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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Cartels Jungle, by Irving E. Cox, Jr.
+
+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: The Cartels Jungle
+
+Author: Irving E. Cox, Jr.
+
+Release Date: March 16, 2010 [EBook #31062]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CARTELS JUNGLE ***
+
+
+
+
+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 Fantastic Universe September 1955.
+    Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.
+    copyright on this publication was renewed.
+
+
+[_In most ideally conceived Utopias the world as it exists
+  is depicted as a mushrooming horror of maladjustment, cruelty and
+  crime. In this startlingly original short novel that basic premise is
+  granted, but only to pave the way for an approach to Utopia over a
+  highway of the mind so daringly unusual we predict you'll forget
+  completely that you're embarking on a fictional excursion into the
+  future by one of the most gifted writers in the field. And that
+  forgetfulness will be accompanied by the startling realization that
+  Irving E. Cox has a great deal more than a storyteller's magic to
+  impart._]
+
+
+                          the cartels jungle
+
+
+                     _by ... Irving E. Cox, Jr._
+
+
+     It was a world of greedy Dynasts--each contending for the
+     right to pillage and enslave. But one man's valor became a
+     shining shield.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+     _... and he who overcomes an enemy by fraud is as much to be
+      praised as he who does so by force._
+
+                                        Machiavelli, DISCORSI, III, 1531
+
+
+The captain walked down the ramp carrying a lightweight bag. To a
+discerning eye, that bag meant only one thing: Max Hunter had quit the
+service. A spaceman on leave never took personal belongings from his
+ship, because without a bag he could by-pass the tedious wait for a
+customs clearance.
+
+From the foot of the ramp a gray-haired port hand called up to Hunter,
+"So you're really through, Max?"
+
+"I always said, by the time I was twenty-six--"
+
+"Lots of guys think they'll make it. I did once myself. Look at me
+now. I'm no good in the ships any more, so they bust me back to port
+hand. It's too damn easy to throw your credits away in the
+crumb-joints."
+
+"I'm getting married," Hunter replied. "Ann and I worked this out when
+I joined the service. Now we have the capital to open her clinic--and
+ninety-six thousand credits, salted away in the Solar First National
+Fund."
+
+"Every youngster starts out like you did, but something always
+happens. The girl doesn't wait, maybe. Or he gets to thinking he can
+pile up credits faster in the company casinos." The old man saluted.
+"So long, boy. It does my soul good to meet one guy who's getting out
+of this crazy space racket."
+
+Max Hunter strode along the fenced causeway toward the low,
+pink-walled municipal building, shimmering in the desert sun. Behind
+him the repair docks and the launching tubes made a ragged silhouette
+against the sky.
+
+Hunter felt no romantic inclination to look back. He had always been
+amused by the insipid, Tri-D space operas. To Hunter it had been a
+business--a job different from other occupations only because the
+risks were greater and the bonus scale higher.
+
+Ann would be waiting in the lobby, as she always was when he came in
+from a flight. But today when they left the field, it would be for
+keeps. Anticipation made his memory of Ann Saymer suddenly vivid--the
+caress of her lips, the delicate scent of her hair, her quick smile
+and the pert upturn of her nose.
+
+Captain Hunter thought of Ann as small and delicate, yet neither term
+was strictly applicable except subjectively in relation to himself.
+Hunter towered a good four inches above six feet. His shoulders were
+broad and powerful, his hips narrow, and his belly flat and hard. He
+moved with the co-ordination that had become second nature to him
+after a decade of frontier war. He was the typical spaceman, holding a
+First in his profession.
+
+As was his privilege, he still wore his captain's uniform--dress boots
+of black plastic, tight-fitting trousers, and a scarlet jacket bearing
+the gold insignia of Consolidated Solar Industries.
+
+Hunter entered the municipal building and joined the line of people
+moving slowly toward the customs booth. Anxiously he scanned the mass
+of faces in the lobby. Ann Saymer wasn't there.
