Quillan looked worried. "Gotta chance it, I guess! Message is pretty important, they say--" He turned, went through the center portal of the three, abruptly found himself walking along a wide, well-lit hall. Nobody in sight here, or in the first intersecting passage he came to. When he reached the next passage, he heard voices on the right, turned toward them, went by a string of closed doors on both sides until, forty feet on, the passage angled again and opened into a long, high-ceilinged room. The voices came through an open door on the right side of the room. Standing against the wall beside the door were two men whose heads turned sharply toward Quillan as he appeared in the passage. The short, chunky one scowled. The big man next to him, the top of whose head had been permanently seared clear of hair years before by a near miss from a blaster, dropped his jaw slowly. His eyes popped. "My God!" he said. "Movaine in there, Baldy?" Quillan inquired, coming up. "Movaine! He ... you ... how--" The chunky man took out his gun, waved it negligently at Quillan. "Tell the ape to blow, Perk. He isn't wanted here." "Ape?" Quillan asked softly. His right hand moved, had the gun by the barrel, twisted, reversed the gun, jammed it back with some violence into the chunky man's stomach. "Ape?" he repeated. The chunky man went white. "Bad News--" Baldy Perk breathed. "Take it easy! That's Orca. He's the commodore's torpedo. How--" "Where's Movaine?" "Movaine ... he ... uh--" "All right, he's not here. And Lancion can't have arrived yet. Is Cooms in there?" "Yeah," Baldy Perk said weakly. "Cooms is in there, Quillan." "Let's go in." Quillan withdrew the gun, slid it into a pocket, smiled down at Orca. "Get it back from your boss, slob. Be seeing you!" Orca's voice was a husky whisper. "You will, friend! You will!" * * * * * The conference room was big and sparsely furnished. Four men sat at the long table in its center. Quillan knew two of them--Marras Cooms, second in command of the Beldon Brotherhood's detachment here, and the Duke of Fluel, Movaine's personal gun. Going by Heraga's descriptions, the big, florid-faced man with white hair and flowing white mustaches who was doing the talking was Velladon, the commodore; while the fourth man, younger, wiry, with thinning black hair plastered back across his skull, would be Ryter, chief of the Star's security force. "What I object to primarily is that the attempt was made without obtaining my consent, and secretly," Velladon was saying, with a toothy grin but in a voice that shook with open fury. "And now it's been made and bungled, you have a nerve asking for our help. The problem is yours--and you better take care of it fast! I can't spare Ryter. If--" "Cooms," Baldy Perk broke in desperately from the door, "Bad News Quillan's here an'--"