Man Who Used the Universe by Alan Dean Foster Read Free Book Online Page B

slowly resumed his seat and contented himself with glaring at Loo-Macklin.
    "How'd you do it?" Khryswhy asked him.
    He held up his bound wrists. "I volunteered to permit these. I'd like them removed with equally little hassle."
    She nodded, touched a hidden button. The door opened and the girl who'd placed them on his wrists came into the room. She looked at him uncertainly as she used an eyedropper to drip debonder on the binder. The glass dissolved and broke apart.
    "Thank you," he told her. She nodded, backed toward the doorway, her eyes never leaving him.
    "All the critical information," he told Khryswhy, "and most of what's less critical, has been removed from the ninth syndicate's storage bank."
    "Removed to where?" asked Amoleen nervously.
    "To a place of safety," he told her. "A place where it will be safe so that I'll be safe."
    "What are you going to do with it?" asked Basright curiously. "Turn it over to the government for reward money?"
    Loo-Macklin shook his head. "Now wouldn't that be a terrible waste? Lal may have been a pig, but he was a good business pig. I have instant access to all the removed information via my personal coding system. I'm not about to tell you in which private bank the information has been placed, and I assure you, you could never find it.
    "I know you won't take my word for it." He smiled. "After all, I'm unstable and unpredictable. If you'll permit me?" He approached the console. Basright stepped out of his way.
    He looked back at Khryswhy. "Remember the question?"
    "Well enough," she told him.
    He turned to the board, thought a moment, and then ran his fingers over the keys. They touched lightly on the contacts, delicate as the fluttering of a musician's hands. Basright and any hidden monitor were shielded from sight of his moving fingers.
    Immediately a long series of figures and words, accompanied by matching illustrations, materialized on the screen.
    "Very well," said Khryswhy, "so you have access to the information you stole. What if we force you to give us your private retrieval codes?"
    "You can't do that." Loo-Macklin told her softly.
    "Want to bet?" Nubra was starting out of his chair again.
    "Idiot," Khryswhy looked bored with him. "I told you to sit down."
    He hesitated, half pleading with her. "But Khrys, let me have him for half an hour. Give me Mule and Pioptolus. We can make him talk." He looked nastily at the unmoving Loo-Macklin. "He'll tell us everything he knows and wish he had more to tell us when we've started on him."
    "Don't you see what we're dealing with here?" she said exasperatedly to the younger man. "Don't you see that he doesn't care? You can't make somebody like that talk. And if you go too far and kill him, which I wouldn't put past you, Nubra, the information will stay hidden permanently. And then where would we all be?"
    "Broke," Loo-Macklin told her. "You might even have to go legal, and that would mean starting at the bottom, status one hundred."
    She ignored that. "Anyway, he's right about one thing. Business is good. I'd like to keep it that way." She turned to him. "What is it you want, kid?"
    "To begin with, you can remember never to call me kid again." He strolled over to the table, pulled up a free chair, and sat down facing them, folding his hands on the smooth surface.
    "I intend to keep the syndicate running profitably and efficiently. Within a year's time we will see its income tripled."
    Amoleen burst out laughing. "Now how do you propose to do that?"
    "By having my orders followed explicitly."
    "Your orders?" Nubra was so furious he was shaking. "If anyone should give orders around here, it might as well be me. I'm a thirty-third-class illegal, I've been in the organized underworld for ten years. I've been . . ."
    "Loud, abusive, and stupid, most of that time," said Loo-Macklin, cutting him off. Nubra ground his teeth and glared at Loo-Macklin, but didn't reply. Not with Khryswhy staring him down.
    "If you need proof of that," Loo-Macklin