Blantyre III was a world of tall towers and stately minarets, of twisting streets and pitch-dark alleyways, of large chimneys and narrow stairways.
In other words, it was a world made to order for the Mouse.
She stood on the makeshift stage at the back of Merlin's wagon now, not quite five feet tall, barely eighty pounds, wearing a sequined tie and tails over her tights, smiling confidently at the assembled crowd as Merlin produced bouquets and rabbits out of thin air. Each of these he handed to her, and each she placed in a special container, since flowers and rabbits were difficult to come by out on the Inner Frontier, and they planned to make use of them a number of times before moving on to the next world.
Then came the cigarette trick. Merlin lit a cigarette, snuffed it out, magically produced four more lit cigarettes, threw them away, pulled yet another out of his ear, and so on, simple sleight of hand, but immensely pleasing to the spectators who had never seen any kind of magic show before.
Then there was the patter, which Merlin kept up incessantly. He told jokes, insulted braggarts, called forth the dark gods to aid him, even read an occasional mind.
And finally, forty minutes into the act, came the piece de resistance.
Merlin had the Mouse climb into a large box, which he then bound with chains and secured with oversized padlocks. The box, he explained carefully, had a twenty-minute supply of oxygen in it, not a second more.
The Mouse was already out of the box and hiding in the back of Merlin's wagon when he had two bystanders help him attach it to a pulley, raise it over a large tank of water, and submerge it, promising his audience that the Mouse had only nineteen minutes left in which to escape or die.
He then pulled out some of his more dazzling tricks, those with fires and explosions, which held the crowd captivated while the Mouse slipped into a black bodysuit, wriggled out the hole in the bottom of the wagon, and slunk off into the shadows.
A moment later she was clambering lithely up the side of an ancient building, hiding in the shadow of a turret until Merlin performed his next trick, and then she was inside a window and scampering lightly down a corridor. There was artwork to be had in this house, lots of it, but she decided it would be too hard to smuggle off the planet. Instead she kept racing from room to room until she finally found a woman's dressing room, quickly scavenged through the drawers until she came to a jewelry chest, and plundered it, placing the contents in a leather pouch tied around her waist.
She checked her watch again. Eleven minutes. Time for at least one more house, possibly two.
She raced back to the window through which she had entered, clambered out and up to the top of a minaret, dove through space to the adjacent building, landed catlike on a ledge, and forced open the window of a darkened room.
She realized immediately that she was not alone, that someone or something was sleeping in a corner. She froze, half-expecting an attack, but then she heard a snore and she was across the room and into a corridor within five seconds.
She could tell by the numerals on the doors that she was in a rooming house rather than a private residence. It could be better; it could be worse. She could plunder four or five different rooms without having to leave the building, but residents of boarding houses rarely had anything worth stealing.
She checked the nearest room. It was empty, not only of people but of anything remotely valuable.
The second room was a little better. A man and a woman were asleep in a large bed, and the air smelled of alcohol and drugs. The Mouse found their clothing in a crumpled pile on the floor and extracted three one-hundred credit notes from the man's wallet. A further search failed to turn up the woman's purse or money, and the Mouse decided that she didn't have enough time to keep looking for them.
She re-entered the corridor with eight minutes remaining on her watch, but just as she did so an elderly woman turned on the light and wandered out to use the only bathroom on the floor. She shot into the stairwell, heard voices coming up from the floor below and realized that at least one of the rooms had a door open, and crouched in the shadows, waiting for the stiff-limbed old woman to make her way down the corridor to the bathroom. It took the old woman almost two minutes, and the Mouse decided that it was time to start heading back. She found an unlit fire exit in the rear of the building, climbed down to the ground, kept to the shadows until she was opposite Merlin's wagon, waited for him to captivate the crowd with one final trick that shot fireworks in every direction, then slithered under the wagon and entered it from beneath.
She placed her pouch carefully inside a production box, so that even if a policeman opened the top of the box he'd have a difficult time finding anything that was hidden in it. Then, with two minutes to go, she donned a black hood and insinuated herself onto the stage.
Merlin was toying with the spectators, half-convincing them that the Mouse was mere seconds from drowning or suffocating if she couldn't escape, and finally he led them in a countdown. When they reached the instant when her oxygen was theoretically used up, Merlin and his black-hooded assistant pulled the box out of the water and hacked away its chains—and revealed not a dead Mouse, but an Antarrean bird of many colors, which spread its wings, hopped out of the box, walked over to the Mouse, and pulled her hood off—its one and only trick.
