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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Thin Edge, by Gordon Randall Garrett
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Thin Edge
+
+Author: Gordon Randall Garrett
+
+Illustrator: John Schoenherr
+
+Release Date: January 6, 2010 [EBook #30869]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THIN EDGE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Sankar Viswanathan, Greg Weeks, and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                         Transcriber's Note:
+
+    This etext was produced from Analog Science Fact & Fiction December
+    1963. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.
+    copyright on this publication was renewed.
+
+
+                              THIN EDGE
+
+
+     There are inventions of great value that one type of society
+     can use--and that would, for another society, be most
+     nastily deadly!
+
+
+                    BY JOHNATHAN BLAKE MAC KENZIE
+
+
+                    ILLUSTRATED BY JOHN SCHOENHERR
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+"Beep!" said the radio smugly. "_Beep! Beep! Beep!_"
+
+"There's one," said the man at the pickup controls of tugship 431. He
+checked the numbers on the various dials of his instruments. Then he
+carefully marked down in his log book the facts that the radio finder
+was radiating its beep on such-and-such a frequency and that that
+frequency and that rate-of-beep indicated that the asteroid had been
+found and set with anchor by a Captain Jules St. Simon. The direction
+and distance were duly noted.
+
+That information on direction and distance had already been
+transmitted to the instruments of the tugship's pilot. "Jazzy-o!" said
+the pilot. "Got 'im."
+
+He swiveled his ship around until the nose was in line with the beep
+and then jammed down on the forward accelerator for a few seconds.
+Then he took his foot off it and waited while the ship approached the
+asteroid.
+
+In the darkness of space, only points of light were visible. Off to
+the left, the sun was a small, glaring spot of whiteness that couldn't
+be looked at directly. Even out here in the Belt, between the orbits
+of Mars and Jupiter, that massive stellar engine blasted out enough
+energy to make it uncomfortable to look at with the naked eye. But it
+could illuminate matter only; the hard vacuum of space remained dark.
+The pilot could have located the planets easily, without looking
+around. He knew where each and every one of them were. He had to.
+
+A man can navigate in space by instrument, and he can take the time to
+figure out where every planet ought to be. But if he does, he won't
+really be able to navigate in the Asteroid Belt.
+
+In the Nineteenth Century, Mark Twain pointed out that a steamboat
+pilot who navigated a ship up and down the Mississippi had to be able
+to identify every landmark and every changing sandbar along the river
+before he would be allowed to take charge of the wheel. He not only
+had to memorize the whole river, but be able to predict the changes in
+its course and the variations in its eddies. He had to be able to know
+exactly where he was at every moment, even in the blackest of moonless
+nights, simply by glancing around him.
+
+An asteroid man has to be able to do the same thing. The human mind is
+capable of it, and one thing that the men and women of the Belt Cities
+had learned was to use the human mind.
+
+"Looks like a big 'un, Jack," said the instrument man. His eyes were
+on the radar screen. It not only gave him a picture of the body of the
+slowly spinning mountain, but the distance and the angular and radial
+velocities. A duplicate of the instrument gave the same information to
+the pilot.
+
+The asteroid was fairly large as such planetary debris went--some five
+hundred meters in diameter, with a mass of around one hundred
+seventy-four million metric tons.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Within twenty meters of the surface of the great mountain of stone,
+the pilot brought the ship to a dead stop in relation to that surface.
+
+"Looks like she's got a nice spin on her," he said. "We'll see."
+
+He waited for what he knew would appear somewhere near the equator of
+the slowly revolving mass. It did. A silvery splash of paint that had
+originally been squirted on by the anchor man who had first spotted
+the asteroid in order to check the rotational velocity.
+
+The pilot of the space tug waited until the blotch was centered in the
+crosshairs of his peeper and then punched the timer. When it came
+around again, he would be able to compute the angular momentum of the
+gigantic rock.
+
+"Where's he got his anchor set?" the pilot asked his instrument man.
+
+"The beep's from the North Pole," the instrument man reported
+instantly. "How's her spin?"
+
+"Wait a bit. The spot hasn't come round again yet. Looks like we'll
+have some fun with her, though." He kept three stars fixed carefully
+in his spotters to make sure he didn't drift enough to throw his
+calculations off. And waited.
+
+Meanwhile, the instrument man abandoned his radar panel and turned to
+the locker where his vacuum suit waited at the ready. By the time the
+pilot had seen the splotch of silver come round again and timed it,
+the instrument man was ready in his vacuum suit.
+
+"Sixteen minutes, forty seconds," the pilot reported. "Angular
+momentum one point one times ten to the twenty-first gram centimeters
+squared per second."
+
+"So we play Ride 'Em Cowboy," the instrument man said "I'm evacuating.
+Tell me when." He had already poised his finger over the switch that
+would pull the air from his compartments, which had been sealed off
+from the pilot's compartment when the timing had started.
+
+"Start the pump," said the pilot.
+
+The switch was pressed, and the pumps began to evacuate the air from
+the compartment. At the same time, the pilot jockeyed the ship to a
+position over the north pole of the asteroid.
+
+"Over" isn't quite the right word. "Next to" is not much better, but
+at least it has no implied up-and-down orientation. The surface
+gravity of the asteroid was only two millionths of a Standard Gee,
+which is hardly enough to give any noticeable impression to the human
+nervous system.
