“Oh, they’re fine,” the maseni said, patting the air with one long-tentacled hand. “There were no illegal bites or unauthorized disintegrations last night.”
“Still, I’d like to see them.”
“Of course you would,” the maseni said, bowing slightly from the waist, his head nearly brushing the ceiling when he stood erect again. “Your secretary has been awake for some three hours now, and she has expressed similar desires. And your Mr. Brutus has been in a foul mood ever since you were rescued last night, demanding this and that, refusing to understand that it was best for you to sleep off the drug—to give us time for certain special arrangements—”
“I’ve heard about these special arrangements before,” Jessie said, “from the prison computer. Just what were you rushing around about while I was unconscious?”
“For one thing,” the lanky alien said, “I had to be spaced back from the home world, by an express ship, so that I could make a number of explanations.”
“Explanations?”
“Yes,” the maseni said. He extended a six-tentacled hand and said, “I’m pleased to meet you, Mr. Blake. My name is Galiotor Tesserax.”
Chapter Sixteen
“But you’re dead!” Helena said, when Jessie introduced her to Galiotor Tesserax some ten minutes later.
“That was merely a convenient lie,” the maseni said, smiling, blinking his beady yellow eyes.
“But how—”
“Before we get into all of that, shall we sit down and make ourselves more comfortable?” He extended a hand toward the shape-changing chairs which were arranged around the conference table in the warden’s private consultation room. “I’ve taken the liberty of ordering drinks, all around, to take the edge off this meeting,” the maseni said, nodding nervously at each of them.
The consultation room door slid open, and a robot clanked in, carrying a tray containing three liquors, two mixers, four glasses, swizzle sticks and orange slices. It bent awkwardly at its waist joint and put the tray down, turned the glasses over and said, “Be there will, sir, more anything?”
“That’s all, thank you,” Tesserax said.
“Please excuse my adjunct,” the prison computer said, from its speaker in the ceiling. “With my budget slashed, I have to make do with damaged mechanicals.”
“You, sir, thank,” the robot said to Tesserax, turned and clanked out of the room again.
The maseni took their orders, mixed their drinks and saw that everyone was relatively content. He added a splash of bourbon to Brutus’ dish when the hell hound complained that his drink was far too weak, and poured himself four ounces of Scotch and four ounces of vodka in the same glass, stirred them together without benefit of ice or mixer. He held this awful concoction tightly in his left hand and never took a single sip of it. That was just as well, Jessie thought, even though he did not know much about the flexibility or temperament of the maseni digestive system.
“First of all,” Tesserax began, “I must apologize for the way you three have been treated. My brood brother Fils should never have come to you in the first place. And once you were involved, you should have been contacted by the proper officials and informed of the falsity of my death certificate. You should never have been treated in the criminal manner you were. I am sorry, sir.”
“I accept your apology,” Helena said, sipping her drink.
Brutus raised his head from his bourbon and snorted to blow droplets of reddish-brown liquid from his muzzle. “I don’t accept,” he said.
“Well, I do,” Jessie said. “But I’m not satisfied with just an apology. I thought we were going to get some explanations.”
“Yes, sir, straight away,” the alien said. “You see, six or seven weeks ago, a major crisis arose on the home world. This crisis was of a nature that demanded it be kept quiet. When the home world officials felt a few of the ranking embassy people here could help solve that problem, we were called away from L.A., secretly, and our absences explained by phony death certificates.”
“Was Pelinorie Mesa another maseni called home?” Jessie asked, remembering the brief conversation he’d had with chubby little Myer Hanlon, whom he’d used in the beginning of the case.