A Talent For The Invisible (v1.1) Read Online Free PDF Page B

while more guests dropped out of the gentle blue sky in silver and gold hoppers. Conger noticed the official skycar of the US ambassador to New Lisbon bouncing in for a landing on the hopper pad to the right of the rose-pink villa.
    Freshly oiled robot serving carts were moving out of a lower doorway in the villa. A lizard man in a fawn tuxedo reached for a canape and was warned, “Not until after the ceremony.”
    Conger drifted unseen through the growing crowd, careful not to nudge anyone. A jovial fat Venusian roared happily at the sight of the newly disembarked US ambassador. He extended a blue green hand, which Conger had to dodge, toward him.
    Near the Venusian, her eyes on the warming up orchestra, was a slim young girl. She was about twenty-four, dark, wearing a midthigh formal shift. The dark girl was pretty, in an unconventional way, and Conger had the notion he knew her. Not from a meeting, but from some past briefing at RFA. He gave an invisible shrug and moved on.
    The lizard prince, shouting and waving his scaly hands in the air, was roaming the great entrance hall of the villa. “On my planet we often stick geraniums in our buttonholes.”
    “Very well, very well, principe, “ a bent old man told him. “We’ll teleport you some geraniums in. What shade?”
    “Oh, that would take hours and hours and I’m due to marry that slatternly princess in less than a half hour.”
    “I am the Duke of Ocasologo,” the old man reminded the lizard. “I can procure geraniums, of any shade you so desire, in the winking of an eye.”
    “Scarlet, then,” said the prince.
    Conger climbed a curving marble staircase leading to the villa’s second floor.
    A very thin young lizard woman in a suit of black lace all-season underwear came running down the long carpeted upper hallway. “I can’t go through with it! I can’t go through with it!”
    To avoid her, Conger threw himself against a paneled wall.
    From out a room at the far end of the corridor two plump women, one lizard and one human, came galloping. They gained on the escaping princess, made grabs at her.
    “The orchestra is already tuning up,” reminded the plump lizard woman as she tackled the princess and brought her to her knees.
    “The sandwiches are all made, too,” added the human matron. “1400 of the things.”
    “Ugh, ugh,” said the princess.
    Conger eased by the tangle of women.
    The princess’ mother said, “The prince is very handsome.”
    “He’s a sissy.”
    “That’s only palace scuttlebutt, dear.”
    The corridor branched into two more corridors. Conger chose the one leading to the left. None of the rooms in this wing were occupied. He searched each one. Finally he found the large white room with the vast skylight. Three mourning doves were waddling across the streaked glass.
    The big room was empty.
    “What’s Sandman do?” he asked himself. “Teleport the whole works around with him?”
    Conger sniffed. There was still a faint medical odor in the room and on the bare floor a single tread mark which might have been made by a movable operating table.
    On his second circuit of the room he saw a small green pill lying against the wall next to a puff of dust. It was a kelp pill, like the ones he carried.
    He rubbed it once across his chin, then put it in his kit.
    The rest of the second floor yielded nothing further. Going back to the fork of the corridors, Conger checked out the right hand turning. Only guest rooms there, no skylight, no lab.
    Touching at the kit strapped to his side, he said, “Let’s talk to the old duke.”
    The Duke of Ocasologo was gone from the hall below, as were the prince and his best man.
    Conger heard the prince complaining out on the lawn.
    He spotted the bent old Ocasologo near the band gazebo handing a bundle of sheet music up to the brown lizard band master. “The principe insists you include some Venusian twelve tone wedding tunes,” the duke was saying. Conger moved, unseen, in the direction