+
+He felt the keen, knife-edge disappointment, and something
+else--something he didn't want to put into words. He had sent Ann a
+micropic telling her when his ship would be in. Of course, there was
+that commission-job she had taken--
+
+Abruptly he was face to face again with the vague fear that had nagged
+at his mind for nearly a month. This wasn't like Ann. Always before
+she had sent him every two or three days a chatty micropic, using the
+private code they had invented to cut the unit cost of words. But four
+weeks had now passed since he had last heard from her.
+
+In an attempt at self-assurance, he recalled to mind just how exacting
+a commission-job could be. Perhaps Ann had been working so hard she
+had simply not had the time to send him a message.
+
+Not even five minutes to send a micropic?
+
+It didn't occur to him that she might be ill, for preventive medicine
+had long ago made physical disease a trivial factor in human affairs.
+A maladjustment then, with commitment to a city clinic? But Ann Saymer
+held a First in Psychiatry.
+
+Hunter fingered the Saving Fund record in his pocket--the goal he and
+Ann had worked for so long. Nothing could go wrong now, nothing! He
+said the words over in his mind as he might have repeated the litany
+of a prayer, although Max Hunter did not consider himself a religious
+man.
+
+At sixteen he and Ann Saymer had fallen in love, while they had both
+been in the last semester of the general school. They could have
+married then, or they might have registered for the less permanent
+companionship-union.
+
+In either case, both of them would have had to go to work. Hunter
+could not have entered the space service, which enrolled only single
+men and Ann could not have afforded the university.
+
+It hadn't mattered to Hunter. But Ann had possessed enough ambition
+for them both. She knew she had the ability to earn a First in
+Psychiatry, and would settle for nothing less. The drive that kept
+their goal alive was hers. She was determined to establish a clinic of
+her own. The plan she worked out was very practical--for Ann was in
+all respects the opposite of an idle dreamer.
+
+Hunter was to join a commercial spacefleet. His bonus credits would
+accumulate to supply their capital, while he paid her university
+tuition from his current earnings. After they married, Hunter was to
+manage the finances of the clinic while Ann became the resident
+psychiatrist.
+
+Even at sixteen Ann Saymer had very positive ideas about curing mental
+illness, which was the epidemic sickness of their world. Eight years
+later, while she was still serving her internship in a city clinic,
+Ann had invented the tiny machine which, with wry humor, she called an
+Exorciser.
+
+She had never used the device in the public clinic. If she had, she
+would have lost the patent, since she had built the Exorciser while
+she was still serving out her educational apprenticeship in the city
+clinic.
+
+"I'm no fool, Max," she told Hunter. "Why should I give it away? We'll
+coin credits in our own clinic with that little gadget."
+
+Hunter had no objection to her aggressive selfishness. In fact, the
+term "selfishness" did not even occur to him. Ann was simply
+expressing the ethic of their society. He admired her brilliance, her
+cleverness; and he knew that her Exorciser, properly exploited, would
+be the touchstone to a fortune.
+
+During one of his furloughs Ann demonstrated what the machine could
+do. After a minor surgical operation, a fragile filigree of
+microscopic platinum wires was planted in the cerebral cortex of a
+patient's skull. From a multi-dialed console Ann verbally transmitted
+a new personality directly into the maladjusted mind. After twenty
+minutes she removed the wire grid, and the disorganized personality
+was whole again, with an adjustment index testing at zero-zero.
+
+"A cure that leaves out the long probe for psychic causes," she said
+enthusiastically. "In minutes, Max, we'll be able to do what now takes
+weeks or months. They'll swarm into our clinic."
+
+Hunter reasoned that Ann had taken the commission-job in order to
+experiment with her machine in a privately-operated clinic. Her
+internship had ended a month before, and it had been an altogether
+legal thing for her to do. The fact that she had taken a commission
+meant she would work for only a specific contract period. And because
+a commission-job carried a professional classification, Ann had not
+been compelled to join the union.
