Tiny sparks of anger flared in the depths of the Falcon's grey eyes, and the muscles swelled across his wide back. But he made no outward move. "It checks," he heard the agent declare a moment later, and then the agent stepped from the booth. The Falcon smiled slightly, drank slowly from his glass. Then his fingers tightened spasmodically, and he felt shock traveling over his lithe body in a nerve-tightening shroud. "Get out of here, Val," he snapped earnestly into his throat-mike. "The showdown is coming." * * * * * Time was frozen for the moment. The music dwindled to flat discords, and the dancers were only a blur at the edge of his line of sight. The Falcon straightened, set the glass on the bar without turning around, and braced his wide-spread booted feet. He felt a surge of fear in his heart, and the muscles of his gun hand were tight and strained. He knew then that the trap was sprung; it was too late to run. Yen Dal, the Martian waiter, was on his knees, his mouth gaping in soundless agony, held there by a numbing paralysis beam in the hands of the IP man who had questioned Curt. His single eye rolled in the ecstasy of pain, and his antennae twisted and writhed with an uncanny life, as the paralysis beam ripped along each nerve with exquisite agony. Then a whistle of pain came from his lung orifice, scaled until it was almost inaudible--and his body threshed in an intolerable spasm that was horrible to see. The Falcon stepped from the bar, circled noiselessly toward the rear exit, felt panic eating at his nerves, for he knew that Yen Dal could not hold out much longer. He stopped in the shadow of a pillar, seeing the IP agent beside the door. He turned a bit, gasped, when he saw that the paralysis beam had been turned off, and that the Martian's antennae was wrapped tightly about the agent's wrist. Then the agent whirled, and his shrill whistle ripped the music to scattered shreds. "_Get that man!_" he bellowed. "_He's the Falcon!_" Curt Varga went whirling to one side, and the dis-gun leaped into his fingers. A needle-ray brushed at his back, and he scythed the agent down with a withering blast from the dis-gun. Smoke surged from a naming drapery, where a ray slashed, and then the curtain flaked into nothingness. A Venusian screamed in a high thin whistle, dropped below the surface of the water in which he stood. The music stilled in broken fragments, and women screamed their fear in panic-stricken voice. Vibrations from a hundred sets of antennae filled the air with a solid sense of knowing dread. "Shoot that man!" the first agent screamed again, and his voice died in a choking burbling sound, as the Falcon's shot caught him squarely in the throat. Curt fired without conscious thought, his hand following the dictates of instinctive thinking, the blazing energy of his gun's discharges hissing in a blurred stream at the agents firing from behind pillars and overturned tables.