The copper-colored egg that represented the suedette suitcase had vanished. Vanning groped inside the locker, finding nothing.
The significance of this didn’t strike Vanning at first. He swung the cabinet around so that it faced the window. He looked again, with identical results.
The locker was empty.
Twenty-five thousand credits in negotiable ore bonds had disappeared.
Vanning started to sweat. He picked up the metal box and shook it. That didn’t help. He carried it across the room and set it up in another corner, returning to search the floor with painstaking accuracy. Holy— Hatton?
No. Vanning hadn’t let the locker out of his sight from the time the police had entered till they left. An officer had swung open the cabinet’s door, looked inside, and closed it again. After that the door had remained shut, till just now.
The bonds were gone.
So was the abnormal little creature Vanning had crushed. All of which meant—what?
Vanning approached the locker and closed it, clicking the latch into position. Then he reopened it, not really expecting that the copper-colored egg would reappear.
He was right. It didn’t.