+
+"Surface at two meters," said the pilot. "Holding."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The instrument man opened the outer door and saw the surface of the
+gigantic rock a couple of yards in front of him. And projecting from
+that surface was the eye of an eyebolt that had been firmly anchored
+in the depths of the asteroid, a nickel-steel shaft thirty feet long
+and eight inches in diameter, of which only the eye at the end showed.
+
+The instrument man checked to make sure that his safety line was
+firmly anchored and then pushed himself across the intervening space
+to grasp the eye with a space-gloved hand.
+
+This was the anchor.
+
+Moving a nickel-iron asteroid across space to nearest processing plant
+is a relatively simple job. You slap a powerful electromagnet on her,
+pour on the juice, and off you go.
+
+The stony asteroids are a different matter. You have to have something
+to latch on to, and that's where the anchor-setter comes in. His job
+is to put that anchor in there. That's the first space job a man can
+get in the Belt, the only way to get space experience. Working by
+himself, a man learns to preserve his own life out there.
+
+Operating a space tug, on the other hand, is a two-man job because a
+man cannot both be on the surface of the asteroid and in his ship at
+the same time. But every space tug man has had long experience as an
+anchor setter before he's allowed to be in a position where he is
+capable of killing someone besides himself if he makes a stupid
+mistake in that deadly vacuum.
+
+"On contact, Jack," the instrument man said as soon as he had a firm
+grip on the anchor. "Release safety line."
+
+"Safety line released, Harry," Jack's voice said in his earphones.
+
+Jack had pressed a switch that released the ship's end of the safety
+line so that it now floated free. Harry pulled it towards himself and
+attached the free end to the eye of the anchor bolt, on a loop of
+nickel-steel that had been placed there for that purpose. "Safety line
+secured," he reported. "Ready for tug line."
+
+In the pilot's compartment, Jack manipulated the controls again. The
+ship moved away from the asteroid and yawed around so that the "tail"
+was pointed toward the anchor bolt. Protruding from a special port was
+a heavy-duty universal joint with special attachments. Harry reached
+out, grasped it with one hand, and pulled it toward him, guiding it
+toward the eyebolt. A cable attached to its other end snaked out of
+the tug.
+
+Harry worked hard for some ten or fifteen minutes to get the universal
+joint firmly bolted to the eye of the anchor. When he was through, he
+said: "O.K., Jack. Try 'er."
+
+The tug moved gently away from the asteroid, and the cable that bound
+the two together became taut. Harry carefully inspected his handiwork
+to make sure that everything had been done properly and that the
+mechanism would stand the stress.
+
+"So far so good," he muttered, more to himself than to Jack.
+
+Then he carefully set two compact little strain gauges on the anchor
+itself, at ninety degrees from each other on the circumference of the
+huge anchor bolt. Two others were already in position in the universal
+joint itself. When everything was ready, he said: "Give 'er a try at
+length."
+
+The tug moved away from the asteroid, paying out the cable as it
+went.
+
+Hauling around an asteroid that had a mass on the order of one hundred
+seventy-four million metric tons required adequate preparation. The
+nonmagnetic stony asteroids are an absolute necessity for the Belt
+Cities. In order to live, man needs oxygen, and there is no trace of
+an atmosphere on any of the little Belt worlds except that which Man
+has made himself and sealed off to prevent it from escaping into
+space. Carefully conserved though that oxygen is, no process is or can
+be one hundred per cent efficient. There will be leakage into space,
+and that which is lost must be replaced. To bring oxygen from Earth in
+liquid form would be outrageously expensive and even more outrageously
+inefficient--and no other planet in the System has free oxygen for the
+taking. It is much easier to use Solar energy to take it out of its
+compounds, and those compounds are much more readily available in
+space, where it is not necessary to fight the gravitational pull of a
+planet to get them. The stony asteroids average thirty-six per cent
+oxygen by mass; the rest of it is silicon, magnesium, aluminum,
+nickel, and calcium, with respectable traces of sodium, chromium,
+phosphorous manganese, cobalt, potassium, and titanium. The metallic
+nickel-iron asteroids made an excellent source of export products to
+ship to Earth, but the stony asteroids were for home consumption.
+
+This particular asteroid presented problems. Not highly unusual
+problems, but problems nonetheless. It was massive and had a high rate
+of spin. In addition, its axis of spin was at an angle of eighty-one
+degrees to the direction in which the tug would have to tow it to get
+it to the processing plant. The asteroid was, in effect, a huge
+gyroscope, and it would take quite a bit of push to get that axis
+tilted in the direction that Harry Morgan and Jack Latrobe wanted it
+to go. In theory, they could just have latched on, pulled, and let the
+thing precess in any way it wanted to. The trouble is that that would
+not have been too good for the anchor bolt. A steady pull on the
+anchor bolt was one thing: a nickel-steel bolt like that could take a
+pull of close to twelve million pounds as long as that pull was along
+the axis. Flexing it--which would happen if they let the asteroid
+precess at will--would soon fatigue even that heavy bolt.
+
+The cable they didn't have to worry about. Each strand was a fine wire
+of two-phase material--the harder phase being borazon, the softer
+being tungsten carbide. Winding these fine wires into a cable made a
+flexible rope that was essentially a three-phase material--with the
+vacuum of space acting as the third phase. With a tensile strength
+above a hundred million pounds per square inch, a half inch cable
+could easily apply more pressure to that anchor than it could take.
+There was a need for that strong cable: a snapping cable that is
+suddenly released from a tension of many millions of pounds can be
+dangerous in the extreme, forming a writhing whip that can lash
+through a spacesuit as though it did not exist. What damage it did to
+flesh and bone after that was of minor importance; a man who loses all
+his air in explosive decompression certainly has very little use for
+flesh and bone thereafter.
