Clatclit nodded.
It took us an hour to locate Baxter. Clatclit showed no signs of surprise when I did not go to the ticket office and book a passage for Earth. Apparently, not being in on the finer points of the Ancients' scheme, he found no wild incongruity in my being brought all the way from Earth to obliterate a man who could just as easily have been dispatched by a sugarfoot. Or else, through some extrasensory awareness, something born of our friendship, he knew that imparting the location of Baxter to the Ancients might well mean my death.
Whatever his reasons, Clatclit simply followed me in my progress through the prison dungeon which, thanks to its completely escape-proof stone-corked cells, was left without guards. We went up into the more well-appointed section of the building, the warmly plastic-decorated halls that were open to the public who passed through the Security inspection when entering or leaving the planet. It was good business to hide the grimmer realities from colonists or casual tourists.
And those who learned about the dungeons were never in a position to pass the word around. Your first view of a Security dungeon was usually your last view of anything.
The public part of the building had too many people in it to suit me. Even if I could get by the flight officials and robo-scanners unchallenged, Clatclit couldn't. The building was rigidly off-limits to extraterrestrials.
So we went up the outside.
Built against, and a good ways into, the high hills that surrounded the town, the building was easy prey for anyone who cared to clamber up the rocky slopes from which it jutted and climb through a window. These slopes were lighted, but not patrolled. After all, under ordinary circumstances, no one in his right mind would try sneaking into an IS stronghold!
Baxter, as it turned out, was seated at a desk not unlike his own back on Earth, in the very office where I'd been last interrogated by the team of Charlie and Foster. He was staring into space, and smoking a cigar, the solitary incandescent lamp on his desk making his ice-white mane of hair a sort of angelic aurora about that pleasantly rubicund face. It was like seeing Satan sporting a good-conduct medal.
Clatclit and I were crouched outside the window, on a narrow ledge we'd reached from the slope. To my intense interest, lying before Baxter, in the glaring circle of lamplight, was the black shirt I'd been wearing when I was rescued by Clatclit, the shirt which had been towed off by that hay-bale to obviate Baxter's being able to track the route of my flight.
I was about to whisper a question about the shirt to Clatclit, when Baxter turned partway about in his chair, and started to stub out the cigar in a black onyx ashtray. The question stuck in my throat, as I caught sight of Baxter's breast.