Which was unfortunate, considering the nature of the criminal's activities.

Behind Yu, a door hissed open a few inches. He heard a baby squalling in there as he whirled around to point his sleek silvery .00 Osprey. He saw a drab woman peeking out at him-a Choom, native to the planet, human-like but for the ear-to-ear mouth, which suddenly widened immensely in horror.

"Police," Yu snapped. "There are dangerous animals loose in the building; for G.o.d's sake keep your door locked!"

The door hissed shut and he heard the lock bleep. Festering tenement hive; if it were a decent place there'd be a security alarm to warn all the tenants to remain safely inside. There were kids in this building. Hopefully, those people on the upper floors had heard Peck's terrible wails and would pay heed to their warning.

At last, the lift clunked heavily to the ground floor and the graffiti-slathered door rasped open. Russet must have heard it over his headset, because he said, "Yu, I mean it, if you abandon that post I'll have to report you to the Chief!"

"Be my guest, puke. And I'll report to all our friends down at the precinct how you sat on your thumbs while Peck was being killed."

"We don't know he's dead."

"You're right. You should go see if we can still save him."

Yu entered the elevator, and the door, just as spray-painted on its inner surface, rasped shut. With a lurch, it began to rise so unevenly he might have thought sweaty slaves were hoisting it up on chains.

"I can't move, d.a.m.n it! That thing is still right there on the landing, looking down at me!"

"If it's an animal it may be pa.s.sive. You might be able to get past it without hurting it."

"I've never seen anything like it-how do I know if it's a cow or a shark, you know what I'm saying? Or the Ophluu, for that matter."

"Why don't you just sit down and take a nap, then, Russet? That seems to be all you're good for right now."

"I'm defending this stairwell so nothing gets past me!"

"While the Ophluu could be escaping onto a fire escape, or breaking into someone's apartment to take a hostage."

"Help is on the way!"

"We can't wait for it."

Something thumped onto the top of the elevator then, causing Yu to plaster his back against the wall and point the Osprey at the ceiling in both fists.

The ceiling was a white plastic mesh, and through it he saw a black writhing shape, as if an immense eel squirmed up there. It had to be one of the illegal animals, though how it had found its way into the elevator shaft he had no idea. Had it escaped the Ophluu's apartment via an air vent, or was it poisonous and the Ophluu had tossed it into the shaft on purpose as a threat to him? Yu was tensed to fire, endangered species or not, but before his nerves could get the better of him he saw the eel-thing slither to the side of the ceiling mesh and drop away. At least, he hoped it dropped away down the shaft, and would not be waiting to spring onto him when the door slid open again.

Earlier today, working undercover and posing as a buyer, Peck had gone to the Ophluu's apartment supposedly to purchase an exotic animal for a pet. A tip from a Punktown pet store had alerted the police to the Ophluu's black market trade in rare and endangered animals, primarily from his home world. Some were sold as exotic pets, mostly to wealthy clients who, as Yu figured it, saw the creatures as another status symbol-something to show off at parties with their paintings and their sculptures. But other beasts were sold to apothecaries to be killed and used for various medicines, their benefits real or imaginary; everything from aphrodisiacs to hallucinogenics. Some of the illegal animals Yu had previously seen change hands in Punktown had been plucked to decorate tribal costumes, skinned to make rich women's fur coats, trained as guard dogs for drug dealers, pitted against each other in gambling den arenas, eaten as delicacies, sacrificed at rituals and even kept as lovers.

Peck had known what the Ophluu looked like. If only Yu had asked him! But they had thought this would be an easy bust.

The Ophluu had never made trouble before or Yu would have taken note of them. But when they had moved in for the shackle, and Peck had gone up ahead to set things in motion, something had gone wrong. Somehow, the Ophluu had realized what was happening. Unless one of the creatures had escaped and attacked Peck, and maybe even hurt the Ophluu also, but Yu doubted it was that. Still, at least some of the animals were now free. There was the thing Russet could see on the stairs, a.s.suming it wasn't the Ophluu, and the eel-thing that had fallen onto the elevator. Were they escaping...or had the Ophluu released them to create pandemonium, so as to cover his escape? Indeed, had he released the animals knowing that it would confuse the enforcers' identification of him?

The elevator ground to a halt at the fifth floor.

