The Big Shot—Nadine took an instant to flash into Cloud’s mind a very good picture of the fellow—was in his private room, but if a dinner were to be on the program it would be later. There were two men in the room; Number One and another man, whom he thought of and spoke to as “Number Nine.” At present the affair was strictly business. Number Nine was handing money to Number One, who was making notes in a book. Twenty credits from Number Seventeen; 50 from No. 20; 25 from No. 26; 175 from No. 29; 19 credits—all he could raise—from No. 30; 125 from No. 31, and so on. . . . The gangsters thought that they were being very smart and cagey in using numbers instead of names, but neither had any idea of the power of a really good telepathic mind, or of that of a really good linguist. Each of those numbers meant something to either or to both of those men, and whatever it was—a name, a picture, a storefront or address, or a fleeting glimpse of personality pattern—Nadine seized and transmitted, either in shorthand or by force of mind, or both; and Vesta taped, in machine-gun-fast Spanish, every written word and every nuance of thought. The list was long. At its end: “Three more didn’t pay up, huh? The same ones holding out as last time, and three more besides, huh?” This was Number One, thinking deeply. “I don’t like it. . . . Ninety Two, huh? I don’t like it a bit—or him, either. I’ll have to do something about him.” “Yeah. Ninety Two. The others all give the same old tear-jerker that they didn’t have it, that our assessments were too stiff for their take, and so on, but Ninety Two didn’t, this time. He simply blew his top. He was hotter than the business end of a blow-torch.” Not much to Cloud’s surprise, Nadine at this point poured into his mind the picture of excessively angry Jim. “Not only he didn’t fork over, he told me to tell you something.” There was a long pause. “Well, spill it!” Number One barked. “What did he say?” “Shall I give it to you straight boss, or maybe I better tone it down some?” “Straight!” “He said for you to go roast, for fourteen thousand years, in the hottest corner you can find of the hottest hell of Telemachia, and take your Srizonified association with you. Take your membership papers and stick ’em. Blow his place up and be damned to you, he says. If you kill him in the blast he’s left stuff in a deposit box that’ll blow all the Srizonified crooked politicians and lawmen in the Fourth Continent off of their perches and down onto their Srizonified butts. An’ if you _don’t_ get him, he says, he’ll come after you with blasters in both hands. Make it plain, he says, that it’s _you_ he’ll be after—not me. That’s exactly what he told me to tell you, boss.” “Me? ME?” Number One demanded. The towering rage, which he had been scarcely able to control, subsided into a warily intense speculation. “How did he find out about _me_? Somebody’ll burn for this!”