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                         Transcriber's Note:

    This etext was produced from Planet Stories July 1952. Extensive
    research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on
    this publication was renewed.


                            [Illustration]


                     THE MAN WHO STAKED THE STARS


                            By CHARLES DYE


     _Bryce Carter could afford a smug smile. For hadn't he risen
      gloriously from Thieves Row to director of famed U.T.? Was
      not Earth, Moon, and all the Belt, at this very moment
      awaiting his command for the grand coup? And wasn't his
      cousin-from-Montehedo a star-sent help?_

       *       *       *       *       *




"What do I do for a living?" repeated the slim dark-skinned young man
in the next seat of the Earth-Moon liner. "I'm a witch doctor," he
answered with complete sincerity.

"What do you do? I mean, what do they hire you for?" asked Donahue
with understandable confusion and a touch of nervousness.

[Illustration: _Bracing themselves, Bryce and Pierce gave the body a
combined strong shove toward Earth. Two gone._]

"I'm registered as a psychotherapist," said the dark-skinned young
man. He looked too young to be practicing a profession, barely
nineteen, but that could be merely a sign of talent, Donahue
reflected. The new teaching and testing methods graduated them young.

"I know I am a witch doctor because my grandfather and his father and
his father's father were witch doctors and I learned a special
technique from my uncles who are registered therapists with medical
degrees like mine. But the technique is not the one you find in the
books, it is ... unusual. They don't say where they learned it but
it's not hard to guess." The dark youth shrugged cheerfully. "So--I'm
a witch doctor."

"That's an interesting thought," said Donahue. It would be a long
three day trip to the Moon and he had expected to be bored, but this
conversation was not boring. "What do you do?" he again asked.
"Specifically." Donahue had rugged features, a dark tan and
attractively sun-bleached hair worn a little too long. He exuded a
sort of rough charm which branded him one of the class of politicians,
and he knew how to draw people out, so now he settled himself more
comfortably for an extended spell of listening. "Tell me more and join
me in a drink." He signalled the hostess and continued with the right
mixture of admiring interest and condescending scepticism. "You don't
chant spells and hire ghosts, do you?"

"Not exactly." The dark innocent looking young face smiled with a
cheerful flash of white teeth. "I'll tell you what I did to a man, a
man named Bryce Carter."

       *       *       *       *       *

A group of men sat in a skyscraper at Cape Hatteras, with their table
running parallel to a huge floor-to-ceiling window that overlooked the
clouded sky and gray waves of the Atlantic. They were the respected
directors of Union Transport, and, like most men of high position,
they had a keen sense of self-preservation and a knowledge of ways and
means that included little in the way of scruples.

The chairman rapped lightly. "Gentlemen, your attention please. I have
an announcement to make."

The buzz of talk at the long table stopped and the fourteen men turned
their faces. The meeting had been called a full week early, and they
expected some emergency as an explanation. "A disturbing announcement,
I am afraid. Someone is using this corporation for illegal purposes."
The chairman's voice was mild and apologetic.

Bryce Carter, second from the opposite end, was brought to a shock of
tense balanced alertness. How much did he know? He gave no sign of
emotion, but reached for a cigarette to cover any change in his
breathing, fumbling perhaps more than usual.

The men at the long table waited, showing a variety of bored
expressions that never had any connection with their true reactions.
The chairman was a small, inconspicuous, sandy-haired man whose
ability they respected so deeply that they had elected him the
chairman to have him where they could watch him. They knew he was not
one to mention trifles, and there was a moment of silence. "All right,
John," said one, letting out his held breath and leaning back, "I'll
bite. What kind of illegal purposes?"

"I don't know much," the small man apologized, "Only that the crime
rate has risen forty percent in the average of the cities served by
UT, and in Callastro City, Callastro, and Panama City, where we just
put in a spaceport, it more than doubled."

"Funny coincidence," someone grunted.

"Very funny," said another. "If the police notice it, and the public
hears of it--"

There was no man there who would willingly have parted with his place
at that table, no one who was unaware that in fighting his way to a
place at that table he had seized some part of control of the destiny
of the solar system.

UT--Union Transport, spread the meshes of its transportation service
through almost every city of Earth and the hamlets and roads and bus
and railroad and airlines between--and even to the few far ports where
mankind had found a toehold in space. But its existence was
precariously balanced on public trust.

UT's unity from city to city and country to country, its spreading
growth had saved the public much discomfort and expense of overlapping
costs and transfers and confusion, and so the public, on the advice of
economists, grudgingly allowed UT to grow ever bigger. There was a
conservative movement to put all such outsize businesses under
government ownership as had been the trend in the last generation but
the economy was mushrooming too fast for the necessary neatness, and
the public rightly would not trust politicos in any operation too
confusing for them to be watched, and preferred to leave such
businesses to private operation, accepting the danger for the profit
of efficient and penurious operation, dividends and falling costs.

But all these advantages were barely enough to buy UT's life from year
to year. It had grown too big.

Its directors held power to make or break any city and the prosperity
of its inhabitants by mere small shifts in shipping fees, a decision
to put in a line, or a terminal, or a crossroad. The power was
indirectly recognized in the honors and higher offices, the free
entertainment and lavish privileges available to them from any chamber
of commerce and any political representative, lobbying discreetly for
a slight bias of choice that would place an airport or spaceport in
their district rather than another.

Perhaps some of the directors used their position for personal
pleasure and advantage, but power used for the sake of controlling the
direction of growth of races and nations, power for its own sake was
the game which was played at that table, its members playing the game
of control against each other and the world for high stakes of greater
control, nursing behind their untelling faces who knows what
megalomaniac dreams of dominion.

Yet they used their control discreetly, serving the public welfare and
keeping the public good-will. When it was possible.

As always Bryce Carter sat relaxed, lazily smiling, his expression not
changing to his thoughts.

"Who knows of this besides us?" someone asked.

The chairman answered mildly. "It was a company statistician in the
publicity department who noticed it. He was looking for favorable
correlations, I believe." His pale blue eyes ranged across their
faces, touching Bryce Carter's face expressionlessly in passing. "I
requested that he tell no one else until I had investigated." He added
apologetically, "Commitments for drug addiction correlate too."

That was worse news. "Narcotics investigators are no fools," someone
said thoughtfully.

       *       *       *       *       *

Neiswanger, a thin orderly man near the head of the table, pressed his
fingertips together, frowning slightly. "I take it then that our
corporation is being used as a criminal means of large scale smuggling
of drugs, transport of criminals on false identification and transport
for resale of the goods resulting from their thefts. Is that correct?"
Neiswanger always liked to have things neatly listed.

"I think so," said the chairman.

"And you would say that the organization responsible is centered in
this corporation?"

"It would seem likely, yes."

The members of the board stirred uneasily, seeing a blast of
sensational headlines, investigations which would spread to their
private lives, themselves giving repetitive testimony to inquisitive
politicians in a glare of television lights while the Federated
Nations anti-cartel commission vivisected the UT giant into puny,
separate squabbling midgets.

It was not an appealing prospect.

"We'll have to stop it, of course," said a lean, blond man whose name
was Stout. He could be relied on to say the obvious and keep a
discussion driving to the point. "I understand we have a good
detective agency. If we put them on this with payment for speed and
silence--"

"And when we know who is responsible," asked Neiswanger, "_Then_ what
do we do?"

There was silence as they came to another full stop in thinking.
Turning culprits over to the police was out of the question, an
admission that such crimes had happened, and could happen again.
Firing the few detected could not impress the undetected and unfired
ones enough to discourage them from their profitable criminality.

"Hire some killings," said the round faced Mr. Beldman, with
simplicity.

The chairman laughed. "You are joking of course, Mr. Beldman."

"Of course," said Mr. Beldman, and laughed barkingly, being well aware
of the permanent film record taken of all meetings. But he was not
joking. Nobody there was joking.

The detective agency and the hired killers would be arranged for.

Bryce Carter leaned back with the slight cynical smile on his lean
face that was his habitual expression. "Suppose the top man is high in
the company?" he suggested softly. "What then?" He did not need to
point out that the disappearance of such a man would be enough to
start a police and stock-holders investigation of the company in
itself. The implication was clear. Such a man could not be touched.

"A hypnotist," suggested Raal. "Someone to make our top man back track
and clean up his own mess."

"Illegal, dangerous and difficult, Mr. Raal," Irving said sourly.
"There are extremely severe penalties against any complicity in the
unsupervised use of hypnotism or hypnotic drugs, and their use against
the will of the subject is a major crime."

"A circulating company psychologist would be legal," suggested the
lean blond man whose name was Stout.

"We have over seventy-five of those on the company payrolls already
and I fail to see what use--"

"One of the special high priced boys who iron out kinks in groups by
joining them and working with them for a while, like that Conference
Manager we had with us last year. Every member of the group that hires
one has to sign an application for treatment, and a legal release.
They are very quiet and don't broadcast what they do or who they
talked with, but they have a good record of results. The groups who
hire them report better work and easier work. We could use one as a
trouble shooter."

"Are they a special organization?" someone asked. "I think I've heard
of them."

"Yes, some sort of a union. I can't remember the name."

"What would you expect them to do for us?" asked Irving.

"I hear--" Stout said vaguely, his eyes wandering from face to face,
"that they have a special tough technique for hard case trouble
makers." For those who knew him, the vague look was a veil over some
thought which pleased him. Presumably he was thinking the thing which
had occurred to them all.

       *       *       *       *       *

The culprit might be a member of the Board. There was a sudden
cheerful interest visible among them as they wondered who was quarry
for the "tough treatment."

"I've heard of that," said Wan Lun, remembering. "It has been said
that they not only do not inform others of the fact of treatment but
frequently do not inform the man under treatment but seem to be only a
new friend until--poof." He smiled. "I think the guild name is Manoba.
The Manoba Group."

Stout said, "They'll probably charge enough for the skill."

Wan said, smiling, "I also heard some idle rumor that in a few such
cases discord within a group was alleviated by sudden suicide.
Presumably a psychologist can grow impatient and push a certain button
in the mind--"

"Sounds like a good idea," Beldman said. "Do you think if we offered
this Manoba the right kind of money--"

"You don't mean that, Mister Beldman," cut in the chairman
reprovingly. "You're joking again."

"We're all great jokers," said Beldman, and laughed.

Everyone laughed.

"I move we vote a sum for the hiring of a Manoba psychologist."

"Seconded, how about five hundred thousand?"

"I don't know their fees," the chairman objected cautiously.

"You can turn back any surplus. We stand to lose more than that by
several orders of magnitude. Spend it at your discretion."

"Make it seven hundred thousand. Give him a little more room."

"I so move."

"Seconded."

"Carry it to a vote."

They slipped their hands under the table edge before their respective
seats, and each man ran his fingers over two buttons concealed there,
before him, chose between the _yes_ and the _no_ button and pushed
one, the choice of his fingers unseen by the others.

Two numbers lit up on the small divided panel before the chairman. He
looked at them with his mild face expressionless. "Rejected by one
vote."

Unanimity was the law on Board decisions, which by a natural law was
probably the reason why no love was lost among them, but this time
irritation was curbed by interest. They sat watching each other's
expressions with glances which seemed casual. Whose was the one vote?

"I move that the vote be repeated and made open," someone said.

"Seconded."

"All in favor of the appropriation for the psychologist raise your
left hand," the chairman requested.

They complied and looked at each other. All hands were up.

"Carried on the second vote," the chairman said without apparent
interest. "For my own curiosity will the gentleman who voted nay on
the secret vote the first time speak up and explain his objections,
and why he changed his mind on the open vote?"

There was silence a moment--Neiswanger looking at his neat
fingernails, Bryce Carter smoking, and smiling slightly as he always
smiled, Stout leaning back casually scanning his eyes from face to
face. Beldman lit a cigar and released a cloud of blue smoke with a
contented sigh. No one spoke.

"Gentlemen," said the chairman. "It is entirely likely that the
culprit is among us."

"Never mind the melodrama, John." Irving tapped the table impatiently.
"We've dealt with that. Let's get on to the next business."


II

In the exit lounge at floor five Bryce Carter stopped a moment and
glanced at himself in the mirror. Thick neck, thick body--a physique
so evenly and heavily muscled that it looked fat until he moved. Atop
the thick body a lean face that he didn't like stared back at him. It
was darkly tanned, with underlying freckles that were almost black.
Years had passed since he had worked in space, but the space-tan
remained indelible. It was not a bland or pretty face.

At the dinner, deep in discussion with Mr. Wan, he had been surprised
to find himself smiling at intervals, irrepressibly. He hoped it had
looked cordial, and not too much like a cat enjoying the company of
mice.

They had no defense against him. The drugs organization could never be
traced to him. The connection was too well concealed. Even the
organization knew nothing about him.

The only evidence which could make the connection was in his own mind.
The only witness against him was himself. He cast his mind back over
the meeting and dinner but there had been no slips past the first
shock of the chairman's announcement, and that had been unobserved by
anyone. The psychologist they had hired might perhaps get a betraying
flicker of expression from him in an interview, many well-trained
observers of human reactions could read expressions that keenly, but
the interviewing of all the Board by the psychologist was not likely.
The Directors of the Board were even now climbing into trains and
strato planes to scatter back to the far points of the earth. It would
take many days for an investigating psychologist to follow to
interview each one. He and Irving would be last on the list, for he
went to Moonbase City, and Irving to Luna City.

He had weeks.

He smiled, fastening bands in his cuffs that folded them tightly on
his wrists, zipping up his suitcoat and slipping on gloves. He looked
at himself again. Where he had been wearing a conservative dark silk
business suit with a short cape, he now seemed to be wearing a
tailored ski-suit with an odd cowl, or a pressure suit without boots
or helmet, which was what it was. Carrying the zipper up further would
have turned the cape to an airtight helmet bubble.

Employes and executives passing in and out of the UT building gave the
clothes an approving and interested glance as they passed. The
justification by utility was obvious. It had cost money to have a
pressure suit designed light and flexible enough for comfortable wear,
but long ago he had grown irked by the repetitious business of
climbing in and out of clothes every time one stepped through a space
lock, while overcapes and hoods were needed stepping outside of any
temperate zone Earth building in winter.

A pressure suit was completely independent of weather and regulated
its own internal heat. Since the suit had been designed the
manufacturer had begun to receive an increasing number of orders for
duplicates, and was now being put into mass production. Probably in
these five minutes he had just made many more sales for the
manufacturer.

He was setting a style, he thought in pleased surprise, stepping out
of the building. The salt wind hit him with a blast of cold, and the
automatic thermostatic wiring in the suit countered with a wave of
warmth as he leaned into the wind and started to walk. The connection
between the Union Hotel and the building he had just left was an
arched sidewalk that curved between them, five stories above the sand
and surf.

The hotel was an impressively towering building against the ragged
sky, and as he walked a gleam broke through from the hidden sunset and
spotlighted it and the low scudding clouds in a sudden glowing red. He
stopped and leaned against the balustrade to watch the red gleams
reflecting from the bay. Red and purple clouds fled by low overhead,
their colors changing as they moved. This was something a man couldn't
see in space or on the moon.

But after a moment he couldn't fully enjoy it, because he was being
watched. The feeling was disturbing.

