ed carpet, gun in his right hand. He lifted
a white face, staring eyes, to Quillan.

"Waitin' for 'em to come back," he muttered. "Man, I'm not for long!
Got hit twice. Near passed out a couple of times already."

"What about your boys on guard downstairs?"

"Same thing there, I guess ... or they'd have showed up. They got
Cooms and the Duke, too! Man, it all happened fast!"

"And the crew on the freighter?"

"Dunno about them."

"You know the freighter's call number?"

"Huh? Oh, yeah. Sure. Never thought of that," Baldy said wearily. He
seemed dazed now.

"Let's see if you can stand."

Quillan helped the big man to his feet. Baldy hadn't bled too much
outwardly, but he seemed to have estimated his own condition
correctly. He wasn't for long. Quillan slid an arm under his
shoulders.

"Where's a ComWeb?" he asked.

Baldy blinked about. "Passage there--" His voice was beginning to
thicken.

The ComWeb was in the second room up the passage. Quillan eased Perk
into the seat before it. Baldy's head lolled heavily forward, like a
drunken man's. "What's the number?" Quillan asked.

Baldy reflected a few seconds, blinking owlishly at the instrument,
then told him. Quillan tapped out the number, flicked on the vision
screen, then stood aside and back, beyond the screen's range.

"Yeah, Perk?" a voice said some seconds later. "Hey, _Perk_ ... Perk,
what's with ya?"

Baldy spat blood, grinned. "Shot--" he said.

"_What?_"

"Yeah." Baldy scowled, blinking. "Now, lessee--Oh, yeah. Star gang's
gonna jump ya! Watch it!"

"What?"

"Yeah, watch--" Baldy coughed, laid his big head slowly down face
forward on the ComWeb stand, and stopping moving.

"Perk! Man, wake up! Perk!"

Quillan quietly took out the gun, reached behind the stand and blew
the ComWeb apart. He wasn't certain what the freighter's crew would
make of the sudden break in the connection, but they could hardly
regard it as reassuring. He made a brief prowl then through the main
sections of the level. Evidence everywhere of a short and furious
struggle, a struggle between men panicked and enraged almost beyond
any regard for self-preservation. It must have been over in minutes.
He found that the big hall portal to the ground level had been sealed,
whether before or after the shooting he couldn't know. There would
have been around twenty members of the Brotherhood on the level. None
of them had lived as long as Baldy Perk, but they seemed to have