Free Gateway To Xanadu by Sharon Green

Phalsyn had given us and tucking it in my bag on the side opposite my completed double-check tape. “When you learn about something in an unusual enough way, the learning sticks with you longer. Don’t you want to remember what you learn, partner?”
    I picked up my already-packed monolon bag and turned to look at him, giving him a grin. Val didn’t seem to appreciate my sense of humor and looked about ready to make mention of the fact, but he was interrupted by the soft bump and scrape of the ship sealing in. A final clank announced it was time to leave the ship, so I turned and headed for the airlock before Val could go back to casting that feral stare; I’d already had more of it than I was interested in, and as I strode away I could hear my partner grabbing up his own bag and hurriedly following.
    I’d been idly wondering just where on the Station Ringer would be waiting, but I should have known better than to waste the effort. When the double doors of the airlock slipped back to let me out of the ship, he was standing not five feet away and staring directly at me, his expression more intent than I’d ever seen it. Ringer, Chief of Agents who reported directly to the Federation Council, a Special Agent who had lived long enough to be given a position like that, wasn’t terribly imposing to look at. With the enormous and nearly empty docking area behind him he looked smaller than he really was, round and harmless and neatly dressed in a green four-piece businessman’s suit that suggested to the universe around him that here was a man who probably sold ladies’ underwear. If his brown hair was a trifle too long for your average businessman, and his black eyes a trifle too sharp, those things were usually overlooked in favor of his pudginess-which was almost all camouflage for the muscle underneath.
    Ringer wasn’t a man who put other men on guard-which was probably one of the reasons he had managed to survive.
    Right at that moment, however, Ringer’s eyes were examining me so closely that anyone trying to sneak up on him would probably have been able to get within ten feet of him before he noticed. His sharp black eyes moved from my long red hair and blue eyes to my face, traveled quickly up and down my body, then went back to my face and started the trip all over again. I smiled faintly at the way he was trying to swallow down his disbelieving shock, and strolled over to him.
    “Hi, cutey, wanta have some illegal fun?” I asked in a low, throaty voice, giving him a smile to match.
    The expression in his eyes flickered as he remembered the recognition signal we’d used the one time we’d worked together on an assignment, about ten or eleven years earlier, and then he grinned.
    “I recognized your hand at the controls during docking, but I didn’t expect that to be the only thing I’d recognize,” he said in a low growl looking me over for the fifteenth time. “Being warned doesn’t do a damned thing to prepare you.”. “You ought to try it from the inside,” I suggested, grinning. “Looking in a mirror has become a traumatic experience -but only from the neck up. From the neck down, everything’s the way it used to be, I’m happy to say.”
    “So I noticed,” he murmured, then moved his eyes to a point just behind my left shoulder. “And that can’t be anyone but Valdon,” he went on in a normal-toned voice, coming up with an unphonied smile of greeting as he put his hand out. “I can see why he’s still in one piece after spending two months alone with you.”
    “She came close to changing that,” Val said dryly as he stepped forward to take the hand offered him, shaking it as though he’d indulged in the gesture all his life instead of just recently having learned it from me. “She forgot to mention that Stations have grabber fields to do the docking, and simply leaned back from the controls when it looked like we were about to crash. She thought it was amusing.”
    “Your people