ed the old patrician twittering, "there's
always someone to pull your chestnuts out of the fire for you--for a
price. Pay it. Then add a plus to the payment and the man's yours to use
again and again."

But even in those days as a callow, trusting youth, he'd been smarter
than Boswell. Observing, from the safety of the sidelines, the way the
old fool had finally tripped up, he'd added a codicil of his own to
Rule One: "Make sure the payment's _final_!"

(... witness the Berlin chestnut pullers. And the unobtrusive and
undiscovered spate of their predecessors whose usefulness had become
outweighed ...)

Then Boswell had said, "Rule Two: You don't have to know the how of
anything. All you have to know is _the man who does_. He always has a
price. The currency is usually odd, but find it, pay it, then proceed
per Rule One."

Even tonight, in his own Throne Room, Lonnie flushed heavily at the way
he'd accepted at face value what came next. "By the way," Old Boswell
had added smoothly, "no connection of course, my boy, but the topic
reminded me. Here are the keys to that daffodil-hued tri-phibian you
ogled at Sporter's exhibit. I must admit you have an eye for dashing
machinery even though I can't agree with your esthetics. No--no ... It's
yours. I feel that you've earned it and more by--"

He'd rushed to the garage to gloat over the mono-cyclic,
gyro-stabilized, U-powered model with the seat that flattened into a
convenient bed at the touch of a button. The tri-phib, he recalled, in
which he'd coaxed Agnes into taking her first ride.

III

The details of that recollection brought up his spirits again and, he
reminded himself, the lesson had sunk in; had developed into his most
useful ethic. After his narrow scrape with Jason's quantum analyzer in
the Berlin incident, it hadn't taken long for a good, one-man detective
agency to locate Physlab Nine's frenetic genius, Moglaut. It had taken
longer to discover Moglaut's currency but, after much shadowing, the
'tec had come through handsomely. Lonnie, automatically applying his
fully-developed Ethic One, always considered it a nice sentimental touch
that the one-man agency's final case was successful.

Moglaut's price was a prim, brunette soprano who wore her eyes disguised
behind heavy tortoiseshell. The ill-cut garb she could afford added
greatly to her staid appearance, obscuring a certain full-bodied
litheness. She earned a throttled existence soloing at funerals