+
+Nevertheless the haze of anxiety still lay oppressively over Captain
+Hunter's mind. No matter what the requirements of Ann's commission may
+have been, she could have met him at the spaceport. She knew when his
+ship was due, and had never failed to show up before.
+
+
+II
+
+The line of people continued to move steadily toward the customs
+booth. Hunter stopped at last in front of a counter where a male
+clerk, wearing on his tunic the identification disc of his U.F.W.
+union local, typed out the customs forms, took Hunter's thumbprint,
+and carefully checked his medical certificate.
+
+"You had your last boosters in the Mars station, is that correct?"
+
+"Yes, last January," Hunter replied.
+
+"That gives you an eight months' clearance." The clerk smiled. "Plenty
+of time for a spaceman's furlough."
+
+"I'm making a permanent separation," Hunter affirmed.
+
+The clerk glanced at him sharply. "Then I'd better issue a temporary
+health card." He ran a red-tinted, celluloid rectangle through a
+stamping machine and Hunter pressed his thumbprint upon the signature
+square. "Can you give me your home address, Captain?"
+
+"I'll be staying at the Roost for a day or so. After that I'm getting
+married."
+
+"I'll assign your health file to the Los Angeles Clinic then," the
+clerk said. "You can apply for an official reassignment later, if
+necessary."
+
+He made a photo-copy of the health card, pushed it into a pneumatic
+tube and handed the original to Hunter. Then he rolled the customs
+form back into the typewriter.
+
+"Since you're quitting the service, Captain, I'll have to have
+additional information for the municipal file. Do you have union
+affiliation?"
+
+"No. Spacemen aren't required to join the U.F.W."
+
+"If you want to give me a part payment on the initiation fee, I'll be
+glad to issue--"
+
+"It'll be a long, hard winter before Eric Young gets any of my
+credits," Hunter said, his eyes narrowing. Considering how Hunter felt
+about the Union of Free Workers and the labor czar, Eric Young, he
+thought he had phrased his answer with remarkable restraint.
+
+"Anti-labor," the clerk said, and typed the designation on the form.
+
+"No," Hunter snapped, "and I won't be labeled that. As far as the
+individual goes, I believe he has every right to organize. No one can
+stand up against the cartels in any other way. But this exploitation
+by Young--"
+
+"You either join the U.F.W., or you're against us." The clerk shrugged
+disinterestedly. "It's all one and the same thing to me, Captain.
+However, if you expect a job in the city, you'll have to get it
+through the union." He typed again on the customs form. "According to
+a new regulation, I'm obliged to classify you as unemployed, and that
+restricts you to limited areas of Los Angeles as well as--"
+
+"When the hell did they put over a law like that?"
+
+"Two weeks ago, sir. It gives the clinics a closer control over the
+potentially maladjusted, and it should help ease the pressure--"
+
+"There are no exceptions?"
+
+"The executive classifications, naturally--professionals, and
+spacemen. That would have included you, Captain Hunter, but you say
+you've left the service."
+
+Hunter gritted his teeth. It had been like this for as long as he
+could remember. Whenever he returned from a long flight there was
+always a new form of regimentation to adjust to. And always for the
+same reason--to stop the steadily rising incidence of psychotic
+maladjustment.
+
+"How does the law define an executive?" Hunter asked.
+
+"Job bracket with one of the cartels," the clerk replied. "Or the
+total credits held on deposit with a recognized fund."
+
+The captain flung his savings book on the counter. The clerk glanced
+at the balance and X'ed out the last word he had typed on the customs
+form.
+
+"You qualify, sir--with a thousand credits to spare. I'll give you a
+city-wide clearance as an executive. But I can only make it
+temporary. You'll have to check once each week with the U.F.W. office.
+If your balance drops below ninety-five thousand, you'll be
+reclassified."