+
+"All O.K. here," Jack's voice came over Harry's headphones.
+
+"And here," Harry said. The strain gauges showed nothing out of the
+ordinary.
+
+"O.K. Let's see if we can flip this monster over," Harry said,
+satisfied that the equipment would take the stress that would be
+applied to it.
+
+He did not suspect the kind of stress that would be applied to him
+within a few short months.
+
+
+II
+
+The hotel manager was a small-minded man with a narrow-minded outlook
+and a brain that was almost totally unable to learn. He was, in short,
+a "normal" Earthman. He took one look at the card that had been
+dropped on his desk from the chute of the registration computer and
+reacted. His thin gray brows drew down over his cobralike brown eyes,
+and he muttered, "Ridiculous!" under his breath.
+
+The registration computer wouldn't have sent him the card if there
+hadn't been something odd about it, and odd things happened so rarely
+that the manager took immediate notice of it. One look at the title
+before the name told him everything he needed to know. Or so he
+thought.
+
+The registration robot handled routine things routinely. If they were
+not routine, the card was dropped on the manager's desk. It was then
+the manager's job to fit everything back into the routine. He grasped
+the card firmly between thumb and forefinger and stalked out of his
+office. He took an elevator down to the registration desk. His trouble
+was that he had seized upon the first thing he saw wrong with the card
+and saw nothing thereafter. To him, "out of the ordinary" meant
+"wrong"--which was where he made his mistake.
+
+There was a man waiting impatiently at the desk. He had put the card
+that had been given him by the registration robot on the desk and was
+tapping his fingers on it.
+
+The manager walked over to him. "Morgan, Harry?" he asked with a firm
+but not arrogant voice.
+
+"Is this the city of York, New?" asked the man. There was a touch of
+cold humor in his voice that made the manager look more closely at
+him. He weighed perhaps two-twenty and stood a shade over six-two, but
+it was the look in the blue eyes and the bearing of the man's body
+that made the manager suddenly feel as though this man were someone
+extraordinary. That, of course, meant "wrong."
+
+Then the question that the man had asked in rebuttal to his own
+penetrated the manager's mind, and he became puzzled. "Er ... I beg
+your pardon?"
+
+"I said, 'Is this York, New?'" the man repeated.
+
+"This is New York, if that's what you mean," the manager said.
+
+"Then I am Harry Morgan, if that's what you mean."
+
+The manager, for want of anything better to do to cover his
+confusion, glanced back at the card--without really looking at it.
+Then he looked back up at the face of Harry Morgan. "Evidently you
+have not turned in your Citizen's Identification Card for renewal, Mr.
+Morgan," he said briskly. As long as he was on familiar ground, he
+knew how to handle himself.
+
+"Odd's Fish!" said Morgan with utter sadness, "How did you know?"
+
+The manager's comfortable feeling of rightness had returned. "You
+can't hope to fool a registration robot, Mr. Morgan," he said "When a
+discrepancy is observed, the robot immediately notifies a person in
+authority. Two months ago, Government Edict 7-3356-Hb abolished titles
+of courtesy absolutely and finally. You Englishmen have clung to them
+for far longer than one would think possible, but that has been
+abolished." He flicked the card with a finger. "You have registered
+here as 'Commodore Sir Harry Morgan'--obviously, that is the name and
+anti-social title registered on your card. When you put the card into
+the registration robot, the error was immediately noted and I was
+notified. You should not be using an out-of-date card, and I will be
+forced to notify the Citizen's Registration Bureau."
+
+"Forced?" said Morgan in mild amazement. "Dear me! What a terribly
+strong word."
+
+The manager felt the hook bite, but he could no more resist the
+impulse to continue than a cat could resist catnip. His brain did not
+have the ability to overcome his instinct. And his instinct was wrong.
+"You may consider yourself under arrest, Mr. Morgan."
+
+"I thank you for that permission," Morgan said with a happy smile.
+"But I think I shall not take advantage of it." He stood there with
+that same happy smile while two hotel security guards walked up and
+stood beside him, having been called by the manager's signal.
+
+Again it took the manager a little time to realize what Morgan had
+said. He blinked. "Advantage of it?" he repeated haphazardly.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Harry Morgan's smile vanished as though it had never been. His blue
+eyes seemed to change from the soft blue of a cloudless sky to the
+steely blue of a polished revolver. Oddly enough, his lips did not
+change. They still seemed to smile, although the smile had gone.
+
+"Manager," he said deliberately, "if you will pardon my using your
+title, you evidently cannot read."
+
+The manager had not lived in the atmosphere of the Earth's Citizen's
+Welfare State as long as he had without knowing that dogs eat dogs. He
+looked back at the card that had been delivered to his desk only
+minutes before and this time he read it thoroughly. Then, with a
+gesture, he signaled the Security men to return to their posts. But he
+did not take his eyes from the card.
+
+"My apologies," Morgan said when the Security police had retired out
+of earshot. There was no apology in the tone of his voice. "I perceive
+that you can read. Bully, may I say, for you." The bantering tone was
+still in his voice, the pseudo-smile still on his lips, the chill of
+cold steel still in his eyes. "I realize that titles of courtesy are
+illegal on earth," he continued, "because courtesy itself is illegal.
+However, the title 'Commodore' simply means that I am entitled to
+command a spaceship containing two or more persons other than myself.
+Therefore, it is not a title of courtesy, but of ability."
