I'd been moving forward as I talked, getting madder and madder, and closer to being ready to dive for that gun and rip it out of her hand.
She was starting to lose some of her determination. The gun muzzle was dipping. I reached out my hand.
The gun was centered on me again in an instant, but the fire was gone out of her eyes.
"Hold it, Ash!" she said. "You sound too mad to be lying, but you haven't convinced me yet. Just stay put a minute. You want to know what's going on? You should have a pretty fair idea by now," she went on, still keeping the gun on me. "I'm after that power pile you're supposed to fly out to Titan. Harry needs it."
I should have known, I suppose. Well, maybe she was still space-struck. Thorsten played rough, and he had some strange friends, but so far he hadn't earned a full-scale visit from the TSN. It didn't mean as much in this case, though. He would have been a tough nut to crack, sitting out there in the Asteroids with a good-sized fleet behind him. Still—
But that was for another time. I let her see by my face that the subject wasn't closed, and then I went on.
"Yeah—keep talking. Who jumped you on Rocket Row last night? Why were you trying to pot me a while ago?"
"Because—goddam it, I don't know what to think!" she said. "Those were SBI men last night. I knew they were trailing me, but I thought I'd gotten rid of them before I contacted you. Maybe I did—maybe they picked me up again when I went back out on the street. Anyway, we killed them, but the SBI knows damn well who did it. We did enough yelling back and forth to let all of New York City know who it was."
That had been a dumb play, all right. I didn't have time to curse my stupidity, though. I didn't care one bit for the idea of me having shot an SBI man. It was his own fault, but it wouldn't help my record any.