I had heard plenty about Shanig, though I'd never done business with him. He had a finger in every financial pie on Mars from import houses to the Argonaut Club, which was directly across the street and which he owned outright. Dealing with Shanig, rumor said, was like stepping into a Venusian boghole--easier to get into than out of. Shanig's uglies chivvied me into a reception room that was all skylights and soft rugs and shining saffa-wood furniture. A big desk stood in the center. Behind the desk sat Shanig's secretary. It was almost worth being kidnapped to be able to stand and look at her. She was a beauty, a tall clean-lined redhead with all the curves a prodigal heredity ever promised a female of the species homo. And she had a warm red mouth and clear green eyes that matched her hair. "Buzz the boss that we got his homo, Cheryl," the Earthie said. "And snap it up, baby. The Chief is but eager about this smiley deal." The girl gave him a curt green glare. "Miss Trayne, to you," she snapped. But she pushed the buzzer on her desk, and a rasping voice from her audiphone said that we should come in. I knew only one of the three men in the office beyond. He was a little blond truckler named Perry Acree who held a booking-clerk's berth at Cargo Declarations, and I didn't need to look twice at the smug complacence of his chicken-chinned face to guess who had tipped Shanig about my smiley. The second was a fat, dignified homo with a clipped gray mustache and the deliberate look of a top-flight medic. The third was Shanig himself. Physically, the great man had seen better days. He was small and old and wizened and bald, and the creases in his sallow face could have been carved with a kit of engraver's tools. His scrawny neck hung in slack wattles, and the hooked nose and hot black eyes of him made him look like a dissipated desert buzzard. But I wasn't tempted to sell him short for even in illness Shanig had the air about him of a baited steel trap. He was an empire builder, one of these human dynamos who pile up fortunes and then die of gastric ulcers before they can spend their loot. "I dislike bringing you here under duress, Bailey," Shanig said. He was trying to make it smooth, but even so he barked like a Syrtis Major jackal. "Dr. Humphrey will explain my reasons for being so precipitate." The medic harumphed reluctantly and fiddled with his mustache. Plainly he didn't like any part of it. "Mr. Shanig," he said, "suffers from a chronic condition of extreme nervous tension, a result of the years of overstrain imposed upon him by his business enterprises. I have prescribed rest and relaxation, but at this late date Mr. Shanig is constitutionally unable to pursue that course. "He is, in a word, incapable of relaxing; yet relax he must or collapse completely. Sedatives are unsatisfactory, impairing the mental processes. Mr. Shanig does not trust hypnotherapy.