Aliens Alien Harvest - By Robert Sheckley Page 0,13

Julie led him.

"What game are you going to play?" he asked.

"I'll try Whorgle," she said.

She pushed her way into the circle, and they made way for her. There were a dozen men and three women betting on the action. They waited while she set out her cash. Then the game went on.

Stan found he couldn't figure out how Whorgle was played. There were cards, of course, and a small ivory marker, and something made it spin and jump between the numbers painted on the table. How long it resided in a square seemed to decide who won, but the cards had something to do with it, too. There were also disk shaped markers with odd symbols on one side. The money, thrown down on the painted stake lines, passed back and forth too quickly for Stan to figure out what was happening. He knew he could work it all out if he just applied his mind, but right now he was feeling light headed. It had been quite a while since his last shot of Xeno Zip. The artificial fire that had enlivened his nerves and dulled his senses was fading out of his system. He was beginning to feel very bad. The pain was simply too hard to handle without something to help it like essence of royal jelly.

At last the pain became too much for him. He had to go into a nearby room and lie down on a couch.

After a while he fell into a troubled sleep and dreamed of grinning skulls dancing and bobbing in front of him.

After a while Julie came and woke him. She was smiling.

"How did you do?" Stan asked her.

"Nobody beats me at Whorgle," she said, riffling through a stack of greenbacks. "Let's go home and get some sleep. Then I need to see Gibberman."

8

Gibberman was a small man who wore a tweed cap pulled low on his forehead and crouched behind his Plexiglas protected desk in his Canal Street pawnbroker's office, looking for all the world like an inflated toad. He wore a jeweler's loupe on a black ribbon around his neck and spoke with some indefinable Eastern European accent.

"Julie! Good to see you, darling."

"I told you I'd come," Julie said. "I'd like you to meet a friend of mine."

"Delighted," said Gibberman. "But no names, please." He shook Stan's hand, then offered Julie a drink from a half empty bottle of bourbon beside him.

"No, nothing," she said. "Look, I'm going to get right to the point. I need plans for a job, and I need them quickly."

"Everybody's always in a hurry," Gibberman said.

"I've got places to go and things to do," Julie said.

"Rushing around is the curse of this modem age."

"Sure," Julie said. "You got anything for me or not?"

Gibberman smiled. "A good job is going to cost, you know."

"Of course," Julie said. "Here, check this out."

She took an envelope from her purse and put it down on the desk in front of Gibberman. He opened it, looked inside, riffled the bills, then closed the envelope again.

"You got it there, Julie. All you've got, that's the price."

"Fine," Julie said. "Now what do you have?"

"A piece of luck for you," Gibberman said. "Not only have I got a first class job, probably worth a million or more, but you could do it tonight if you want to move that fast."

"Fast is just what I want," Julie said. "You're sure this is a good one?"

"Of course I'm sure," Gibberman said. "There's an element of risk in all these matters, as you well know. But with your well known talents, you should have no particular difficulty."

Gibberman twirled around in his chair and pushed a wall painting out of the way. Behind it was a small safe set into the wall. He twirled the combination, blocking Julie and Stan's view with his body. Reaching in, he pulled out half a dozen envelopes, looked through them rapidly, selected one, put the rest back, then closed the safe.

"Here's the job, my dear. Set for New York, and on a street not too far from where we are just now."

"This had better be good," Julie said. "That's every cent we've got in the world."

"You know how reliable I am," Gibberman said. "Together with my accuracy goes my well known discretion."

9

"What is this?" Stan asked. They had gone back home and had opened the manila envelope that Gibberman had given her. Inside was a map, a floor plan of an apartment, several keys, and a half dozen pages of