_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.