The crowd applauded wildly, Merlin passed his hat for donations, and finally the audience dispersed, leaving them there in the middle of the now-empty street.
"Well?" asked the magician. "How did you do?"
"Some credits, some jewelry," replied the Mouse. "Nothing special."
"That's the problem with this world," said Merlin. "There is nothing special to it." He stared contemptuously at the houses. "All these stately facades, and each boudoir with its own facade of costume jewelry. Six nights without a major score. I'm for calling it quits."
The Mouse shrugged. "Suits me. Where to next?"
"Westerly is the next human world."
"Westerly is an alien world," she corrected him.
"It's got about twenty thousand humans living in a kind of Free Zone right in the heart of their biggest city," said Merlin. "We can refuel there."
"We can refuel right here."
"We're going to," explained Merlin patiently. "But Westerly should make a nice one-day stop along the route. Who knows? Maybe we can pick up some fresh fruit. That's something we can't get on this particular dirtball."
She shrugged again. "All right. Westerly it is." Merlin began driving the show wagon back to the spaceport. "What do the natives call it?" continued the Mouse.
"Call what?" he asked distractedly.
"Westerly."
"Well, the human natives call it Westerly."
"Thanks a heap."
"You couldn't pronounce what the aliens call it. It's listed on the star maps as Romanus Omega II." He paused. "It's an oxygen world, of course."
"Any idea what the natives are like?"
"I imagine they breathe oxygen," he said. "What difference does it make? We're only going to perform for a human audience."
"You don't crawl down chimneys or through sewers," she replied. "If I'm going to run into an alien in tight quarters, I want to know what my options are."
"Same as always: run like hell."
They rode in silence until they reached the spaceport, then loaded the wagon into Merlin's brightly-decorated ship. Once they had taken off and laid in a course to Westerly, the Mouse relaxed with a beer while Merlin began running the gemstones she had stolen through the computer's spectrographic sensors. When he finished he cross-checked them against his current jeweler's reference guides, and finally placed tentative values upon them.
"Could have been worse," he said at last. "I do wish you'd get over your compulsive urge to always grab the biggest stones, though. So many of them really aren't worth the trouble."
"What about the diamond bracelet and the sapphire necklace?" she asked without looking up.
"They were very nice pieces. But those beads that look like pearls—absolutely worthless."
"You'll find some pretty little girl to give them to, once we get back to the Frontier," said the Mouse.
"I shall certainly try my utmost," agreed Merlin. "But that in no way alters the fact that they won't bring a credit on the black market."
She sipped her beer thoughtfully. "We don't want credits anyway, not the way the Democracy's going these days. If I were you, I'd sell this stuff for Stalin ruples and Maria Theresa dollars."
"Then we're going to have to wait a few weeks. As long as we're within the Democracy, people are going to want to pay us with credits."
"Then you'd better charge more, because credits don't spend very well out where we're heading."
"I don't tell you how to steal them; don't you tell me how to unload them."
The Mouse stared at him for a moment as he practiced making the jewels appear and disappear beneath a colorful silken scarf, then went back to concentrating on her beer. It had been a long week, and she was tired, and her left knee was throbbing from where she'd banged it against a turret two nights ago. In fact, her whole body hurt from the chores she kept giving it. It really was time for a vacation, and as she sought out her bed and drifted off to sleep, she found herself hoping that they could make a big enough killing on Westerly so that she could afford to take a few months off.
* * *
Westerly, decided the Mouse, was like most alien worlds. At first glance it seemed to make perfect sense; it was only when you looked more closely that it seemed less and less reasonable.
"Well, what do you think?" asked Merlin as he drove the show wagon down the main street of Westerly's human enclave.
"I don't like it," replied the Mouse.
"What's the problem?"
"Look at the way the streets all twist and turn back into themselves," she said. "There are some skyscrapers with no windows or doors at all, and some little one-story buildings that are all glass and have fifteen doors. I don't know if I can figure it out in ten minutes."
"Just stick to the human buildings," said Merlin. "We don't want any alien objects anyway."
"It's not that simple," she said. "Which ones are the human buildings? If I pick the wrong one, I could get lost inside of it for an hour or more. I have a horrible feeling that every corridor ends in a blank wall, and that every staircase forms a continuous loop."
"You're overreacting," said Merlin.
"I don't think so," she said, "and it's my opinion that counts." She paused. "Your information was wrong. This planet never saw twenty thousand men at one time. I'd be surprised if they've got a thousand in residence."
