"Would you mind having to kill yourself every day, Heraal? And twice on Sundays?"
Heraal looked doubtful. "Well, for the honor of my Clan, perhaps—"
Stebbins said, "Boss, you mean—"
"Shut up. Heraal, you're hired—$75 a week plus expenses. Stebbins, get me a contract form—and type in a clause requiring Heraal to perform his suicide stunt at least five but no more than eight times a week."
I felt a satisfied glow. There's nothing more pleasing than to turn a swindle into a sure-fire crowd-puller.
"Aren't you forgetting something, Corrigan?" asked Ildwar Gorb in a quietly menacing voice. "We had a little agreement, you know."
"Oh. Yes." I moistened my lips and glanced shiftily around the office. There had been too many witnesses. I couldn't back down. I had no choice but to write out a check for five grand and give Gorb a standard alien-specimen contract. Unless....
"Just a second," I said. "To enter Earth as an alien exhibit, you need proof of alien origin."
He grinned, pulled out a batch of documents. "Nothing to it. Everything's stamped and in order—and anybody who wants to prove these papers are fraudulent will have to find Wazzenazz XIII first!"
We signed and I filed the contracts away. But only then did it occur to me that the events of the past hour might have been even more complicated than they looked. Suppose, I wondered, Gorb had conspired with Heraal to stage the fake suicide, and rung in the cops as well—with contracts for both of them the price of my getting off the hook?