f the irregular, smoking, hole in the ceiling, and gave it a
short burst, then fired another at the exit from the descent tube.
Then he took to his heels and followed the Assassins and Hadron Dalla
into Prince Jirzyn's apartment.

As he ran through the open door, the Assassins were letting Dalla down
into a chair; they instantly threw themselves into the work of
barricading the doorway so as to provide cover and at the same time
allow them to fire out into the central well.

[Illustration: ]

For an instant, as he bent over her, he thought Dalla had been killed,
an assumption justified by his knowledge of the deadliness of Akor-Neb
bullets. Then he saw her eye-lids flicker. A moment later, he had the
explanation of her escape. The bullet had hit the game bag at her
side; it was full of spools of metal tape, in metal cases, and notes
in written form, pyrographed upon sheets of plastic ring fastened into
metal binders. Because of their extreme velocity, Akor-Neb bullets
were sure killers when they struck animal tissue, but for the same
reason, they had very poor penetration on hard objects. The
alloy-steel tape, and the steel spools and spool cases, and the
notebook binders, had been enough to shatter the little bullet into
splinters of magnesium-nickel alloy, and the stout leather back of the
game bag had stopped all of these. But the impact, even distributed as
it had been through the contents of the bag, had been enough to knock
the girl unconscious.

He found a bottle of some sort of brandy and a glass on a serving
table nearby and poured her a drink, holding it to her lips. She
spluttered over the first mouthful, then took the glass from him and
sipped the rest.

"What happened?" she asked. "I thought those bullets were sure death."

"Your notes. The bullet hit the bag. Are you all right, now?"

She finished the brandy. "I think so." She put a hand into the game
bag and brought out a snarled and tangled mess of steel tape. "Oh,
_blast_! That stuff was important; all the records on the preliminary
auto-recall experiments." She shrugged. "Well, it wouldn't have been
worth much more if I'd stopped that bullet, myself." She slipped the
strap over her shoulder and started to rise.

As she did, a bedlam of firing broke out, both from the two Assassins
at the door and from outside. They both hit the floor and crawled out
of line of the partly-open door; Verkan Vall recovered his
submachine-gun, which he had set do