Brain Ships - Anne McCaffrey [97]
"Well, I can make something up that sounds pretty exotic," Alex said cheerfully. "My clients won't give a damn. So, what do you want to do about delivery?"
"You hire a lifter and a kid from SpaceCaps," the Quiet Man said instantly. "I'll do the same. They meet here, tomorrow, at twelve-hundred. Your kid gives mine the credit slip, mine gives yours the box. Make the slip out to the bar, the usual."
Since that was exactly the kind of arrangement Alex had made for the gross of funeral urns, with only the time of delivery differing, he agreed, and he and the Quiet Man left the bar and went their separate ways.
When he returned to the ship, he took the stairs instead of the lift, still trying to remember where he had seen the style of the tiny vase.
"You look cheerful!" Tia said, relief at his safe return quite evident in her voice.
"I feel cheerful. I picked up some artifacts on the black market that I'm sure the Institute will be happy to have." He emptied his pockets of everything but the "perfume bottle" and laid out his "loot" where Tia could use her close-up cameras on the objects. "And this, I suspect, is stolen—" He unwrapped the kachina. "See if you can find the owner, will you?"
"No problem," she replied absently. "I've been following your credit chit all over the station; that's how I figured out how to keep track of you. Alex, the two end skulls are forgeries, but the middle one is real, and worth as much as everything you spent tonight."
"Glad to hear it." He chuckled. "I wasn't sure what I was going to say to the Institute and Medical if they found out I'd been overtipping and buying rounds for the house! All right, here's my final find, and I have a load of them coming over tomorrow. Do you remember what the devil this is?"
He placed the warped little vase carefully on the console. Tia made a strange little inarticulate gargle.
"Alex!" she exclaimed. "That's one of SWOT's artifacts!"
He slapped his forehead with the heel of his hand. "Of course! That's why I couldn't remember what book I'd seen it in! Spirits of space—Tia, I just made a deal with the crewman of the ship that's running these things in for a whole load of them! He said—and I quote—'the bosses only wanted the bigger stuff.' They're not really artifacts, they're from some failed human art-religious colony."
"I'm calling the contact number Sinor gave us," she said firmly. "Keep your explanations until I get someone on the line."
* * *
Tia had been ready to start sending her servos to pick lint out of the carpet with sheer nerves until she figured out that she could trace Alex's whereabouts by watching for his credit number in the station database. She followed him to three different bars that way, winding up in one called "Rockwall," where he settled down and began spending steadily. She called up the drink prices there, and soon knew when he had made an actual artifact purchase by the simple expedient of which numbers didn't match some combination of the drink prices. A couple of times the buys were obvious; no amount of drinking was going to run up numbers like he'd just logged to his expense account.
She had worried a little when he didn't start back as soon as the bar closed—but drinks kept getting logged in, and she figured then, with a little shiver of anticipation, that he must have gotten onto a hot deal.
When he returned, humming a little under his breath, she knew he'd hit paydirt of some kind.
The artifacts he'd bought were enough to pacify the Institute—but when he brought out the little vase, she thought her circuits were going to fry.
The thing's identification was so obvious to her that she couldn't believe at first that he hadn't made the connection himself. But then she remembered how fallible softperson memory was. . . .
Well, it didn't matter. That was one of the things she was here for, after all. She grabbed