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.