+
+[Illustration]
+
+The manager had long since realized that he was dealing with a Belt
+man, not an Earth citizen, and that the registration robot had sent
+him the card because of that, not because there was anything illegal.
+Men from the Belt did not come to Earth either willingly or often.
+
+Still unable to override his instincts--which erroneously told him
+that there was something "wrong"--the manager said: "What does the
+'Sir' mean?"
+
+Harry Morgan glowed warmly. "Well, now, Mr. Manager, I will tell you.
+I will give you an analogy. In the time of the Roman Republic,
+twenty-one centuries or so ago, the leader of an Army was given the
+title _Imperator_. But that title could not be conferred upon him by
+the Senate of Rome nor by anyone else in power. No man could call
+himself _Imperator_ until his own soldiers, the men under him, had
+publicly acclaimed him as such. If, voluntarily, his own men shouted
+'_Ave, Imperator!_' at a public gathering, then the man could claim
+the title. Later the title degenerated--" He stopped.
+
+The manager was staring at him with uncomprehending eyes, and Morgan's
+outward smile became genuine. "Sorry," he said condescendingly. "I
+forgot that history is not a popular subject in the Welfare World."
+Morgan had forgotten no such thing, but he went right on. "What I
+meant to say was that the spacemen of the Belt Cities have voluntarily
+agreed among themselves to call me 'sir'. Whether that is a title of
+ability or a title of courtesy, you can argue about with me at another
+time. Right now, I want my room key."
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Under the regulations, the manager knew there was nothing else he
+could do. He had made a mistake, and he knew that he had. If he had
+only taken the trouble to read the rest of the card--
+
+"Awfully sorry, Mr. Morgan," he said with a lopsided smile that didn't
+even look genuine. "The--"
+
+"Watch those courtesy titles," Morgan reprimanded gently. "'Mister'
+comes ultimately from the Latin _magister_, meaning 'master' or
+'teacher'. And while I may be your master, I wouldn't dare think I
+could teach you anything."
+
+"All citizens are entitled to be called 'Mister'," the manager said
+with a puzzled look. He pushed a room key across the desk.
+
+"Which just goes to show you," said Harry Morgan, picking up the key.
+
+He turned casually, took one or two steps away from the registration
+desk, then--quite suddenly--did an about-face and snapped: "_What
+happened to Jack Latrobe?_"
+
+"Who?" said the manager, his face gaping stupidly.
+
+Harry Morgan knew human beings, and he was fairly certain that the
+manager couldn't have reacted that way unless he honestly had no
+notion of what Morgan was talking about.
+
+He smiled sweetly. "Never you mind, dear boy. Thank you for the key."
+He turned again and headed for the elevator bank, confident that the
+manager would find the question he had asked about Jack Latrobe so
+completely meaningless as to be incapable of registering as a useful
+memory.
+
+He was perfectly right.
+
+
+III
+
+The Belt Cities could survive without the help of Earth, and the
+Supreme Congress of the United Nations of Earth knew it. But they
+also knew that "survive" did not by any means have the same semantic
+or factual content as "live comfortably". If Earth were to vanish
+overnight, the people of the Belt would live, but they would be
+seriously handicapped. On the other hand, the people of Earth could
+survive--as they had for millennia--without the Belt Cities, and while
+doing without Belt imports might be painful, it would by no means be
+deadly.
+
+But both the Belt Cities and the Earth knew that the destruction of
+one would mean the collapse of the other as a civilization.
+
+Earth needed iron. Belt iron was cheap. The big iron deposits of Earth
+were worked out, and the metal had been widely scattered. The removal
+of the asteroids as a cheap source would mean that iron would become
+prohibitively expensive. Without cheap iron, Earth's civilization
+would have to undergo a painfully drastic change--a collapse and
+regeneration.
+
+But the Belt Cities were handicapped by the fact that they had had as
+yet neither the time nor the resources to manufacture anything but
+absolute necessities. Cloth, for example, was imported from Earth. A
+society that is still busy struggling for the bare necessities--such
+as manufacturing its own air--has no time to build the huge looms
+necessary to weave cloth ... or to make clothes, except on a minor
+scale. Food? You can have hydroponic gardens on an asteroid, but
+raising beef cattle, even on Ceres, was difficult. Eventually,
+perhaps, but not yet.
+
+The Belt Cities were populated by pioneers who still had not given up
+the luxuries of civilization. Their one weakness was that they had
+their cake and were happily eating it, too.
+
+Not that Harry Morgan didn't realize that fact. A Belt man is, above
+all, a realist, in that he must, of necessity, understand the Laws of
+the Universe and deal with them. Or die.
+
+Commodore Sir Harry Morgan was well aware of the stir he had created
+in the lobby of the Grand Central Hotel. Word would leak out, and he
+knew it. The scene had been created for just that purpose.
+
+    "_Grasshopper sittin' on a railroad track,
+         Singin' polly-wolly-doodle-alla-day!
+      A-pickin' his teeth with a carpet tack,
+         Singin' polly-wolly-doodle-alla-day!_"
+
+He sang with gusto as the elevator lifted him up to the seventy-fourth
+floor of the Grand Central Hotel. The other passengers in the car did
+not look at him directly; they cast sidelong glances.
+
+_This guy_, they seemed to think in unison, _is a nut. We will pay no
+attention to him, since he probably does not really exist. Even if he
+does, we will pay no attention in the hope that he will go away._
+
+On the seventy-fourth floor, he _did_ go away, heading for his room.
