Part 4 (1/2)

Through the softening filter of the airtight gla.s.s 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, pa.s.sing 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 s.p.a.ceman, 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 a.s.sisted 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 pa.s.sed and released him. The Cure was a brief h.e.l.l, 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 s.p.a.ceman let himself go.

The receptionist looked up with fright in her eyes as he pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed 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 s.p.a.cegram 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 compet.i.tion 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 s.h.i.+pping and delivery service Bryce had built up from the days when he had been merely an asteroid prospector with a s.h.i.+p 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 s.h.i.+p or supplies, depending on him, using his s.h.i.+p 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 s.h.i.+ps 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 s.h.i.+ps 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 s.h.i.+p 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 s.p.a.ceways 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.