Jules lit flat on the table and slid angle-wise across its length. His terrific momentum carried him – along with a welter of breaking and flying dishes, glassware, silverware, food and drink – directly at the man trying so frantically to draw his weapon. En route, Jules stuck out one arm and brushed the blonde aside.
He didn’t push her hard at all – just a gentle, one-handed shove, enough to get her out of the way. Nevertheless, she went over backward, chair and all, performing an involuntary somersault that sent her skirt flying to reveal a stun-gun hidden on the inside of her thigh. She landed on her head and was knocked instantly unconscious.
Continuing his slide, Jules made a point of his left elbow and rammed it into the man’s gut. Then, as the man doubled up and whooshed in agony, Jules whirled off the table to a standing posture and chopped the hard, calloused edge of his right hand down on the back of his victim’s neck. The snap of that neck breaking was audible ten meters away above the uproar and screams then going on.
As the man dropped lifelessly to the ground Jules, in one deft motion, snatched the man’s half-drawn weapon and glanced at it. It was a stun-gun rather than a blaster, but its dial was set at ten. Wide open.
Instantly lethal. That, Jules decided, would never do, so he clicked it back to three – a half-hour stun. Then he played its nerve-jangling beam briefly over the other couple at the table – who had appeared far too unconcerned during all this action to be truly unconcerned – and whirled around to see how well his sister was making out.
Yvette was doing quite well. The table under which she had disappeared had leaped into the air, turned over – shedding glasses far and wide along the way – and crashed down at the end of the bar where the first blasterman and three other goons had been standing. Yvette was right behind it, a fury on wheels. The loose, flowing Delfian robes were only a minor encumbrance as she moved, a factor that she had to take into account. One quick swoop sufficed to pick up the fallen blaster, which she then tried to bend around the side of the second man’s head. The gun broke up almost as thoroughly as the head did.
The third man had now had time to reach for his own blaster. He had no compunctions at all against using it in so crowded a room; any number of innocent people could die as long as he wiped out the two targets. The beam had, in fact, already incinerated three patrons at the bar before Yvette could take effective action. Ducking as only someone with her reflexes could, she grabbed this third man by the ankles, up-ended him and kicked the flaming blaster out of his hand before it could do any more damage.
As she rolled to her feet once more, she lifted the thug up over her head and was about to use him as a flail on the fourth when that unlucky wight slumped bonelessly to the floor under the beam of her brother’s stunner.
She had the motion all made, though, and acrobats frown on waste motion. So, continuing her swing, she hammer-threw the man she’d picked up over a few rows of tables and out into fifteen meters of air through the middle of one of the three immense windows.
Have you ever heard forty-one square meters of one centimeter-thick plate glass shatter all at once? It makes a noise.
Such a noise that all lesser noises stopped instantly. And in that strained, tense silence, Jules spoke quietly to his sister. Both were apparently calm, neither breathing so much as a single count faster than normal. Only their eyes – his a glacially cold gray, hers a furiously hot blue – betrayed how angry and disconcerted they both were. ‘Many more of them, you think?’ he asked.
‘Not to spot. Yvette shook her head. ‘And we’ve got no time to check.’
‘Right. Take that one, I’ll bring the other. Fl it.’ Carrying the two unconscious men who were left alive, the d’Alemberts ran lightly, but at a terrific speed, down three flights of stairs and out into the parking lot. The attendant was startled to see the two wealthy Delfians who had entered the building so recently running out now carrying two very dead-looking human bodies; he tried simultaneously to run and to yell, but accomplished neither – a half-hour stun from Jules’ gun saw to that.
Loping across the darkened parking lot; they spotted their car and reached it in seconds. They dumped their reluctant guests in the aft compartment, then climbed in themselves and slammed the doors shut. Tortured rubber shrieked and smoked as the heavy car spun out of the lot and onto the highway. Fortunately the traffic at half past two in the morning was so light that Jules didn’t have to drive far before a moment came when no other car was in sight.
There was a reason why the d’Alembert vehicle was a little longer, wider, rounder- and much heavier – than a standard car. Now, alone in the road for, a moment, Jules punched three innocent-looking studs on the control panel, and three things happened: i) the car’s lights went out; 2) the two halves of an airtight, beamproof, transparent canopy shot up from those too-round sides, snapped together, and locked; and 3) the vehicle went straight up into the air, at an acceleration of four Earthly gravities – they didn’t dare hurry with two Earthers aboard to an altitude of sixty kilometers before it stopped.
Their Delfian disguises had come through the action pretty much the worse for wear. Jules and Yvette removed the tattered remnants and stared wordlessly into each other’s eyes for a long half minute. Then Yvette spoke.
‘That was our contact- our only contact. And we don’t know anybody in SOTE on Earth.’
‘We could go back to Father,’ Jules suggested. ‘If he could arrange this meeting there must be ways to set up others.’ Yvette shook her head. ‘But this meeting was blown! There was a leak. There had to be a leak, Julie.’
‘I’m afraid you’re right. And it was no ordinary leak, either it had to be right in the Head’s own office …
Jules’ voice died away.
Yvette shivered. ‘Any meeting Father could set up might get blown the same way- and next time, we might not be lucky enough to get away. Any ideas?’
‘Only one. We’ve got to find the Head ourselves.’
‘We’ve got his retinal pattern,’ Yvette conceded. ‘But aside from that we haven’t an inkling of who or where the Head is. He may not even be on Earth.’
‘Well, there’s bound to be somebody here in the Tampeta office, and they’ll be on the alert. That brawl put the stuff into the fan but good. They’ll be monitoring the channel every second, waiting for us to make our move.’
‘But our friends’ friends down there will b e monitoring all channels every second – and they probably have the codes if they were able to know about our rendezvous.’
Jules thought for a minute, then grinned. ‘So I’ll go back to one that’s so old and so simple that they probably never heard of it – unless it’d fool our monitor, too.’
‘I don’t think they’d have any mental defectives manning the SO E boards at a time like this,’ his sister commented. ‘True. Alors, here goes.’
He flipped a blue switch and raised his powerful – and not painfully unmusical – deep bass voice in song: ‘Sing of the evening star, Oh Susan; sweetest old tune ever sung. Oh Susan, sweet one, ‘tis everything soft, Oh …’
‘Susan here.’ A lilting, smooth as-cream contralto voice came from the speaker. There was a moment of silence, then the voice said, ‘Cut!’ and Jules flipped his switch once more. Satisfied, the voice concluded, ‘We’ll beep you in. Out.’
‘I’ll say they’re alert,’ Yvette commented. She half giggled in relief, then went on, ‘And she’s fast on the uptake – “Sus an here” my left eyeball. You made that whole thing up on the spur of the moment, didn’t you?’
‘Uh huh. If I’d had a little time the verse would have been as good as the music.’
Yvette snorted. ‘Ha! Modesty, thy name is Jules! Perhaps you should have gone into opera instead of acrobatics. But we were right about one thing, at least – no mental defective could have made “S-O-T- E – S-O-S” so fast out of that mess of yowling. But my guess is it won’t really be a beeper.’
‘Anything else but. I’d bet on laser. They’ve got us lined up and they’ll pour it right into our cup so I’d better set the cup spinning.’
He did so, and in less than a minute the pencil-thin beam came in, chopped up into evenly spaced dashes by the rotation of the cup-antenna of the car. There was, of course, no voice or signal.