"Let's compromise, then," said Merlin, bringing the wagon to a halt.
"How?"
He jerked his head at a large steel-and-glass building just across the street. "The Royal Arms Hotel," he said. "Human-owned, human-run. We've got all day to study it. Let's go in, have lunch, and walk around a bit. If you're comfortable with it by nightfall, it's the only place you'll have to hit."
She nodded her agreement. "Fair enough," she said.
"I'll join you as soon as I can find a place to leave the wagon."
While she was waiting for him, she walked entirely around the hotel, and located what would be her means of ingress later that night: a ventilation shaft attached to a basement laundry. There was a grate covering it, and room enough to park the wagon right over it. She had already entered the lobby when Merlin caught up with her.
"Well?" he said. "Learn anything?"
"Two things," she replied. "First, I know how I'm getting in."
"Good."
"And second," she continued, indicating a Robelian and a trio of Lodinites, "they've got more than just men staying here."
"They'll have their own floors," replied Merlin with a shrug. "It just means we have to be selective."
"What about the locks?"
"They should be standard, keyed into the house computer so they can change combinations on a moment's notice." He paused. "If you forget half of what I've already taught you, it might take you thirty seconds to crack one of them."
"You don't mind if we check them out before tonight?"
He shrugged. "Whatever you wish."
"Has it occurred to you that you could probably loot fifty guest rooms between now and dinnertime?" she suggested.
He shook his head. "We've been through all that before. The only reason we've never been arrested is because we do our looting only during the time we have an alibi."
She made no reply, but kept looking surreptitiously into corners, down corridors, behind room dividers. From what she could tell—and she couldn't be certain until she examined some of the rooms—it appeared that most or all of the human guests used the airlifts to the right of the registration desk, which put them on levels Four through Nine. Levels Two and Three were reached by gently-ascending ramps to the left of the registration desk, and seemed to be of interest only to Canphorites, Lodinites, and Robelians.
"Well, at least they're all oxygen breathers," she muttered. "I hate it when they change environments." She turned to Merlin. "Have you spotted the service lifts yet?"
He frowned. "There don't seem to be any."
"There must be. They'd never let the maids go up in the same airlift as the paying customers." She paused. "Maybe you'd better go tell the management that we're here to put on a show for their customers tonight, before they think that we're casing the premises."
"And what will you be doing while I'm explaining away our presence?" asked Merlin.
"Casing the premises," she replied with a smile.
Merlin approached the front desk, and the Mouse took an elevator to the seventh level, made sure that the locks were a type she could pick, tried to take the lift down to the basement to inspect the laundry, found that it stopped at the lobby, and finally rejoined the magician just as he was emerging from the day manager's office.
"All set?" she asked.
"They won't give us any problems, and it'll justify our hanging around the hotel for the rest of the afternoon."
"Good. Let's start by having some lunch."
He agreed, and a moment later they entered the main-floor restaurant. Only two other tables were occupied, and Merlin nodded toward the farthest one.
"See that alien over there?" he whispered, indicating the lone being at the table.
"The humanoid with the bad complexion?" she asked.
Merlin nodded. "The one who's dressed all in silver. Steer clear of him."
"Why?"
"Wait'll he reaches for something and you'll see."
As if on cue, the alien signaled for a waiter, and she could see that he had once possessed four arms, but that one had been amputated.
"What kind of race does he belong to?" she asked.
"I don't know—but unless I miss my guess, that's Three-Fisted Ollie."
"Never heard of him."
"Just keep out of his way."
"Outlaw?"
"Bounty hunter. They say he's killed more than thirty men, and that he never takes contracts on his own race." The magician paused thoughtfully. "I wish I knew why he was on Westerly; he usually operates on the Inner Frontier."
"Unless he's hunting for us."
"Come on," said Merlin. "There's not a warrant out on us anywhere in the Democracy."
"That you know of," she said.
"That anyone knows of," he replied confidently. "Anyway, if you run into him tonight, just apologize and get the hell out of his way quick."
The Mouse nodded and punched her order into the small menu computer. A moment later Merlin prodded her with his toe.
"What now?" she asked.
"Don't look turn around or pretend to notice him—but do you see who just joined the alien?"
She turned her head.
"I said don't look directly!" hissed Merlin.
"All right," said the Mouse, staring directly into Merlin's eyes. "It's a big bearded human with a small arsenal hanging down from his belt. I assume you know him, too?"
"It's Cemetery Smith."
