The Captain was taking my Quantrell blaster when my reprieve came. One of Shanig's uglies burst into the office with disaster written all over him.
"Chief, the girl's coming up in the lift with another smiley! The whole lower floor is hypnotized. She'd have got me too if the lift hadn't carried me out of reach!"
I'll give Shanig credit for this—he thought fast. He added up the score in a flash and lunged across the desk, yelling for his startled uglies to follow up. If Cheryl got to us with the smiley the jig was up, and he knew it.
He ripped the Quantrell blaster out of Captain Giles' hand and turned it on us. He meant to wipe out the lot and clear himself by laying the carnage to a battle between me and the patrol.
It was close, but not close enough.
A sudden serenity wiped the tension off his face like chalk marks off a blackboard. Captain Giles and his patrolies slacked off with him, caught in the same euphoric spell.
They stood smiling and docile while Cheryl Trayne strode in with Cora's little tungsten cage under her arm. If she had looked good to me before, right then she looked like a red-haired angel.
"Good girl," I said, and took over from there.
Shanig confessed on the spot to the slimy deal he had pulled over me, and signed a statement to that effect. He got on the reception-room phonovision and ordered his crew in the adjoining building to drop everything and return Perry Acree at once. He destroyed the bogus contract and took back the elastic check he had given me, and he enjoyed doing it. Cora, sensing Joey so close in the Argonaut Bar across the street, was working her mating call overtime.
"It was really inconsiderate of you to swindle our young friend William," the Captain said to Shanig. "Of course you won't object to serving a light sentence—say five years—to make amends?"