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white; they moved with a gangling gait designed to suggest huge reserves of strength. Some of them actually had strength. Not many of them were measured the way Curdy was. Thinking was what counted. Everybody knew there were people working for Jockey Hole who could take him to bits one-handed, but it was Jockey who figured out things to be done. That was where Curdy was going. He’d made up his mind.
    Now this little event here, this minute. That was curio, it was indeed.
    The commotion died slowly; Lyken’s big cruiser hummed away down the Avenue Columbus, bound for his base. Curdy waited, changing occasionally from foot to foot and chewing on a pad of tranks. Everybody knew that Jockey Hole had got where he was because he was measured like anything. He never got flustered or worked up about anything. Maybe to him that came naturally. Maybe not. Curdy thought he probably used tranks like everyone else.
    Waiting, he let the words he had heard revolve slowly in his mind. Had the pug got anything to do with it? Curdy knew him by sight, had heard accounts of him from places. Thickhead, was the account. Stupid like stone. All that connected him with the affair, odds were, would be the baton Lyken’s bodyguard had used to crack his head. Also to be weighed: whether Breaker Bolden would be capable of talking any other way than with his fists just now. Curdy could look after himself. Most of the yonder boys had to know how. Difference was, Curdy reflected, that a pug of Breaker Bolden’s kind didn’t care about looking after himself at all. What he wanted was to take care of the other guy.
    “Lyken! Remember Akkilmar!”
    It should mean something. It meant something to Lyken. Curdy slipped his whangee stick out of the sewn slot in his right high boot and began to curve it back and forth, considering. Jockey would want to know about this.
    He tossed a mental coin to decide whether he should sell the news at once, and hope to get a bonus for speed in delivery, or whether he should fish around a while and try and get details of what Akkilmar actually meant, thus earning his bonus for giving all and more.
    The mental coin landed on its edge and teetered as a further idea struck him: the chances were good that if Akkilmar meant anything significant, Jockey would know already. The coin toppled and said for immediate delivery.
    The crusted clot of faceless corpuscle-people about the entrance of The Market had dispersed. As usual, the stream of humanity moved by. Still bending and flexing his whangee stick, Curdy moved with it.
    Across the entrance the cultists had come back, the altar high-heaped with tracts. The nail-studded effigy of Tacket loomed behind the green light. The cultist who did the pitch was limping over to Breaker Bolden with a nail and a mallet in his hands, a collection can rattling on his belt.
    Curdy watched and grinned without amusement. The cultists had it figured all wrong, as usual. They expected the pug, sullenly nursing his battered head, to be an easy touch; he’d want to buy a nail and drive it into Tacket, they thought. Not measured at all, those cultists—wild aiming always.
    The pug just snarled at first. The cultist persisted. A few people gathered around, keeping out of arm’s reach. Bolden told the persistent cultist to go away. The cultist went on trying. He tried once too many times. Bolden reached out and grabbed his mallet, and hit him with it on the top of the head. The other two cultists came limping up to protest. Curdy didn’t stay to see any more. But when he was thirty yards down the street he could still hear the row.
    There was a police cruiser parked outside The Market. It was empty. Maybe it had something to do with the Lyken problem. Curdy saw it when he glanced back. But there was no one in sight who might make the connection.
    He went quickly—but careful not to give the appearance of hurrying—to a crosstown travolator stage. Noon. The chances were good that Jockey was