In the Grand Central Hotel, a man moved down the hallway toward Suite
7426. He stopped at the door and inserted the key he held in his hand,
twisting it as it entered the keyhole. The electronic locks chuckled,
and the door swung open.
The man closed it behind him.
He was not a big man, but neither was he undersized. He was five-ten
and weighed perhaps a hundred and sixty-five pounds. His face was dark
of skin and had a hard, determined expression on it. He looked as
though he had spent the last thirty of his thirty-five years of life
stealing from his family and cheating his friends.
He looked around the sitting room. Nothing. He tossed the key in his
hand and then shoved it into his pocket. He walked over to the nearest
couch and prodded at it. He took an instrument out of his inside
jacket pocket and looked at it.
"Nothin'," he said to himself. "Nothin'." His detector showed that
there were no electronic devices hidden in the room--at least, none
that he did not already know about.
He prowled around the sitting room for several minutes, looking at
everything--chairs, desk, windows, floor--everything. He found
nothing. He had not expected to, since the occupant, a Belt man named
Harry Morgan, had only been in the suite a few minutes.
Then he walked over to the door that separated the sitting room from
the bedroom. Through it, he could see the suitcases sitting temptingly
on the bed.
Again he took his detector out of his pocket. After a full minute, he
was satisfied that there was no sign of any complex gadgetry that
could warn the occupant that anyone had entered the room. Certainly
there was nothing deadly around.
Then a half-grin came over the man's cunning face. There was always
the chance that the occupant of the suite had rigged up a really
old-fashioned trap.
He looked carefully at the hinges of the door. Nothing. There were no
tiny bits of paper that would fall if he pushed the door open any
further, no little threads that would be broken.
It hadn't really seemed likely, after all. The door was open wide
enough for a man to walk through without moving it.
Still grinning, the man reached out toward the door.
He was quite astonished when his hand didn't reach the door itself.
There was a sharp feeling of pain when his hand fell to the floor,
severed at the wrist.
The man stared at his twitching hand on the floor. He blinked stupidly
while his wrist gushed blood. Then, almost automatically, he stepped
forward to pick up his hand.
As he shuffled forward, he felt a _snick! snick!_ of pain in his
ankles while all sensation from his feet went dead.
It was not until he began toppling forward that he realized that his
feet were still sitting calmly on the floor in their shoes and that he
was no longer connected to them.
It was too late. He was already falling.
He felt a stinging sensation in his throat and then nothing more as
the drop in blood pressure rendered him unconscious.
His hand lay, where it had fallen. His feet remained standing. His
body fell to the floor with a resounding _thud!_ His head bounced once
and then rolled under the bed.
When his heart quit pumping, the blood quit spurting.
A tiny device on the doorjamb, down near the floor, went _zzzt!_ and
then there was silence.
V
When Representative Edway Tarnhorst cut off the call that had come
from Harry Morgan, he turned around and faced the other man in the
room. "Satisfactory?" he said.
"Yes. Yes, of course," said the other. He was a tall, hearty-looking
man with a reddish face and a friendly smile. "You said just the right
thing, Edway. Just the right thing. You're pretty smart, you know
that? You got what it takes." He chuckled. "They'll never figure
anything out now." He waved a hand toward the chair. "Sit down, Edway.
Want a drink?"
Tarnhorst sat down and folded his hands. He looked down at them as if
he were really interested in the flat, unfaceted diamond, engraved
with the Tarnhorst arms, that gleamed on the ring on his finger.
"A little glass of whiskey wouldn't hurt much, Sam," he said, looking
up from his hands. He smiled. "As you say, there isn't much to worry
about now. If Morgan goes to the police, they'll give him the same
information."
Sam Fergus handed Tarnhorst a drink. "Damn right. Who's to know?" He
chuckled again and sat down. "That was pretty good. Yes sir, pretty
good. Just because he thought that when you voted for the Belt Cities
you were on their side, he believed what you said. Hell, _I've_ voted
on their side when it was the right thing to do. Haven't I now, Ed?
