"It's Jenna Caddrick's kidnapper. We found him! Skeeter did, that is. I had the good sense to put Skeeter on the payroll as a detective for the Neo Edo—which is why he's got a squawky, since you asked—and the first thing he did was solve the mystery of where Noah Armstrong went."

"You found Armstrong? Where? My God, Skeeter, say something!"

La-La Land's most notorious miscreant—Neo Edo's house detective?—smiled wryly and handed over a couple of improvised sketches. He'd drawn over the top of a flier with Noah Armstrong's photo. "That's what Armstrong looked like when he went through the Wild West Gate. Dressed as a pistolero named Joey Tyrolin. Pretended to be drunker than a British lord, stumbled around bragging about how he was going to win a shooting competition. Now for the bad news. Our missing down-timer, Julius, went through with him. Posing as a woman and probably under duress. You ought to be able to pull the gate records to find out which name Julius was using. He was dressed as the woman Joey Tyrolin's porter dropped a trunk on." He handed over a second sketch.

She stared from one altered photograph to the other, mind racing back to the events at the Denver Gate's last opening; then pivoted on one stiletto heel and headed for the telephone. "Good work, Skeeter, very good work. Denver opens—" she peered through the windows to the nearest chronometer hanging from the Commons ceiling "—at nine-fifty a.m., six days from now. Be there. You're joining the search team. If I remember right, you've been down the Wild West Gate before and you're good in a scrap. And clearly, you've got more than laundry fuzz between your ears."

Kit said drolly, "Better make that two reservations for Denver, Ronnie. I'm going, too."

Telephone halfway to her ear to arrange for Skeeter's gate pass, Ronisha aborted the motion midair. She stared, mouth coming adrift. Kit and Skeeter started laughing. "Okay," she muttered. "You're going, too." She punched the direct-line intercom to the war room. "Bax, outfit a search team through the Wild West Gate, stat. Skeeter Jackson and Kit Carson have located Noah Armstrong. He's posing as Joey Tyrolin, in company with those kids headed for the Colorado pistol competition. And I've got a sketch up here to match against photos of all the women who went through on that tour. I want you to put a name to one of them. The one Tyrolin's porter dropped a trunk on. You remember the incident? That lady was our missing down-time teenager, Julius. Looks like Armstrong forced the boy to help him escape by threatening Ianira and her family."

Startled sounds came over the speaker, then Bax replied strongly. "I'm on it."

Ronisha closed the open circuit and jabbed a lacquered fingernail down onto one of the phone's memory buttons, linking her to security. "Mike, send somebody to every outfitter on station. Jenna Caddrick's abductors went down the Wild West Gate. They had to pull together an outfit for Denver, so somebody on Shangri-La ought to remember them. Get somebody on it. Several somebodies."

"On the way."

"Skeeter. you and Kit get busy outfitting. I'll join you—where? Connie Logan's is your favorite outfitter's, isn't it, Kit? I'll authorize the expenditures from station coffers. Kit, you're priceless. With a little luck, we may yet keep Shangri-La open for business."

"That is," Kit said dryly, "the basic idea. C'mon, Skeeter. Did I say twenty an hour? Make it fifty."

Skeeter looked like a man in deep shock.

Ronisha sympathized.

Skeeter and Kit, the latter grinning like the devil's own favorite imp, sauntered into the elevator, Kit whistling merrily as the doors slid closed. Ronisha stared after them for a long moment, still nearly speechless, herself; then she was on the telephone again, tracking down every Wild West guide who'd ever worked the gate, for somebody to guide the search team out to the site of that black powder shooting competition.

Six days wasn't much of a head start to plan a time tour, when the so-called tour was a search-and-rescue mission into dangerous country by horseback, on the trail of armed terrorists holding hostages. If he'd had time, Skeeter might have panicked. Fortunately, Skeeter Jackson had plenty of practice in falling slap into unexpected little "situations" and landing more or less on his feet. Nor had he truly panicked in quite a while. At least, not since encountering that enraged gladiator, Lupus Mortiferus.

An hour after leaving the aerie, Connie's staff was busy packing away his new wardrobe and Skeeter was bent over a table in the infirmary, getting a backside full of needles. He'd already received the necessary immunizations once before, of course, having been down the Denver gate on a trip wheedled out of a rich mark. But his records showed a need for several booster shots, so he dutifully reported to the infirmary, where he listened to some tourist complain bitterly about the sting as injection after injection went in. Rachel Eisenstein's voice floated in, calm and unsympathetic. "If you'd followed the instructions in your tour-planning immunization schedule, you could have had this over with weeks ago, one at a time."

"But I'm going to be too sore to sit in a saddle!"

"That is not," Rachel said briskly, "my problem."

Skeeter grinned as unhappy curses, centering mostly around the sadistic bent of doctors in general and women doctors in particular, issued from the cubicle, interspersed with complaints about the waste of paying good money for a tour the price of the Wild West Gate if one had to spend the entire trip as a walking, talking pincushion.

"Tourists," Skeeter grimaced. "You'd think they'd remember to bring their brains along, when they leave home."

"You just said a mouthful," the nurse behind him agreed. "There, that's it. Last one. Six boosters, all guaranteed to keep you from coming down with a full-blown case of what ails you. Get going. Kit's chewing nails, waiting to drag you over to the library."

"Oh, God..."

The next six days passed in a blur of frantic activity. Kit Carson put Skeeter through the most rigorous training he'd ever endured. He learned that speaking "Old West Slang" was not as simple as imitating John Wayne movie dialogue, which was what he'd done in the cathouses and gambling dens of Denver on his last trip—major portions of which he preferred not to recall too closely. And loading bullets for black-powder guns, even replica models made of higher quality steel, with closer tolerances, was nowhere near as simple as shoving a cartridge into a six-shooter and pulling the trigger. Not if you wanted to hit what you were shooting at when the six-shooter went bang. And Skeeter had never even heard of "balloon head cartridges." The only thing he really comprehended was that you could get slightly more black powder into them, which was fine by him. More bang for the buck was a great idea, in his opinion, going after the Ansar Majlis down time.

He also learned how to reload them. And while he measured bullets and sorted them out by weight and discarded those with any slight flattened spots or surface bumps, Kit taught him Old West Slang. He learned why a man should never bake a bang-tail before bedding-down the remuda and why a gentleman never called a lady a Cypriot. If he did, the lady's husband or father might shoot him over it. Might as well just come right out and call her a whore.

And so it went, until Skeeter thought his brain would burst.

He spent two entire days at the firing range, where Ann Vinh Mulhaney put him through hours of shooting lessons, both live-fire and inside the computer simulator she'd built, a room-sized Hogan's Alley affair with 360-degree rear-projection screens and plenty of real props to use as cover. He spent most of the first day in the computer simulator, working on target acquisition skills and reacting to armed threat and finding out just how many ways one can miss with a firearm at close range under stress. The second day was less fun than the room-sized shooting gallery, but just as instructive. Skeeter could hold his own in a knife fight, but he'd never fired a gun. Ann doled out electronic earmuffs, which allowed her to continue the lecture, while filtering out the sharp, damaging reports of guns discharging the length of the weapons range. "I had to kick a tourist off the line and he wasn't happy about it," she said, dragging him toward an empty lane. "Kit wants you on this firing line all day, Skeeter, which means we've barely got time for adequate weapons selection, load selections, firing procedures, shooting practice, and cleaning lessons."