.

"I suspected, of course, as soon as I discovered you were not the true Pawel Spiro. Your 'cover' was good, very good; highly professional, even, comparable to my own disguises. Everything dovetailed—appearance, mannerisms, motive, timing. I deduced from the polished performance you could only be another professional such as I."

Pawel was watching him with dull glazed eyes like blunt pebbles in a face devoid of expression or mobility. Hautley expanded, basking in the drama of the revelation.

"While enroute from Thoth to your hotel here on Vassily II I dialed your Personnel Computer at the Carina-Cygnus Intelligence Depot, your official headquarters. It was not difficult to obtain a print of your dental history. My mirror-eyes, in this instance, contain X-ray contact lenses. Your fillings and bridgework—alas!—we have come so far technologically, but the age-old problem of dental caries is still with us! The moment you greeted me I X-viewed your dental structure, compared it mentally with the records, and as I had suspected for some time, you are none other than the galaxy's most feared and feted crime-fighter, Captain Rex Dangerfield!"

Quicksilver smiled with cool mockery. "As a Confidential Agent myself, I rarely go through the difficult, time-consuming work of altering my own dental structure to conform to a new disguise. And I doubted if even so famed and fearless an Agent as yourself, my dear Dangerfield, would do so either. Those in our profession will go to every conceivable length to alter fingerprints, retinagraphs, even palm and footprints, but when it comes to making a special visit to Painless Potter the friendly neighborhood dentist, ah! That's too much to ask in the cause of duty!" He chuckled. Dangerfield remained impassive, one hand hooked within his jerkin, doubtless clutching a checkbook as a drowning man clutches a straw. Then he spoke.

His voice was calm and conversational. Dangerfield said: "The ornamental buttons on my surcoat are shock-projectors, two-dimensional microminiaturized printed-circuit models activated on the psionic level. I am standing facing you in full. My upper button is aimed at the clump of muscles directly above your heart. If you attempt to draw a weapon or make a sudden move I will fire a paralyzing shock into your heart muscles and you will die instantly of psionically-induced heart failure! Now toss the Crown of Stars over here."

Hautley's air of unruffled aplomb was never more unshaken. He smiled and continued: "In a moment, surely. But don't you want to know how I figured you for the most celebrated crime-fighter in the galaxy, even before comparing your pearly white choppers to the dental records? It was very, very simple and will only take a moment. The level of your disguise's artistry was such that only four men in the galaxy, including myself, could have accomplished it with such a degree of finesse. The other two men are known to me; we have worked together on one occasion or another. That left only Captain Rex Dangerfield, master of disguise. You and I have never met before. I doubted very much if my four friends would dare the risk of attempting to pull off an imposture under my very nose. That left only you, Captain."

"You are very intelligent, Quicksilver," Dangerfield said tonelessly. "Too intelligent for your own good ..."

"Now," continued Quicksilver smoothly. "As to your motive: there could be only one motive. In the course of an official investigation, I presume, you stumbled across some evidence that the Neothothic cult object contained some extraordinarily valuable 'thing.' Something so valuable as to thrust even the Crown's own intrinsic or historic value into the pale. You have had a busy and long career, Captain; many temptations have come before you, as they have come before me. But here you are, risking your professional reputation, your name and career, your very life—the value of the 'thing' must be truly inestimable. Thus, I suspect it to be a technological secret."

"You are quite correct, damn you," Dangerfield said in cold tones quite unlike the hesitant, wavering voice of Pawel Spiro. "The Cavern Kings of Thoth were not, as has been universally believed, of 'pre-space' technology. In fact, they possessed an amazing variety of energy weapons, a science of armaments many millenia in advance of our own level of military technology. A man who had control of such secrets could conquer the galaxy, master the Empire itself, rule the entire Universe! I learned of all this from a renegade-Neothothic priest, defrocked, exiled, and eager for revenge. He revealed under the psychoscope that one of the gems in the Crown is an energy-retaining galina crystalloid upon which is molecularly recorded in universally comprehendible mathematical terminology the entire weapons technology of the extinct race of lizardmen!"