Haven't I?"
"Sure you have," said Tarnhorst with an easy smile. "So have a lot of
us."
"Sure we have," Fergus repeated. His grin was huge. Then it changed to
a frown. "I don't figure them sometimes. Those Belt people are crazy.
Why wouldn't they give us the process for making that cable of theirs?
Why?" He looked up at Tarnhorst with a genuinely puzzled look on his
face. "I mean, you'd think they thought that the laws of nature were
private property or something. They don't have the right outlook. A
man finds out something like that, he ought to give it to the human
race, hadn't he, Edway? How come those Belt people want to keep
something like that secret?"
Edway Tarnhorst massaged the bridge of his nose with a thumb and
forefinger, his eyes closed. "I don't know, Sam. I really don't know.
Selfish, is all I can say."
_Selfish?_ he thought. _Is it really selfish? Where is the dividing
line? How much is a man entitled to keep secret, for his own benefit,
and how much should he tell for the public?_
He glanced again at the coat of arms carved into the surface of the
diamond. A thousand years ago, his ancestors had carved themselves a
tiny empire out of middle Europe--a few hundred acres, no more. Enough
to keep one family in luxury while the serfs had a bare existence.
They had conquered by the sword and ruled by the sword. They had taken
all and given nothing.
But had they? The Barons of Tarnhorst had not really lived much better
than their serfs had lived. More clothes and more food, perhaps, and a
few baubles--diamonds and fine silks and warm furs. But no Baron
Tarnhorst had ever allowed his serfs to starve, for that would not be
economically sound. And each Baron had been the dispenser of Justice;
he had been Law in his land. Without him, there would have been
anarchy among the ignorant peasants, since they were certainly not fit
to govern themselves a thousand years ago.
Were they any better fit today? Tarnhorst wondered. For a full
millennium, men had been trying, by mass education and by mass
information, to bring the peasants up to the level of the nobles. Had
that plan succeeded? Or had the intelligent ones simply been forced to
conform to the actions of the masses? Had the nobles made peasants of
themselves instead?
Edway Tarnhorst didn't honestly know. All he knew was that he saw a
new spark of human life, a spark of intelligence, a spark of ability,
out in the Belt. He didn't dare tell anyone--he hardly dared admit it
to himself--but he thought those people were better somehow than the
common clods of Earth. Those people didn't think that just because a
man could slop color all over an otherwise innocent sheet of canvas,
making outre and garish patterns, that that made him an artist. They
didn't think that just because a man could write nonsense and use
erratic typography, that that made him a poet. They had other beliefs,
too, that Edway Tarnhorst saw only dimly, but he saw them well enough
to know that they were better beliefs than the obviously stupid belief
that every human being had as much right to respect and dignity as
every other, that a man had a _right_ to be respected, that he
_deserved_ it. Out there, they thought that a man had a right only to
what he earned.
But Edway Tarnhorst was as much a product of his own society as Sam
Fergus. He could only behave as he had been taught. Only on
occasion--on very special occasion--could his native intelligence
override the "common sense" that he had been taught. Only when an
emergency arose. But when one did, Edway Tarnhorst, in spite of his
environmental upbringing, was equal to the occasion.
Actually, his own mind was never really clear on the subject. He did
the best he could with the confusion he had to work with.
"Now we've got to be careful, Sam," he said. "Very careful. We don't
want a war with the Belt Cities."
Sam Fergus snorted. "They wouldn't dare. We got 'em outnumbered a
thousand to one."
"Not if they drop a rock on us," Tarnhorst said quietly.
"They wouldn't dare," Fergus repeated.
But both of them could see what would happen to any city on Earth if
one of the Belt ships decided to shift the orbit of a good-sized
asteroid so that it would strike Earth. A few hundred thousand tons of
rock coming in at ten miles per second would be far more devastating
than an expensive H-bomb.
"They wouldn't dare," Fergus said again.
"Nevertheless," Tarnhorst said, "in dealings of this kind we are
walking very close to the thin edge. We have to watch ourselves."
[Illustration]