"Another bounty hunter?"
Merlin shook his head. "A hired killer. One of the best."
"So why are an alien bounty hunter and a professional assassin sitting fifty feet away from us?" asked the Mouse.
"I don't know," said the magician nervously. "They should both be on the Frontier, and they sure as hell shouldn't be talking to each other."
"Are they after us?" asked the Mouse calmly, even as she searched for exits and mentally calculated her chances of reaching them.
"No. These guys don't fool around. If they wanted us, we'd already be dead."
"What do you want to do about tonight?" she asked. "We can give the hotel a pass, and just take off."
"Let me think about it," said Merlin. He lowered his head and stared at his interlocked fingers for a long moment, then looked up. "No, there's no reason to cancel out. They're not after us, and we don't represent any competition to them. We're thieves, they're killers."
The Mouse shrugged. "Makes no difference to me."
"I wonder who they're after?" mused Merlin, as the human got to his feet, said something to the alien, and walked out into the hotel lobby. "Whoever it is, he must be damned good if it takes the two of them together to hunt him down."
They ate in silence, and then, as twilight approached, the Mouse began passing out holographic flyers announcing the magic show that would shortly be performed on the street outside the hotel.
By sundown, when Merlin began producing bouquets and birds and rabbits with professional élan, they had attracted a crowd of about sixty, all but a handful of them humans. Merlin continued to bedazzle the crowd, the Mouse performed her two or three simple illusions to a smattering of applause, and then Merlin put her into the box and began securing the locks, even as she rolled out the false back. By the time he had maneuvered it into the water tank, she was beneath the surface of the street, crawling through the ventilation shaft into the laundry. There were two women on duty, and it took her a minute longer than she had anticipated to reach the enclosed fire stairs. She raced up the stairs to the fourth level, then emerged and began checking for unlocked doors. She found one, quickly looted the room of its few valuable items, and then broke into another room. This one provided even less booty, and she soon emerged into the corridor. According to her watch, she had time for perhaps two more rooms if she was fast enough, one more if she had to hunt for its treasures.
Then, suddenly, she heard a door open, and she shot into the stairwell. There was no reason to wait for the resident to traverse the corridor and reach the airlift, when all she had to do was climb another floor and loot two rooms on the fifth level—but some instinct warned her not to climb any higher. Perhaps it was the press of time, perhaps it was the possibility of running into Cemetery Smith, but whatever the reason, she found herself waiting for the fourth level corridor to become empty rather than ascending to the fifth.
"Goddamn it!" bellowed a voice, and she peeked into the fourth level corridor.
Evidently whoever had opened the door had managed to lock himself out of his room, because now he was cursing at the top of his lungs and pounding on his door. Other doors cracked open as curious residents sought the reason for the disturbance, and the Mouse pulled her head back into the stairwell, convinced that the fourth level wouldn't be safe for her until long after she had to return to the magic show.
She took two steps up the stairwell, then heard still more noise on the fifth level, as the sounds of cursing and pounding rose through the building, and she immediately reversed her course, racing down to the second level, well below the noise.
She stepped cautiously into the corridor, which was a bit wider than the human section, and began checking the doors. The first two were locked, the third had a hideous growling sound emanating from behind it. It was as she approached the fourth door that she heard a sound that had no business being in the alien section of the hotel: the sobbing of a human child.
It took her less than twenty seconds to pick the lock and leap into the darkness of the room before the door could slide shut behind her. She pulled out a tiny flashlight and began inspecting the premises. There was an oddly-shaped couch and chair that no human could ever sit in, a table on which were placed six bronze artifacts that were absolutely meaningless to her, and another table with the remains of an alien meal on it.
Then her light caught a slight movement in the corner of the room. She immediately turned and focused it, and found herself staring at a small blonde girl manacled to the heavy wooden leg of an immense chair.
"Help me!" pleaded the girl.
"Are you alone?" whispered the Mouse.
The girl nodded.
The mouse crossed the room and set to work on the girl's manacles.
"What's your name?" asked the Mouse.
"Penelope," sniffed the girl.
"Penelope what?"
"Just Penelope."
The manacles came apart and dropped to the floor, and the Mouse stood up and took her first good look at the girl.
Penelope's blonde hair seemed to have been haphazardly cut with a knife rather than a shears, and it obviously hadn't been washed in weeks, or perhaps months. There was a large bruise on her left cheek, not terribly miscolored, obviously on the mend. She was thin, not wiry and hard like the Mouse, but almost malnourished. She was dressed in what had once been a white play outfit that was now grimy and shredded from being worn for weeks on end. Her feet were bare, and both her heels were raw.