Damn rubbernecks, he thought, and turned irritably, half hoping that
at least it would be an acquaintance or some pretty girls.

But there was no one watching him.

A few pedestrians walked by hurriedly because it was growing dark and
the view that they had come to enjoy was fading. The wind wrapped
their enveloping capes around them and made them all look abnormally
tall and columnar.

It was darker. The sidewalk lights abruptly flicked on in a flood of
amber light that thickened the twilight beyond their circle to an
opaque purple curtain of darkness.

He noticed a pedestrian walking slowly towards him from the direction
he had come. The figure approached more slowly than seemed natural,
with his head bowed and his hands in his pockets as though lost in
thought.

       *       *       *       *       *

A trailer from the detective agency? It was too soon for that. If it
were arranged that every member of the Board be trailed, still it
could not have been arranged and begun so soon.

[Illustration]

Besides, there was something more deadly than that in the walking
man's indifference.

A killer arranged by Beldman? It would be natural for Beldman or Stout
to take a chance and fight back the direct way. But there was no
evidence. How could either of them have decided who to blame or who to
fight?

The few huge buildings that stood dark against the night sky were
being brightened now by lights going on in hundreds of windows. In
long slender spans between them stretched the aerial walks and the
necklaces of amber lights that outlined them. The wind blew colder
across the walks and the view of sea and sky that had been visible
from them now was blotted out by night. The walkers were going in.
There was small chance of sheltering himself in a crowd, or even of
keeping only one or two walkers between himself and the one who
followed him.

At the first sight of the approaching figure he had instinctively
leaned back against the concrete railing and taken his gun from its
pocket holster, holding it lightly in his gloved hand.

An aged couple and a vigorous middle-aged woman hurrying in the
opposite direction glanced at him without interest or alarm. His pose
was not menacing, and anyway most men with money enough to travel
carried hand arms.

This was an indirect effect of a Federated Nations ruling that only
hand arms of a regulated deadliness be manufactured as the armament
of nations. The ruling had been carefully considered for other
secondary effects, for any nation growing over-centralized and
militaristic was likely to arm its citizens universally for greater
military power by numbers, and then suffer the natural consequences of
having armed their public opinion.

An armed man need not vote to be counted, and once having learned that
lesson, the feeling that an armed man carried his bill of rights in
his pocket made this the first clause of the written and unwritten
constitutions of many suddenly democratic nations. "The right of the
yoemanry to carry arms shall not be abridged." They kept their guns.

And with weapons instantly available to hot tempers, dueling came back
into custom in most places.

All this had little effect on the large calm manufacturing countries
who had run the UN and now ran the FN, but it made easy their decision
that since, in space, policing is almost impossible, the citizens who
venture there must be armed to protect themselves. Thus, in spite of
the continued outcry of a minority of Christian moralists, a holster
pocket was now built into all space suits.

Bryce had grown up in a famine country, an almost unpoliced area, and
weapons had been as familiar to his hands as fingers since he had
passed twelve. And when, as a steel-worker, he had been one of the
first settlers in the foundry towns of the Asteroid Belt, he had found
life no gentler there. But it was all right as far as he was
concerned. He had heard of safer and duller ways to live but had never
wanted them. Life as a moonbased transport manager had been a short
interval of nonviolence, five years of startling calm which he had not
yet grown accustomed to.

The gun fitted into his hand as comfortably as his thumb, or as the
handshake of an old and trusted friend, but it was useless here.
Reluctantly he slipped it back into his pocket and began walking
again. A director of UT couldn't shoot people on intuition.

He had barely stopped for a count of ten, and there was still distance
between them when he had turned, but the follower could be walking
faster now, narrowing the distance between them.

If he had waited and fired, an inspection of the man's pockets could
have confirmed his judgment by the finding of an assassin's illegal
needle gun. That alone might be enough to satisfy the police if he
were still merely a spaceworker, but a Director of UT couldn't live
that casually. It would be difficult to explain his certainty to the
police, and still more difficult to explain to the newspapers. He
could not afford that sort of publicity.

Bryce let out a soft curse and lengthened his stride.

He had to wait for proof of the follower's intentions. And the only
proof would be to be attacked, and the first proof of that, since
needle guns are soundless and inconspicuous, would probably be a
curare-loaded needle in his back.

After that the follower could inconspicuously drop his weapon over the
balustrade, its self-destroying mechanism set to melt it before it
reached the sands far below.

However since the follower certainly would not openly run after him,
the most logical thing to do, Bryce decided, was to run to the hotel
as if he were in a hurry. The idea irritated him.

He walked on, slowing perversely. It was irrational to walk, and he
knew it, but he walked, and the knowledge that it was irrational
irritated him further. The skin between his shoulder blades itched
meditatively in its own imaginative anticipation of an entering
needle. What good did it do him to be proud of his brains when he put
himself in a spot where he walked around like a target?

He controlled a rising rage but he walked.

The sky was totally dark now and there were only two or three couples
ahead on the slender concrete span and one old couple he had just
passed, so that they were between himself and the follower. But that
was no adequate screen.

Far above soared the sky taxis. And now he wanted a taxi. He was
approaching a place where there was a hack stand. Just ahead, at the
midway point, where the upward curve of the sidewalk leveled off and
began to curve down, a narrow catwalk jutted into space with a small
landing platform at its end. "TAXI" a luminescent arrow glowed at him
directingly as he came abreast of it.

       *       *       *       *       *

He walked rapidly out along the railed catwalk, making a perfect
target he knew, silhouetted against the glow. He cursed under his
breath, reaching the end of it. Here he made an even more perfect
target, with the single bright light that poured down brilliance on
the bench and landing platform spotlighting him against the darkness
of the night. The bench was thin iron grillwork. It offered no cover.

He needed cover. He considered the white concrete pillar of the lamp,
put his hand on the railing and jumped up to sit on the railing
casually, a one hundred fifty foot fall behind him and the width of
the lamp post between him and the follower, who now was an unmoving
figure leaning against the railing of the sidewalk near where the
catwalk began.

The sight of the insolently lounging figure did nothing to sooth his
irritation. This escape was not the way he wanted to deal with a
threat. There was an oddity in the man's waiting. The range was poor,
and he probably was not firing, although he would look as if he were
not in any case, but if he were not going to take this chance for his
murder attempt, why did he openly exhibit himself, arousing suspicion
and cutting off future chances? An innocent stroller or even a mere
trailer from the detective agency would have strolled on.

Above came the nearing drone of a taxi which had spotted him in the
bright pool of light at the hack stand.

There was something in the careless confidence of the follower's open
interest in him that raised his neck hair as no direct threat could
have, and filled the rumble of the night-hidden surf with obscure
menace. The man acted as if his job was over, clinched.

Bryce reached the answer as the taxi floated down on hissing roter
blades and settled to the platform. Sliding down from the railing he
walked toward it, stiff-legged. The light was out inside it, and the
cabby did not climb out or attempt to open the door for him. Bryce
turned his head and looked back as if for a last glance at the
watching figure, grasping the door handle with his right hand as if
fumbling blindly. He was left handed. When the door was open a crack,
it stopped opening, and those inside saw the muzzle of a magnamatic in
his left hand looking through the crack at them.

It's easier to catch wolves if you're disguised as a rabbit, Pop Yak
had told him once. He must have looked a complete sucker, starting to
climb into a dark cab with his head turned backward!

"Don't move," Bryce said, some of his anger reaching his voice in a
biting rasp. Inside, the driver was frozen with his head turned enough
to see the glint of a muzzle behind his neck, and in the darkened far
corner of the back seat where there should have been no one there was
the pale blur of a face, and a hand holding something. Bryce knew that
there was no way a shot could reach him except through the shielding
steel door or the shatterproof window, and a man would hesitate before
shooting through glass when he was looking down the throat of Bryce's
gun. Bryce waited for him to think it over.

The hand of the man in the back seat came into focus as his eyes
adjusted to the dark inside, and he could see that it was holding a
gun. The gun was not pointing at anything in particular. It was frozen
in mid-motion. The man had a half-smile frozen on his face, probably
in the way he had been smiling just before Bryce spoke.

"Open your hand. Drop it." The glint of the gun disappeared, and there
was a faint thud from the floor. Bryce opened the door and slid into
the rear seat, watchful for motion, ready to shoot. "Face front!" They
faced front like two puppets, perhaps the uncontrollable rasp in his
voice was convincing. He still did not know whose men they were, or
why they had been hired. It would be no use questioning them for they
would not know either. He could guess who it was, a name came to mind,
but there was no way of checking up. This kind of business did not fit
well with the crucial balance of his plans for the next two weeks. "Be
careful," he said perhaps unnecessarily, "I'm nervous. Union Hotel
please."

The short ride to the hotel was made in dead silence, with the man in
the opposite corner barely moving enough to blink his eyes. He was
middle-aged, with the resigned sagging lines to his face of ambition
disappointed, but he sat with a waiting stillness that Bryce
recognized as something to watch. There was probably another gun
within quick reach of that passive right hand.

The roter drifted down to a landing space on the floodlighted landing
roof of the hotel and settled with a slight bump. "Don't move." The
clumsy careful business of opening the door backward with his right
hand and sliding out without taking his eyes from either of them was
tediously slow.

Once out, he slammed the door briskly. "Take off." Not until the red
and green lights had faded into the distance did he turn away, pocket
his gun and walk into the wide doorway to the elevators. As he brushed
past the hotel detective standing in the doorway the detective was
reholstering a large size police pacifier. Apparently he had been
ready to impartially stun everyone concerned at the first sign of
trouble, which probably explained why those in the aircab had not
attempted any retaliation. The detective gave Bryce a cold stare as he
went by, probably in disapproval of guests waving weapons on hotel
premises.


III

In his luxurious hotel room Bryce checked his watch. Eight o'clock. A
telephone call was scheduled for some time in the half hour. He filed
the question of who was behind the night's attack and picked up the
phone. The dial system was in automatic contact with any city in the
world. He dialed.

Somewhere in a city, a phone rang. It rang unheard, for it was locked
into a safe in a tiny rented office with some unusual mechanisms
attached. The ringing was stopped abruptly and a recorded voice
answered, "Yeah?"

Bryce took a dial phone from the night table where it had been sitting
innocently like a toy he had bought for some child. "Hi Al," he said
cheerfully to the automatic mechanism at the other end. "Listen, I
think I've got a new phrase for that transition theme. How's this?" He
put the receiver against the back of the toy and dialed the toy dial.
It responded to each letter and number with a ringing note of
different pitch that played a short unmelodious tune.

The pitch notes went over the line and entered the mechanism, making
the contacts within it that dialed the number he had dialed on the toy
phone.

"How's that?" Bryce said cheerfully.

The recorded voice said, "Sounds good. I'll see what I can do with
it." Somewhere far away and unheard another phone had begun to ring.
"Want to speak to George?"

"Sure."

A phone rang in a pay booth somewhere in a great city railroad
station, and someone browsing at a magazine stand or sitting on a
suitcase apparently waiting for a train strolled casually to answer
it.

"Hello?" said a noncommittal voice, prepared to claim that he was
merely a stranger answering the phone because it was ringing in
public.

"Hello George, how's everything going?" Bryce asked. Those words were
his trade mark, the passwords that identified him to everyone as the
Voice who gave Tips. Among the monster organization which had grown
from the proven reliability of those tips, the voice was known as
"Hello George." Hello George's tips were always good, so they had come
to be followed as blindly as tips from God, even when they were not
understood. Certainty was one thing men in the fencing and drug
smuggling business most sorely lacked.

They communicated only by phone. They transmitted their wares by
leaving them in public lockers and mailing the key. They never saw
each other's faces or heard each other's names, but even the use of a
key could be a trap that would bring a circle of narcotics agents of
INC around the unfortunate who attempted to open the locker.

Far away over the bulge of the Earth between, a man sat in a phone
booth waiting for his tip. "Pretty well. No complaints. How's with
you, any news?"

"I think you'd better cut connections with Union Transport. They're
getting pretty sloppy. I think they might spill something."

"Wadja say?" asked the man at the other end cautiously, "I didn't get
you."

"Better stop using UT for shipping," Bryce repeated, wording his
sentence carefully. "They aren't careful enough anymore. You don't
want them to break an inc case wide open, do you?" INC was the
International Narcotics Control agency of the F. N. But the
conversation would have sounded like an innocent discussion of
shipping difficulties to any chance listener on the telephone lines.

The flat tones were plaintive and aggrieved. "But we're expecting a
load of stuff Friday. Our buyers are expecting it." Stuff was drug,
and expecting was a mild word for the need of drug addicts! "And we've
got a lotta loads of miscellaneous items to go out." The contact was a
small man in the organization but he evidently knew just how "hot"
fenced goods could be. "That can't wait!"

He had planned this. "Maybe they are all right for shipments this
week. I'll chew them out to be careful, check up and call back Friday.
Meanwhile break with them."

"Tell them a few things from me, the--" the distant voice added a
surprising string of derogatory adjectives. "Friday when?"

"Friday about--about six." The double "about" confirmed the signal for
a telephone appointment that was general for all contact numbers.

"Friday about six, Okay." There was a faint click that meant he had
hung up and the phone in the safe was open for more dialings on his
toy dial.

Bryce hung up, leaned back on his bed and pushed a button that turned
on the radio to a semiclassical program. Soothing music came into the
room and slow waves of colored light moved across the ceiling. He
tuned to a book player, and chose a heavy economics study from the
current seller list of titles which appeared on the ceiling. The daily
moon ship was scheduled to blast off at five thirty, its optimum at
this week's position of the Moon. By this time tomorrow night, he and
all the other members of the Board would be out of reach of any easy
observation or analysis by their hired psychological mind-hunter.

With a slight chilling of the skin he remembered the cop-psychos the
gangs had warned him about in his scrambling and desperate childhood,
and what they were supposed to do to you when they caught you in a
third offense.

He had been born into an ex-European quarter in a Chinese city, a
descendant of something prideful and forgotten called an Empire
Builder, and grew with the mixed gangs of children of all colors who
roamed the back streets at night, looting and stealing and breaking.
Population control was almost impossible in a land where the only
social security against starvation in old age was sons, and social
security was impossible in a land so corrupted by the desperation of
famines, so little able to spare the necessary taxes. The nation was
too huge to be fed from outside, and so had been left by the FN to
stew in its own misery until its people solved their basic problem.

So, in an enlightened clean and wealthy world, Bryce Carter had grown
up in a slum whose swarming viciousness was a matter of take, steal,
kill, climb or die. Perhaps under those special circumstances police
penal compulsion had to be brutally strong, stronger than the drive
for life itself, as brutal as the lurid tales he had heard. Perhaps in
other countries the methods were different, a hypno-converted man not
a horror to his friends, but he had had no time to study and
investigate if it were so, and the horror and hatred remained.

But there was no need to think about the psycho-hunter the Board had
put on him for by the time the hunter could reach him UT would have
fallen as a legal entity, its corruption would be completely public,
and the psychologist would be called off before discovering anything.
Bryce thought of the slight nervousness he had let show at the first
words of the chairman's announcement. The only witness against him was
himself. His control wasn't perfect. No one's was. But he was safe.