The Osprey hummed, charged up but on pause, its solid .00 projectiles available to enforcers only-except when bought on the black market. They would fairly explode when they struck a body, since one never knew what species of body one had to bring down, as now. Because their effects were so devastating, the projectiles themselves didn't need to be large, so the Osprey carried thirty of the small pellets in its handle cartridge. They offered Yu some measure of comfort when the scene before him was unveiled by the sliding elevator door.

The murky hall stretching before him was lined with twelve doors, six to a side. At its end was a metal door to the fire escape, but it didn't seem to have been opened. A light tube overhead fluttered with wild pulsations. And a creature like a man-sized toad that had been half torn inside-out by a malicious child squatted on the stained carpeting about halfway down the narrow hall, facing in Yu's direction.

Some kind of guard dog?

Its body was a translucent bladder with a dim, amber-colored glow inside it. Dark organs could be discerned within, pulsing like a number of shadowy fetuses. The creature's limbs were solid enough, and ended in ominous skeletal appendages like the hands of a corpse. Yu had no doubt that those bone digits could be thrust easily into an enemy. As for the head-it was an anemone, nothing more. A nest of writhing canary-yellow tendrils.

The Ophluu? Those hands, skeletal as they were, did look capable of the dexterity needed by an advanced being. And those bunched hind legs; might they not support the toad-thing in a bipedal stance? Not that all intelligent races were bipedal, by any means...

Though he felt ridiculous doing so, Yu told the creature in a firm voice, "Don't move-police!"

The creature showed no reaction one way or the other. Was he merely addressing some mindless beast? Suddenly, Yu had a little more sympathy for Russet's predicament on the level below.

He let his eyes trail beyond the beast to the doors in the hall. The last four on the right, B-9 through B-12, all belonged to the Ophluu; at least he knew that much from Peck. He wished the owner of the tenement had been called in, so that he could describe the tenant of those rooms. The owner had permitted the Ophluu to open up the walls separating those four apartments, thus creating one large warehouse of sorts for his collection. The owner could not be ignorant of the criminal's activities, was no doubt nicely compensated for his cooperation. Yu would see to it that the b.a.s.t.a.r.d was dragged down to the precinct house as soon as he got out of this mess.

How'd the Ophluu get the critters up and down, though, here on the fifth floor? Yu imagined many were small enough to carry in boxes, and that the larger specimens, like his friend the toad-thing, were brought up here via this very elevator. G.o.d knew the floor of it was stained enough to be the inside of an animal's pen, not to mention the stink, now that he thought of it. Then there was the fire escape as well. Was it the kind with stairs, or a lift itself? Yes; Yu took another quick look at it over the creature blocking his path. The lift variety. So the Ophluu's choice of lodgings was not so illogical after all.

"Move!" Yu growled at the creature. He didn't feel as foolish snapping orders of that sort, which one might yell at a recalcitrant animal as well as at a more evolved creature. He gestured with the Osprey. "Out of my way! Go! Go!"

Slowly, still gripping the silvery pistol in both fists, he began edging his way down the gloomy corridor.

"Go! Go on! Get out of my way!"

A door on the left hissed half open, and a balding Choom man in an undershirt and briefs squeezed half out to see what the uproar was about. "Look," he was bellowing, "I have a third shift j-" His eyes had fallen on the Osprey, and it was as though its barrel suddenly gagged him. He began to duck back inside. It was a good thing he did, for he hadn't seen the toad creature behind him tense its powerful hind legs.

"Inside! Get inside!" Yu cried, and squeezed back on his trigger.

As the creature launched itself into the air that Medusa head of tentacles spread wide like the petals of a sunflower, revealing a gaping black maw without teeth. The skeletal claws of the creature spread wide as well.

Yet in mid-air, the .00 projectiles found its flank, and punctured that glowing bladder. The door to the Choom's apartment bleeped locked even as the creature thudded against it, carried forward by its momentum. But the thing that slumped to the carpet was already dead. The anemone tendrils only convulsed for seconds, like a nest of dying worms, and though no blood came from the ruptured belly, the glow had gone out of it.

"G.o.d d.a.m.n," Yu hissed. Though there was no doubt the thing would have done the Choom some serious harm, he still regretted having to kill the beast. Unless, of course, it had been the Ophluu himself, in which case he didn't mind as much.

He went to look closer at the thing. No, not the Ophluu, he decided. Its startled spring at the Choom had been too unthinking.

He buzzed at the Choom man's door.

"Who's there?" a voice demanded from a grille speaker.

"Police. I want to know what your neighbor looks like."

"Which neighbor?"