"Don't turn the light on," said Penelope. "He'll be back soon."
"What race does he belong to?"
Penelope shrugged. "I don't know."
The Mouse pulled a dagger out of her left boot. "If he comes back before we leave, I'll have a little surprise for him, that's for sure."
Penelope shook her head adamantly. "You can't kill him. Please, can't we leave?"
The Mouse reached out a hand and pulled Penelope to her feet. "Where are your parents?"
"I don't know. Dead, I think."
"Can you walk?"
"Yes."
"All right," said the Mouse, heading toward the door. "Let's go."
"Wait!" said Penelope suddenly. "I can't leave without Jennifer!"
"Jennifer?" demanded the Mouse. "Who's Jennifer?"
Penelope raced to a corner of the room and picked up a filthy rag doll. "This is Jennifer," she said, holding it up in the beam of light. "Now we can go."
"Give me your hand," said the Mouse, ordering the door to slide into the wall.
She stuck her head out into the hall, saw no movement, and quickly walked to the stairwell, practically dragging the weakened little girl behind her. Once there, they walked down to the basement level and made their way to the laundry room.
"Now listen carefully," whispered the Mouse. "I want you to crawl on your hands and knees, just the way I'm going to do, behind this row of laundry carts, until we reach that vent. Can you see it?"
Penelope peered into the semi-darkness and shook her head.
"I'll let you know when we're there. Once we reach the vent, I'm going to boost you up inside it. It's narrow and it's dark, but you won't get stuck, because that's how I came in and I'm bigger than you are."
"I'm not afraid," said Penelope.
"I know you're not," said the Mouse reassuringly. "But you have to be absolutely silent. If you make any noise, the maids who are running the washing machines on the other side of the room might hear, and if they come over to investigate, I'll have to kill them."
"It's wrong to kill."
"Then don't make any noise and I won't have to," said the Mouse. "Are you ready?"
Penelope nodded her head, and the Mouse began crawling toward the vent. When she reached it she turned to see how far Penelope had gotten, and was surprised to find the little girl almost beside her.
The Mouse made sure that the maids were still busily loading and unloading the washers and dryers, put a finger to her lips, then lifted Penelope into the vent. The little girl writhed and wriggled, and finally made it to the right angle where the vent left the building and went beneath the street.
The Mouse was about to follow her when she heard a plaintive whisper.
"I can't find Jennifer!"
"Keep going!" hissed the Mouse. "I'll find her."
She waited for a moment until she could hear the child wriggling forward again, then climbed into the vent herself. She came upon the rag doll wedged into a corner as the vent turned out of the building, tucked it into her belt, then continued crawling until she caught up with Penelope, who had reached the grate beneath Merlin's wagon and didn't know what to do next.
The Mouse quickly removed the grate, boosted Penelope into the wagon, and followed her, leaning back down through the false floor to reattach the grate.
"Wait here," she instructed the child. "And don't make a sound."
She donned her black hood and made it to the act's finale with no more than ten seconds to spare. When it was over, and most of the crowd had dispersed, she led Merlin back inside the wagon.
"What kept you?" asked the magician. "You cut it awfully close."
"I hired an assistant," said the Mouse with a smile.
"An assistant?"
The Mouse pointed at Penelope, who had buried herself under a bag of props.
"Good God!" muttered Merlin, lifting the bag. "Where the hell did you find her?"
"Chained to a bed in an alien's room."
The magician squatted down next to the little girl and examined the bruise on her cheek. "You've had a hard time of it, haven't you?"
She stared at him without answering.
"Has she got any family on Westerly?" Merlin asked the Mouse.
"I don't think so."
"What was she doing here?"
"I don't know," said the Mouse.
"Hiding," said Penelope.
"He doesn't mean now, Penelope," said the Mouse. "He meant when I found you."
"Hiding," repeated Penelope.
"You mean the alien who stole you was in hiding?"
She shook her head. "He was hiding me."
The Mouse nodded. "From your parents."
Penelope shook her head again. "My parents are dead."
"From the authorities, then," said the Mouse.
"No."
"Then from who?" asked the Mouse in mild exasperation.
Penelope pointed a thin, wavering finger out the wagon's only window to the doorway of the hotel, where Cemetery Smith and Three-Fisted Ollie were speaking in loud angry voices to the doorman.
"From them."