Trouble Magnet by Alan Dean Foster Page B

him of himself, and by inference for the greater humankind whose final fate he might hold in the balance? If so, it behooved him to find out.
    Besides, he could as easily take the measure of the melancholic inhabitants of Visaria in Subar’s company as he could by his dejected lonesome. What was calling him away so insistently? His nondescript hotel room? Why not spend a little downtime in the youth’s company? If he couldn’t please himself, Flinx mused, he could for a little while at least provide some small measure of gratification to this aimless, befuddled adolescent.
    “Okay,” he heard himself saying. “I’ll stick around a little longer. So you can show me your place.”
    “Tscheks!”
an obviously pleased Subar exclaimed. “You can save the galaxy, or whatever it is you have to do, later.”
    “Sure,” Flinx replied agreeably and without elaboration. “No hurry.”
    Subar took a step down the rooftop accessway, then hesitated, looking back at his bawling friends. “What about them?”
    Flinx considered. “Do you really care?”
    Subar’s gaze rose from his mysteriously afflicted companions to his enigmatic new one. Was this a trick question? The offworlder, he was by now convinced, was like a neutron star full of tricks—compressed down and packed tight and ready to explode in his face if he took one wrong step or said one wrong word. He could sense that by trying to think of the “right” reply, he was taking too long to say it.
    “Yes,” he blurted. It must have been the right response. Or at least, not a wrong one.
    “They’ll come out of it sometime tonight,” Flinx assured him, “and they’ll never know what happened to them.”
    Subar was not the only youth present, he reflected as he followed the boy outside the rooftop hideaway and down the accessway, who could lie a little when it suited his purposes.

CHAPTER

    6
    It was surreptitious contacts that led to Shyvil Theodakris being given his original appointment, and the clandestine manipulation of bits and bytes of history that had allowed him to rise to his present position. That acknowledged, many of those whose participation in his advancement had been crucial were retired, and some were dead.
    Everyone involved, not least Theodakris himself, was gratified by the outcome. Only peace and satisfaction had adhered to the analyst. His work had reflected well on all who had come in contact with him, and his role in advancing stability and progress in Malandere had been recognized by both his immediate superiors and the various city administrations that had come and gone during his successive terms of office. He and his supporters had every reason to be pleased with his contribution.
    If Senior Situations Analyst Shyvil Theodakris had a fault, it was a predilection to personal vanity. The long hair that reached to his shoulders was both unnaturally lush and dark for a man of his advanced age—the result of multiple transplants and artificial enhancements. His attractively dyed eyes, one dark blue and the other bright yellow in the current style, were a consequence of astute chemical manipulation rather than an obscure genetic imbalance. Periodic melding of expensive skin appliqués hid naturally blooming liver spots and other signs of age.
    For all his efforts, there was no mistaking his inherent maturity, though to the untrained eye and unknowing co-worker it was difficult to tell just by looking at him whether he was sixty or a hundred. The disparity was sufficiently great enough to justify his regular visits to an assortment of cosmetic manipulators who might as well have been on regular retainer.
    This morning promised to be a good one. Chaos had reigned less than usual the previous night, resulting in a marked reduction in the number of cases he would be expected to peruse. Unless the details of one struck his fancy, he would give them the usual once-over before passing them on to subordinates for deeper analysis. Underlings would