or me. I came up out of my chair, lifting my fist from the floor
and putting my back and thigh muscles behind it. It should have taken his
head off, but all he did was grunt, stagger back, dig his heels in, and
then come back at me with his head down. I chopped at the bridge of his
nose but missed and almost broke my hand on his hard skull. Then the other
guy came charging in and I flung out a side-chop with my other hand and
caught him on the wrist.

But Rhine training can't do away with the old fact that two big tough men
can wipe the floor with one big tough man. I didn't even take long enough
to muss up my furniture.

I had the satisfaction of mashing a nose and cracking my hand against a
skull again before the lights went out. When I came back from Mars, I was
sitting on a kitchen chair facing a corner. My wrists and ankles were
taped to the arms and legs of the chair.

I dug around. They had Martha taped to another chair in the opposite
corner, and the two gorillas were standing in the middle of the room,
obviously trying to think.

So was I. There was something that smelled about this mess. Peter Rambaugh
was a mental, and he should have been sensitive enough to keep his take
low enough so that it wouldn't drive Martha into thinking up ways and
means of getting rid of him. Even so, he shouldn't have been gunning for
me, unless there was a lot more to this than I could dig.

"What gives?" I asked sourly.

There was no answer. The thug with my forty-five took out the clip and
removed a couple of slugs.

He went into the kitchen and found my pliers and came back teasing one of
the slugs out of its casing. The other bird lit a cigarette.

The bird with the cartridge poured the powder from the shell into the palm
of my hand. I knew what was coming but I couldn't wiggle my fingers much,
let alone turn my hand over to dump out the stuff. The other guy planted
the end of the cigarette between my middle fingers and I had to squeeze
hard to keep the hot end up. My fingers began to ache almost immediately,
and I was beginning to imagine the flash of flame and the fierce wave of
pain that would strike when my tired hand lost its pep and let the
cigarette fall into that little mound of powder.

"Stop it," said Martha. "Stop it!"

"What do they want?" I gritted.

"They won't think it," she cried.

The bright red on the end of the cigarette grayed with ash and I began to
wonder how long it would be before a fl