"The Ophluu. The one with the animals."

"I don't see nothing and I don't know nothing. But get that b.a.s.t.a.r.d and his stinking noisy menagerie out of here!"

"I need to know what he looks like!"

"Don't talk to me. He's got friends, they always do. Leave me alone! I haven't seen a thing!"

To h.e.l.l with him. Peck might still be alive and in need of help. Yu turned from the door, instead regarded doors B-9 through B-12. Did all of them still open into the linked apartments, or only one?

He touched the key for B-9. A red light came on and there was the beeping complaint of a lock. B-12, he guessed, but tried B-10 anyway.

The door hissed fully open.

It was a zoo in there.

Close to his face, something like a pumpkin with a large starfish grafted to its base was inching up the wall. Half covering the ceiling of the linked rooms was something like an immense walking stick insect. This, at least, Yu recognized from a VT wildlife program; a Tikkihotto animal. It could fold its legs up so that the whole thing was little larger than a man's hand, if it wanted.

A fat lizard basked on a windowsill. Birds took up a chattering chorus of alarm, some in cages and some free. Most of the creatures in here were contained, fortunately; in mesh cages, in aquariums, in transparent terrariums and pens. In the corners there were a few larger pens made from repulsor beams. In one, monkey-like animals with faces like garish totem pole images were bounding against the repulsor walls in excitement. The other large repulsor pens had been deactivated.

There was no furniture, no bed in sight that might give Yu some sense of the occupant's physiology. Maybe there was a bed in one of the off-branching rooms, from which came more strange chattering, weird gibbering, and the burbling of support tanks of one kind or another.

The sounds were chaotic, the smells a nearly visible miasma despite the air system, and the sights made Yu's mind reel.

But all of this-the starfish, the walking stick, the lack of furniture-was a secondary, peripheral matter. What seized his attention primarily was the body of Peck, sprawled on the floor across the room, his gun lying a few inches from his gnarled hand.

There was no blood, but his eyes stared gla.s.sily. The cause of this was no mystery; a great black limb like a tentacle was squeezed around his neck. The thing that had killed him was also clearly dead. It was a black, almost amorphous blob of rubbery flesh, ringed with more of those long tentacles, its head ringed in smaller tentacles which gave it some slight resemblance to the toad-beast. If it too had once glowed, the glow had since dispersed. Peck had ripped its barrel of a body open with several shots which Yu had not heard over his headset. Peck must have had his gun set to silence mode. Yu had his silencer to OFF, so that the tenants would keep behind doors if they heard him fire.

Over the two dissimilar corpses linked in an embrace of death stood another creature. When Yu had burst in, the thing had swivelled its head to regard him.

"Freeze!" Yu yelled at it, taking a firing stance.

It was bipedal, its legs skinny and jointed, as were its arms. Crab-like three-toed pincers snicked at the ends of its arms. The body was s.h.a.ggy with fur, and the black dome of a head was ringed with tiny black eyes that glittered at him.

The thing had been leaning over Peck as if about to touch him. To retrieve his gun, perhaps? Was this the thing Yu had heard making odd sounds over Peck's headset? Yes; those dry autumn leaf sounds had been the delicate clicking of its claws.

"Get back from him!" Yu shouted. He had decided that this being was the best candidate for the Ophluu, unless the black market trader was hiding in one of the other rooms.

The being didn't budge. Even if it were the Ophluu, could it understand his words without a translator unit in hand?

Yu stepped nearer, gesturing with the gun. "I said get back from him, d.a.m.n you!"

The being obeyed, but looked poised for action, its claws snapping more aggressively. Unless that was an agitated language it was babbling.

From a kitchen doorway, another creature began to emerge. It was terrible; a raw red blob like some organ torn from a giant's chest. A spaghetti of red limbs whipped at the air crazily and a head of red tendrils writhed. Yu guessed that these similar creatures were all from the Ophluu's world. But was this one worth considering as that being? Yu decided to stick with the s.h.a.ggy, upright being...but he still didn't like the way the scarlet monstrosity was advancing toward him out of the kitchen.

"Get back!" he now yelled at this thing, while keeping his gun on the s.h.a.ggy creature.

Again Yu asked himself if the Ophluu had opened up the pens to create a diversion, or had he let these things have free reign of his apartment normally? Maybe some of the pens had been opened accidentally in the black monster's struggle with Peck. Yu could still no more figure out what had happened than he could put labels to the exotic fauna he was seeing.

