He found a bottle of some sort of brandy and a glass on a serving
table nearby and poured her a drink, holding it to her lips. She
spluttered over the first mouthful, then took the glass from him and
sipped the rest.

"What happened?" she asked. "I thought those bullets were sure death."

"Your notes. The bullet hit the bag. Are you all right, now?"

She finished the brandy. "I think so." She put a hand into the game
bag and brought out a snarled and tangled mess of steel tape. "Oh,
_blast_! That stuff was important; all the records on the preliminary
auto-recall experiments." She shrugged. "Well, it wouldn't have been
worth much more if I'd stopped that bullet, myself." She slipped the
strap over her shoulder and started to rise.

As she did, a bedlam of firing broke out, both from the two Assassins
at the door and from outside. They both hit the floor and crawled out
of line of the partly-open door; Verkan Vall recovered his
submachine-gun, which he had set down beside Dalla's chair. Sarnax was
firing with his rifle at some target in the direction of the lifter
tubes; Dirzed lay slumped over the barricade, and one glance at his
crumpled figure was enough to tell Verkan Vall that he was dead.

"You fill magazines for us," he told Dalla, then crawled to Dirzed's
place at the door. "What happened, Sarnax?"

"They shoved over the barricade at the lifter tubes and came out into
the well. I got a couple, they got Dirzed, and now they're holed up in