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. It acknowledges that we saved you from the burning Pit.'
`I want to see a lawyer. Meanwhile I won't sign anything.' The last time I was in this fix it got me tied down, washing dishes, for four months. This time I couldn't spare four months; I had to get busy at once, searching for Margrethe.
'Don't be stupid. Do you want to be tossed back into that stuff?'
A second voice said, 'Knock it off, Bert. Try telling him the truth.'
('Bert?' I thought that first voice was familiar!) 'Bert! What are you doing here?' My boyhood chum, the one who shared my taste in literature. Verne and Wells and Tom Swift - 'garbage', Brother Draper had called it.
The owner of the first voice looked at me more closely. 'Well, I'll be a buggered baboon. Stinky Hergensheimer!'
'In the flesh.'
'I'll be eternally damned. You haven't changed much. Rod, get the net spread again; this is the wrong fish. Stinky, you've cost us a nice fee; we were fishing for Saint Alexander.'
`Saint who?'
'Alexander. A Mick holy ^an who decided to go slumming. Why he didn't come in by a Seven-Forty-Seven God only knows; we don't usually get carriage trade here at the Pit. As may be, you've probably cost us a major client by getting in the way just when this saint was expected and you ought to pay us for that.'
"How about that fin you owe me?'
`Boy, do you have a memory! That's outlawed by the statute of limitations
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