He concentrated on the opening pages of the Basic Principles of
Economies.

       *       *       *       *       *

In the darkened UT building which could be seen from his window a few
lights still burned where the night shift dealt with emergencies.

In a small projection room on the fifty-fifth floor a man sat and
looked at a film of the UT Board meeting of that day. He played only a
certain small twenty minute interval, listening closely to the
voices--"Gentlemen, your attention please--" Watching the faces--"Do
the police know of this?" ... "Do you think if we offered this Manoba
the right kind of money...." "Will the gentleman who voted nay on the
secret vote the first time speak up and explain...." "It is entirely
likely that the conspirator is among us." On the screen showed the
apparently bored faces and relaxed poses of men accustomed to the
power game, habitually masking their feelings from each other,
shifting their positions slightly sometimes, some smoking. "We've
dealt with that, let's get on to the next business."

The watcher stopped the film and silently reset it. It began again
with the chairman on the screen rapping the table lightly. "Gentlemen,
your attention...."

In the darkened projection room the chairman sat to one side smoking
and thinking while the psychologist played the film through for the
fourth time.

The chairman was wondering just how seriously the watcher was taking
Mr. Beldman's proposals about what he should do to the culprit, and
whether he would raise his fee.

The telephone rang.

       *       *       *       *       *

"Four thirty, Mr. Carter," said the voice of the night clerk in the
receiver.

It was time to catch the five thirty Moon ship. He splashed cold water
on his face and the back of his neck until he was awake, took a hot
shower, dressed rapidly, and gave up his key at the desk at 4:45.

"A letter for you, Mister Carter," she smiled, handing it to him. From
the wall speakers a mild but penetrating voice began repeating, "Bus
line for spaceport leaving in twelve minutes. All passengers for Luna
City, Moon Base, Asteroid Belt and points out, please go to the
landing deck. Bus line for spaceport leaving in twelve minutes--"

He opened the letter when he had settled down in a comfortable morris
chair in the airbus. The letterhead said MANOBA Group Psychotherapeutic
Research and Conference Management.

One sheet of it was a half page contract in fine print, apparently a
standard form with the name of Union Transport Corporation typed in
the appropriate blanks. Above it was printed in clear English and
large type for the benefit of those readers unaccustomed to contracts.
"WARNING. After you have signed this release you have no legal
recourse or claim as an individual against any physical or mental
injury or inconvenience you may claim to have sustained as a result of
the activities of the contracted psychotherapist(s) in the course of
group therapy. Your group is the responsible agent. It must make all
claims and complaints as a unit, and may withdraw from the contract as
a unit. Those who withdraw from the group withdraw from participation
in the contract."

Bryce smiled. Or in other words, if you didn't like it, you could quit
your job and get out!

The other sheet he glanced at casually. It seemed to be an explanatory
page to the effect that the Manoba's work was strictly confidential
and they were under no obligation to explain what they had done or
were doing or give their identities to any member of the corporation
who had hired them. There was nothing resembling a sales talk about
results, and the only thing approaching it was a stiff last sentence
referring anyone who was curious about the results of such treatment
to the National Certified Analytical Statistics of Professional
Standing in such and such bulletins of such and such years.

He signed the contract, smiling, and mailed it at a handy postal and
telegraph window at the spaceport before boarding the spaceship.

       *       *       *       *       *

The phone was ringing.

Bryce rolled over sleepily and picked it up. "Eight A.M. L.S. S.S.
Sir," said the soft voice of the desk clerk.

"Okay," he grunted, glancing at his watch and hanging up. It was two
minutes after eight, but he didn't check her up on it. If he placed
the voice rightly, it belonged to an exceptionally pretty brunette. He
had not tried to date her yet, but she looked accessible, and Mona was
becoming tiresome.

He turned the dial in the headboard that reversed the polarization of
the window and rose reluctantly, stretching as sunlight flooded the
room. It was daylight on Moonbase City. It had been daylight for a
week, and it would be daylight still for another week.

Through the softening filter of the airtight glass the view of distant
crater walls and the airsealed towers of Moonbase City shone in etched
magnificence, but he gave it only a glance. It was always the same.
There was no weather on the Moon and no variety of view.

"Good morning," he smiled, passing a bellboy in the luxurious, deep
colored halls.

"Good morning, Mister Carter," the boy answered rapidly with an eager
nervous smile.

Bryce had caught the management up sharply on several small lapses,
and they all knew him now. He strode on, pleased. Efficiency.... No
one gave him a second glance or noticed him in the tube trains, but he
was not irritated by it. Someday they would. Someday the whole world
would know his face as well as they knew their own. He promised that
to them silently and then settled down to concentrate on some
constructive planning before reaching the office. He was not going to
waste his time gawking at ads or listening to the music like the
others.

"Mister Carter?" said a hesitant voice behind him as he was reaching
for the handle of the office doors.

"What is it?" he asked crisply, turning, but as he saw who had spoken
he knew exactly what it would be.

"Pardon me Mister Carter, but--" It was a spaceman, a skinny wreck of
a man in clothes that hung on him. A junky, a drug addict. Bryce knew
the signs. He had spent all his money and gone without food for his
drug, and now he had remembered from Belt talk that Bryce Carter was a
soft touch for a loan. "Never mind," Bryce snarled, reaching for the
door again.

He assisted the smuggling of the stuff but that did not mean that he
had to admire the fools who took it. The man was muttering something
about a loan when the door shut and cut off his words. The loan would
be spent on more junk. If he had wanted food he could have signed into
a state hospital to take the Cure, and be imprisoned and fed until the
hunger for his drug had passed and released him. The Cure was a brief
hell, but it was fair payment for having had his fun, and if the
addict had any guts he would face it. Any time he was ready to pay the
price of exit he could go back to being a man.

Bryce strode through the offices irritably. It did not matter if
Earthlings chose to waste their time in artificial ecstasy, but it was
different to see a good Belt spaceman let himself go.

The receptionist looked up with fright in her eyes as he passed and
gave him a special good-morning, with a smile that was tremulous and
very eager to please. He still had her in the stage of new employment
where she was kept afraid of losing her new job with a bad reference.
It was best to put them all over the hurdles at first.

He gave her a condescending smile as he went through into the inner
offices. "Good morning." She was shaky enough. A few well faked cold
rages against minor errors had done well. From now on she would need
only smiles to give the utmost in loyalty and hard work. What had
Machiavelli said? "Make them fear your wrath, and they will be
grateful for your forebearance."

He did not bother to speak to Kesby when he passed his open office
door. Kesby didn't need smiles or praise, he worked loyally just for
the rare curt acknowledgement that he had done well. Three years of
managing had made him a good lieutenant, completely faithful. When
Bryce quit Union Transport Kesby would follow him.


IV

He went into his luxurious inner office with its deep rugs and
eye-relaxing colors and its comfortable wide desk with its speaker box
and telephones that were like the nerve wires of power, and sat down
comfortably like a king on a throne or a mule skinner in the driver's
seat with ten pairs of reins in each hand. He never felt completely
awake and up to his full size in the morning until he was here.

There was a good stack of letters and memos on the desk waiting for
him. On top of the mail stack was a letter labeled PRIVATE in a beamed
spacegram envelope. He did not recognize the name at the head of it
but the return address was General Delivery, Reef Three, The Belt. It
read:

_Something urgent has come up. Must see you. Arrange when. Bob._
Roberto Orillo, who had been his manager in the small line that UT had
taken from him, now the owner of a tiny line of his own which
carefully avoided competition with UT in the Belt.

"Arrange when." They could only meet in secret. What would Orillo want
to discuss?

The theory he had held in the back of his mind for three days gave
answer--Murder! It was Orillo who was behind the attempted attack on
Earth. This meeting was another trap. Orillo wanted him dead.

Roberto Orillo had been his first helper with the shipping and
delivery service Bryce had built up from the days when he had been
merely an asteroid prospector with a ship overstocked with supplies
and an obliging willingness to sell his surplus.

After he put his traveling stores on schedule he noticed that an
increasing number of people began moving into the Belt to settle along
his route without investing in the proper ship or supplies, depending
on him, using his ship for a store and bus service, swelling his
profits. He found that wherever he chose to extend a route and offer
credit for a stake settlers would appear and a community begin to
grow.

He absorbed that lesson and laid plans.

UT blocked them. Running his store ships on their regular rounds,
making loans, mediating deals, taking half interests in ideas that
looked profitable, selling fuel and power, subtly binding his
customers to him with bonds of dependency deeper than peonage, Bryce
found suddenly that UT, whose trade mark had never been seen in the
Belt before, had slipped in five ships patterned precisely after his,
but larger, more magnificent and expensive, and set them running on
the same course as his but one day ahead. His customers told him. They
were apologetic but they had bought at the ship which came earliest,
enticed by the glitter and the bargain prices.

It was a killing blow, and was obviously meant to be so. The UT
managers were wise in the ways of power, and with limitless money
could bankrupt him.

That day Bryce saw that he could not fight UT from outside, and he saw
a dream of empire greater than Alexander ever dreamed of being ripped
from his hands. When a tactful and conciliating offer came from UT for
a merger and an exchange of stock at double its value, he saw it was
an indirect bribe for his silent submission without complaints to
Spaceways or to the Anti-Cartel Commission of the FN, and he saw that
the only way to compete with the gigantic corporation was to destroy
it from within.

He held out for a seat on the Board of Directors. They gave it to him.

And in three years had done an efficient job of corrupting and
undermining UT to the point where it was ready to fall. UT had a week
more to live in respected public service before an outraged public
tore it apart.

Bryce had left Orillo in the Belt to form a small delivery company
servicing thinly settled outlying points where the profits were too
small to disturb UT. It would be this company that would take over and
buy out the UT equipment when Spaceways chopped up the monster
corporation, and it was planned that Orillo offer Bryce full
partnership when this event took place.

But perhaps Orillo objected to sharing his reign with a partner. And
perhaps Orillo had always objected to the fact that Bryce was the only
one who knew Orillo was a fugitive from justice. Bryce had never quite
been able to tell what went on behind the handsome blond face and
impassive blue eyes of his assistant.

Bryce had taken him in hand and given him a job after Orillo fled from
a murder charge in South Africa. And Bryce had arranged the operations
that gave Orillo a new face, new fingerprints and an unworried future.
Only Bryce could now give the word to the police which could bring the
examination that would show Orillo's retina tallied with that of a
wanted man.

But if murder had always lain behind those impassive pale blue eyes,
why had there been no attempts before? The answer to that was easy. Up
to this time Bryce's activities had been profitable to Orillo. He had
seen where Bryce's plans were leading and wanted them to succeed, so
that he might step into Bryce's shoes and reap the results.

In three more months Bryce's death would be the death of a partner,
and bring the unwanted spotlight of police investigation on Orillo
himself, but now, at this point, the disappearance of Bryce Carter
would bring police inquiry and suspicion only to the already shaky and
undermined fabric of UT.

Bryce counted the profit and loss of his death to the man he had
helped, and smiled ruefully. Yet the request for the meeting might be
genuine and important. He had to take a chance on it and meet his
ex-assistant and future partner somewhere far away from witnesses,
recognition--or protection.

Taking a memo pad he printed, _I'll meet you Friday; 3:PM LM_, and
wrote in the coordinates of a position in space not very far out from
Earth, indicated the radar blink signals for its buoy and clipped the
memo sheet to the envelope with its false name and return address.
Ringing for his secretary, he handed it to her.

"See that that gets beamed back immediately. Friend of mine seems to
be in some sort of a jam."

That was that. He turned to his work. After an hour or so the intercom
box clicked and Kesby said unexpectedly, "Visitor to see you, boss.
Can I send him in?"

"Yes." The receptionist had strict orders to keep out everyone except
those scheduled for appointment, and to announce the names and
businesses of dubious cases for his deciding, but Kesby must have
overridden her decision. He sounded confident. Probably someone
important.

       *       *       *       *       *

Kesby opened the door with an expression half nervous, half
mischievous, "Your visitor," and closed it hastily as the person
stepped in.

He didn't belong in there. It was obvious to Bryce that whoever he
was, he had gotten in through a lie.

The young man who stood inside his office watching him was no one
connected with the business. He was too young for any position of
importance. The slender frailty of childhood was still with him. Yet
that impression soon faded under the impressiveness of his stance. It
was more than just arrogance or poise, it was an unshakable
confidence. As if no failure could be conceived.

He stood balanced to move either forward or back. His voice was again
a surprise. Absolute total clarity, almost without inflection as if
the words reached the mind without needing a voice. "If you're going
to throw me out, this is the best time to do it." Dark brown skin of
one of the dark races, jet black straight hair, a dark pair of eyes
that were merry and watchful and had the impact of something
dangerous. Colossal gall, Bryce characterized it to himself. He might
be as good as he thinks he is. He was probably selling the Brooklyn
Bridge, and he should never have gotten in, but the fact that he had
somehow gotten past Kesby made him worth a few questions before being
thrown out.

"What do you want?"

He came forward to the desk to answer. "I want to be your right arm."
He took out a pack of cigarettes, shaking one free and offering it
with courtesy. "Have one?" Bryce shook his head and the boy put one
between his own lips and put the pack away. "My name is Pierce," he
said, lighting the cigarette with the flame cupped in his hands as if
he were used to smoking in the wind. He looked up with his eyes
squinting against the smoke, shook the match out and dropped it in the
desk ash tray. "Roy Pierce."

He was as much at home as an invading army. Bryce felt an impulse to
laugh.

He knew this kid very well, but he couldn't place where, when, or how.
"Am I supposed to know the name?"

"Do you remember Pop Yak?"

Bryce remembered Pop Yak. He gave in with a sigh, and ordered in the
singsong vernacular of his childhood. "Okay. Sitselfdel, speeltalk
cutchop!"

Pop Yak was a grizzled man who had watched Bryce fighting with another
kid. Afterward he had taken Bryce into his store and given him ice
cream and some pointers on dirty fighting. Not much had penetrated the
first time but Bryce went back for advice again, learning that that
was the place to be told how to do things and get what he wanted. Pop
was always patient with his teaching, and always right.

He had chosen Bryce as his agent to sell minor drugs to the other kids
and acted as a fence for the things he stole, and he encouraged him to
study in the compulsory school and loaned him books. And Pop was the
first to give him the tip on legitimate business and how to pull money
on the right side of the law and make a profit they couldn't kick
about. Good old Pop. "Will-pay." The boy sat down and leaned forward
with a slight intent motion of a hand that was Pop's favorite gesture,
one Bryce had picked up from him himself.

"He told me you're on the way up." Roy Pierce held him with a steady
dark gaze. "I want a slice of that, and I want it the easy way,
hitching my wagon to your rocket. You can use me. A big man is too
public. You need a new hand and a new voice, one that does what you
want done, and can do it in the dark or the light, without your
name--a stand-in for alibis, and a contriver of accidents so they
break for you without your motion. A left arm that your enemies don't
recognize as yours."

He was asking to be Bryce's substitute in the things that had to be
done without connection to himself, and yet had to be done by Bryce
himself, because no one could be trusted with the knowledge of them.

