A needle ray of light streamed suddenly from the hooded man's hand, splashed off a paper which he'd drawn from his pocket. He checked the string of figures printed there, returned the paper to his pocket. He worked swiftly, surely. Then with a sigh of satisfaction he swung back the heavy door.
There was a faint thump in the corridor outside the office that broke the silence.
The hooded man snapped erect, the compressed air slug gun in his hand. He was sharply conscious of the hum of Venusian night life outside the windows. The room felt sticky, close. His hand was damp with sweat about the pommel of the slug gun.
He waited five minutes, ten minutes without moving, but the noise was not repeated.
He drew a breath, set to examining the papers in the safe by the aid of the midget flash. Most of them he put back carefully, just as they'd been, but two packets he stuffed into an inside coat pocket. He closed the door, spun the dial. He heard a sharp click behind him, leaped around.
At the same instant, the room was flooded with bright white light.
"Please don't!" said a girl's voice.
The hooded man arrested his hand halfway to his shoulder holster.
A startlingly beautiful girl, he saw, was standing in the doorway to the corridor covering him with a wicked dart gun. She was a tall girl with the yellowest hair he'd ever seen. She wore a spun glass negligee and her skin was blue. It was the pastel blue of a Terran dawn flushed with rose.
She came all the way inside, slid shut the door.