"If you will notice their eyes," the girl remarked dryly, "you will find that a good proportion of the Yarga's clientele are high on Soames drug."
Glayne started and looked more closely at the couples entering the stage. Then he saw what she meant. Here and there he saw eyes—burning eyes—eyes that glittered with a brilliant fire that emanated from huge, dilated pupils. They were using the marvelous Soames energizing drug; it fairly blazed from their slitted lids. Its purpose was to accelerate physical reaction speeds—but why use it on a small planet like Lorle IV? With the question came the answer. Their quarry had the .95 reaction index of a big-planet man. That was Glayne's index. And that meant that they were right on top of him.
"I think," he intoned softly to the girl, "it would be wise for us to move on to the next stage."
In reply she slipped smoothly from his arms, seized him by the sleeve of his loose-fitting jumper, and propelled him to the tingle screen. When he balked she grinned at him and stood in the field of the screen herself and laughed at him. It was a bubbly, elated laugh. Glayne liked it. And he liked the way the soothing color movements of the tingle screen caressed the long curves of her figure. But he didn't like the nervous manner in which the glittering, dilated pupils flickered at them and held them curiously, then flickered casually away.
The girl was clever, he realized. The keyed-up Delban agents would be far less likely to suspect an intoxicated couple of dark designs. Suddenly the red-headed girl stumbled, accidentally pushed from the other side of the screen. Instinctively Glayne reached out to steady her—reached out with a long, liquid motion of his powerful arm. In one instant every Soames-dilated eye in the room was upon him. In another, Cardy guns were magically appearing in a dozen hands.
But, fast as they were, Glayne was faster. He drew his own weapon with blurred speed, fired, and flung himself and the girl through the screen into the second stage. The Delban agents hesitated to fire blindly through the screen and rushed after them. The big Guardian hurtled through the exotic darkness of the second stage with the girl in his left arm. He scattered and smashed tables right and left, littering the floor with bewildered and drunken patrons.
The exit toward which he was heading was suddenly no longer an exit. It was filled with a crowd of huge, glittering eyes and wicked looking Cardy guns. In a single movement, Glayne dropped to the floor and fired.
The second stage was in an uproar. Now agents were pouring through the tingle screen in pursuit. Desperately Glayne sought for a means of escape. Then he saw the portal that evidently led to the kitchen or the bar. He grabbed the dazed red-head and rushed through the portal, swept down a short corridor, turned, and straight-armed two tray-bearing waiters as he dashed through a second portal. And suddenly he was behind the entrance bar where he had taken his first drink. He tensed for a fraction of a second, then vaulted the low bar.
A bartender and two customers stared at them with blank amazement but there was not a Delban agent in sight. Swiftly Glayne set the girl upon her feet and together they fled from the building. He noted approvingly the capable-looking Cardy she held in her small fist.