Could he be trusted? His coming could be another trap by the
unidentified enemy. It was almost too providential, almost too well
timed. "References and abilities?"

Roy Pierce reached into his wallet and handed out an aptitude profile
card backed by the universal test score listings in training and
skills on the other side. Bryce played with the card and studied the
youth. The boy was well dressed in a dark tailored suit of the kind
Bryce favored. He looked able, clean, cool and ruthless. "Armed?"
Bryce asked.

A thing like a very thick cigar suddenly appeared in Pierce's hand.
The end of it pointing at him was solid except for a very small hole.
A needle gun, obviously, loaded with two and a half inch grooved drug
carrying needles.

"Sleep or death?" Bryce asked.

"Sleep," Pierce said, putting it away. "It's licensed." Bryce wondered
what made him so sure he could trust this kid. He analyzed while he
questioned. He did not bother to look at the card.

"Languages?"

"Basic coast pidgin, symbolic and glot." Basic English and Poliglot,
the two universals.

"Detector proofed?" Lie detectors could be a nuisance, for they were
used casually and universally without needing the legal warrants and
deference to constitutional immunities and medical supervision of
hypno-questioning.

Pierce smiled with a flash of white teeth. "First thing I ever saved
my money for."

Though they spoke standard English, Bryce had placed his intonations
almost to the block he grew up in. Almost to the half block! He was as
familiar as Pop Yak, as familiar as his own face in the mirror, and as
understandable. Bryce knew the inside of his mind as well as if it
were a suddenly attached lobe of his own. It was like looking back
through time at himself younger and less complex.

Pop Yak had turned out another on the same model, a younger simpler
duplicate of himself. Pierce was doing exactly what he said, offering
service to Bryce as he would offer him a sword, simply for the risk
and delight of being an instrument in a power game with stakes as high
as he had guessed Bryce's game to be. There was no danger of him being
a plant, and no danger of him squealing under pressure: the risk of
death or arrest was part of his pay.

       *       *       *       *       *

"Okay," Bryce said. He gestured with his head to a corner of the room
behind him. "Sit over there. You're my cousin from Montehedo, and I'm
showing you the town." He turned to his appointment pad again and
read. After Pierce had placed a chair in the indicated position, Bryce
said without turning. "This week I can use a bodyguard. Someone's
hiring killers for me."

There was no sound of motion for a moment. Bryce got the idea that
Pierce was more surprised than the fact warranted. But his question
was gentle and deadly. "Any idea who?"

"The line forms to the left." Bryce said dryly, "Put away that needle
gun and buy something legal that kills." He handed back a sheaf of
letters, memos and graphs. "Read these and learn." For some reason he
felt exhilarated.

He turned back to work, routing shipments, shifting rates to balance
shifting costs, lowering rates for preliminary incentive on lines that
could run at lower cost with a heavier load, occasionally using the
Bell communication load analyzer and Kesby's formula analysis for a
choice of ways of averting bottlenecks and overload slow-down points,
sometimes consulting the solar system maps on the walls.

Good service built up customer demand and dependency on good service.
Producers manufacturing now on Earth with the new materials shipped in
from space could not be cut off from access to the new materials
without ruin to the manufacturers. Earth was becoming dependent on
space transport.

Once the customers were given it, they grew to need it. He smiled at
the thought. It was another kind of drug traffic, and wielded the
same kind of potentially infinite power over the customers.

One thing he had learned from the Economics tome he had struggled with
four nights ago, a simple inexorable principle he had recognized dimly
before--that since it was difficult and more expensive to ship out
goods from Earth to space than it was to drop goods into Earth from
space, eventually spacepeople might be independent of Earth, and Earth
totally dependent on space products.

The potentialities of the business game were amazing past anything Pop
Yak had ever hinted, but the funny thing was he had to find it out
step by step for himself. That kind of excitement wasn't in stories.
The adventures of explorers, research men, and detectives were written
into stories, but not money men. The life and growth and death and
blackmail of individuals were in the stories he had read, but not the
murder of planets and cities, the control and blackmail of whole
populations, in this odd legal game with the simple rules. Funny there
hadn't been lurid stories about this in the magazines he read as a
kid.

He grinned--Well, the kids would read about _him_. In fifteen years
he'd have everyone under his thumb and they'd smile and bow and be
frightened just speaking to him.

The work vanished rapidly, the pile of accumulated letters and reports
dwindling, and the phone ringing at intervals.

Complaints he dealt with carefully, wording each letter in reply so as
to give the impression that he, Bryce Carter, was personally breaking
the corporation policy to satisfy the complainer, and adding a word of
praise on the intelligence and lucidity of the complaining letter. So
far he had made a total of some six hundred letter-writing allies that
way. Complainants were usually loquacious, interfering types who
expressed more than their share of public opinion, and many would
glorify him to everyone whose ear they could hold, if only to have it
known that they were on pally terms with a Director of the great UT.

Many of the letters were merely friendly and chatty, telling of money
troubles, successes and family affairs. To these he recorded a few
friendly remarks on wire spool, telling the same joke to each, and
slipped each loop of wire into an envelope to be mailed.

Pierce, studying a transport routing map, looked over and grinned at
the sixth repetition of the joke, and Bryce grinned back and continued
on recording a letter to an address in the Ozarks. "Got a young cousin
of mine in from Montehedo, Miss Furnald, he's sitting here watching to
see how a big business office operates and he's grinning at me because
it looks like I want to just sit and talk at my friends all day long.
I have fifty-nine business letters here to answer--honest to
God--fifty-nine, I just counted them, so I guess I'll cut off and show
the young squirt how I can work. Send me that photo of your sister's
new baby."

He hung up the record mouthpiece. One more voter and loyal friend to
pull for him when he was a public figure and the going got rough.

He grinned. It was a strange life and a strange game.


V

When he left the office with Pierce, someone stepped out of a corner
of the corridor and clutched at his sleeve, speaking rapidly. Bryce
brushed off the hand carelessly and walked on.

"A junky," he remarked to Pierce. There was a quick flash of motion
behind them that sent them whirling to one side. Pierce stood aside
with the small needle gun in his palm waiting to see if it would be
needed, while Bryce finished the downstroke of his hand that sent the
knife and the junky reeling to the rubbery corridor flooring.

"Shall I report him?" Pierce asked, making his needle gun vanish in
the same smooth motion it had appeared, and indicating a phone sign.

"No. It doesn't matter," Bryce walked on thoughtfully. "Everyone wants
to kill me at once."

Pierce said, "It's easy to sway a miserable man to the point of
pinning all his troubles and hate on to one name, like Bryce Carter."

"I know," said Bryce. He saw that the smiling dark young man was
alert, walking a little ahead of him and glancing quickly left and
right as they approached corners and intersections and recessed
doorways where a man could wait unseen, doing his job as a bodyguard
efficiently and inconspicuously. "If it's the man I think it is,"
Bryce told him, falling into step again after they passed the turn
into the tube trains, "he's working against a deadline. It's now or
never. There won't be any more of this after next month."

Pierce answered after a glance at a passing mirror to see if they were
followed, and a quick scan of the train platform. "Your usual haunts
will be booby trapped. Better stay out of routine."

That night, in the spacehands end of the city, they ate the dinner
that he usually had with Mona at a nightclub, or alone looking for a
good pickup in an expensive cocktail lounge. It was in the shipping
area around the docks, at the opposite end of the city from his usual
haunts. The ceiling was low and the glasses shivered and danced with
the constant muted thunder of jets that shuddered through the floor
from the nearby landing fields.

His new assistant and bodyguard was pleasantly deferential, lighting
cigarettes for him, listening respectfully to his opinions, drawing
him out with questions that showed he understood what he was listening
to.

Bryce could not remember having had such a good time talking since he
left the company of the meteorite miners at the Belt. Everything he
said seemed right and even brilliant. As he talked and told anecdotes
of his life and sketched some of his plans he saw his past life with
peculiar vividness as if he were a stranger seeing it for the first
time. In the reflected light of the interest and enthusiasm of his
audience, events took on a new glow of entertainment and adventure and
success where they had seemed to be just work and risk and routine at
the time.

They had an evening to pass. Somehow Pierce got into conversation with
a little Egyptian who could have stood for Cyrano and had the same
merry impetuous way about him. Raz Anna was his name. He claimed to be
the Caliph of Baghdad, still incognito, or perhaps a professional
explorer disguised as a native. After a few drinks he enlisted them,
somewhat confusedly, as the two missing musketeers and they found
themselves wandering arm in arm from bar to bar and up and down dark
alleys interviewing the heathen natives.

Bryce realized that he was laughing steadily and enjoying himself in a
way that had nothing to do with the small number of drinks he had had.

He couldn't get any deference out of Raz. Raz wouldn't have deferred
to God himself, and it was no use trying to impress him, for nothing
impressed him. Apparently the hook-nosed, merry little man had no
ambition and no envy of anyone, and wanted no better of life than he
had at the moment.

It was a strange new world they led Bryce through--Not the ragged,
starving, crowded viciousness of his childhood--not the fighting
equality of spacemen and rock miners, many of them wanted by the
law--not the simple barren hospitality of the settlers in the Belt who
owed him money, and who invited him to their sparse dinners in
gratitude--Those he had always managed to keep in their places and
exact a certain measure of respect.

Even the smooth powerful men of wealth around him now accorded him a
certain measure of deference that was an acknowledgement of strength.
But the two musketeers he was with and the world they opened for him
seemed to respect neither distance nor politeness, nor hold any fear
for strength. Friendly insults, and uncritical friendliness mingled
oddly with the mock-solemn pretense of the fairy tale, and that part
was genuine and spontaneous. It didn't seem to be a different kind of
people he was meeting exactly: it was the same kind of people
approached differently. He didn't know exactly how it was done, and he
let the other two take the lead.

Perhaps he had drunk too much, he thought as he rode the hotel
elevator. For in retrospect, the evening was a haze of pleasure that
was hard to pin his attention to. Everything he had said, everything
that had happened seemed profoundly right, an atmosphere which he had
encountered rarely before and only then in the last stage of
drunkenness. But he was sober. He had had only a few drinks, and his
perceptions seemed sharpened rather than blurred. Yet, where there
should have been critical thoughts and regrets for errors and restless
plans in his mind, there was only a pleasant empty buzz.

"Too much talk," he thought, yawning as he walked down the luxurious
hotel corridor to his room.

       *       *       *       *       *

It was that night that he first noticed something wrong with the
mirror.

He glanced into it casually while undressing, then not so casually,
walking up to it and inspecting his face. A slight, unpleasant tingle
coursed along his nerves.

A stranger--When he tried to focus on what was wrong he could find
nothing that looked any different, yet the total effect was completely
wrong. He decided that it must be the mirror, some subtle distortion
of the reflection. The old one must have been broken in cleaning and a
new one put in.

The chill passed and still the good blank feeling lasted. He went to
bed reviewing the evening and smiling, and went to sleep without
resorting to the mental arithmetic that he generally used to clear his
mind of dissatisfactions.

The next morning the mirror still looked peculiar. There seemed to be
nothing wrong with the reflected image of the room, but when he gave
himself the usual inspection before stepping out into the corridor the
feeling of strangeness returned and his eyes felt as if they were
blurring.

He put his hand up to his eyes instinctively and felt a distinct shock
when the mirrored image did the same.

Odd.

A slender smiling young man joined him in the lobby, rising and
falling into step with him as he passed, going through doors before
him with the inconspicuous alertness and precaution. He did his duties
as a bodyguard well, Bryce noted, but that was only to be expected.
Efficiency is, and should be, unnoticeable.

One thing he discovered during the working morning at the office.
There had been nothing wrong with the mirror in his hotel room. The
washroom mirror was worse!

He stood for a while, frozen in midstep, while he looked at a lean
tanned and freckled face which looked like a color movie of his, every
feature in its proper place as he remembered it, but yet not his. It
didn't belong to him. He made faces at it, and it made faces back as
if it were his, while he tried to believe that he was looking out of
the gray eyes which looked back at him, then he heard someone coming
in and left suddenly and sheepishly.

That afternoon, after Pierce got into the swing of the work, he began
to be useful, fitting himself into the work routine as though he had
always been part of it, making the right calls and contacts and
appointments on the barest hints, handing him the phone intuitively as
he needed it, always at the right time with almost telepathic
instinct. While checking over the decisions and plans of Kesby and the
staff that needed his okay, and signing typed letters Bryce talked the
thoughts and plans which came half formed to mind, almost thinking
aloud. And when his remarks struck something that sounded like it
would be good to do soon, he saw Pierce jotting them down, later
detailing the preliminary steps for Bryce's use.

And too, all the small tasks were being taken from him with easy
naturalness, saving him much time. His assistant was being what he had
claimed he would be, a genuinely useful left hand. Bryce found himself
proud of the kid's manifest efficiency, for he was a product of the
same school that Bryce himself had climbed from.

On the way back to the hotel, after work, he caught Pierce glancing at
him with a thoughtful expression, and realized that he had been
faltering and giving a second glance to every public mirror that he
had passed. He was momentarily embarrassed, wondering if any strain
had showed on his expression.

There was a party he had to go to that night so he changed to formal
clothes and stepped off again for the home of the FN Administrative
Governor of the Moon.

He did not want to attend. It would be another of those stiff,
lonesome dinners he had suffered through before, but he had to learn
to make friends on his own social level, and be easy and convivial
with the kind of people he would be associating with the rest of his
life.

After the first hour had given him a good test, Bryce decided that the
evening was as bad as he had anticipated. He stood on the outskirts of
a small group, holding a drink and watching resentfully as a
startlingly beautiful woman laughed and talked with the others of the
group and not with him. She had been introduced to him as Sheila
Wesley. The jokes she had with the others were quick and subtle
flashes of wit and insight, and seemed to be based on a mutual
understanding that he could not share, even though some of the others
had just been introduced and had been strangers to each other a few
minutes back; it was something he grasped vaguely as a common
background and approach to life that they shared, perhaps through
education.

There were quick references to political situations they all seemed
familiar with, or a name that could have been some character in a book
they might all have read, or could have been somebody in history, each
reference followed by a subdued laugh and an added witty statement
from some other quarter. No one of them gave a word to him or noticed
that he was there.

Why should they? He was dressed well and expensively, but so were they
all. He was a person of prominence and power, but so were they all,
and bored by it. He could not talk like the others. Then what could he
do to make Sheila Wesley smile at him the way she smiled down at the
ridiculous little fat man beside her as he excitably stuttered out his
opinions.

       *       *       *       *       *

Sheila Wesley was not like Mona, to be captured by money and clothes
and influence. Would she be impressed even by the power he would have
later? He tried to picture her as tremulous and awed, hanging on his
words and flattering him, but he couldn't believe it. She probably
wouldn't notice him any more than now. There was nothing he could do
to impress her. He had thought Mona had poise, but now he saw that her
manner was just an inadequate carbon copy of a completely spontaneous
original. The woman, Sheila, managed to be poised, aloof, and yet
friendly to everyone, simultaneously warm and unattainable.

He desired to be bitingly rude. That, at least, would make her admit
that he existed. She was smiling at that ridiculous little fat man
again.