"But he had already blabbed the same info elsewhere, hadn't he?" Hautley deftly interposed. ''To Heveret Twelfth of Canopus, for one—Heveret, whose royal predecessor, Heveret Eleventh, was one of the most ambitious warlords of the last century. Number 12's greatest desire was to outdo the exploits of his Pop, and as soon as he got the word, he began getting ideas. But your talkative ex-frater also sold the news to two other blokes as well—one of them a gangland chieftain on Thieves' Haven, who sicced a passel of Bad Guys on the trail of the lore; the second, some official less corruptible than you of the Imperial government, who triggered an official Intelligance survey of the problem of purloining the Crown and the whole technology, a survey which ultimately led to the government's attempted retaining of my own services in that capacity. Ah, it's been quite a round-robin, hasn't it, Rex, old boy?''

"Well, the party's over as of right now, Quicksilver," Dangerfield sneered. "Just toss the Crown over to the sofa; gently now, no tricks! Don't try any games like pitching it at my head or kicking it into the pit of my stomach, or I'll give you a coronary on the spot!"

"Right-o, gently it is. Now, Barstine."

The heart-stopping buttons on Dangerfield's surcoat vaporized in a searing puff of metallic steam.

In the other comer of the room, Barsine Torsche stepped from behind the light-baffle which had enabled her to enter the room directly behind Quicksilver under full invisibility, and to record every word of this conversation on her ringrecorder. In her right hand she held a multigun, whose nondirectional ionic-blast component had just disintegrated the deadly buttons with a curved beam. Now the neuronic stungun component felled Dangerfield like a disrooted kazolba tree, and stifened him out safely in stasis.

"Captain Rex Dangerfield, I arrest you under the provisions of Public Criminal Code A-12, Sub-section 4, on the charges of Illegal Use of Official Secrets, Criminal Impersonation, Conspiracy Towards Violating Planetary Sovereignity, and General Knavery," she intoned formally above the recumbent figure, just to complete the record. Then, deactivating the recorder, she turned to the bland. smiling Hautley.

"Okay, toss over the junk jewelry, Quicksilver, c'mon!" she snapped "Your government needs that technology."

"No government needs so deadly a weapon as an advanced energy-weapons science," he laughed lightly. "Especially, considering the fact we have no enemies. Or if the government does, then it's up to them to find someone smarter than me to do the job!"

"You mean ..." she gasped.

"I mean. No, Barsine, your simple, childlike faith in me is touching, but even the one and only Hautley Quicksilver couldn't figure out a way to tell the one true Crown of Stars in that warehouse full of phony copies. I didn't even try, frankly. All I needed for my purpose was to snag just one of 'em, to confront 'Pawel Spiro' with. If your boss, 'Ol' T.J.,' wants the Crown, he'll have to steal it himself!"

Her lovely eyes glowed with dawning comprehension, then flashed with fury.

"Oh! Hautley. Quicksilver. You. Beast!" she hissed between clenched teeth (which is a difficult trick to perform: try it yourself and see). "All the scintillating way from Thoth to the hotel you've been refusing to tell me how you picked the right Crown, and I've been wracking my brains till they're as limp as day-old asparagus, trying to figure out how you did it! Now it turns out you didn't do it, at all! You are the most insufferable, superior, supercillious, smug grulzak in the Known Universe. I hate you!"

He reached out a casual arm and pulled her into a smothering embrace.

"That is inaccurate. You utterly adore me, and you know it . . . poor child!" he commented. Then he kissed her with such expertise that her toes curled up and her kneecaps wilted like day-old asparagus, to match the above-described condition of her intellectual equipment. Then he made the mistake of releasing her.

KRAK!

Her palm connected with his cheek stunningly. Crimson with fury, she slapped a gravity-neutralizer on Dangerfield's forehead and towed him out of the room like a suitcase. Hautley sighed, gingerly touching his stinging cheek.

"Such passion," he yawned, boredly. "Why does she keep up this dull pretence of fighting it? The girl's mad for me, obviously."

He had a versicle expressive of this amorous ennui:

Grim jest: they yield at touch of hand.

Too easy conquest is ... too bland!

We shall leave the indomitable Quicksilver at that point, enveloped in his own comfortable delusions.

THE END