+He keyed open the door and strolled over to the phone, where a message
+had already been dropped into the receiver slot. He picked it up and
+read it.
+
+     COMMODORE SIR HARRY MORGAN, RM. 7426, GCH: REQUEST YOU CALL
+     EDWAY TARNHORST, REPRESENTATIVE OF THE PEOPLE OF GREATER LOS
+     ANGELES, SUPREME CONGRESS. PUNCH 33-981-762-044 COLLECT.
+
+"How news travels," Harry Morgan thought to himself. He tapped out the
+number on the keyboard of the phone and waited for the panel to light
+up. When it did, it showed a man in his middle fifties with a lean,
+ascetic face and graying hair, which gave him a look of saintly
+wisdom.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Mr. Tarnhorst?" Morgan asked pleasantly.
+
+"Yes. Commodore Morgan?" The voice was smooth and precise.
+
+"At your service, Mr. Tarnhorst. You asked me to call."
+
+"Yes. What is the purpose of your visit to Earth, commodore?" The
+question was quick, decisive, and firm.
+
+Harry Morgan kept his affability. "That's none of your business, Mr.
+Tarnhorst."
+
+Tarnhorst's face didn't change. "Perhaps your superiors haven't told
+you, but--and I can only disclose this on a sealed circuit--I am in
+sympathy with the Belt Cities. I have been out there twice and have
+learned to appreciate the vigor and worth of the Belt people. I am on
+your side, commodore, in so far as it does not compromise my position.
+My record shows that I have fought for the rights of the Belt Cities
+on the floor of the Supreme Congress. Have you been informed of that
+fact?"
+
+"I have," said Harry Morgan. "And that is precisely why it is none of
+your business. The less you know, Mr. Tarnhorst, the safer you will
+be. I am not here as a representative of any of the City governments.
+I am not here as a representative of any of the Belt Corporations. I
+am completely on my own, without official backing. You have shown
+yourself to be sympathetic towards us in the past. We have no desire
+to hurt you. Therefore I advise that you either keep your nose out of
+my business or actively work against me. You cannot protect yourself
+otherwise."
+
+Edward Tarnhorst was an Earthman, but he was not stupid. He had
+managed to put himself in a position of power in the Welfare World,
+and he knew how to handle that power. It took him exactly two seconds
+to make his decision.
+
+"You misunderstand me, commodore," he said coldly. "I asked what I
+asked because I desire information. The People's Government is trying
+to solve the murder of Commodore Jack Latrobe. Assuming, of course,
+that it was murder--which is open to doubt. His body was found three
+days ago in Fort Tryon Park, up on the north end of Manhattan Island.
+He had apparently jumped off one of the old stone bridges up there and
+fell ninety feet to his death. On the other hand, it is possible that,
+not being used to the effects of a field of point nine eight Standard
+gees, he did not realize that the fall would be deadly, and
+accidentally killed himself. He was alone in the park at night, as far
+as we can tell. It has been ascertained definitely that no
+representative of the People's Manufacturing Corporation Number 873
+was with him at the time. Nor, so far as we can discover, was anyone
+else. I asked you to call because I wanted to know if you had any
+information for us. There was no other reason."
+
+"I haven't seen Jack since he left Juno," Morgan said evenly. "I don't
+know why he came to Earth, and I know nothing else."
+
+"Then I see no further need for conversation," Tarnhorst said. "Thank
+you for your assistance, Commodore Morgan. If Earth's Government needs
+you again, you will be notified if you gain any further information,
+you may call this number. Thank you again. Good-by."
+
+The screen went blank.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+_How much of this is a trap?_ Morgan thought.
+
+There was no way of knowing at this point. Morgan knew that Jack
+Latrobe had neither committed suicide nor died accidentally, and
+Tarnhorst had told him as much. Tarnhorst was still friendly, but he
+had taken the hint and got himself out of danger. There had been one
+very important piece of information. The denial that any
+representative of PMC 873 had been involved. PMC 873 was a
+manufacturer of biological products--one of the several corporations
+that Latrobe had been empowered to discuss business with when he had
+been sent to Earth by the Belt Corporations Council. Tarnhorst would
+not have mentioned them negatively unless he intended to imply a
+positive hint. Obviously. Almost too obviously.
+
+Well?
+
+Harry Morgan punched for Information, got it, got a number, and
+punched that.
+
+"People's Manufacturing Corporation Ey-yut Seven Tha-ree," said a
+recorded voice. "Your desire, pu-leeze?"
+
+"This is Commodore Jack Latrobe," Morgan said gently. "I'm getting
+tired of this place, and if you don't let me out I will blow the whole
+place to Kingdom Come. Good bye-eye-eye."
+
+He hung up without waiting for an answer.
+
+Then he looked around the hotel suite he had rented. It was an
+expensive one--very expensive. It consisted of an outer room--a
+"sitting room" as it might have been called two centuries before--and
+a bedroom. Plus a bathroom.
+
+Harry Morgan, a piratical smile on his face, opened the bathroom door
+and left it that way. Then he went into the bedroom. His luggage had
+already been delivered by the lift tube, and was sitting on the floor.
+He put both suitcases on the bed, where they would be in plain sight
+from the sitting room. Then he made certain preparations for invaders.
+
+He left the door between the sitting room and the bedroom open and
+left the suite.
+
+Fifteen minutes later, he was walking down 42nd Street toward Sixth
+Avenue. On his left was the ancient Public Library Building. In the
+middle of the block, somebody shoved something hard into his left
+kidney and said. "Keep walking, commodore. But do what you're told."