He drained his glass and, completely unnoticed, left the party. Nobody
would miss him, he was sure.

Outside in the corridor, Roy Pierce, his assistant, was engaged in
conversation with two young men and two girls.

"There he is now," he heard Pierce say.

And one of the young men came toward him laughing.

"Is it true that this lunatic cannot go and make up with the lady of
his heart because she has had him banned? If we all try to smuggle him
in--"

And one of the girls, a really gorgeous blonde, called, "He was just
telling us about that time you were in space with the pirates after
you and they had stolen the big focusing mirror from the first Belt
foundry furnace. I'm sure you can tell it better--you tell it."

He was surrounded by the five then. "Go ahead," they were urging,
laughing, "Go ahead!" "It didn't really happen did it?"

This accusation was made by the pretty blonde. He looked at her half
indignantly. "I don't know how he tells it but it happened." And he
began to tell what had happened.

The two girls and the two young men listened, adding occasional
startled interjections and admiring laughter.

Pierce inserted an occasional question and Bryce became aware that in
answering them he was guided to stress and amplify points that made
clearer the danger and comedy. Later he became aware that he was half
consciously following the clues of Pierce's expression for the right
stress and mood of the telling, now off-hand and smiling in telling
what he had done, now heavily dramatic mimicking and burlesquing the
tones and threats of the outlaws, now ironic and bitterly indifferent
in passing over damage and deaths--as a wryly lifted eyebrow in the
dark young face listening, and a faint imperceptible shrug made him
see what had happened from a different angle than he had seen it then.
Pierce apparently had something he needed, a good story sense.
Following him must be something he had learned unconsciously last
night, but it worked. He could see how well it worked in the
expressions of his audience.

Someone leaving the party had stopped to listen, standing behind his
right shoulder. When he finished, amid the exclamations and sighs of
his listeners a cool, familiar voice drawled.

"That's quite a story. I picked up something about that at the new
foundry on reef five, but it was already an old yarn then." She stood
before him, still smooth and poised and lovely, offering her hand.
"I'm glad to hear it from the horse's mouth. Aren't you Bryce Carter?
We were introduced in there, I think, but the name didn't click."

It was Sheila Wesley.

That evening was something to remember.

First they were a private party at a nightclub, then at a small
restaurant. Tom, Betty, who was the pretty blonde, Ralph and the
pretty brunette whose name was Marsha, Pierce, himself and Sheila. The
talk ranged wildly over a multitude of subjects, breaking sometimes
into collective fantasies of nonsense like a hat full of fireworks
that left them laughing helplessly, sometimes shifting to philosophy
and mutual confidences. Every so often Pierce brought the subject
around to something that struck home to Bryce and he found himself
holding forth with unexpected passion and eloquence, and he was
surprised to see that the others were keenly interested.

Pierce rarely said more than an occasional cheerful remark, but in the
more subtle plays of conversation Bryce found himself still half
consciously consulting the cues of his expression to find what his own
reaction should be, to find the right word and the right attitude that
pleased the table and urged them all on to greater and more fantastic
heights of talk. It was obvious that Pierce never had any difficulty
understanding anyone. He had an instinct that Bryce lacked, and Bryce
willingly surrendered to superior skill and followed his silent lead.

Sheila he discovered, besides being a member of one of the top
diplomatic families, had worked for a short while as a consultant at
the Belt plastic manufactory when it was being set up, and had taken
to space life. She shared his enthusiasm about the future of the
Asteroid Belts.

It was an unprecedented evening. At the close of it he had four new
friends, and had discovered that "Tom" was Thomas Mayernick, one of
the attorneys of the Spaceways Commission, and one of the men whom he
had gone to the dinner to meet.

And Sheila, tall and slender and beautiful, pressed his hand as the
group parted, and said in her wonderful voice, "I want to see you
again Bryce," she smiled. "I eat at the technicians' end of town, you
know. I'll be with a Group at Geiger's Counter, tomorrow lunch. If you
bear the company of slide rule artists we'd be glad to see you any
time."

He stood for a moment, oddly surprised.

"Say thank you to the lady." Pierce smiled. And to Sheila, "You
shouldn't startle people like that, Ma'm. His heart's weak."

"I just dropped dead," Bryce said, finding words. "You aren't leading
me on? You'll be there?"

"On my honor," she smiled. "Good night, Bryce." She was used to such
tributes. Half mocking as they were, she knew how much they were
basically sincere, and accepted their tribute to her beauty as a
matter of course. What a wife to have and introduce as his wife to
other men, and see the look in their eyes.

He remembered suddenly that he had not once mentioned that he was a
Director of UT. Somehow the conversation had never been led to a
subject where he could have said it. He made a mental note to tell her
next time. It seemed strange that he had been with five people so many
hours without informing them that he was a Director of UT. He had done
the same thing last night, now he remembered. But they had seemed to
like him without it.

He let himself into his hotel room and turned on the light, but the
first sidewise glimpse of himself in the mirror was disturbing. He
solved that problem by the remarkably simple expedient of turning the
light out again, and undressed in the dark, grinning foolishly.


VI

Approaching the scientists' and technicians' row along the subsurface
arcades, the expensive restaurants grew fewer and were replaced by
German-type beer halls, schools with courses advertised in their
posted schedules whose titles were completely unintelligible to him,
and second hand bookstalls selling battered technical books and
journals whose titles were undecipherable in any tongue Bryce could
think of. The lunch hour crowds were beginning to pour out into the
arcades from elevators and tube trains in a rush to get first place in
their favorite eating places.

Pierce half turned as if his eyes caught on the expression of a face
behind them.

"Carter! There you are, you bastard!" The voice came from behind him,
thick with rage, but more than that was the insult. It meant
challenge. This was nothing in which Pierce could defend him!

Bryce wheeled, left hand automatically plucking out his magnomatic,
wondering if the attacker would be the honorable kind of duelist who
would hold fire long enough for him to get his gun out.

Miraculously it seemed to be happening. He already had his sights
halfway on to the speaker when he recognized him, a gross heavy figure
he had seen a hundred times. Mr. Beldman of the Board of Directors.
What was he doing on the Moon?

Beldman stood with his fists on his hips and his legs spraddled,
sneering at Bryce. "That's right," he said, heavily sarcastic, "start
shootin' when you're surrounded by innocent spectators; when you know
I can't draw on you. That's the way of a crook." The husky base voice
echoed from the walls. Behind him to the bend of the corridor people
were scattering hastily out of the firing line.

_Crook_ was the central word. Somehow Beldman had found out that Bryce
was responsible for the corruption of UT, and he was dealing with the
matter in the most direct way that it could be dealt with, for a death
in a private duel would be laid to a quarrel and not investigated.

How had he found out? Bryce forced down the question as he stiffly
reholstered his magnomatic. There was no use thinking of that until
the question of surviving the next five minutes was settled. He stood
with his hands empty, feeling curiously empty inside, oddly missing
the white rage and love of murder that usually carried him through
such things.

It seemed too good a day to spoil. He would rather have continued his
way to lunch with Sheila, and let the man live--or let himself live.
This would be no duel for a little bloodletting. Beldman's purpose was
to kill. And Beldman himself, knowing what he knew, had to die. "Do
you understand what you have said, sir?" Bryce used the formal words
of the dueling countries.

"You're damn well right I do!"

"Are you prepared to take the consequences, sir?"

"More ready than you are," Beldman said, his hands still on his hips.
He amplified his remark with a few well chosen words that harked back
to his truck driving days.

"How many shots?" Bryce asked more softly, beginning to want to kill.

"Until one of us is down with his gun out of his hand."

Bryce repeated the provision to the crowd that had drawn up discreetly
along the side-lines. "We fire until one of us is both down and
disarmed."

There was a murmur of surprise among the crowd for that was an unusual
and deadly provision for a formal duel. As Bryce paced backward the
required number of paces, counting aloud, two men volunteered as
seconds. They came forward to compare the guns rapidly and show them
to the duelists. It had to be done and finished rapidly, for lunch
hour had begun with its flood of people into the corridors, and they
were holding up traffic.

Bryce's gun was a .42 magnomatic, working on an electrical
acceleration of the slug by electromagnetic rings in the thick barrel.
It was soundless except for a legal built-in radio yeep that announced
its firing and number to the police emergency receivers. Beldman's gun
was another maggy of the same make but heavier with a wide-mouthed
barrel apparently throwing a much heavier caliber slug.

"Ready?" The second stepped back to the edge of the crowd and began
counting off half a minute by seconds.

The faces of the crowd faded from his consciousness. Bryce stood with
his hands empty at his sides as the seconds were counted. "Thirty,
twenty-nine, twenty-eight, twenty-seven," came the voice, counting
evenly and loudly. The world narrowed to a corridor of space with the
blocky figure of Beldman at one end and himself at the other. Funny,
Bryce thought, that he had never considered that bull-headed
impatience and strength as dangerous. He was a massive block of a man;
where Bryce was thick with muscle, J. H. Beldman was so wide in
shoulder and barrel and so thick in arm that he looked almost round.
Like Bryce he had worked up from the bottom, Bryce remembered,
starting as a truck driver and labor organizer, and then owning his
own line and giving UT a stiff battle before being bought out. Crude,
but that didn't mean that there wasn't a lightning brain behind that
round face.

"Twenty-six, twenty-five, twenty-four, twenty-three--"

He had underestimated the deadliness of the man. Beldman was obviously
subject to rages, and in the grip of one now, and if he had survived
all the duels and battles that his rages had brought long enough to
grow as old as he was then his age was an indication not of weakness,
but of the degree of his deadliness. The irritable thought came that
he might well be killed by this ox.

"Twenty-two, twenty-one, twenty, nineteen--"

He flexed his fingers restlessly, and felt in his mind the speed and
sureness of his draw and firing. That big blocky figure was just
another obstacle standing in his way, to be blasted aside. A loud
mouth to be shut.

"Ten, nine--" He concentrated on the counting, "--six, five, four--"
sureness growing like a coiled spring in every muscle. "--three--" He
crouched slightly. That blocky figure that was all the rest of the
world was no more than a target. A big target.

"Two--one--_fire_."

Something confusing happened. As the word came it seemed that a
gigantic blow hit him somewhere on his left shoulder, twisting him
around so he couldn't see his target. He spun back, willing himself to
shoot again quickly, but his legs buckled oddly as he turned. He
reeled, finding his balance with great effort.

Heavy slug, he thought, seeing as delayed memory the coiled spring
speed with which Beldman had moved. Bryce's left arm did not seem to
have any connection with his mind. Glancing down briefly he saw that
it dangled.

       *       *       *       *       *

But the maggy was still there, held in the numb, unfeeling hand,
pointed limply at the ground.

He wondered if he had fired it yet.

"Drop it and fall down," advised Pierce's clear voice from somewhere.

There was a stirring and whisper from the blur of the crowd who stood
watching to see that the rules were observed. Beldman was walking
towards him.

"Do you end the duel?" asked someone, probably the second.

"No," the blur of Beldman answered and suddenly he came into focus,
walking up, his wide mouthed gun unwavering in his hand. Bryce
remembered the provisions of the duel. Fire until one is down and
weaponless. There was nothing said about remaining at a fixed
distance. Beldman intended to walk up close enough to shoot him
between the eyes. It was too late to let himself fall and end the
duel. Beldman would fire if he saw Bryce begin to fall now. He was
already close enough for a sure head shot.

Feeling was returning to his left arm. It dangled abnormally far and
probably looked broken and useless, but there was nothing actually
wrong with it, only something in his shoulder was broken. After the
first cold numbness of impact, sensation returned tingling in his
fingers, and pain was beginning to burn in his shoulder. Bryce waited
a few more seconds, feeling the control returning to his fingers, not
changing the glazed off focus of his eyes. How many duels had Beldman
won like this? The impact of one of those heavy slugs hitting bone was
a dazing blow, enough to stun some men, and he probably counted on
that effect.

The square figure lumbered closer, a lumpish clumsy caricature of the
self-made man, brutally strong, unashamedly misfit to the society of
the smooth-wise, smiling, easy mannered people that he and Bryce had
joined; a model of everything that Bryce was trying to destroy in
himself.

With a quick twist of the wrist Bryce swung his palm flat up flipping
the magnomatic muzzle into line with it and put a bullet into the
round face.

In that position of his hand the back kick of the shot twisted his arm
back in its broken shoulder and pulled the maggy from his hand, but it
didn't matter. The duel was over.

The motionless crowd dissolved again into talking individuals going to
lunch.

Pierce picked up the maggy and made the usual query of those who chose
to remain.

"Which of you has any complaint of unfairness or advantage taken by
either party of this duel?"

Most of them were leaving, anticipating the arrival of the police with
their time-consuming questions, but twenty or so crowded close around
Bryce and the corpse. "Press a thumb on your shoulder sub-clavian,
man," someone advised Bryce. "You're bleeding like a faucet."

Pierce's clear voice said the standard words over the murmur and
shuffle of feet. "No unfairness having been observed, when called to
give testimony you can then say that he shot in self-defense and under
duress."

A low wail of sirens was heard.

       *       *       *       *       *

"Who was that character?" Pierce asked later, sitting beside the table
while a surgeon patiently pieced together the three or four shattered
pieces of Bryce's collarbone and fastened them with ingenious plastic
bolts.

Bryce absently watched the process in a large tilted mirror slung
overhead. Medicine bored him. "J. H. Beldman, member of the Board of
Directors," he explained, and for the benefit of the policeman
standing beside the door he added, "Bad tempered as they come." He
looked into the mirror uneasily, trying to focus on his face.

His clothes were being cleaned of blood and dried somewhere. When the
doctor had finished sewing and patching Bryce showered and dressed in
a small dressing room beside the emergency ward, where he found his
clothes hanging neatly in a drying closet.

As he finished a man in plain clothes entered and dismissed the cop
with a word, and handed Bryce a printed notice and his magnomatic;
"You're clear," he said, leaving again with a friendly half salute.
"No charges." The police had already recorded the testimony of the
witnesses and inspected the weapons used. It had been a fair duel and
the survivor was clear with a standard case for self-defense. The
printed notice called him to testify at the coroner's inquest into the
death of J. H. Beldman during the next Saturday, but there would be no
charges and no investigation.

There would be no trouble from Beldman, but who else knew what he had
known, that Bryce Carter was responsible for the corruption of UT? How
had he learned it? If someone else knew, there was going to be
trouble.

Coming out of the emergency ward, he checked his watch.

One-fifteen. Too late to find Sheila Wesley still at Geiger's Counter.
But he knew he could see her another day--and with a good story to
explain why he had not turned up the first time.

They ate at the nearest stand and went back to work. Trying to write
was almost impossible, and even using his left hand for minor tasks
was difficult. In spite of quick healing of muscle and flesh from the
amino and nucleic acid powders the doctor had packed in, the shoulder
ached with a tightness that spoiled his coordination. He shifted to
writing clumsily with his right hand.

After twenty minutes he abandoned the pretense of working and began
thoughtfully doing practice draws with his right hand. It was stiff
and clumsy, and there was no holster in his right pocket to make
grasping easy. The second time the maggy caught on his pocket edge and
slipped from his hand he left it on the rug where it had fallen,
sitting looking at it thoughtfully for a moment. Today was the day he
would meet Orillo.

