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.