+
+Harry Morgan obeyed, with an utterly happy smile on his lips.
+
+
+IV
+
+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 outré 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]
+
+
+VI
+
+Commodore Sir Harry Morgan was herded into a prison cell, given a
+shove across the smallish room, and allowed to hear the door slam
+behind him. By the time he regained his balance and turned to face the
+barred door again, it was locked. The bully-boys who had shoved him in
+turned away and walked down the corridor. Harry sat down on the floor
+and relaxed, leaning against the stone wall. There was no furniture of
+any kind in the cell, not even sanitary plumbing.
+
+"What do I do for a drink of water?" he asked aloud of no one in
+particular.
+
+"You wait till they bring you your drink," said a whispery voice a few
+feet from his head. Morgan realized that someone in the cell next to
+his was talking. "You get a quart a day--a halfa pint four times a
+day. Save your voice. Your throat gets awful dry if you talk much."
+
+"Yeah, it would," Morgan agreed in the same whisper. "What about
+sanitation?"
+
+"That's your worry," said the voice. "Fella comes by every Wednesday
+and Saturday with a honey bucket. You clean out your own cell."
+
+"I _thought_ this place smelled of something other than attar of
+roses," Morgan observed. "My nose tells me this is Thursday."
+
+There was a hoarse, humorless chuckle from the man in the next cell.
+"'At's right. The smell of the disinfectant is strongest now. Saturday
+mornin' it'll be different. You catch on fast, buddy."
+
+"Oh, I'm a whiz," Morgan agreed. "But I thought the Welfare World took
+care of its poor, misled criminals better than this."
+
+Again the chuckle. "You shoulda robbed a bank or killed somebody. Then
+theyda given you a nice rehabilitation sentence. Regular prison. Room
+of your own. Something real nice. Like a hotel. But this's
+different."
+
+"Yeah," Morgan agreed. This was a political prison. This was the place
+where they put you when they didn't care what happened to you after
+the door was locked because there would be no going out.
+
+Morgan knew where he was. It was a big, fortresslike building on top
+of one of the highest hills at the northern end of Manhattan
+Island--an old building that had once been a museum and was built like
+a medieval castle.
+
+"What happens if you die in here?" he asked conversationally.
+
+"Every Wednesday and Saturday," the voice repeated.
+
+"Um," said Harry Morgan.
+
+"'Cept once in a while," the voice whispered. "Like a couple days ago.
+When was it? Yeah. Monday that'd be. Guy they had in here for a week
+or so. Don't remember how long. Lose tracka time here. Yeah. Sure lose
+tracka time here."
+
+There was a long pause, and Morgan, controlling the tenseness in his
+voice, said: "What about the guy Monday?"
+
+"Oh. Him. Yeah, well, they took him out Monday."
+
+Morgan waited again, got nothing further, and asked: "Dead?"
+
+"'Course he was dead. They was tryin' to get somethin' out of him.
+Somethin' about a cable. He jumped one of the guards, and they
+blackjacked him. Hit 'im too hard, I guess. Guard sure got hell for
+that, too. Me, I'm lucky. They don't ask me no questions."
+
+"What are you in for?" Morgan asked.
+
+"Don't know. They never told me. I don't ask for fear they'll
+remember. They might start askin' questions."
+
+Morgan considered. This could be a plant, but he didn't think so. The
+voice was too authentic, and there would be no purpose in his
+information. That meant that Jack Latrobe really was dead. They had
+killed him. An ice cold hardness surged along his nerves.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The door at the far end of the corridor clanged, and a brace of heavy
+footsteps clomped along the floor. Two men came abreast of the
+steel-barred door and stopped.
+
+One of them, a well-dressed, husky-looking man in his middle forties,
+said: "O.K., Morgan. How did you do it?"
+
+"I put on blue lipstick and kissed my elbows--both of 'em. Going
+widdershins, of course."
+
+"What are you talking about?"
+
+"What are you talking about?"
+
+"The guy in your hotel suite. You killed him. You cut off both feet,
+one hand, and his head. How'd you do it?"
+
+Morgan looked at the man. "Police?"
+
+"Nunna your business. Answer the question."
+
+"I use a cobweb I happened to have with me. Who was he?"
+
+The cop's face was whitish. "You chop a guy up like that and then
+don't know who he is?"
+
+"I can guess. I can guess that he was an agent for PMC 873 who was
+trespassing illegally. But I didn't kill him. I was in ... er ...
+custody when it happened."
+
+"Not gonna talk, huh?" the cop said in a hard voice. "O.K., you've had
+your chance. We'll be back."
+
+"I don't think I'll wait," said Morgan.
+
+"You'll wait. We got you on a murder charge now. You'll wait. Wise
+guy." He turned and walked away. The other man followed like a trained
+hound.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After the door clanged, the man in the next cell whispered: "Well,
+you're for it. They're gonna ask you questions."
+
+Morgan said one obscene word and stood up. It was time to leave.
+
+He had been searched thoroughly. They had left him only his clothes,
+nothing else. They had checked to make sure that there were no
+microminiaturized circuits on him. He was clean.
+
+So they thought.
+
+Carefully, he caught a thread in the lapel of his jacked and pulled it
+free. Except for a certain springiness, it looked like an ordinary
+silon thread. He looped it around one of the bars of his cell, high
+up. The ends he fastened to a couple of little decorative hooks in his
+belt--hooks covered with a shell of synthetic ruby.
