She could not repress a start of surprise as her eyes met those of the
thin-featured young man entering the vidiphone booth. He returned her
gaze with somber interest.
Gabe relaxed. "So that's the one, eh? Not very formidable. Looks the
way he always should have looked." He lit a milgot. "I'll get Gorman to
tip off the zarquil boys--only one game in this parish, I'm told--that
that life-form's not to be allowed to play; I'll make any loss good
out of my own pocket. That'll keep him onstage for the nonce. He won't
leave to get himself fixed up somewhere else as long as I stay. And I'm
going to stay ... to the bitter end." He smiled lovingly to himself.
_But it's not the right man_, Helen thought gladly. _He did manage to
change, after all. Gabe has the wrong man._ She felt a little sorry
for the unknown and doomed individual who inhabited the delicate,
angular body, but it was so close to death anyhow that the immediate
threat didn't matter. And Gabriel--the real Gabriel--was safe.
VI
The emaciated young man entered Gorman's office and locked the door
behind him with an electroseal. "Disembodiment," he identified himself.
"So you did get a new body, Jed," the lawyer remarked affably. "Very
good packaging. Makes you look like a poet or something."
"Good as a disguise, maybe, but one hell of a lousy hulk." The young
man hurled himself into the chair by the desk. Even Gorman winced at
the cruel treatment accorded such obvious fragility. "Gimme a milgot,
Les. This thing--" he indicated his body with contempt--"is shot to
Polaris. Won't last more than a few months. Some bargain I got."
Gorman lit a stick himself. "The guy who got your body didn't get such
a bargain either," he murmured through a cloud of purple smoke.
"At least he'll live. If he's lucky. I wish he'd hurry and get himself
picked up, though, so I could collect the folio and jet off. Can't go
after it now. Hounds will be sniffing after anybody gravitating around
the place where I've stashed it until they're sure they have me. They
don't know where the money is exactly, of course, or they'd soak it up,
but they've got an idea of the general sector."
"Want me to pick it up for you, Jed?" the lawyer asked, his pale,
flickering eyes brushing across the young man's dark intense ones.
"Oh, sure. All I need is for you to know where it is and all I'd see
would be your rocket trail." The young man leaned across the expanse of
littered steel. "Or _do_ you know where it is, Les?" he asked softly.
"Do you know where it is and are you just hibernating until I'm safely
out of the way?"
In spite of himself, Gorman could not help moving back. "Don't be a
fool, Jed," he said in a voice that was several tones higher. "If I
knew where it was ... well, you're not very frightening in your present
embodiment, you know."
"Don't be too sure of that, Gorman. And you were always yellow; anybody
could frighten you." He began to laugh shrilly. "Hey, that's good. Get
it? Any body, see?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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