is convinced that he
is inescapably right and that whoever differs with him is not only an
ignoramus but a venal scoundrel as well. One was a beefy man in a
gold-laced cream-colored dress tunic; he had thick lips and a
too-ready laugh. Another was a rather monkish-looking young man who
spoke earnestly and rolled his eyes upward, as though at some
celestial vision. The third had the faint powdering of gray in his
black hair which was, among the Akor-Neb people, almost the only
indication of advanced age.

"Of course it is; the whole thing is a fraud," the monkish young man
was saying angrily. "But we can't prove it."

"Oh, Sirzob, here, can prove anything, if you give him time," the
beefy one laughed. "The trouble is, there isn't too much time. We know
that that communication was a fake, prearranged by the Volitionalists,
with Dr. Harnosh and this Dallona of Hadron as their tools. They fed
the whole thing to that idiot boy hypnotically, in advance, and then,
on a signal, he began typing out this spurious communication. And
then, of course, Dallona and this Assassin of hers ran off somewhere
together, so that we'd be blamed with discarnating or abducting them,
and so that they wouldn't be made to testify about the communication
on a lie detector."

A sudden happy smile touched Verkan Vall's eyes. He caught each of his
Assassins by an arm.

"Marnik, cover my back," he ordered. "Olirzon, cover everybody at the
table. Come on!"

Then he stepped forward, halting between the chairs of the young man
and the man with the gray hair and facing the beefy man in the light
tunic.

"You!" he barked. "I mean YOU."

The beefy man stopped laughing and stared at him; then sprang to his
feet. His hand, streaking toward his left armpit, stopped and dropped
to his side as Olirzon aimed a pistol at him. The others sat
motionless.

"You," Verkan Vall continued, "are a complete, deliberate, malicious,
and unmitigated liar. The Lady Dallona of Hadron is a scientist of
integrity, incapable of falsifying her experimental work. What's more,
her father is one of my best friends; in his name, and in hers, I
demand a full retraction of the slanderous statements you have just
made."

"Do you know who I am?" the beefy one shouted.

"I know _what_ you are," Verkan Vall shouted back. Like most ancient
languages, the Akor-Neb speech included an elaborate, delicately-shaded,
and utterly vile vocabulary of abuse; Verkan Vall culled from it
j