+
+The clerk ran another celluloid card--this time it was blue--through
+the stamping machine and passed it across to Hunter. Captain Hunter
+picked up his bag and entered the customs booth, which by that time
+was empty. The probe lights glowed from the walls and ceiling,
+efficiently X-raying his bag and his clothing for any prohibited
+imports. Within seconds the alarm bell clanged and the metal doors
+banged shut, imprisoning Hunter in the booth.
+
+Now what? he asked himself. What regulation had he violated this time?
+In his mind he inventoried the contents of his bag. It contained only
+a handful of personal belongings, and the tools of trade which he had
+needed as a captain of a fighting ship. Everything was legitimate and
+above-board. Hunter hadn't even brought Ann a souvenir from the
+frontier.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After a time, the booth door swung open. A senior inspector, carrying
+a blaster, crowded into the cubicle.
+
+"Open your bag!" The inspector commanded, motioning with his weapon.
+
+Hunter saw that the blaster dial was set to fire the death charge, not
+the weaker dispersal charge which produced only an hour's paralysis.
+
+Hunter thumbed the photocell lock. It responded to the individual
+pattern of his thumbprint, and the bag fell open. The inspector picked
+up the worn blaster which lay under Hunter's shipboard uniform.
+
+"Smuggling firearms, Captain, is a violation of the city code. The
+fine is--"
+
+"Smuggling?" Hunter exploded. "That blaster was registered to me nine
+years ago." He snapped open his wallet.
+
+The inspector frowned over the registration form, biting indecisively
+at his lower lip.
+
+"That was issued before my time," he alibied. "I'll have to check the
+regulations. It may take a while."
+
+He left the booth. He was gone for a quarter of an hour. When he
+returned, both metal doors snapped open. "Your permit is valid,
+Captain Hunter," the inspector admitted. "Unrestricted registrations
+like yours have not been issued for the past five years. That's why
+the probe was not adjusted to the special conditions which apply in
+your case. Your permit is revocable if you are committed for
+maladjustment."
+
+Hunter grinned. "I wouldn't count on that. My adjustment index is
+zero-zero."
+
+"A paragon, Captain." The voice was dry and biting. "But you may find
+conditions on the Earth a little trying. You haven't had a chance to
+get really well-acquainted with your own world since you were a kid of
+sixteen."
+
+Hunter's customs clearance had taken more than an hour. Before he left
+the municipal building, he made a quick tour of the lobby, searching
+again for Ann Saymer. Satisfied that she had not come, he put in a
+call from a public tele-booth to Ann's apartment residence. After a
+moment, Mrs. Ames' face came into sharp focus on the screen, the light
+coalescing about her hair.
+
+A warm, motherly widow of nearly eighty, Mrs. Ames had been the
+residence's owner for a decade, and had taken a great deal of
+vicarious pleasure in Ann's romance with the captain. "It's so
+different," she said once to Hunter, "your faith in each other, the
+way you work together for a goal you both want. If the rest of us
+could only learn to have some honest affection for each other. But,
+there, I'm an old woman, living too much in the past."
+
+As soon as Hunter saw her face on the screen, he knew that something
+was wrong. She was tense and nervous, tied in the emotional knots of
+an anxiety neurosis. And Mrs. Ames was not the woman to fall easy
+victim to mental illness. If Hunter had been guessing the odds, he
+would have put her adjustment index on a par with his own.
+
+"I haven't seen Ann for a month," she told him.
+
+"Where is she? My last micropic from her said something about a
+commission-job--"
+
+"She's all right, Max. Did you join the U.F.W.?"
+
+"I'll be damned if I will."
+
+Why had she asked him that? Her question seemed totally unrelated to
+her reassurance as to Ann--another clear symptom of her emotional
+unbalance.
+
+"About Ann, Mrs. Ames," he persisted. "Do you know what clinic gave
+her the commission?"
+
+Mrs. Ames stared at him in surprise. "Ann didn't tell you in her
+micropic?"
+
+"We use a personal code," he explained. "That makes a certain type of
+communication extremely difficult."
