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It was a puzzle. Luckily, he didn’t care enough about solving it to let it worry him unduly. He watched the sky, he watched his performers. He watched reflections of it all in the fist-sized Rafa life-crystal he wore upon a yard of silken cord about his neck, wondering why he’d bothered to obtain the thing in the first place.

That philosopher, whoever he had been, had been right: the greatest mystery of life was life itself. And the question that best stated it was: why bother?

A tear rolled down Bohhuah Mutdah’s pillow of cheek, but he was far too numb to notice it.

In a hidden place, Rokur Gepta thought upon the art of deception. How ironic it was, and yet how fitting, that the surest way to lie to others is to lie to oneself first. If you can convince the single soul who knows the falsehood for what it is, then everyone else is an easy mark.

Salesmen had known this simple wisdom for ten thousand years, but Rokur Gepta had never known a salesman. Politicians knew it, too, but politicians were Gepta’s natural prey, and while the spider knows the ways of the fly in many respects, she never asks him what he thinks of the weather.

Gepta, isolated by necessity now, from his cruiser, from his underlings, even from his beloved pet—they’d better be taking proper care of it, or they themselves would face a greater appetite!—did not regret the rigors which fulfillment of his plans required. Long centuries before an infant Bohhuah Mutdah moaned that life meant nothing, Gepta was consumed by an overwhelming lust for all the things life meant to him: power; hunger filled; power; humiliation of enemies; power.

He let himself be warmed, in his stifling concealment, by memories of triumphs past, by extrapolation to future victories. He saw himself astride the universe, whipping it on to exhaustion in his service. In a linear progression, he would make vassals of emperors, servants of gods. Nothing was beyond the scope of his ambition, nothing.

And his certain destruction of Lando Calrissian would be but a microscopic footnote, a token of good luck, a single four-leaf clover in an infinite field. It was an exercise in determination to Rokur Gepta, an example of taking minute pains to assure that everything, absolutely everything, was right.

The subject of a microscopic footnote to the future history of intergalactic space was pleased.

He rolled another cigarette and lit it while Vuffi Raa checked references against the Oseon ephemeris. Exactly as the gambler had anticipated, they’d wound up, at the end of the program, in a flock of asteroids which were well cataloged and identifiable.

And not too very far away from Oseon 5792.

A gambler’s life had taught him to take satisfaction from success without being cocky or becoming careless. Well outside the range of the best-known ship-detection systems, and despite the fact that the Flamewind howling outside had blinded any such devices, he ordered Bassi Vobah and her feathered colleague into hiding. Examining the blueprints of the Falcon, it had occurred to him that there was space below the corridor decking that might be perfect for installing hidden lockers. Smuggling was merely an interest with him; it might someday rise high enough among his priorities to become a hobby. In the meantime, he had not as yet taken time or gone to the expense of building the lockers. He might never get around to it.

As a consequence, the two police officers were extremely uncomfortable just then, zipped into their spacesuits and stuffed beneath the decking. They clung to stanchions, cursing Lando and their jobs, wishing they had become clerk typists or shoe salespersons.

Which suited their chauffeur right down to the ground.

“Fifty-seven ninety-two coming up, Master. I believe it’s that big blob over there on the right.”

“That’s starboard, old binnacle; don’t let’s disillusion the tourists. Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of—You’ve got the package ready?”

The little robot turned from the controls, reached behind himself adroitly, and took a vacuum-wrapped parcel from the jumpseat. “I inspected it and