Kaspar's Box

Nope. You'd have to go in by air somehow, and silently at that, then land quiet as a mouse on one of them attic dormers, then find one that you could neutralize the alarms for and then open and squeeze in undetected. You'd need night vision, a couple of good ferrets to scout ahead, and personal shielding just in case you stepped on the wrong floorboard and they came looking just to check.

Magnetic field levitators would be out, they'd surely be detected by this setup. Parachute, then, from someplace a few blocks away and at night. The good old ways. In fact, except for the night vision and the ferrets, the best way to do it at all would be with as little technology as possible. Folks who could afford this kind of super protection paid to guard against every damned piece of potential burglary in all creation, but often forgot that folks often could do things without all those machines. A bit of diversion-say, a runaway elephant or somesuch charging at the gate-and it wouldn't be that impossible to get in.

Getting out would be a different and more complex matter.

What are you thinking about this for, you old fool? he scolded himself. You said yourself that there's no rhyme or reason to doin' it, no profit, only the gravest danger. And he was certainly in poor physical shape for such an operation.

Damn it! That's what made the damned challenge so appealing!

And when you're caught, Murphy, what do you tell 'em then? They'd put your brain through a wringer with one of them stones of theirs, find out what an old idiot you were, then scrub your brain clean as a whistle and you'd wake up in a trash dumpster someplace not even rememberin' that you ever done it.

Idly he wondered just how many of those gems they had, and whether or not all of them were in use or stuck in boxes someplace. Just a few dozen of them wouldn't depress the collector's market but would set him up nice for life.

He couldn't forget the effect on that young sergeant, though, looking into just that one. But it showed that you had to basically touch one, or be very close to it, and look into it in order for it to work its voodoo. No getting around touching, but you sure as hell didn't need to look into the damn thing's cursed eyes.

It seemed so strange, standing here in the middle of genteel civilization, thinking of those girls and such things as those gem necklaces. It wasn't the idea of losing his soul to the devil-if he had one, the devil long ago owned it outright. But he preferred not to meet the old bastard until he had to.

So what the hell are you doin' here, you blasted idiot?

At just that moment he sensed that he was not alone in the alleylike back lane. It wasn't anything he could see or hear or smell, but there was some old survival sense that told him that he was being observed, and not through some remote camera or sensor. Someone, something, was right here with him, watching, waiting, and, somehow too, he felt that it knew him.

He tried to seem natural, looking eventually up one direction and then back the other. Nothing. Nothing but some of the inevitable big bugs and other creepy crawlies that were too much a part of this world to even be banished from these sorts of neighborhoods.

He knew, though, that he wasn't imagining it. Life and death more than once had depended on him accepting these feelings, and more than one promising young scoundrel he'd known had died by dismissing them.

The back doors and windows? Maybe, but the feeling didn't seem that remote, nor did the stone walls lining both sides of the alley lane make for good, consistent angles from which to observe an intruder. Robotic systems would be used for security by folks with this kind of money and status; maybe some suspicious, noisy pet with big teeth as well. This wasn't that. It was more like the sense you got in a jungle when you knew that the snake was just two meters from your neck and ready to pounce. And since nothing that large and intelligent and dangerous would be allowed outside private grounds and certainly would never get this far into the city without tripping all sorts of animal control sensors, that meant a mind.

But where? The brickwork seemed unbroken, the tops of the walls and fences were high but not high enough to conceal somebody like that, and certainly there was nobody in the middle of the road.

Suddenly a male voice whispered to him, so close that he jumped.

"Captain, go down the street to the end, make a left. Someone will meet you at the end of the block."

He went from jumping to freezing solid, and then he turned and slowly, warily, looked closely again. Nobody. Nothing.