Soft come the dragons Read Online Free PDF Page B

threatened to tip him into irrationality. But that, he cautioned himself, would do the musician no good at all. He was the man's only hope! There were only seconds left. Then he remembered the gun on the desktop. It had been lying at the opposite end from the pencils, heavy and ugly, a deterrent to burglars. He touched the pistol psionically, but he could not nudge it. He pressed harder, eventually moved it slightly until the barrel was pointing toward the Hound. Pulling the light wire of the automatic trigger was easy. The gun spat a narco-needle that bounced off the beast. That was no good!
    And then the Hound shot Taguster. Four times in the chest: thud, thud, thud, thud! The guitarist gurgled thickly, sighed, and dropped his head, quite dead now. Ti felt as if all the energy he had possessed had been sucked out of him by an electric vampire, yet he could not let the Hound escape. He sent his cameras swiveling about, looking for things small enough to be handled by his limited talents. He found various trinkets and figurines and rained them uselessly upon the killer machine. It surveyed the room, perplexed, firing darts in the direction from which the souvenir hail came, unable to discover its assailant. Then it turned a spatter of darts on the receiver head and floated out of the room—out of the house and away . . .
    For a time, Ti remained in the living room receiver, looking at Taguster's corpse. He was too weakened to do anything else. His mind filled with remembrances of their friendship, scene after scene flicking after one another like dried leaves blown by a cold autumn wind. Finally, when there were no more memories, there was nothing to do but return to his own set, to his own house. He broke with Taguster's receiver and allowed his mind to flow back into the Mindlink beam, mixing with the blacks and the grays and the almost subaudible murmuring of the thousands of other Mindlink customers. Colors appeared, and he was abruptly back in his own body. He sat for a moment, regaining lost energy, then used a servo to lift the helmet from his head and shut off the machine.
    What now?
    Ordinarily, he would not have had to consider that question, for he would have wasted no time in summoning the police. But it had been a Police Hound that had killed Leonard Taguster! If the legal authorities had conspired to take the musician's life, as unlikely as that seemed, then it was madness to contact them about investigating the crime! No, he had to know more before he took any action. But what did he have to go on? Margle! He had the name. He lifted out of the cup-chair and crossed the living room, moved through a painting-lined corridor, and came into the library. He stopped at the wall where the direct com-screen to Enterstat, his newspaper, lay like a cataracted eyeball. He punched a button, the third yellow one in an alternating series of green and yellow. A panel slid away beside the screen, revealing a computer keyboard, the direct line to the Enterstat computer. He punched out the letters m-a-r-g-l-e and depressed the bar marked full data report.
    Thirty seconds later, a printed stat sheet popped out of the info receival slot and into the plastic tray, glistening wetly. He waited a moment for it to dry, then reached with a servo and picked it up. He held it up to his eye, read it, blinking. Klaus Margie was connected with the Dark Brethren, the underworld organization that had been encroaching on the territory once sacrosanct to the Mafia, and it was rumored that he was the number one man, though this information could not be checked for authenticity. He was six feet tall and weighed two hundred and one pounds. His hair was dark, but his eyes were "baby blue. He had a three-inch scar along his right jaw line. He was missing a thumb on his right hand. He believed in taking a hand in the common dangerous chores of the mob. He would not send one of his boys to do something he had never done himself. He was a man of action,