He decided that with Peck dead, it might not be a bad idea after all to back off and seal the apartment up until the others got here. Maybe Russet wasn't as much a prissy little puke as he'd thought. Yu had to admit that he had jumped into the deep water a little too quickly more than once before. On occasion, he had been lucky to have swum out of it alive. He realized that it might be prudent to start for sh.o.r.e right now- He touched his headset. "Russet! Can you hear me?"

"Where are you?"

"In the room. Peck's dead. Call base; where the h.e.l.l are the uniforms?"

"I'll buzz them. Where's the Ophluu?"

"In my sights. I think."

The red creature lunged, then; it was uncanny how that awkward blob could suddenly hurl itself forward, lashing out with its many slender arms. It was not Yu it seized, however, but the s.h.a.ggy being instead. The s.h.a.ggy thing reached up and clipped some of the arms that engulfed it, but there were too many-so many that Yu nearly lost sight of the smaller being.

"Hey! Hey!" Yu cried. He aimed his Osprey, hunting for a clear shot, but in the frenzy of struggling bodies and whipping limbs he couldn't sight on the thing's tentacled head.

He side-stepped rapidly, danced in closer a few steps, but several of the red creepers now came shooting out for him. One wrapped around his left wrist. Yu placed his gun's muzzle against it and pulled the trigger. A blast, and the severed end came free, dropping to squirm at his feet.

It was too late for the s.h.a.ggy being, in any case. It had gone limp in its coc.o.o.n of red feelers, like a moth mummified by a spider. The red blob began to withdraw to the kitchen, dragging its prey behind it.

Well, a fitting end to the b.a.s.t.a.r.d, Yu thought. He knelt to take Peck's gun. He'd retreat, seal the door, guard it until the back-up arrived.

As he was about to touch the gun, he noticed an odd thing about the black monster that lay dead alongside his partner. Two odd things, in fact.

For one, the creature was missing one of the black tentacles that ringed its belly. It had not been blown off by Peck's gun; the place where it had detached was too neat, a kind of socket. The other odd thing was that several of the tentacles had weird silver markings on them. At first, he took them to be a natural spotting. Then, he realized they were tattoos.

An animal might be tattooed for identification. But however alien written language could be, this did not appear to be even hieroglyphics. The markings seemed purely decorative.

Yu suddenly changed his mind about the Ophluu.

So, Peck and the criminal had killed each other, then...right?

But his eyes shifted again to that empty socket. There should be a limb there. A tentacle, long and black, like some giant snake. Or an eel...

Abruptly, he straightened.

Maybe that tentacled dome for a head wasn't so much a head, after all. Maybe the brain of an Ophluu was situated in a less obvious place. A place that, like the tail of some lizards, could be detached in an emergency.

Or, more precisely, like the arm of a starfish. Which, later, would grow into an entirely new creature of its own.

Yu dashed out the door, turned, tapped the b.u.t.ton to close it. He then bolted to the elevator, closed himself inside, and hit the b.u.t.ton marked BAs.e.m.e.nT.

The Ophluu would be down there, no doubt searching for a window or air vent by which to reach outside. Yu decided to let Russet stay where he was for now, and didn't alert him to his revelation. There was no time; the elevator was descending faster than it had ascended.

When it reached bottom, Yu heard a wet splash, as if from a fruit being stomped on.

"d.a.m.n," he breathed.

Detective Yu emerged from the lift, stepped around behind it into the wire mesh cage which enclosed its cables and machinery. He knelt, gun in hand, and peered under the carriage.

Sure enough, a black rubbery tip showed from beneath the lift, a small pool of clear liquid spreading around it. As Yu watched, the tip quivered, though whether this was voluntary or a nervous spasm he had no way of knowing.

"Sorry," he told it, but not with any great sincerity.

He didn't feel guilty. The thing had already been dazed by its fall, he reckoned, and his crushing of it had been purely accidental. And with Peck dead, well, that cinched his dispa.s.sion.

He watched until it stopped moving altogether, and then he rose, slipping the Osprey back into its holster. He let out a sigh. What a nightmare, he thought.

But this was Punktown, and its diversity of life, however hostile it might often be, still held him fascinated...as when he'd been a boy and loved to visit the zoo.

Now he'd return upstairs, and with the others see to it that the Ophluu's own zoo was safely relocated. Selfish b.a.s.t.a.r.d. How could the alien have bartered in rare life that way? And he had killed an innocent policeman, as well.