+
+"I didn't see her, Max. After she took the commission some men came
+for her things. They brought me a note from Ann, but it didn't tell me
+where she was. It just authorized the men to move out her belongings."
+
+"Is the work outside of Los Angeles? Do you know that much?"
+
+"At first I guessed--" She broke off, biting her lip, and her face
+twisted in an agony of intense feeling. "No, Max, an old woman's
+guesses won't help. I can't tell you any more about it."
+
+"I'll come out and see you this afternoon, Mrs. Ames," he promised,
+"after I check in at the Roost. I want to look at that note you had
+from Ann."
+
+
+III
+
+Captain Hunter left the municipal building and stood on the transit
+platform. It was blazing hot in the noon sun, and he considered
+chartering an autojet to the city, as he always had before. But though
+a jet was faster than the monorail it was also more expensive. Acutely
+mindful that he had left the service and would earn no more juicy
+credit bonuses, he took the monorail instead.
+
+He had only a ten-minute wait before a crowded car screamed to a stop
+at the port station. Hunter went aboard, along with four passengers
+from recent inbound flights--laboring class tourists returning from
+vacations on one of the planetoid resorts. Since a majority of the
+people who passed through the spaceport were executives or
+professionals, they used the autojets.
+
+Hunter's uniform set him apart. A spaceman was expected to live high,
+to throw away credits like the glamor heroes on the Tri-D space
+dramas.
+
+The monorail car was crowded, primarily with afternoon-shift workers
+on their way to the industrial area. They all wore on their tunics the
+discs of the Union of Free Workers. The four tourists who went aboard
+at the spaceport with Hunter pulled out their U.F.W. badges and pinned
+them on. They belonged. Hunter didn't.
+
+He found an empty chair at the rear of the car, beside a gaudily
+attired woman, whose union disc proclaimed her a member of Local 47,
+the Recreational Companion Union. What miracles we perform, Hunter
+thought, with a judicial selection of innocuous words!
+
+He glanced at the woman. She was past the first bloom of youth and her
+face, under her makeup, was heavily lined, her eyes shrewd and
+observing. Had he known that she had been shadowing him almost from
+the instant of his arrival in Los Angeles, and had been awaiting his
+return to Earth in obedience to carefully formulated instructions he
+would not have regarded her so complacently.
+
+The monorail shot up toward the Palms-Pine pass of the San Jacinto
+Mountains. From the crest of the grade Hunter could look back at the
+flat, cemented field of the spaceport and the ragged teeth of the
+launching tubes rearing high on the Mojave. Ahead of him, misted by
+the blue haze of industrial smog, was Los Angeles, the capital city of
+Sector West--and indirectly the capital of the entire planet.
+
+Almost indistinct against the horizon were the soaring, Babel towers,
+the tangled network of walk-levels, jet-ways and private landing
+flats, which was the center-city. The lower, bulky factory buildings
+squatted under the towers and spreading outward from them, like
+concentric rings made by a stone hurled into a quiet pool, was the
+monotonous clutter of the minimum-housing.
+
+The city sprawled from San Diego to Santa Barbara, and it lapped
+against the arid Mojave to the east. Beyond were the suburban homes of
+laborers and low-echelon executives who had carved brass-knuckled
+niches for themselves in the medium-income bracket.
+
+Hunter saw the panoramic view of Sector West for only a split-second
+before the monorail car screamed down through the layer of gray haze.
+For thirty minutes the car shot across the minimum-housing area,
+stopping from time to time at high-platformed stations.
+
+In the industrial district the car emptied rapidly. Only Hunter and
+his faded seat companion got out at the turnaround terminal and took
+the slideway to center-city. In the metro-entry at the top of the
+stairs they went through a security check station manned by six
+blaster-armed police guards.
+
+Half of the guards wore the insignia of Consolidated Solar Industries
+and half of United Research, the two titan cartels which were locked
+in deadly battle for the empire beyond the stars.
