I woke up thinking, It wasn't that strong!
And everyone else was waking too.
Something had knocked us all out at once. Which might mean the ship had an unconscious captain! I left the lounge at full speed, which was a wobbly walk.
The control-room door was open, which is bad practice. I reached to close it and changed my mind because the lock and doorknob were gone, replaced by a smooth hole nine inches across.
Margo drooped in her chair. I patted her cheeks until she stirred.
"What happened?" she wanted to know.
"We all went to sleep together. My guess is gas. Stun guns don't work across a vacuum."
"Oh!" It was a gasp of outrage. She'd spotted the gaping hole in her control board, as smooth and rounded as the hole in the door. The gap where the hyperwave radio ought to be.
"Right," I said. "We've been boarded, and we can't tell anyone about it. Now what?"
"That hole..." She touched the rounded metal with her fingertips.
"Slaver disintegrator, I think. A digging tool. It projects a beam that suppresses the charge on the electron, so that matter tears itself apart. If that's what it was, we'll find the dust in the air filters."
"There was a ship," said Margo. "A big one. I noticed it just after I ended the show. By then it was inside the mass limit. I couldn't go into hyperspace until it left."
"I wonder how they found us." I thought of some other good questions, but let them pass. One I let out. "What's missing? We'd better check."
"That's what I don't understand. We aren't carrying anything salable! Valuable, yes. Instruments for the base. But hardly black-market stuff." She stood up. "I'll have to go through the cargo hold."
"Waste of time. Where's the cargo mass-meter on this hulk?"
"Oh, of course." She found it somewhere among the dials. "No change. Nothing missing there, unless they replaced whatever they took with equivalent masses."
"Why, so we wouldn't know they were here? Nuts."
"Then they didn't take anything."
"Or they took personal luggage. The lifesystem mass-meter won't tell us. Passengers move around so. You'd think they'd have the courtesy to stay put, just in case some pirates should--ung."
"What?"
I tasted the idea and found it reasonable. More. "Ten to one Lloobee's missing."
"Who?"
"Our famous, valuable kdatlyno sculptor. The third kdatlyno in history to leave his home planet."
"One of the ET passengers?"
Oh, brother. I left, running.
Because Lloobee was the perfect theft. As a well-known alien artist who had been under the protection of Earth, the ransom he could command was huge. As a hostage his value would be equal. No special equipment would be needed; Lloobee could breathe Earth-normal air. His body could even use certain human-food proteins and certain gaseous human anesthetics.
Lloobee wasn't in the lounge. And his cabin was empty.
)
Itinerant space pilot and epic hero Beowulf Shaeffer finds himself in the midst of an interstellar scandal when an alien sculpture artist is kidnapped from his passenger starship.
