than ten minutes before, through which the pocket itself and contents had been neatly extracted. Presumably by the Kiddie.

"Damn!" was the best Mac could do, but he said it with feeling. He was casting about in his mind for something he could say to the girl that might make her forget about tips when he saw the Kiddie himself, luminescing a vivid green, scuttling out the front door.

"Hey!" he yelled, and it wasn't only a desire to get away that kept the Kiddie from looking around; he couldn't hear any more than he could speak. Language failing, Mac took stronger measures. He left his sport-silk jacket on the arm of the bewildered girl and sprinted after the Kiddie. Intercepting him just previous to the door, he swung the Palladian around and gestured with frantic anger. The Kiddie, with a surprising show of strength in so frail a body, attempted no answer or denial of the charge of theft, but wrenched himself free and darted out the door.

Mac, following, met the inevitable. When the luck of the MacCauleys ran bad, it stayed bad—or worse. He collided with a fat and pugnacious drunk. Not only collided with him but knocked the wind out of him. If it hadn't been that the drunk had an equally drunk and volatile companion, that would have been all right. As it was, Mac found himself on the receiving end of a pale, knuckly Venusian fist.

He was flat on the floor before he realized he'd been hit. Then began the real trouble.

Somebody yelled, "Oh, boy! A fight!" and leaped joyously on Mac with a pair of magno-caulked spaceman's boots. What happened after that got worse and worse. Everybody in the gambling joint seemed to have mayhem in their hearts. Practically to a man, they poured out and joined in the free-for-all. Half the floating population of Pallas seemed to have come to rest on MacCauky's solar plexus by the time he heard the soft, popping noises from the weapons of the house's private army of bouncers and trouble-shooters. When MacCauley next found himself able to look around he was out in the half-hearted illumination of the street, sick and weak from the effect of the gas pellets which had quelled the riot.

And without a penny to his name.

It would have been foolhardy to have left his money in the "safe" at the hotel, though there was slight comfort in that thought. One place was as good as another on Pallas, where laws were made for the sheer pleasure of violating them; the native Palladians, shifty and unmoral as 

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