+
+Then he leaned back, putting his weight on the thread.
+
+Slowly, like a knife moving through cold peanut butter, the thread
+sank into the steel bar, cutting through its one-inch thickness with
+increasing difficulty until it was half-way through. Then it seemed to
+slip the rest of the way through.
+
+He repeated the procedure thrice more, making two cuts in each of two
+bars. Then he carefully removed the sections he had cut out. He put
+one of them on the floor of his cell and carried the other in his
+hand--three feet of one-inch steel makes a nice weapon if it becomes
+necessary.
+
+Then he stepped through the hole he had made.
+
+The man in the next cell widened his eyes as Harry Morgan walked by.
+But Morgan could tell that he saw nothing. He had only heard. His eyes
+had been removed long before. It was the condition of the man that
+convinced Morgan with utter finality that he had told the truth.
+
+
+VII
+
+Mr. Edway Tarnhorst felt fear, but no real surprise when the shadow in
+the window of his suite in the Grand Central Hotel materialized into a
+human being. But he couldn't help asking one question.
+
+"How did you get there?" His voice was husky. "We're eighty floors
+above the street."
+
+"Try climbing asteroids for a while," said Commodore Sir Harry Morgan.
+"You'll get used to it. That's why I knew Jack hadn't died
+'accidentally'--he was murdered."
+
+"You ... you're not carrying a gun," Tarnhorst said.
+
+"Do I need one?"
+
+Tarnhorst swallowed. "Yes. Fergus will be back in a moment."
+
+"Who's Fergus?"
+
+"He's the man who controls PMC 873."
+
+Harry Morgan shoved his hand into his jacket pocket "Then I have a
+gun. You saw it, didn't you?"
+
+"Yes. Yes ... I saw it when you came in."
+
+"Good. Call him."
+
+When Sam Fergus came in, he looked as though he had had about three or
+four too many slugs of whiskey. There was an odd fear an his face.
+
+"Whats matter, Edway? I--" The fear increased when he saw Morgan.
+"Whadda you here for?"
+
+"I'm here to make a speech Fergus. Sit down." When Fergus still stood,
+Morgan repeated what he had said with only a trace more emphasis. "Sit
+down."
+
+Fergus sat. So did Tarnhorst.
+
+"Both of you pay special attention," Morgan said, a piratical gleam in
+his eyes. "You killed a friend of mine. My best friend. But I'm not
+going to kill either of you. Yet. Just listen and listen carefully."
+
+Even Tarnhorst looked frightened. "Don't move, Sam. He's got a gun. I
+saw it when he came in."
+
+"What ... what do you want?" Fergus asked.
+
+"I want to give you the information you want. The information that you
+killed Jack for." There was cold hatred in his voice. "I am going to
+tell you something that you have thought you wanted, but which you
+really will wish you had never heard. I'm going to tell you about that
+cable."
+
+Neither Fergus nor Tarnhorst said a word.
+
+"You want a cable. You've heard that we use a cable that has a tensile
+strength of better than a hundred million pounds per square inch, and
+you want to know how it's made. You tried to get the secret out of
+Jack because he was sent here as a commercial dealer. And he wouldn't
+talk, so one of your goons blackjacked him too hard and then you had
+to drop him off a bridge to make it look like an accident.
+
+"Then you got your hands on me. You were going to wring it out of me.
+Well, there is no necessity of that." His grin became wolfish. "I'll
+give you everything." He paused. "If you want it."
+
+Fergus found his voice. "I want it. I'll pay a million--"
+
+"You'll pay nothing," Morgan said flatly. "You'll listen."
+
+Fergus nodded wordlessly.
+
+"The composition is simple. Basically, it is a two-phase material-like
+fiberglass. It consists of a strong, hard material imbedded in a
+matrix of softer material. The difference is that, in this case, the
+stronger fibers are borazon--boron nitride formed under tremendous
+pressure--while the softer matrix is composed of tungsten carbide. If
+the fibers are only a thousandth or two thousandths of an inch in
+diameter--the thickness of a human hair or less--then the cable from
+which they are made has tremendous strength and flexibility.
+
+"Do you want the details of the process now?" His teeth were showing
+in his wolfish grin.
+
+Fergus swallowed. "Yes, of course. But ... but why do you--"
+
+"Why do I give it to you? Because it will kill you. You have seen what
+the stuff will do. A strand a thousandth of an inch thick, encased in
+silon for lubrication purposes, got me out of that filthy hole you
+call a prison. You've heard about that?"
+
+Fergus blinked. "You cut yourself out of there with the cable you're
+talking about?"
+
+"Not with the cable. With a thin fiber. With one of the hairlike
+fibers that makes up the cable. Did you ever cut cheese with a wire?
+In effect, that wire is a knife--a knife that consists only of an
+edge.
+
+"Or, another experiment you may have heard of. Take a block of ice.
+Connect a couple of ten-pound weights together with a few feet of
+piano wire and loop it across the ice block to that the weights hang
+free on either side, with the wire over the top of the block. The wire
+will cut right through the ice in a short time. The trouble is that
+the ice block remains whole--because the ice melts under the pressure
+of the wire and then flows around it and freezes again on the other
+side. But if you lubricate the wire with ordinary glycerine, it
+prevents the re-freezing and the ice block will be cut in two."
+
+Tarnhorst nodded. "I remember. In school. They--" He let his voice
+trail off.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Yeah. Exactly. It's a common experiment in basic science. Borazon
+fiber works the same way. Because it is so fine and has such
+tremendous tensile strength, it is possible to apply a pressure of
+hundreds of millions of pounds per square inch over a very small area.
