oddy
immobilized--better word, located--for a while. So I went back to our
suite, picked the lock of Hoddy's room, and allowed myself half an hour
to search his luggage.

All of his clothes were new, but there were not a great many of them.
Evidently he was planning to re-outfit himself on New Texas. There were
a few odds and ends, the kind any man with a real home planet will hold
on to, in the luggage.

He had another eleven-mm pistol, made by Consolidated-Martian
Metalworks, mate to the one he was carrying in a shoulder-holster, and a
wide two-holster belt like the one furnished me, but quite old.

I greeted the sight and the meaning of the old holsters with joy: they
weren't the State Department Special Services type. That meant that
Hoddy was just one of Natalenko's run-of-the-gallows cutthroats, not
important enough to be issued the secret equipment.

But I was a little worried over what I found hidden in the lining of one
of his bags, a letter addressed to Space-Commander Lucius C. Stonehenge,
Aggression Department Attache, New Austin Embassy. I didn't have either
the time or the equipment to open it. But, knowing our various Departments,
I tried to reassure myself with the thought that it was only a
letter-of-credence, with the real message to be delivered orally.

About the real message I had no doubts: _arrange the murder of
Ambassador Stephen Silk in such a way that it looks like another New
Texan job...._

Starting that evening--or what passed for evening aboard a ship in
hyperspace--Hoddy and I began a positively epochal binge together.

I had it figured this way: as long as we were on board ship, I was
perfectly safe. On the ship, in fact, Hoddy would definitely have given
his life to save mine. I'd have to be killed on New Texas to give
Klueng's boys their excuse for moving in.

And there was always the chance, with no chance too slender for me to
ignore, that I might be able to get Hoddy drunk enough to talk, yet
still be sober enough myself to remember what he said.

Exact times, details, faces, names, came to me through a sort of hazy
blur as Hoddy and I drank something he called superbourbon--a New Texan
drink that Bourbon County, Kentucky, would never have recognized. They
had no corn on New Texas. This stuff was made out of something called
superyams.

There were at least two things I got out of the binge. First, I learned
to slug down the national drink without batting an eye. Second,