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“What is ‘funny,’ Lord?”

Lando sighed, beginning to be resigned to permanent exasperation. “Something about this whole confounded setup. Here I neatly avoid a messy conflict with that character out in the bar, and then you go and try to set yourself up in the Key Bearer business. And I don’t see why Gepta and his pocket-piece governor need me to do their dirty work in the first place. They had the Key, why not just … Come on, Vuffi Raa, we’re getting out of here. I need a chance to think. We’ll doss down aboard the Falcon tonight and get a fresh start in the morning.”

He paused, then added, “And I want you to help me rig up a few booby traps in case anybody else wants to try grabbing the Key.”

“Master, I’m not sure my programming will allow that!”

The bartender stood, impassive, then turned and went back into the bar. “Good luck, sir. I think you’re going to need it.”

Keeping a suspicious eye glued to Mohs, Lando said to Vuffi Raa, “Very well, then, whether we can overcome your cybernetic scruples or not, we’re still spending the night aboard the Falcon. Get out front and find us some transport—a bus, a vegetable gravlifter, anything.” He shrugged uncomfortably, trying to unwind a painfully twisted muscle in his shoulder. “Do you think they might have any taxis on this misbegotten mudball?”

The robot knew a rhetorical question when he heard one.

Lando watched him go, rubbed at his bruised shoulder, stood up and stretched.

“Stay a moment, Lord.” It was the old Toka. “It is not meet that thy servant mount the same conveyance as thyself.”

Lando snorted. “What do you propose as an alternative?”

Mohs shook his snowy head. “Worry not, Lord, neither trouble thyself over the minor travails of thy servant, but go thou, instead, thine own way, even as thy servant shall go his.”

“Catchily put. Does that mean you’ll meet us at the spaceport?”

The old man looked puzzled. “Is that not what I just said?”

“Somewhere in there, I suppose; it got lost in the transubstantiation. Very well, old disciple, have it your own way.” Blast, there was a snag in his tailored uniform trousers. They simply weren’t intended for brawling. “We’ll leave a light burning in the starboard viewport.”

He left by the front door to join Vuffi Raa. Mohs presumably exited through the back. A hoverbus swooshed along almost immediately. Lando and the robot were whisked the ten kilometers to the landing field in as many minutes.

They were not unanticipated.

“What in the name of the Core is that?” Lando asked the equally astonished droid.

Outside the chain-link gate that filled a gap between the force-field pole-pieces around the port, a considerable and highly unusual crowd had gathered. Absently, Lando paid the driver droid, turned to stare at the hundreds of stooped gray figures standing in their loincloths in the moonless dark, chanting to the cold unanswering stars.

As the gambler and his companion approached them, the primitives stepped back en masse, forming a broad, open corridor. To one side, a spaceport security officer was visible through the transparency of his guard booth, gesticulating at the visicom.

Lando and Vuffi Raa, the former growing more reluctant by the minute to surround himself in an unpredictable mob—especially after his recent wrestling match with one of the natives—made slow, involuntarily stately progress as the crowd folded itself back before them, the rhythmic chanting never missing a beat.

At the end of the living aisle, they encountered Mohs.

• VIII •

IT HAD BEEN a couple of very long sleepless days. Lando didn’t even want to think about how an ancient savage on foot had beaten a fusion-powered hovercraft across ten kilometers of twisted, ruin-strewn thoroughfare to the spaceport.

Let the robot figure it out, he told himself groggily, that’s what Class Two droids are for.

Mohs, High Singer of the Toka, had, of course, been leading the high-pitched, disharmonious chant. Now the old man signaled the others to provide a more subdued