“And to replace those items,” Hebster was going on, “I will—”
“What I mean,” Theseus broke in, “is this. You know the greatest single difficulty composers face in the twelve-tone technique?”
“I can offer you,” the executive continued doggedly, sweat bursting out of his skin like spring freshets, “complete architectural blueprints of the Empire State Building and Radio City, plus five… no, I’ll make it ten… scale models of each. And you get the rest of the stuff you asked for. That’s it. Take it or leave it. Fast!”
They glanced at each other, as Hebster threw the exit door open and gestured to the five liveried bodyguards waiting near his private elevator. “ Done,” they said in unison.
“Good!” Hebster almost squeaked. He pushed them through the doorway and said to the tallest of the five men: “Nineteenth floor!”
He slammed the exit shut just as Miss Seidenheim opened the outer office door. Yost and Funatti, in the bottle-green uniform of the UM, charged through. Without pausing, they ran to where Hebster stood and plucked the exit open. They could all hear the elevator descending.
Funatti, a little, olive-skinned man, sniffed. “Primeys,” he muttered. “He had Primeys here, all right. Smell that unwash, Yost?”
“Yeah,” said the bigger man. “Come on. The emergency stairway. We can track that elevator!”
They holstered their service weapons and clattered down the metal-tipped stairs. Below, the elevator stopped.
Hebster’s secretary was at the communicator. “Maintenance!” She waited. “Maintenance, automatic locks on the nineteenth floor exit until the party Mr. Hebster just sent down gets to a lab somewhere else. And keep apologizing to those cops until then. Remember, they’re SIC.”