+Under pressures like that, steel cuts easily. With silon covering to
+lubricate the cut, there's nothing to it. As you have heard from the
+guards in your little hell-hole.
+
+"Hell-hole?" Tarnhorst's eyes narrowed and he flicked a quick glance
+at Fergus. Morgan realized that Tarnhorst had known nothing of the
+extent of Fergus' machinations.
+
+"That lovely little political prison up in Fort Tryon Park that the
+World Welfare State, with its usual solicitousness for the common man,
+keeps for its favorite guests," Morgan said. His wolfish smile
+returned. "I'd've cut the whole thing down if I'd had had the time.
+Not the stone--just the steel. In order to apply that kind of pressure
+you have to have the filament fastened to something considerably
+harder than the stuff you're trying to cut, you see. Don't try it with
+your fingers or you'll lose fingers."
+
+Fergus' eyes widened again and he looked both ill and frightened. "The
+man we sent ... uh ... who was found in your room. You--" He stopped
+and seemed to have trouble swallowing.
+
+"Me? _I_ didn't do anything." Morgan did a good imitation of a shark
+trying to look innocent. "I'll admit that I looped a very fine
+filament of the stuff across the doorway a few times, so that if
+anyone tried to enter my room illegally I would be warned." He didn't
+bother to add that a pressure-sensitive device had released and reeled
+in the filament after it had done its work. "It doesn't need to be
+nearly as tough and heavy to cut through soft stuff like ... er ...
+say, a beefsteak, as it does to cut through steel. It's as fine as
+cobweb almost invisible. Won't the World Welfare State have fun when
+that stuff gets into the hands of its happy, crime-free populace?"
+
+Edway Tarnhorst became suddenly alert. "What?"
+
+"Yes. Think of the fun they'll have, all those lovely slobs who get
+their basic subsistence and their dignity and their honor as a free
+gift from the State. The kids, especially. They'll _love_ it. It's so
+fine it can be hidden inside an ordinary thread--or woven into the
+hair--or...." He spread his hands. "A million places."
+
+Fergus was gaping. Tarnhorst was concentrating on Morgan's words.
+
+"And there's no possible way to leave fingerprints on anything that
+fine," Morgan continued. "You just hook it around a couple of nails or
+screws, across an open doorway or an alleyway--and wait."
+
+"We wouldn't let it get into the people's hands," Tarnhorst said.
+
+"You couldn't stop it," Morgan said flatly. "Manufacture the stuff and
+eventually one of the workers in the plant will figure out a way to
+steal some of it."
+
+"Guards--" Fergus said faintly.
+
+"_Pfui._ But even you had a perfect guard system, I think I can
+guarantee that some of it would get into the hands of the--common
+people. Unless you want to cut off all imports from the Belt."
+
+Tarnhorst's voice hardened. "You mean you'd deliberately--"
+
+"I mean exactly what I said," Morgan cut in sharply. "Make of it what
+you want."
+
+"I suppose you have that kind of trouble out in the Belt?" Tarnhorst
+asked.
+
+"No. We don't have your kind of people out in the Belt, Mr. Tarnhorst.
+We have men who kill, yes. But we don't have the kind of juvenile and
+grown-up delinquents who will kill senselessly, just for kicks. That
+kind is too stupid to live long out there. We are in no danger from
+borazon-tungsten filaments. You are." He paused just for a moment,
+then said: "I'm ready to give you the details of the process now, Mr.
+Fergus."
+
+"I don't think I--" Fergus began with a sickly sound in his voice. But
+Tarnhorst interrupted him.
+
+"We don't want it, commodore. Forget it."
+
+"Forget it?" Morgan's voice was as cutting as the filament he had been
+discussing. "Forget that Jack Latrobe was murdered?"
+
+"We will pay indemnities, of course," Tarnhorst said, feeling that it
+was futile.
+
+"_Fergus_ will pay indemnities," Morgan said. "In money, the
+indemnities will come to the precise amount he was willing to pay for
+the cable secret. I suggest that your Government confiscate that
+amount from him and send it to us. That may be necessary in view of
+the second indemnity."
+
+"Second indemnity?"
+
+"Mr. Fergus' life."
+
+Tarnhorst shook his head briskly. "No. We can't execute Fergus.
+Impossible."
+
+"Of course not," Morgan said soothingly. "I don't suggest that you
+should. But I do suggest that Mr. Fergus be very careful about going
+through doorways--or any other kind of opening--from now on. I suggest
+that he refrain from passing between any pair of reasonably solid,
+well-anchored objects. I suggest that he stay away from bathtubs. I
+suggest that he be very careful about putting his legs under a table
+or desk. I suggest that he not look out of windows. I could make
+several suggestions. And he shouldn't go around feeling in front of
+him, either. He might lose something."
+
+"I understand," said Edway Tarnhorst.
+
+So did Sam Fergus. Morgan could tell by his face.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When the indemnity check arrived on Ceres some time later, a short,
+terse note came with it.
+
+"I regret to inform you that Mr. Samuel Fergus, evidently in a state
+of extreme nervous and psychic tension, took his own life by means of
+a gunshot wound in the head on the 21st of this month. The enclosed
+check will pay your indemnity in full. Tarnhorst."
+
+Morgan smiled grimly. It was as he had expected. He had certainly
+never had any intention of going to all the trouble of killing Sam
+Fergus.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Thin Edge, by Gordon Randall Garrett
+
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