by Charles Dye and Katherine MacLean

“ 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? ”

“ 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. ”

“ Bryce's earphones picked up Pierce's voice again. “Frontier-born nations always look back and say that the first years were the best.”
The words caught at something Bryce had felt before. He looked at Earth hanging splendidly in space. It was beautiful and he was fond of it, but—He said, “I don't think we'll ever go back.” Nor would mankind itself. Never again—through all conquests from this point in time—would mankind go back down into the mesh of gravity to be a thin film over the surface of a planet.
“Give old Earth a smile, Bryce, we've hatched.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ His assistant was sitting quietly on the edge of the desk as he had been for some time, motionlessly watching the thin plume of smoke that rose from a cigarette in his hand. He was as still as if he were listening for some subtle sound far away. Rocket jets flashed an orange glow through the venetian blinds and fell in stripes of orange light across the dark young face. The brief rumble of a rocket take-off came, transmitted through the ground and the building. Smoke curling up from the cigarette was the only motion.
“Roy, is Pierce your real name?” ”

“ 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. ”

“ So, in an enlightened clean and wealthy world, Bryce Carter had grown up in a slum whose swarming viciousness was a matter of take, steal, kill, climb or die. Perhaps under those special circumstances police penal compulsion had to be brutally strong, stronger than the drive for life itself, as brutal as the lurid tales he had heard. Perhaps in other countries the methods were different, a hypno-converted man not a horror to his friends, but he had had no time to study and investigate if it were so, and the horror and hatred remained. ”

“ The subconscious is not rational, but it generalizes from regularities that the conscious mind never has the subtlety to notice. It saw me consistently representing its own internal reactions, hour after hour in every situation more clearly than Bryce ever saw himself express anything in a mirror, and more steadily than he ever saw any mirror. The subconscious then associated the inside emotion with the corresponding outside image for each one. I became Bryce's subconscious self image. When he thinks of doing anything, the image in the imagination that does it is not himself, it is me. ”

“ Manipulating this image of Thor you talk about, so that it will take the blood offerings of the people and even you and that half-baked discipline of yours, Morge. I must look at your god Thor one of these days—
He suddenly felt very weary and sat down on the floor; looking up at Thougor, he said, “But that is not part of being civilized, to tell the people what to think. You must make them think without telling them what to think. And with the dam, next winter there will be freedom from want for the first time. The tribe will have a chance to think and be on the road to civilization.” ”

“ His dark expressionless eyes met Bryce's, and Bryce felt the impact of them, and realized for the first time that there was the same slight bitter off-hand smile on his own lips, and inwardly the quiet ironical mood with the still clarity of a deep pool. His own mood? He hefted the gun in his hand, feeling its weight and balance. “You could have done that over the televiewer,” he pointed out dispassionately. “What is the average mortality, do you know?”
“Not high. It is only inexperience that is dangerous. If one can get through one's first three or four cases, it's safe enough.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ His house is in the sky, and when he steps out of it he can fly like a bird. And food. To grow food there is sunlight Earth never dreamed of. For heat and power there is sunlight to focus. Space is flooded with heat, irradiated with power—
"It's not child's play taming it, and those on the ground don't see it yet. But the next step of mankind is out into space, and it's never coming back."
Pierce, sitting in one of the shock tank armchairs, asked, "What part do you have in this?"
Bryce looked at him with a feeling almost of surprise, as if he had been called back from a long distance. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ I said civilization is cooperation among men in adapting to environment—which includes man.”
The two men stared at each other, and for awhile there was silence.
“Nevertheless,” Thougor finally said, “Thor and blood offerings continue!”
Builder watched Thougor turn and stalk out of the tiny hovel that housed his plans and his work, himself and his dreams. What could he do? He could only appeal to the tribe's reason; Thougor could appeal to their emotions which were far stronger. But unless emotion was controlled, used wisely, there could never be any reason. ”

“ Bryce was smiling at Pierce's mock astonishment. He knew that the kid didn't care in the slightest where Bryce led him as long as there was a fight at the end of it, and he left it to Bryce to choose the odds.
The odds might be even enough. Orillo himself, if he came with murder as his intention, would bring no helpers for witnesses, and he would expect Bryce to bring none. Or if he had hired assassins, he would not come himself, and they would not know who had hired them, but they would have been told to expect one man only.
The secrecy of any meeting in space is practically absolute. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The quick deep rumble of sound came and faded in the walls around them. A fleeting smile touched the face, and the dark eyes rested on his for a moment as Roy Pierce gave the information casually as if it were any other information, answering the question that had been meant. “It is my mother's name. We always take our mother's names. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But he was even more depressed when, at the close of day, two workmen grew careless and slipped into the last mold being filled; their ear-splitting shrieks brought half the tribe up over the hill above the village and down to the dam sight.
After Builder explained what had happened, there were angry mutterings to the effect that Thor was displeased with the dam and therefore had taken lives. Nothing Builder could say would dissuade them from this notion, so well had Thougor indoctrinated them with religious fear of anything used to control nature. ”

“ Pierce had drawn the ship off beyond detector range by now, and it would seem to any ship approaching that he had not yet arrived.
It was peaceful there, no breeze stirred the leaves. Twenty feet above, fixed in the air on clear spokes of lucite, the crystal globe that was the sun for this small world gave forth its warming flood of light, sunlight borrowed from the sunlight outside and led in on the lucite spokes. ”

“ At Pierce's words, Bryce sharpened his eyes on the face across the table. There was a touch of seriousness in those words; more like a statement than a suggestion.
Pierce smiled wryly and took a vial out of his pocket and poured it into his drink. He spun the empty bottle between thumb and fingers.
“We owe ourselves some fun,” Pierce repeated. “We've nothing on the fire tonight, nothing to do that's crucial. It's a good night to experiment.” ”