"How well can you handle a four tube cabin cruiser?"

"Line of sight only. I'm no navigator," Pierce responded.

Bryce said soberly, realizing what he had decided, "This is a good day
to have a bodyguard who's a good shot. I have an appointment to meet a
friend--and I'm not sure he's a friend."

"I shoot," Pierce said, writing at one of the letters he had been set
to. "Happy to oblige. Shall I wear my bulletproof clothes?"

"You could do with something like that," Bryce said soberly.

Pierce looked up from the letters. "Would this be the man behind all
these bullets, and you're meeting him in space?"

"Yes."

"In armor plated tanks with heavy artillery?"

"No."

"No light and heavy cruisers. No marines?"

"Just you." Bryce was smiling at Pierce's mock astonishment. He knew
that the kid didn't care in the slightest where Bryce led him as long
as there was a fight at the end of it, and he left it to Bryce to
choose the odds.

The odds might be even enough. Orillo himself, if he came with murder
as his intention, would bring no helpers for witnesses, and he would
expect Bryce to bring none. Or if he had hired assassins, he would not
come himself, and they would not know who had hired them, but they
would have been told to expect one man only.

       *       *       *       *       *

The secrecy of any meeting in space is practically absolute. If there
is one thing which space has plenty of, it's distance--distance enough
to lose things in, distance enough to hide in, distance enough so that
even if you know where something is by all the figures of its
coordinates, if it's smaller than a planet you can't find it even when
you are there. To put it crudely, what space has is space. And finding
something that doesn't want to be found in space is like looking for a
missing germ in the Atlantic.

He had the coordinates of the beacon he had chosen for his appointment
point and the robot pilot took him to that area with automatic
precision. But once there he had to cruise manually back and forth
three times through the perpendicular plane of Earth's equator before
picking up the radar pip of the buoy, which was set to broadcast its
presence by a circular sweep of radar pulses on a flat plane
corresponding to the Earth equatorial average.

He found it no later than expected, which was over an hour early, on
the principle that he who arrives first finds no ambush.

He left Pierce with certain instructions and floated from the ship to
the familiar globe that spun so placidly on the anchoring rod that
attached it to the controlling buoy. The buoy was powered strongly
enough to have controlled the orbits of fifty such globes without
strain. Buoys of that type were just beginning to be popular in the
Belt.

Once inside he opened his faceplate, looking around with the same
pleasure he always felt on his visits here. It was like being back at
the Belt for a time. After the raw harshness of the moon and the
artificial luxuries of its cities, after the agoraphobic vastness of
Earth's giant surface, to be within this little close-knit familiar
world was soothing and relaxing. It was a green glade of leaves and
branches, greenness underfoot and overhead, a brown metal cliff with
vines and a door to his left, a larger brown metal cliff like the
round head of a barrel with doors in it to his right, and a circular
silver door in the center. Behind the small right hand cliff was the
small amount of regulating machinery required, behind the doors of the
larger cliff was a small kitchen, and convertible study-bedrooms.
Behind the silver door was a corridor leading to the airlock and
space. It was forty feet from cliff to cliff, and from the growing
greenery underfoot to the growing greenery overhead, as spacious as a
wide glade in the woods of Earth.

He picked his way among the vines and shrubs to a carpetlike patch of
green moss and sat down comfortably to wait. Pierce had drawn the ship
off beyond detector range by now, and it would seem to any ship
approaching that he had not yet arrived.

It was peaceful there, no breeze stirred the leaves. Twenty feet
above, fixed in the air on clear spokes of lucite, the crystal globe
that was the sun for this small world gave forth its warming flood of
light, sunlight borrowed from the sunlight outside and led in on the
lucite spokes.

He had an interest in its manufacture, and had anchored his globe here
as a commercial sample of a spaceglobe for the viewing of likely
settlers. It was slightly better and more compact, since it was a
newer model, contained in an ovoid hull that was only forty-six by
sixty-six feet, but in essence it was like any of the farms and homes
of the asteroid belt, and there was nothing like it on any planet in
the universe.


VII

Behind the silver door a bell rang suddenly. A spaceship was
approaching.

It was still early. They would see the globe alone and assume that
Bryce had not yet arrived. The spaceship itself might be armed
illegally, but those within would not blast the globe without checking
its interior. Bryce glanced up at the silver door in the cliff and
arranged his position so as to be lounging on one elbow, with his gun
hand lying relaxed under a thin curtain of leaves. The magnomatic was
pointing up towards the corridor door.

There were a few tall bushes between the base of the cliff and
himself, but the silver central door was five feet up a flight of
steps and in clear view.

Four flights of steps radiated away from the circular door to the
hull, like spokes from an axle, all of them leading "down" to the
inside surface of the globe. As he waited he heard the faint clang of
magnetic soles hitting the metal of the airlock, and then the door
chimes that announced that the airlock was being used. Someone was
coming in.

He could follow their actions in his mind, timing them. Now they would
be floating in the vestibule, facing a circular wall with a door, the
wall spinning silently and rapidly, and the door in its center turning
slowly end over end. The door marked the axis of rotation. There was a
turning bar with handles running through the center of the airlock.
They would float up to that and grip it to pick up spin, until the
vestibule seemed to be rotating around them and only the circular wall
and the central door seemed to be steady. Beyond it would be the
corridor, and then the silver door.

The door in the cliff dilated silently. Two spacesuited men stood in
it.

It was incredible that he had let them come in without seeing the door
open. In the first split second he saw that neither of them was
Orillo. In the second instant he saw that no weapons were visible, but
that one stood slightly behind the other and his right arm was hidden.

They had happened to come to the entrance at an angle to his
orientation, almost at right angles, and they would be confused for a
moment, before they identified his shape, for to their orientation if
they used Earth-thought for it, he would seem to be leaning head
downward on an almost vertical slope. He took advantage of the lag to
move his gun under its curtain of leaves and get the sights lined on
them.

They swung their eyes around the circle and saw him. "Mister Carter?"
asked the foremost one. Their faceplates were still closed, and their
voices slightly distorted by transmission through the helmet speaker,
but he could hear a note of surprise. As the first one spoke the
second one moved his hidden arm slightly, as if he were holding
something.

Bryce did not tighten his finger on the trigger. These could be mere
innocent sight-seers. The position of his head, almost upside down
relative to theirs, was probably confusing them, though almost
certainly they had studied trimensional photographs of him. At any
rate they probably were aware that they were standing like targets in
the corridor doorway and would be in no mood to postpone action.

"Take off your helmets, gentlemen, make yourselves at home." It was a
partial admission that he was the man they wanted, but not certain
enough for a decision. He saw the shoulder-twitch that meant that the
second one's hidden hand jerked in a moment of uncertainty, and he
thought he saw something glitter under the first one's arm--the old
trick of shooting from under a friend's screening arm....

"Mr. Bryce Carter?" the foremost one was asking again.

Bryce smiled. "No, Pierce," he said. He had turned on the two-way
speaker and tuned it to the ship as he came in.

Immediately the voice came in the corridor behind them. "Stand still.
You're covered."

There was no chance that anyone could genuinely be behind them, but
the rear one whirled and snapped a startled shot into the darkened
corridor, and the other leaped sidewise down from the doorway, drawing
his gun with blurred speed, and leveling on Bryce as his feet left
contact with the sill. He was falling slowly, almost floating, and it
should have been an easy shot, except for something he had obviously
forgotten, or he never would have leaped.

Bryce disregarded him as a danger, and threw three shots at the other,
who still stood startled and off balance in the corridor, firing three
with his inexperienced right hand to make sure of placing even one.
The figure dropped out of sight in the corridor.

       *       *       *       *       *

In the flick of time that Bryce's eyes had been away from the falling
one, the path of the man's leap had begun to curve strangely, until
now he seemed to be floating in a curve, flying sidewise and upward,
faster and faster as he approached the hull. The rule of conservation
of momentum was having its way. To the man's dizzied eyes, as he tried
to keep Bryce within his sights long enough to fire, it must have
seemed that the ground began inexplicably to turn and slide by, that
suddenly the whole shell was turning around him like a big wheel,
carrying his target up the wall and over his head.

He was almost to the sliding ground when a bush caught at his feet and
yanked them from under him with a crackling of branches, and the
bottom tread of a flight of stairs swung at his head like a gigantic
club. Among the sudden splintering of branches and snapping of vines
was a crunching thud which sounded final.

To anyone within a globe, it did not ordinarily appear to be spinning,
the only sign it was, was the comfortable pseudo-gravity for anyone
standing on hull level. But to those who approached the ground from
the lighter G corridor, the stairs were necessary--stairs whose treads
were oddly dipped in the middle in a shallow U. By bracing against one
side of the U coming down, and on the other going up, one invisibly
picked up enough speed to match the speed of the ground level. Jumping
was the equivalent of jumping out of a moving car at forty feet a
second, the sixteen feet a second, half of the corridor plus an extra
thirty feet a second spin, the side slip speed of an eighteen foot
drop where it had looked like five.

It was probably these added extra distances in the air, Bryce decided,
that sometimes made the bird flights look so bewilderingly variable in
speed and direction. He had not thought before how difficult it would
be to plot a straight course from one side of the globe to the other.

He waited for a sign of motion, his magnomatic ready, looking up at
the gunman lying overhead, forty feet away on the other side of the
globe. The limp figure was unmoving, it looked badly tangled in vines,
and its gun was gone. There was no need to shoot, but he wondered
suddenly, if he had, what kind of a curve would the bullet have
followed?

There was no sound from the other, but Bryce hesitated to climb the
stairs and put his head above floor level of the corridor. A voice
might give the other direction for a snap shot if that was what he was
waiting for. Bryce chanced speaking.

"I've got this one, Pierce. How's the other?"

The televiewer in the entrance hall replied, "Lying on his back with
his gun five feet away. You all right?"

"Yes." Bryce walked around the circumference of the globe and searched
in the vines for the missing weapon of number one. The body in the
spacesuit nearby was quite definitely a corpse. He saw the gun
glittering a little further on and picked it up, wiping off leaf pulp
on a clean patch of moss. It was a heavy duty police pacifier, a
distance stunner, adjusted to a narrow beam.

He climbed to the corridor and collected the other weapon. It was a
police pacifier too. They had not meant direct murder then, but only
to stun him and deliver him to Orillo, C. O. D.

"How are you doing with their ship?" Bryce asked, "Is it armed?"
Armament for spaceships was illegal, and careful official inspection
made it rare.

"I didn't wait to see," Pierce's voice came apologetically after a
pause in which some background noise sounding like a crash came over
the televiewer speaker. "It started swinging around when I came in
sight, so I just rammed it with that pretty ornamental nose spike. I'm
backing off now with the forward braking jets."

"Then whoever's inside is probably either spacefrozen or cooked.
Jockey that ship around on the spike and give her a four minute shove
toward Earth, then push that button that collapses the ornamental
vanes on the spike and let it pull loose when you start braking. I
don't want any ship hulks floating around here."

"Aye-aye, Cap."

"Go slow on those braking jets when you pull loose. The back wash
could touch your hull."

Pierce returned and came in to help Bryce drag the corpses through the
airlock and into space.

They braced against the silver curve of the floating spaceship and
gave the body a combined strong shove towards Earth. Spinning slowly
end over end it dwindled into a dark speck against the glowing orb of
Earth, destined to be a meteorite and make a small bright streak in
the Earth sky several days later.

    _When the tubes conk out, the fuel runs down,
     The cold creeps in to where I lie._

Pierce was reciting as they went back into the globe for the second
corpse.

    _I'll take the meteor's trail--go home to Earth
     And make a Viking's funeral in the sky._

"This is too easy," Bryce complained as they watched the second corpse
fade from sight. "The trouble is, in space all corpses are delicti.
It's an incentive. Launch your enemies."

"Gaucho country did all right under that system," Pierce said
somberly, "and so did the American frontier." He floated motionless, a
spacesuited figure turned toward the gray-green misted globe of Earth
that shone against the black star-sprinkled sky as if he could have
reached out and touched it. The sun caught the planet on its day
hemisphere and reflected brilliantly from a shadowy blue glaze of
water that was the Mediterranean, turning half of it to white fire.

Bryce's earphones picked up Pierce's voice again. "Frontier-born
nations always look back and say that the first years were the best."

The words caught at something Bryce had felt before. He looked at
Earth hanging splendidly in space. It was beautiful and he was fond of
it, but--He said, "I don't think we'll ever go back." Nor would
mankind itself. Never again--through all conquests from this point in
time--would mankind go back down into the mesh of gravity to be a thin
film over the surface of a planet.

"Give old Earth a smile, Bryce, we've hatched."

For a moment longer Bryce hung, watching Earth turning below. The
management of UT was down there. He'd be damned if he'd let them get
away with thinking they could tell him what to do, or tell the Belt
where a line should be extended and a colony planted. The belt was his
country, not theirs. Space belonged to the people who lived in it.

"No taxation without representation," Pierce said irrelevantly, as if
he had been reading Bryce's thoughts. They jetted back to the ship and
into the spacelock.

"Frontier country--" Bryce said as he stepped into the cubical of the
revolving door. Gently tightening elastic bands drew him into position
within the man-shaped mold. "What's a frontier on your terms, Roy?"
When he was in place the other half of the rubbery, air-excluding mold
closed on him and the airtight cylinder rotated, delivering him into
the interior of the ship. He pushed the button impatiently to have it
revolve back for Pierce, but it remained obstinately open, its servo
refusing to close on a mold full of air and rotate air back for
release into space.

Bryce remembered then. This was something he didn't have to bother
with when he flew alone, for when going in or out he was always in the
door when it rotated; it never turned empty. Beside the door on a hook
hung an inflated pressure suit, complete with gloves, boots, and
helmet. Except for the absence of any sign of a head or face inside
the dark translucence of the helmet it looked like a full-sized man.
Bryce reached it down and placed it in the mold, and watched grinning
as the mold closed and the door rotated, delivering the man-form to an
equivalent hook in the spacelock. The doll was known by all spacemen
as Hector Dimwitty, and every ship had one or two. There were a
thousand yarns and jokes circulating about the adventures of the
Hectors, most of them lewd, and a few of them true.

Pierce's answer was in his earphones, "A frontier is where people go
when they are young, broke, or have the cops after them."

"Right. Suppose I stake the broke, and loan them transport, and offer
the fugitives unregistered safety to receive mail and to buy
supplies?"

"You do that?" Pierce stepped out of the door and they took off their
helmets.

"Yes, when I am my own man, not working for UT."

"If you do that, you bring in ten times as many of the broke who
wanted to settle there, and--" Pierce took a long jump in
understanding, saying softly, "They're dependent on you. Handcuffed to
you and praying for your health and prosperity as long as you hold
their loans and secrets, for with your death or bankruptcy, another
man might come to your books to read the records of your loans, and
demand payment, and give the secrets to the police or keep them for
his blackmail. But to do it is to take a risk of murder or arrest, and
a high cost in hard work and money. Why do you want to do this? What
payment do you take?"

