THE ETHIC OF THE ASSASSIN By HAYDEN HOWARD _Incorruptible, The Assassin. The best you could do was to buy the delicate Kri-Kri death._ [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories July 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] The monotonous cry of the kri-kri hushed with a clap of silence that snapped the young doctor upright in bed. Konrad had stolen his lovely wife. Was it a dream? His hand moved to find Kit's smooth, gently slumbering back. He smiled, already fuddled as to what had awakened him, and settled back comfortably again, stroking his hand along the curve of her body with a certain sleepy pride. Three months, he thought, and Kit would bear him their first child, a pioneer five light-years from the ancestral home of his protoplasm. I wonder if he will take as long to settle down as I did? I wonder what's the matter with the kri-kri? As his eyes widened to note the cluster of seventeen small moons whirling past the window he heard the sputtering flight of the skar. Quickly he faced the explosion of moonlight that silhouetted the kri-kri's cage against the window screen. Taen said it isn't strong enough, he thought, fumbling for the light switch, then thinking better of it. The light might attract the skar. Louder than the ventilators atop the transparent dome of the city rose the staccato airblasting of the skar. With a haunting shriek, it collided with its long, wingless shadow against the window screen. A twang, the glint of a spear quivering in the wire. A hiss and a rustle and it was gone. By the time it struck again, Jeff had lifted the amulet Taen gave him from the night table. As he squeezed the release button, he could feel the angry vibration of the minute warrior within. A mosquito-like whine faded after a red fleck of light no larger than the eye of an insect. Like a tiny meteor, the prisoner of the amulet flashed across the mirror and quenched within the skar. The long airsquid stuttered and blundered against the laughing mask with a crackle of its exoskeleton. As it tumbled out of sight behind the foot of the bed, Jeff slid his feet to the rug and fished for his slipper. He was in time to catch the skar slithering weakly across the rug, pumping air like a man with a crushed chest. It popped when he hit it with his slipper. Bending, white-muscled, across the moonlight, he searched for his minute defender. But its light had gone out. What he did see was the ugly gleam of man-made poison on the beak of the skar. "Konrad, no, please," Kit's little-girl voice called from her sleep. Then she breathed regularly again. The young doctor gritted his teeth as he closed the window and cautiously fished his pajamas from beneath the bed covers. * * * * *