The fourth set was pitiful. O'Ryan played like a blind man and the
Indonesian ran it out with the loss of exactly one point per game. The
red line on the computer-board yawed wildly toward the bottom instead of
following the white line as it should have.
"Keep your credits," Lindsay told Senator Anderson. "You were right. As
it turned out I did know something after all."
"It's impossible!" cried the senator. "But it's cheap at the
price--here!" He withdrew his wallet and began pulling out crisp
hundred-credit notes.
"Look out!" cried Lindsay. Around them the stands had erupted into
violence. While the players were shaking hands at the net, angry--and,
Lindsay suspected, frightened--bettors and spectators leaped the low
barriers and swarmed out onto the dark court. They hemmed the players
in, driving them toward the wall directly under the UW box in which
Lindsay and Anderson were sitting.
Someone threw something and Yamato-Rau stumbled and fell to his hands
and knees. Swinging his racquet like one of his ancestors' shillalehs,
O'Ryan charged to his rescue, pulled him to his feet, covered his
retreat to the wall. There Lindsay was able to pull first the
Indonesian, then the Irishman, up into the box.
"Damned fool!" said Anderson. "Getting us into a riot." But a moment
later Lindsay saw the senator swinging hard at an angry customer with a
fist in which his wallet was still clenched. The man made a grab for it
as someone else hit Anderson over the head with a plastic bottle. He
dropped across a contour-chair, letting his wallet fall from unconscious
fingers.
UW police formed a protective wall around them and Pat O'Ryan,
recognizing Lindsay, said, "Thanks, Ambassador. I guess I owe you a
couple. If my eyes hadn't gone bad on me...."
Lindsay was tempted to admit his guilt in that matter but decided
against it. He had no desire to be caught in another riot. He picked up
Anderson's wallet, put it back in the still unconscious senator's breast
pocket. A white-clad interne was brought through the police cordon,
knelt beside Anderson and began to make repairs.
"You'd better leave now, Ambassador," said one of the boss policeman
respectfully to Lindsay when the senator had been carted away on a
stretcher. Lindsay nodded. Then he noticed a slip of paper lying beneath
the chair across which Anderson had fallen. It read: _rec. 10,000 cdt. 1
em. & di. neck_. It was from Zoffany, the jeweler.
"What the hell!" Lindsay discovered he was speaking aloud. He stuffed
the paper in his pocket and followed the officer through a maze of
underground passages out of the Colosseum. He still thought, _What the
hell!_ What could Nina have reported about him that was worth that sort
of money to the senator?
* * * * *
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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