"They pay by being my men, grateful and ready to back me up when I
want help later. They don't have to be grateful, for they know I can
call any loan if the owner crosses me, and I've built a reputation for
an occasional fit of irrational temper that is threat enough for
anyone to avoid crossing me, without feeling that I have wanted to
threaten or force them. As for the fugitives they pay enough by
wanting the Belt to be organized as a nation independent of Earth, so
that the hand of the law can't stretch out and drag them back, and
they can become wealthy in open business, in the million chances for
wealth that lie around them in the Belt. They don't know that they
want this yet, but they will see it when it is told to them. I can't
do any of this now--it's suspended for as long as I am part of UT and
have to drag the dead weight of ten Earth-tied conservatives with me
in every decision."


VIII

He stopped to set in the coordinates of the Moon for the robot pilot,
but he found himself still wanting to talk. "Man has reached space--do
you think he'll ever go back to the ground? In space he has gravity
only when he wants it, and any weight of gravity he likes, depending
on how fast he spins his house. And no gravity when he wants that. You
see what that means to engineers in the advantage of building things?
No weight in transportation, no weight in travel, limitless speed and
almost no cost as long as he stays away from planet pulls. His house
is in the sky, and when he steps out of it he can fly like a bird. And
food. To grow food there is sunlight Earth never dreamed of. For heat
and power there is sunlight to focus. Space is flooded with heat,
irradiated with power--

"It's not child's play taming it, and those on the ground don't see it
yet. But the next step of mankind is out into space, and it's never
coming back."

Pierce, sitting in one of the shock tank armchairs, asked, "What part
do you have in this?"

Bryce looked at him with a feeling almost of surprise, as if he had
been called back from a long distance. "Me?" he laughed, a little awed
by the immensity of the goal, and the ease of it.... "First President
of the Belt and political boss for life. That's enough."

Enough to hold the solar system in the palm of his hand, if he chose.
He who rules space, rules the planets. It was the first time he had
ever mentioned his goal to anyone.

Roy Pierce asked, "What do I do about this 'friend' of yours who lays
traps?"

The last attack had settled the question of who was behind the other
attacks, and who had told Beldman, but Orillo would still be a useful
pawn. All that was necessary was to evade his attempts at murder for a
month or so until partnership tied them too close for murder.

Bryce explained some of that to Pierce, setting up a chess board to
pass away the time until they arrived back at Moonbase City.

"What's my next assignment?" Pierce asked, when they were several
moves into the game.

Bryce recalled a danger he had made no move to guard against. "The
Board hired a psychologist, a mind hunter, to find out who's doing the
undermining. He's one of the Manoba group. Remember the name, look it
up and find out what their methods are, how to recognize them, and
report back what to do about it."

"I'll take care of him," Roy Pierce said absently, moving his knight
to threaten Bryce's bishop.

"No unnecessary trouble. Remember I have to keep my name clean." Bryce
moved a pawn one step to cover the bishop and leave room for his other
bishop to menace the knight.

"I'll be careful. There'll be no publicity. He won't get hurt,"
Pierce said, moving the knight into Bryce's second line where it
threatened the king and a cornered castle. "Check." And he added, as
if apologizing for having delayed his move, "I don't like to move
until I'm sure what's going on."

The remark didn't seem to be suited to the game, as if he had referred
to something else.

       *       *       *       *       *

It was during dinner on the Moon that he and Pierce loosened up for
the first time since the ambush. Pierce had been comparatively silent
since the chess game on the trip back and Bryce too, whether in
sympathy with him or in a naturally parallel mood, had little to say.
But now the tension had diffused and, with the stimulus of aromatic
food, they climbed out of their depression of emotional solemnity.

The decorations of the dining room were lush. While they ate, the
materialism of their lives was reinforced. From silvered-and-tapestried
wall to wall there was life here, low-keyed with excitement in the blend
of subdued talk and the shifting artistry of lights and music. Their table
was almost in the center of the islands of tables and potted trees, and
around them were the diners, their voices washing up at them both,
inviting them with gentle tugs to surrender their resistance, beckoning
them into the sea of simple pleasures.

"We owe ourselves some fun, Bryce."

At Pierce's words, Bryce sharpened his eyes on the face across the
table. There was a touch of seriousness in those words; more like a
statement than a suggestion.

Pierce smiled wryly and took a vial out of his pocket and poured it
into his drink. He spun the empty bottle between thumb and fingers.

"We owe ourselves some fun," Pierce repeated. "We've nothing on the
fire tonight, nothing to do that's crucial. It's a good night to
experiment."

The warm voice waves lapping at Bryce's mind suddenly receded and left
a chill. With instinctive wariness he thought of hypnotics and
single-shot addictors.

Pierce couldn't have missed the emotionless freeze on the other's
face. Still twirling the vial casually, he began to explain. It was a
new drug, he said, found being used by a tribe in Central Africa.
"I've heard of it for some time and what you mentioned a little while
back reminded me of it."

Bryce caught the hidden reference. Central Africa--and the Manoba
group. So Pierce had not dismissed the mind hunter from his thoughts
as a problem to be easily dealt with.

"It's still in the testing stage," Pierce added. "But some of it is
circulating among medical students. The tests have interesting
effects. And, as I say, tonight's a good night to experiment, it's
called B'nyab i'io."

The chill in Bryce's head and spine was thawing out. "You're not
conning me?" He said it with a grin, but there was an edge to the
question which demanded an answer.

Pierce gave it to him, for a brief moment deadly serious. "You
couldn't get addicted if you swam in it."

Bryce believed him. He stared at the glass. "What does it do to the
I.Q.? We've got to collect some information here and there this
evening. I want to be able to read and talk." He smiled crookedly. "No
worse than usual, that is."

"Either raises the I.Q. or leaves it alone."

"What's the effect?"

"It affects different people different ways. After hearing the reports
I'd like to see how it hits us." Pierce pushed it towards him,
grinning. "Leave half for me."

Bryce's wary thoughts touched poison and immunity and murder, but
inwardly he began to scoff at his own habits of suspicion. However,
before he could reach for the glass, Pierce had given a short snort as
though in recognition of his presumptuousness and drank his own share
first.

Then Bryce raised the cold glass to his lips.

As he put it down he could feel the change beginning to spread through
his blood, warming and relaxing, bringing closer the memories of
pleasure and good times. The restaurant was now completely seductive,
with the surf of voices pleasant in his ears, calling to him to join
the world and its offers of uncomplicated pleasures. He felt himself
blending with the ethereal background mixture of light and sound.

"I like this," he decided.

"We should take notes." Pierce was smiling as he stuffed the empty
vial back in his pocket.

       *       *       *       *       *

The next day Bryce looked back on that evening with pleasure. Everyone
had been remarkably pleasant, friendly and considerate, and Pierce had
always had the right friendly word and gesture to reward them,
speaking for Bryce, knowing his way around the cities of the Moon to
the right places for the information they sought, always speaking for
Bryce Carter, his employer, getting him the things he wanted, giving
the orders he wanted to give before Bryce had even fully realized that
he wanted them. Bryce had needed to say nothing the whole time except
"Right. That's it," and everything went as he wanted it.

"A perfect left hand man," he smiled, stretching, and turned the
polarization dial to let in the sunlight.

The telephone rang. He picked it up and the desk clerk said in a
deferentially hushed voice, "Eight o'clock, Mister Carter."

For some reason the hushed voice struck him as funny. "Thanks, I'm
up." He hung up and stretched again. It was soothing to have someone
solicitous that he arose on time, if only a hotel. The hotel had given
him a lot of good service. He felt suddenly grateful for all the
pleasures and luxuries and small services they surrounded him with. It
was a good place. He was feeling good that morning. Maybe because the
sun was so bright....

He liked the look of the people passing in the lobby as Pierce joined
him, and he liked the look of the passengers in the tube trains on the
way to the office. They all looked more friendly. And as he pushed
through the second glass door into his offices he liked the clean
shine of the glass and the rich blended colors and soft rugs and gray
textured desks and the soft efficient hum of work in progress.

Bryce usually passed Kesby's office with a businesslike nod, but
Pierce smiled in, stopping for an instant with Bryce. "Good morning,
Kesby. We're glad to see you." It was true enough and expressed what
he felt.

Bryce exchanged a grin with Kesby at the boy's insolence and then went
on into his office.

It was a good day.

It was a good day for what he had to do.

In the luxury of his inner office he sank into the deepest, softest
chair, letting his cousin-from-Montehedo sort the mail, agreeing with
the boy's suggestions for action or sometimes issuing his own
instructions, keeping only half his mind on the routine day's
business, relying on Pierce, and concentrating the other half on the
deed to be done. The plan was set in his mind but he had changes to
make.

He was barely conscious of the time slipping by as he lay, rarely
moving, in his chair, while Pierce worked at top speed.

By one o'clock the deck was cleared for action.

Bryce stood up, stretched, and checked his watch again. It was 1304
hours. A telephone call was scheduled in about another hour, and five
more successively about a half hour apart.

"Order us some lunch, Pierce, before I lift the drawbridge."

The food came in as he was instructing his staff to leave them
undisturbed for the rest of the afternoon.

By the time they had finished eating, their isolation was complete.
The office was a command post now, with only the slender, unattended
telephone wires connecting them with the outside worlds.

Bryce moved over behind his desk. He drew the telephone toward him and
dialed a number. Somewhere, in the locked safe, the phone rang.

From the case he took a toy dial phone. Pierce's eyes were on it, his
eyebrows lifted quizzically, but Bryce offered no explanation. The boy
was due for a series of surprises. And when it was over, he would know
everything without any explanations, and too late to interfere.

"Hi Al," Bryce said to the recorded "Yeah?" at the other end. He
dialed a number on the toy dial, the one receiver against the other's
back. After the usual ritual, Bryce said, "Hello George, how's
everything going?"

This is it, Bryce thought. This was the first part of the final blow
to UT. And the only instrument he needed in his delightfully simple
method was a telephone. Originally he had planned six brief warning
calls to the six key numbers of the ground organization. He would tell
them to refuse to take anything from the hands of the UT branch, and
break contact with them immediately after accepting cash for
miscellaneous items. That would set the stage.

The police trap would close on all members of the UT branch of the
organization while they were encumbered with a maximum of
incriminating objects to dispose of in too little time. Then would
come his anonymous tip to the police. He'd inform them that certain
employees of UT in a few listed cities would be found to be smuggling
in large quantities of drugs. The thing would be so simple. And the
whole works would blow up with the efficiency of the calculated
explosion of nuclear reaction.

That had been his original plan.

But things would be different now. The morning in the easy chair had
changed his approach. The newer, more elaborate program, still
remarkably simple, would bring down the whole structure within UT
without the help of the police, but by himself alone, planning it,
initiating it, executing it with no one's help. Not even Pierce's.

He heard himself saying:

"This is 'Hello George.' Listen to me and don't interrupt.

"Somebody has talked. I've been betrayed myself. Get that? Hello
George is washed up. Right now the cops are tapping this line. It
doesn't make any difference to me, now. But it does to you. This is an
open warning from Hello George to you. Spread the word. I'll keep
making calls until they break in on me and cut this line.

"Meanwhile, spread the word. Break connections with me and the whole
organization. Get out of range before the trap closes. But pass on
this warning first.

"I'll hold out against questioning a short time. The police will get
me eventually, of course. And when they do they'll pump me dry.
They'll get names and addresses. The whole works will get grabbed,
unless you move fast. Spread the word."

Bryce paused and winked at Pierce who was standing at his elbow, "Any
questions? Yes, I'm sure. Of course I'm sure. Any other questions?
Good luck, Okay."

He hung up.

As Caesar once said, the dice were rolling.

Pierce, beside him through it all, simply stood there, his eyes wide
and his face sharp with curiosity and incredulity, his body twitching
now and then from the infection of the excitement which rippled over
the room. That excitement had been there, though Bryce had not
permitted himself to indulge in it in any visible way. He had showed
Pierce a new facet to his operations, one which Pierce could not
anticipate immediately, one in which only he, Bryce, could make the
snap decisions and evaluate the immediate responses demanded of him.

That was with the first call.

       *       *       *       *       *

With the second one Pierce began to contribute, rising to the occasion
as he had so often and quickly done in the past. He began pacing up
and down between calls, smoking furiously and laughing under his
breath.

"Tell 'em the police are breaking down the door," he suggested during
the third call. "Say you're hypnoed to hold out against questioning
five days at the most, two hours more likely."

His suggestions were a howl. Bryce repeated them into the phone with
counterfeit desperation and was rewarded by the sounds of panic at the
other end. He and Pierce chortled over the frantic queries and
exclamations from the victim. The whole thing, succinct and pointed
and with the dramatic power of simplicity, was one super practical
joke which would set the entire solar system scurrying around for the
next few weeks.

The ramifications would be endless. Persons would vanish abruptly and
take up new names and identities in the obscure countries, others
would draw out their heavy savings and take the first rocket out from
Earth. There would be a new influx of refugees to the Belt, new
settlers to be honest farmers and factory workers and repair men.

Yes, the situation was dramatic.

The day was a good day.

But as Bryce hung up on the last call, a depressing sense of calamity,
unsettlingly anti-climatic, began to press down on him. Pierce was
talking about plans for the next week with an enthusiasm which should
have been completely contagious.

But there was something wrong. There was something wrong.

What was it?

Bryce felt Pierce's enthusiasm catch at him and start to sweep him
away. He savored the pleased glow produced by the shattering changes
he had managed to cram into one day. With six telephone calls he had
broken the drug ring completely and forever, broken it so completely
that no member of it would ever have dealings with any member of it
again. All of them were out of business, fleeing with the imaginary
hounds of the law baying at their heels.

He smiled at the thought.

And then his smile faded for some strange reason and he ceased
listening to Pierce for a moment, looked away and ceased listening,
for hearing Pierce just then distracted oddly from the clarity of his
thinking. He wanted to review what he had just done.

What was wrong?

What?

He struggled with a mounting confusion, the desk top and telephones
blurring as he tried to concentrate with desperate effort.

Unexpectedly the question sprang into focus. It was as if the room
turned inside out, the day turned upside down.

He had smashed himself--not UT!

Why?

Why had he made those calls--changed his plans--and made those calls?

With the most perfect and terrible clarity he saw the results of what
he had done. The organization destroyed. The contacts he had made
fifteen years ago as an anonymous young dock hand, contacts that as
Bryce Carter he could never make again--vanishing--merging with the
great mass of the public--becoming gray unknown figures. The building
of years melting like a sugar castle melts into the tide--the
invisible army that had obeyed his sourceless voice without being able
to blackmail or rebel, the perfectly balanced tool in his hands that
could be used for the bribing of venal politicians, with a limitless
fund for the bribery, the growing secret control of the most venal of
the political machines of Earth, that by the time he needed it it
would have been an irresistible weapon in his hand for the single
swift political blow that would rip the Belt from Earth control, and
give it a seat on the Assembly of the Federated Nations, and mastery
of the solar system--

But as he sat there the organization dissolved.

He grasped the phone, but there was nobody to call now, no one would
answer. He could never reach them again.

