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'Tell her it's important. It could, uh, mean considerable embarrassment for
her if she ignores what I have to tell her."
The robot paused, no doubt relaying the message. Then it abruptly slid back
and the door opened. "She will see you, but only if one of us accompanies
you."
"Fine." David followed the robot into the T'klar's suite.
She stood before the window, her back to the stars. To her left, another
doorway led off into the rest of the suite. The en-
tire room sparkled with the blue fluorescence peculiar to her atmosphere, and
up close David could see that her fur was also a light shade of blue, and as
fuzzy as a kitten's. Her ears were high and rounded, half buried in fur, and
though her eyes were in the right place they were twice the size of Da-
vid's and irised in six segments like star sapphires. She wore
240 Jerry Olfion a single piece of clothing, a strip of green cloth wound once
around her waist and looping up over her right shoulder.
The robot took up station between David and her, slightly to the side.
"Ambassador Sarell," David said.
Her head whipped around like an owl's, back and forth from David to the robot
and back in a motion almost too fast to see. "You are not Ambassador DeLange."
she replied.
Uh-oh. So all humans didn't look alike, at least not to all aliens. "He's, uh,
indisposed at the moment," David said.
"I'm one of his aides. He sent me to tell you that he visited with the man you
accused of killing the Ranthamk, and he's convinced that David Wikondu is
innocent."
"That's ridiculous," she said. "I saw him fire the shot."
"You watched a being wearing a human mask fire the shot.
Then he turned and ran, but collided with m David. The real assassin got away,
while David tried to see if he could help the Ranthanik."
"He ran back for the gun he'd dropped," Sarell said.
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"The gun? Wait a minute. The gun!" David suddenly real-
ized he had a chance. "I David never touched the gun. Fin-
gerprints would prove that."
"Fingerprints?"
David nodded eagerly, "Right, fingerprints! Human hands are each unique. They
leave their pattern on whatever they touch. We can check the gun for
fingerprints and prove that
David didn't shoot it.*'
"You're calling me a liar? The T'klar ambassador?" Her eyes seemed to blaze at
him.
"I no, of course, I " David spluttered to a stop. Was he about to create
another interspecies incident here? He looked away from her hypnotic eyes,
checked the robot to see if it might be about to toss him out the door. Wait a
minute, he thought. The robot.
In for a penny, in for a pound, he thought. Aloud he said, "You call yourself
a liar. Why else are you under guard if you're so sure you've caught the
assassin?"
Sarell snorted something that didn't translate. What did translate was, "There
may have been more than one of them.
I'm a potential witness against them all. I'm sure they would
VOIATILE Mix
241
like to keep me silent." She started to say something else, but a thumping
noise from the hallway made her pause.
"What was that?" David asked, but he got his answer when the robot that had
been stationed outside the door teetered over and fell with a crash to the
floor.
"We are under attack," the remaining robot said with a calmness that belied
its words. 'Take cover." It rolled for-
ward, pushing David behind it with one arm while another snaked forward with a
heavily finned, glistening beam weapon of some sort.
The T'klar whipped her head around to look at David for a moment, then she
grabbed his arm and pulled him into the next room, which proved to be a
reasonably realistic re-
creation of some kind of enormous flower, opened to make a sort of bowl-shaped
bed. She led him across its spongy sur-
face, shoved one of the five-foot petals aside, and pulled him into darkness
beyond.
The crackle and thump of fighting echoed from the other room, then another
crash that sounded suspiciously like the second robot going down.
"Uh-oh," David muttered. "I think we're in trouble."
"Quiet!" She pulled him across an uneven floor littered with what felt like
rocks underfoot; David noticed faint flashes of light as they grated against
the floor. He stooped
and picked up one in either hand. They were hot to the touch, but not so hot
he couldn't hold them. He felt silly defending his life with rocks, but they
would be better than nothing.
Sarell had other plans, though. She had better night vision than he did; she
reached for something on the wall and a nar-
row crack of light grew before them. A door. Of course; the rooms were all the
same, the hotel just connected more of them to make bigger suites. And each
one had its own door.
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