"The order," he said. "Where the Devils is the order? I can't detain that crazy doctor that came in on the Blixo without a detention order. You've been missing two nights and a day! I was going to turn him loose at dawn if I didn't get authority to hold him." He was banging his fist down on an unstamped sheet.

Oh, Gods. Miserable as I was, the thought of Doctor Crobe getting loose upon Afyon made me reel. That would be all it would take to escalate my condition to terminal heart failure.

I grabbed spastically at my pockets for my identoplate. I couldn't get into my pockets.

The guard captain snorted. "You've got your fur coat on backwards, Gris."

I looked down. It was true. In my dull condition, I had donned it back to front. No wonder the walk had been cold.

I somehow got the coat off. It fell to the floor. I fumbled around and found my identoplate. I stamped the order two or three times just to make sure it was making an impression. I was pretty shaky.

The chill of the hangar was biting into me. I put the identoplate back in my pocket somehow. I reached over and tried to pick up the coat.

After a couple of ineffectual plucks, I got hold of a corner of the coat and lifted it. I couldn't make out what part of it I had hold of. I rotated the whole thing and found I now had it upside down.

PLOP. PUNK.

The guard captain said, "My Gods, Officer Gris, are you drunk or something?"

I looked at him. He was pointing at the floor.

THE LOCKET!

THE WALLET!

In my dazed condition I stared at them stupidly on the floor. I was still holding the bearskin coat upside down. I looked at the coat.

It had an inside breast pocket I never knew had existed! The locket and wallet had fallen out of it!

Dazedly I tried to account for it. And then I remembered that when I had paid the excess baggage check, I had put my wallet back into what I thought had been my tunic breast pocket. But by the evidence before me, I must have stuffed it into the bearskin coat instead. The stuffing process must have caught the locket chain and snapped it and the locket had been stuffed into the pocket along with the wallet!

I was stunned. I hadn't known of this pocket. And furthermore, I thought only kangaroos had pockets, not bears!

I picked up the wallet. All the remaining $880 I had taken of their travel money was there.

I picked up the locket. The chain wasn't even broken: I had just neglected to push the safety catch closed when I had put it on and the clasp had simply slid out.

The Countess Krak had not taken them!

The kiss on the cheek had been in honest apprecia­tion when she thought, mistakenly, that I had made her a present of a credit card.

She didn't even know you had to PAY for credit card purchases later, for that had been withheld in the effort to get her to wreck Heller with crazy spending.

I suddenly recalled that earlier she had even asked who was the boss of the hospital and, finding it was I, then supposed that everything in the area was Apparatus gear and thus open to mission requisition. She hadn't even stolen that.

And then came the lowest blow of all. She wasn't a crook! Maybe Heller was correct that her police record was false and she had been framed by the Assistant Lord of Education for Manco! Maybe his deathbed confession was wholly valid and she was blameless!

Gradually, I began to seethe. My ire against her began to rise like a red and suffocating tide!

She was taking advantage of her innocence!

She was even denying me the relief of believing she was a criminal!

I knew right then that there was no limit whatever to the skulduggery of the Countess Krak!

Dimly, I became aware that the guard captain was still talking. He was going on and on about something. Eventually he got my attention.

"What?" I said.

"Captain Bolz!" said the guard captain. "I'm trying to tell you that Captain Bolz of the Blixo is awfully upset with you. No one could find you anyplace. He has been wanting to get up to Istanbul but he said he couldn't leave until he saw you. He's been tearing the place to pieces looking for you for a day and a half. He's mad as screaming Devils about it. I'm trying to tell you that you've got to go see him right away, regardless of the time."

Oh, Gods. Fate was not out of ammunition. Here was more trouble.

"Where the Hells have you been?" roared Captain Bolz.

He reared up off the gimbal bed in his cabin, a mass of chest hair and wrath.

I stood timidly in the oval doorway, twisting my karakul cap round and round in my hands. The master of the battered Blixo was not his usual self. No affable invitation to have a seat, no slightly fawning demeanor.

"It's been an awful trip!" he snarled. "A (bleeping) fairy running around flirting with my crew, a crazy, gibbering idiot of a doctor trying to convince the mates the ship would run better if he gave them flippers instead of hands, and the most beautiful woman I ever seen in my whole life locked up in her cabin and not even giving me an ankle glimpse. And then I arrive here and just before I slide in through the mountaintop the whole control panel tries to tell me I'm about to have a collision with a spaceship!"

I cringed. I knew why that was. The hypnohelmet breaker switch in my head!

"Then I get safely into the hangar," he ranted on, "after braving Gods know what perils and where are you? No Scotch. No 'Hello, Bolz,' and that ain't all! Three months ago when I was up in Istanbul, I meet this rich widow. And she says that she'll just die if I don't come back and, (bleep) it, Gris, here I am hanging around this stinking hangar for a day and a half and nobody can even find you!"

"Why did you have to see me?" I ventured timidly. And, indeed, it was true. He didn't have to clear in through me.

"First things first," he said. "Sit down in that chair! We can get this over with in time for me to be on that morning plane if we get moving."

I sat down in a gingerly way, my hand not far from my stungun butt. These spacers are peculiar people. They can get out of hand. Not only that, you have to be crazy to become a spacer in the first place. Just because some rich widow was waiting for him, he had no call to be so upset. Or did he?

He plopped a thick mass of paper down in front of me. Blank Voltar Apparatus gate passes. An unusual number.

"Stamp those and we can talk further," he threat­ened.

"Aren't these an awful lot?" I said. After all, one should have some care in authorizing official documents.

"It's none of your business, except the rich widow also owns a counterfeit Scotch distillery and Scotch is getting to be all the rage on Voltar-knocks them kicking! And I'm not offering you a piece of it-either the widow or the Scotch business-and I need so many cargo-gate passes because you might not be around very long."

Ominous. Distinctly ominous. I knew now that he had something up his sleeve. "You better tell me more," I said.

"I'll (bleep) well tell you more when you stamp those (bleeped) passes," said Bolz. "And don't date them.

Blank that part of your stamp. I can forge that much of it with my own."

Fate was having its way with me. I knew he wouldn't tell me until I stamped. I was already too beaten down to argue further. I got out my identoplate, blanked the date and began to stamp.

I stamped and stamped and stamped.

Captain Bolz got himself some hot jolt. He didn't offer me any. Then he finalized his packing of a trip bag and began to dress in Western clothes.

I stamped on and on. He could land a dozen spaceship freighter loads of Scotch, a case at a time, with all this.