"Could I have a cigarette?" Orison asked.
"Do." Kraft Gerding removed a pack from his pocket and lighted it for her, passing it from his lips to hers. Orison, hiding her feelings of distaste for this intimacy, drew on the cigarette. "Perhaps I might have a drink as well?" she asked. "All this is making me rather dizzy."
"It is dizzy-making," Kraft conceded. "In an instant, my pet." He strode from the treasure-room, shouting in his native language to the guards.
Orison tugged a twenty-dollar bill from one of the bundles on which she'd been sitting and held it to the tip of her cigarette, drawing to make it hot. The paper glowed, but the tiny patch of fire died out almost at once. She fumbled in her purse. There it was—her bottle of nail-polish remover. She splashed the aromatic fluid over the bundled money and again touched her cigarette to it. The paper flared. Flames ran in upstream rivers through the stacks above.
Orison ran to the nearest jeep and turned the key. The gears were unfamiliar to her, but she mastered them sufficiently to get moving forward toward the steel doors. Up the ramp she rolled, her feet braced down hard on the accelerator, wedged into her seat. The jeep struck the steel doors and bounced back the ramp to the sound of a giant Chinese gong, its engine stalled. Groggy, Orison dismounted and ran to the door. She pounded on the steel with both fists, shouting for help.
An arm encircled Orison, and she heard behind her the door of the money-room slam shut. "The blaze will smolder itself out in a moment, my dear," Kraft Gerding said. He spoke to the guard who held her, and she was released. "I doubt that you've destroyed more than a million dollars' worth of your local paper with your prank," he said. "Five minutes' press-run. I've brought you a spot of brandy. I daresay you can use it. Arson is thirsty work."
He held out his hand. One of the purple-eared guards produced a silver tray with a decanter and two balloon-glasses, poured them a quarter full and presented the glasses to his chief, bowing deeply. Kraft took one glass, giving the other to Orison. "A toast?" he asked. "To the success of my rebellion. To our inevitable marriage. And to the health of our progeny, who are, my dear, to inherit the Earth. A shotgun toast," he said.
Orison dashed her brandy toward his face. Kraft turned, catching the shower against his left ear, where it trickled down to stain the braid of his epaulette. He glared and raised his hand in a most unchivalrous gesture, then stopped himself. One of the guards produced a silken cloth to blot him dry.
"The word 'shotgun' was perhaps ill-chosen," Kraft said. "The spirit you show, dear Orison, is a quality most appropriate to the future Empress of Earth."