United States or North Macedonia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
An express elevator took Verkan Vall down to one of the middle stages, where he showed his sigil to the guard outside the door of Tortha Karf's office and was admitted at once. The Paratime Police chief rose from behind his semicircular desk, with its array of keyboards and viewing-screens and communicators.
Dirzed's teeth flashed white against his brown skin as he gave Verkan Vall a quick smile. "By all means, Lord Virzal; I would much rather be distrusted than to find that my client's friends were not discreet." There were a couple of hotel Assassins guarding Dirzed's airboat, on the landing stage.
"If you're right and that's the way it looks to me, too he's probably just called in and notified the Society that he's still carnate and so is the Lady Dallona, and called off any search the Society might be making for him." "And I've got to find the Lady Dallona as soon as I can. Well, if I can't reach her, maybe I can get her to send word to me," Verkan Vall said.
It won't do, with your political record, to try to play down these stories of a gigantic criminal conspiracy. That's too close to the Management line. And at the same time, you want to avoid saying anything that would get Verkan Vall and Tortha Karf started off on any new lines of investigation." Salgath Trod nodded. "Just depend on me; I'll handle it."
"Don't you use zerfa?" he asked. "Very little," Verkan Vall replied. "I grow it. If you'd see the bums who hang around our drying sheds, on Venus, cadging rejected leaves and smoking themselves into a stupor, you'd be frugal in using it, too." Klarnood nodded. "You know, most men would want a pipe of fifty percent, or a straight zerfa cigarette, after what you've been through," he said.
The seats, and the pilot's instrument panel in front of them, swung on gimbals, and the finger of the indicator swept slowly over a ninety-degree arc as the rocket rose and leveled. By then, the high cirrus clouds Verkan Vall had watched from the field were far below; they were well into the stratosphere.
He wiped the screen and then began punching combinations. "The standard smother-out technique," Verkan Vall grinned. "I only heard a little talk about the 'Flying Saucers', and all of that was in joke.
He flipped the run-back switch, till he had recovered the page he wanted. Verkan Vall read of a Fourth Level aviator, in his little airscrew-drive craft, sighting nine high-flying saucerlike objects. "That was how it began," Tortha Karf told him. "Before long, as other incidents of the same sort occurred, our people on that line began sending back to know what was going on.
Do you want the whole thing just as it happened, Assistant Verkan, or just a condensation?" "Give me what you think it indicates, remembering that you're probably trying to analyze a large situation from a very small sample." "It's big, all right," Skordran Kirv said. "This gang can't number less than a hundred men, maybe several hundred.
"Too bad you're not coming back from your vacation, instead of starting out. Chief's Assistant Verkan," Skordran Kirv said. "This is too big for me to handle alone, and I'd sooner work under you than anybody else Chief Tortha sends in." "Vall!" Dalla cried in indignation. "You're not going to just report on this and then walk away from it, are you?"
Word Of The Day