This was sanity now, but what had it been before when he was
cheerfully destroying his future? It seemed to him that there were two
halves to his brain, each wanting different things. For a moment the
one that had controlled the day was gone, and he was sane again, but
how long would that moment last? What sign had there been when it took
control? Would he know it when it came again?

He remembered that in the tube train that morning he and Pierce had
had a half joking argument about the best short-and-merry life. One of
the happy ones on the list had been the INC agent, because they spent
so much of their lives working into smuggling gangs that they had all
the pleasures and profits of being a crook and an honest man too. Was
that where he had slipped his cog?

Looking back on the things he had done that day he saw that much of it
had fitted an abstract pattern of justice, as if he had been thinking
of himself as an INC man. Or as if--

He thought of the things he had seen in his childhood that they had
called zombies, and jeered at and tormented without fear of any
retaliation or vengeance from their gray-faced victims. Imprisoned
men--they looked normal--but they had been mentally imprisoned.
Law-zombies, memorizing and following laws and being honest with a
simple and terrifying literalness.

He had not known that he had any capacity for terror.

Bryce Carter. He had his name, his identity and his memory, and they
were his own. Sometimes he had had nothing else, only the pride and
strength of knowing his identity, that it was his and stronger than
others, just as his hands were stronger, a thing they couldn't take
from him.

_Could they?_ There was a nightmare he had had more than once, that he
remembered suddenly for the first time, with all its atmosphere of
childish strangeness. The cop psychos were after him. He was trapped
in a big room with lights and they had his head open and were chasing
him around inside his head somehow, trying to catch him, and kill him,
the him that lived in his mind.

Would he know if it was gone?

The black sharp-edged shadows of the crater walls were drawing across
the landing plain outside, bringing to a close the two weeks of
daylight, and the reflected sunlight was dimming in the room. He could
hear the rumble of a heavy ship of a cargo fleet lowering in to a
landing.

His assistant was sitting quietly on the edge of the desk as he had
been for some time, motionlessly watching the thin plume of smoke that
rose from a cigarette in his hand. He was as still as if he were
listening for some subtle sound far away. Rocket jets flashed an
orange glow through the venetian blinds and fell in stripes of orange
light across the dark young face. The brief rumble of a rocket
take-off came, transmitted through the ground and the building. Smoke
curling up from the cigarette was the only motion.

"Roy, is Pierce your real name?"

The light flashed and faded in bars of orange across the young face he
had thought was like his own, the boy he had thought had come from Pop
Yak. The quick deep rumble of sound came and faded in the walls around
them. A fleeting smile touched the face, and the dark eyes rested on
his for a moment as Roy Pierce gave the information casually as if it
were any other information, answering the question that had been
meant. "It is my mother's name. We always take our mother's names. I
am a Manoba--a Manoba of Jaracho."


IX

Looking into Bryce's face he slid to his feet slowly, ground out the
stub of his cigarette and stood before the desk.

Bryce took out his gun and held it where Pierce could see it. "Are
Manobas ever shot?" It was a heavy little gun, his maggy, its barrel
sleek and rounded, the heavy metal warm from being worn close to the
skin.

"Sometimes. It's a natural enough reaction."

It was a spaceworthy gun with adjustable velocity for driving through
padded suits and pressure suits. The velocity was set high, but it
would be inartistic to blow a large hole through a psychotherapist.
Bryce turned the dial down slowly, watching him.

"Do the professional ethics of privacy and non-publicity cover this
kind of situation?"

Pierce was smiling slightly with a touch of bitter humor. "It's
undiplomatic to tell you that, but yes, the contingency is covered.
There is nothing to connect myself with you as a case in any records,
nor anything to identify me as a member of the Manoba group contracted
by your company. The ethic of privacy is allowed to have no exceptions
for the family's record."

A cool curiosity held him. "Tell me--when you saw that I was beginning
to think, why didn't you just needle me down for a short nap and
leave?"

The smile remained. "I am supposed to control the shock of
realization, and make sure that it is assimilated without damage to
the subject." His dark expressionless eyes met Bryce's, and Bryce felt
the impact of them, and realized for the first time that there was the
same slight bitter off-hand smile on his own lips, and inwardly the
quiet ironical mood with the still clarity of a deep pool. His own
mood? He hefted the gun in his hand, feeling its weight and balance.
"You could have done that over the televiewer," he pointed out
dispassionately. "What is the average mortality, do you know?"

"Not high. It is only inexperience that is dangerous. If one can get
through one's first three or four cases, it's safe enough."

Looking back over the past days it was quite clear that Pierce had
control over his emotions. Any emotion Pierce chose him to feel he
would feel. It remained to be seen how much that could influence what
he was going to do. The dark-skinned young man stood before the desk
casually and answered questions with a slight restrained smile that
set the wry irony of both their minds.

A man does what he wants. That is freedom, but what he wanted could be
controlled apparently. A man _is_ what he wants. But what he wanted
could be changed. How easy had it been to change him. Bryce tried
himself with a thought of the power and glory of rule, the reign and
mastery of space--a goal that had warmed his thoughts for many years.

He didn't want it.

There was a numbness where there should have been emotion, and all he
could feel for his loss was the resignation and the faint bitter humor
permitted him by Pierce's smile. Watching that smile he shifted the
heavy little gun in his hand, turning it over casually, feeling its
familiar weight and the texture of its surfaces.

He spoke gently. "If you don't mind my asking, have you passed through
your first three cases yet?"

"You are my first," said Roy Pierce, whom he had trusted. "I'm afraid
I was clumsy."

"Oh--you did all right." Bryce shot him then, placing the bullet
carefully in the pit of his stomach where it would hurt. That was for
doing well. For justice. No man has the right to meddle in another
man's mind.

Pierce had been starting to speak. He swayed back a half step with a
flicker of change crossing his face then stood steady and smiling
again. That brief grimace touched Bryce's nerves with a sensation that
was like the jangle of something heavy dropped inside a piano, a sound
he had heard once. But the numbness did not lift from his feelings. He
was still smiling. The third bullet would be between the eyes.

The words were low and rapid but clear.

Bryce did not listen. "This is for doing a good job," he said,
overriding the other voice with his own, and pulled the trigger again,
placing the slug slightly lower this time, in the belly, where if it
entangled in one of the spinal plexus it could hurt past belief.
Pierce swayed slightly. His face went to the clay-blue color that
comes to dark-skinned races when they pale. Bleeding inside somewhere,
and already dead unless he were given help, Bryce figured.

For a moment Bryce saw something like effort in the dark unreadable
eyes. Then suddenly Pierce smiled, his young face disarmingly innocent
and merry. "Oh, come on, Bryce, it's not that serious. Be a good
sport. You don't want to--"

Suddenly Bryce saw the situation as the sheerest humor, a sort of
lunatic farce for the laughter of some cosmic joker. He swung the
gunsights up towards the smiling face. Amusement bubbled in his blood
and he heard himself laugh--heard it with a grim secondary amusement.

"The joke's on you," he said, and pulled the trigger, then laughed
again. The joke was on him.

He had missed. He had missed at a distance of three feet. Yet his hand
was rock-steady. Pierce's control had him. His laughter stopped as the
humor in Pierce's attitude faded down again to the small wry smile
that had been there from the beginning.

Bryce had not lost. He had only to wait a little and he had won.
Unless Pierce could use his control to force him to call help. He set
himself to resist and not to listen. There was not long to go. The
expressionless dark eyes that held his were beginning to widen
slightly in an effort of sight that meant that a private darkness was
closing in on the psychotherapist. The rumble of distant rockets
seemed louder, covering his fading voice. "It's your choice, Bryce. I
give it to you. You won't want this later--Bryce--but don't--hunger to
undo. It is payment enough for all--times like this--that you
change--and do not--want--them any--again--" Pierce pulled in a
strangling breath, swaying more visibly. "Gun," he whispered, reaching
out in Bryce's direction, his eyes going sightless.

Bryce handed him the magnomatic, and watched as Pierce fumbled his
hands over it, putting his prints on it blindly, his knees bending.

When he fell, Bryce picked up the phone and called Emergency. The
emergency squad would be cruising around in the halls somewhere
nearby, looking for the source of the three radio notes that had told
them that a gun was fired.

       *       *       *       *       *

"That was the last I saw of him," the young man stopped talking and
looked pleased with himself.

Donahue drained his drink irritably and put it on the bar that had
been set up on the ceiling when the Gs went off. It clung
magnetically. "Make it the same, please." He turned to Roy Pierce,
floating beside him. "Stop needling me, man, finish the story. The way
you tell it, I don't know what you did, how you did it, or even
whether you died or not."

"Oh, I died," said Roy Pierce. "But they revived me," he added.

"Good! I'm glad to hear that!" said Donahue more cheerfully, wondering
suddenly just how extensively he was being kidded. "For a moment
there you had me worried. Now explain about this treatment."

"It's called soul eating," explained the dark-skinned, straight-haired
boy, "I don't think you could do it."

Donahue thought that information over carefully. "Maybe not. How's it
done?"

"In the tribes of my people the soul is supposed to be an invisible
double who walks at your side, protecting you and speaking silently to
your mind. Its face is the face that looks out of mirrors and up from
pools at you, and the shadow that walks on the ground beside you.
Evildoers, after they had spoken to a Manoba, would say that their
reflections were gone. Our family was called The Eaters of Souls, and
all the tribes were afraid of us for nine hundred miles around."

"So am I," said Donahue compactly. "As my Yiddish grandmother on my
mother's side would say, it sounds from werewolves."

"I can explain it."

"No magic?"

"Look," said the youth tersely, "Do I want to get kicked out of the
FNMA? What if I had sat in a jungle circle loaded to the ears with
herbs and spells, with the drums of my cousins throbbing around me,
and learned the best and subtlest ways of my technique back in time
looking through the eyes of my great grandfather, or conversing with
his ghost. Do you think I would say so?"

"No," Donahue admitted. He edged away a little.

The youth spoke gloomily. "Rapport and intensified empathy is
something you learn by exposing yourself to mirrors. The technique is
published, known and accepted among psychologists, but most of them
just don't try. It backfires too easily, and it takes too high a level
of skill. It originated with my family." The youth spoke even more
gloomily. "What I do is obvious enough if I make it so. It's simply
prior mimicry. I watch the trend of what goes on in his thoughts, and
express approximately what he is feeling and thinking a little before
he does. So that presently, subconsciously he is depending on me to
tell him what he thinks and how he feels.

"I was his mirror, his prior mirror. I am a clear, expressive
underplaying actor as an actor, and each shade of reaction is separate
and unmistakable. The subconscious is not rational, but it generalizes
from regularities that the conscious mind never has the subtlety to
notice. It saw me consistently representing its own internal
reactions, hour after hour in every situation more clearly than Bryce
ever saw himself express anything in a mirror, and more steadily than
he ever saw any mirror. The subconscious then associated the inside
emotion with the corresponding outside image for each one. I became
Bryce's subconscious self image. When he thinks of doing anything, the
image in the imagination that does it is not himself, it is me. This
can cause considerable mental confusion."

"It should!" Donahue agreed fervently.

"I put him in new places and situations where he was unsure and I was
sure, so that when I diverged from mirroring him, he gave me the lead
and mirrored me. One of us had to be the originator and the other the
reflection, but now it was reversed. He did not fight it
subconsciously because the results were pleasant. I kept the lead and
led him a mental dance through thoughts and reactions he had never had
before, in a personality pattern completely foreign to his own, one
that I wanted him to have. I hadn't been hired for that, but I had
time to pass before I could untangle that UT problem, and I wanted to
do it for him. The mirror link was complete the first day, but I'm
afraid the extra days made it indelible. He'll always be me in his
mind, and mirrors will never look right to him."

       *       *       *       *       *

"It's so simple, it's obvious," said Donahue with disappointment. "It
doesn't sound like magic to me."

The youth was thoughtful, frowning. "Sometimes it doesn't to me
either. I wonder if the ghost of my grandfather was telling me the
right--"

"Forget the ghost of your grandfather," Donahue interrupted hastily.
On his few space trips he could never get used to this business of
floating eerily around in the air, and it seemed a poor time to talk
about ghosts. "What about Bryce Carter. What became of him? You know,"
he said defiantly, "I like his plans for organizing the Belt and
breaking UT. And, come to think of it, if I had been there when you
were interfering with _that_, I think I would have shot you myself."

"UT had only hired me to find the organizer of the smuggling ring and
persuade him to disband his organization in UT. I had done that. So
the third day, when I could walk, I left the hospital and went back to
Earth, and collected my fee for a job done. Many people had vanished
suddenly from their payrolls, and the crime statistics in some cities
had shown a startling lull. They knew I had done it, and so they paid
and were grateful." The dark youth shrugged. "I didn't feel I had to
tell them about Orillo. He tipped the police and started a rumor, and
there was evidence enough in the crime statistics of the months
before, when they were correlated with the distribution of branches of
Union Transport, though there was nothing to point at anyone in
particular except the ones who had disappeared."

Donahue remembered. "Sure that's that investigation of transportation
monopolies that raised such a stink last year. I saw part of it in
Congress."

Pierce handed him a travel folder. Gaudily illustrated, it advertised
the advantages of the C&O lines for space tourists. "Carter and
Orillo."

Donahue looked up, puzzled, "But this is the next step in what he
planned. I thought you changed him."

"Mahatma Gandhi would have followed out those plans," Pierce said with
a touch of grimness. "As you pointed out, they are attractive. But I
changed him. I won't give you personality dynamics, but if you want a
list of changes--He's married to Sheila Wesley, that's one change. And
instead of going home nights he roisters around in bars and
restaurants, talking to everybody, listening to everybody, liking them
all and enthusiastically making friends in carload lots. That's
another change. He doesn't look into mirrors because they make him
feel cross-eyed. That's because he unconsciously expects to see me in
the mirror. And he will organize the Belt and be president as he
planned. I won't stop him in that. The difference will be that he
won't want the power he'll get." Pierce said grimly, "A power-lusting
man can never be trusted with power: he goes megalomaniacal. Carter
was already halfway there. But he's safe from that now. He's going to
be given plenty of power, and see it only as responsibility, and not
want it. That's the only safe kind of man to have in a powerful
position."

"That--" said Donahue with great earnestness, "--is like sending a
poor damned soul to Kismetic paradise as a eunuch. You psychologists
are all complete sadists," he said lifting his drink. "I suppose
you've put something in my drink?"

"Absolutely nothing," Roy Pierce assured him, grinning. "Funny thing
was, when I got back to Earth that time, _I_ kept feeling cross-eyed
when I looked into a mirror. And my friends said I was not myself. If
I was not myself, I knew I must still be Bryce Carter. Things had
seemed different, and they had warned me that the technique sometimes
backfired when I was learning. So I called my uncle Mordand on the
televiewer--he's the head of the family, and he lives in an estate in
the jungle--and he--"

Donahue was fascinated again.

There was a different approach for each case, Pierce had found. It was
not ordinarily ethical to discuss any case history, but he knew with
great surety that Donahue could be trusted not to repeat what he was
being told. The only reason there wasn't something extra in his
current drink was because there had been something in the last drink.

This was case five.

       *       *       *       *       *






End of Project Gutenberg's The Man Who Staked the Stars, by Charles Dye