…only to collide with a wall that hadn’t been there a second ago. I turned swiftly, to find myself looking up at a formidable figure dressed in police blue. Shiny buttons spanned a chest that seemed almost as broad as the alley. But that was not the biggest surprise.

The face grinning down at me was suddenly familiar.

“Uh… Crewman… Wems?”

The demmie security man kept smiling, but something struck me as wrong. Not the layer of makeup that gave his face (like mine) an imitation local-greenish tone. No, it was the teeth. Several were crudely capped, I realized suddenly, in order to make them look less pointy.

“Hello Professor,” Wems said in a low and friendly tone.

That is, it seemed friendly… till he whipped forth a truncheon, the size of a tree branch, and used it to rap me sharply on the head, ending that brief morning and bringing back the night.

6.

After it has happened to you enough times – (and if you hang around demmies, it will) – you finally get kind of used to waking up in strange, dank places with a splitting headache, lacking a clue to where and how you got there. (There was that time when Captain Ohm insisted that we go bar-hopping on Erythromycin-Six… and we came to in the harem of a Slug Queen on Escargotia, more than ninety parsecs away. But that’s another story.) Seriously, when you get hit on the head as often as I have been, across this galaxy, it has strange, long term effects… as I’m sure you listeners have noticed.

On this occasion, at least, I regained consciousness on a soft surface. Not a bed, exactly, but a cushioned pallet or sofa, in a dim room that was illuminated only by single, fancy candelabra on a nearby table. Dust motes and flickering light made my eyes itch, so I quickly looked away from the flames, rubbing my nose. But the rest of the chamber wasn’t any more comforting. Cobwebs spanned the corners and furnishings. Gloomy figures, attired in lavish native costumes, stared down at me from large portraits, with expressions that seemed to say nothing good will come of this.

No kidding.

I sat up, gingerly bracing for the inevitable stabs of pain. At least Wems had been trained well, there was that small mercy. His application of force had taken away consciousness without crushing my skull. Even the hematoma, throbbing under my fingertips, didn’t seem too blood-sodden or swollen. A fine, professional job. Only…

…only why?

Why did Wems disguise himself as a local constable and then attack me?