I said something I hoped nobody (and Nobody) noticed before I answered it. Turned out to be Tony Sudakis. He said, "I just wanted to let you know my people aren't too happy about my turning records over to you yesterday."

"They've made me aware of that already, as a matter of fact," I said, and told him about the phone call from the Consortiums lawyer. "I hope I haven't gotten you into a pickle over this."

"I'll survive," he said. "However much they want to, they can't send me to perdition for obeying the law. If you push that warrant too hard, though, things'!! get more complicated than anybody really wants."

"Yeah," I said, still puzzled about where he was coming from. The contemptuous way he dismissed higher management made me guess he'd worked his little charm with the amulet again, but the message he delivered wasn't that different from Dill's. I'd got somewhere pushing Dill, so I decided to push Sudakis a little, too: "You aren't having any kind of trouble out there, are you?"

But Sudakis didn't push. "Perkunas, no!" he exclaimed, an oath I didn't recognize. "Everything's fine here… except for your ugly numbers."

"Believe me, I don't like those any better than you do," I said, "but they're there, and we need to find out why."

"Yeah, okay" He suddenly turned abrupt. "Listen, I gotta go. 'Bye." He probably had done his little charm, then, and run out of time on it.

I pulled out my Handbook of Coetics and Metapsychics to see what it had to say about Perkunas. I found out he was a Lithuanian thunder-god. Was Sudakis a Lithuanian name? I didn't know. The Lithuanians, I read, had been about the last European people to come to terms with Christianity, and a lot of them also remained on familiar terms with their old gods. Tony Sudakis certainly sounded as if he was.