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“Or the Mindharp.”

“Yes, although I’d venture that if the Mindharp were simply a device to tell the Toka to run and fetch their masters’ pipe and slippers, it wouldn’t deserve quite so august a resting place. However, one thing is certain: it is where that scoundrel Mohs met up with his savage cohorts. As such—”

“As such,” Vuffi Raa ventured, “it may be a wonderful place to get ambushed—again. Hold still, please, Master, while I tape your ears.”

“Leave my ears out of this, you mechanical menace, they were fine before.”

“Master, please! I am programmed to—”

“All right, all right! Then limber up your piloting appendages. We’re headed for that pyramid again. Only this time, I’m carrying two heavy blasters—and an umbrella to keep arrows out of the muzzles.”

Mohs wasn’t hard to find. When the Millennium Falcon arrived, he was sitting on a sand dune in the shadow of the pyramid, smoking a lizard.

• XIII •

“TWICE HAVE I doubted thee, O Lord, yea, even as twice hast thou proved me in error! Kill now thy miserable excuse for a servant, that he may disgrace thee no further!”

The fire, built of twigs and leaves in a scooped-out hollow in the ubiquitous reddish sand of Rafa V, was no larger than a teacup. It failed to warm Lando although he sat cross-legged not more than two feet away, trying to avoid noxious fumes rising from a branch that sported a small, disgusting reptile skewered neatly from end to end.

An ugly way to die, the gambler thought, even for a lizard. And it made an even uglier lunch.

“Look, Mohs, see me about that sometime when I’m not so tired. I may surprise you and take you up on the offer. In the meantime, are you still interested in trying to use the Key?”

“Of a certainty, Lord! Too long have my people, the wretched Toka, suffered under the tyrannical thumb of the—”

“Save it for the union meeting, Singer. All I want to know is where to put this thing. If somebody—your people, for instance—benefits, and somebody else loses as a result, well, that’s no paint off my hull, I can assure you.”

Secretly, the amateur star-captain was thoroughly enjoying the chance to use what he imagined was tough-sounding spacefaring jargon. Now that he’d had a hot meal, plenty of coffeine, and was wearing a fresh change of clean, undamaged clothes, he felt downright jaunty, even considering the miserable night he’d spent in the life-orchard.

“I don’t give a hiccup out the airlock, even if Gepta benefits, as long as I get out of this confounded system with a full cargo and a whole skin—not necessarily in that order, mind you.”

Mohs had started a little at the mention of the sorcerer’s name. Now he positively reeled, managing to wring his bony hands at the same time. “O Lord, they servant knoweth full well that thou sayest these cynical things only as a test of my faith, fortitude, and other virtues—”

“Which are too microscopic to mention.”

“—which are too microscopic to mention, as thou sayest, Lord. Yet, wouldst thou mind very much not making such vile, blasphemous, and mercenary utterances in the mortal presence of thy humble servant? It causeth unease.”

“Oh it doth, doth it?”

Lando glanced back over his shoulder. He was pretty sure that at least half of the old man’s “unease” derived from the imposing presence of the Millennium Falcon about fifty meters away across a clear expanse of sand, her full batteries trained in a protective circle to prevent a reenactment of the earlier ambush. In an inner pocket of his parka, her captain carried a transponder that kept the Falcon’s guns from sweeping within a couple of degrees of whoever wore it. This was a necessary precaution because Vuffi Raa was not at Battle Stations, inside.

He was programmed against it.

Somewhere back along the line, Lando had ceased resenting the little robot’s programmed pacifism, and simply begun planning around it. In the righthand outside slash pocket of his parka, he carried a second device with which he could trigger every weapon aboard his ship. Vuffi Raa could handle opening the