Two more figures poured around the corner. They spotted the body and reversed their direction with admirable rapidity. They would move after him much more cautiously now.

He ran again. Another pile of crates went up in crackling smoke far to his left. He had them shooting at shadows now. Sooner or later, however, someone would slip behind him and fire at a shadow that wouldn’t be so insubstantial. It was up to him to put that meeting off permanently, if possible.

His knowledge of the floor plan of the great building was superficial at best. Ship-masters didn’t stoop to supervising storing procedure first hand. He knew that there should be several small personnel entrances spotted around the enormous expanse of metal and plastic, however. Warehousing permitted little flexibility in construction; they rarely varied except in size from port to port. The same lack of variance also told him that none of the personnel entrances would be left unlocked at night unless operations were proceeding. It happened that tonight the nearest new cargo was light-minutes off. He doubted that his pursuers would be so stupid as to permit him to slip unnoticed out the main entrance.

Zig-zagging constantly, laser at the ready, he made his way unevenly to the closest section of wall. There was a door there, all right. It was locked, all right.

He turned the laser to pencil thinness and began cutting around the circular automatic lock. If nothing else, that ought to alert the port police to the presence of intruders. Obviously the watchman had been taken care of. There was the chance that this alarm was tied in to the one at the main entrance, in which case it would have been rendered useless when the thieves cut the main one. Not that the police would arrive in time to save his own skin, whatever the case.

It was slow work, damnably slow! The high-intensity pistol was built to cut packing plastic and maybe people, both of which were considerably softer than bomb-proof plating. The metal glowed, began to drip lazily down the side of the door. Much too slow. Tridee stars smashed in such doors with the same ease that they dispatched assassins via clever verbiage. Hammurabi was considerably stronger than any tridee star and valued the bones in his shoulder. Doors were usually as unyielding as certain women.

He wasn’t going to cut through in time.

As a last resort, he would put the pistol to the open case and threaten to melt its inexplicably valuable contents to an aromatic puddle.

They continued to fire wildly and often, behind him. Maybe he’d gotten them so confused that they thought he’d slipped behind them and had started shooting at each other. That thought gave him enough respite to relax slightly.

Three men appeared in the shadow of a towering processing tank, newly arrived from Wolophon III. The lock was barely a quarter burnt through. He pressed his back to the door and shoved the muzzle of the warm pistol into the case, thumbing the beam to wide fan. The gun was hot from continuous use.