+
+The government played it safe, Hunter thought with bitterness, using
+an equal number of police from each organization. On Earth the pacific
+balance of commercial power was never disturbed--not, at least, on the
+surface. The two imperial giants lived side by side in a tactful
+display of peace.
+
+On the frontier the real conflict raged, fought with all the weapons
+of treachery and an arsenal of highly refined atomic weapons--the
+blaster which could tear a man into component elements, and the
+L-bombs that were capable of turning a young sun into a nova.
+
+The woman passed through the security check with no trouble. The men
+knew her and made only a perfunctory examination of her cards. But
+Hunter again had difficulty because of the blaster in his bag. His
+registered permit carried no weight with the guards. It was not their
+duty to execute existing law, but to protect their private employers.
+
+However, the Consolidated insignia on Hunter's jacket made the three
+Consolidated guards ready to honor his permit. Eventually they
+persuaded the opposition to pass Hunter into the city, on the ground
+that the captain's zero-zero adjustment index indicated that it was
+safe for him to carry arms.
+
+When Hunter went through the probe, he found the woman waiting for
+him. During the half-hour ride from the spaceport, he had tried twice
+to start a conversation with her, and failed. Now, abruptly, her face
+was animated with interest. She put her arm through his and walked
+with him to the lift shaft.
+
+"So you got away with it, Captain." Since it was long-standing
+fashion, she had trained her voice to sound low-pitched and husky. "I
+mean, bringing a blaster into center-city."
+
+"Why all this fuss about a gun?" Hunter asked.
+
+"It's a new government regulation," she told him.
+
+"The government doesn't make the law," he reminded her. "The cartels
+do."
+
+"The last fiscal mental health report showed the percentage of
+maladjusted--" She laughed throatily. "I wish we'd use words honestly!
+The survey showed the _lunatic_ percentage is still increasing. The
+cartels are using that report as an excuse to keep the people
+unarmed."
+
+Hunter was regarding her steadily. "Why?" he asked.
+
+"We're not as content with our world as we're supposed to be," she
+said. "Eric Young can't keep all of us in line forever. Captain, we
+could use your blaster. It's next to impossible to get one these days.
+I could make it worth your while--"
+
+"It's registered to me," Hunter pointed out.
+
+"I'll change the serial," was her instant reply. "Your name wouldn't
+be involved."
+
+"No, I want to keep it."
+
+"To use yourself?"
+
+"Don't talk nonsense," he said. "This isn't the frontier."
+
+He made the denial vehemently, but deep in his mind he had an
+uncertain feeling that her guess was right. Earth was not the
+battle-ground, but it had spawned the conflict. The appearance of
+peace was a sham. Here the battle was fought with more subtlety, but
+the objective remained the same.
+
+If Ann Saymer had somehow been caught in the no-man's-land between the
+two cartels--It was the first time that thought had occurred to
+Hunter, and it filled him with a dread foreboding.
+
+The woman sensed his feeling. He saw a smile on her curving lips. She
+said softly, "So even a spaceman sometimes has his doubts."
+
+"I left the service this morning," he said. Suddenly he was telling
+her all about himself and Ann. It was unwise, perhaps even dangerous.
+But he had to unburden himself to someone or run the risk of losing
+his emotional control.
+
+"So now you've lost this--this ambitious woman of yours," she said
+when he had finished.
+
+"No," he protested. "I won't let myself believe that. Once I did--"
+
+"As well as her interesting invention--the Exorciser," she went on
+relentlessly. "Have you ever wondered, Captain Hunter, what might
+happen if the platinum grid was _not_ removed from a patient's brain?"
+
+"No, but I suppose--I suppose he'd remain in control of the operator
+of the transmitter."
+
+She nodded. "He'd become a perfectly adjusted specimen with a
+zero-zero index, but--he'd also become a human robot with no will of
+his own."
+
+"But Ann wouldn't--"
+
+"Not Ann, Captain. Not the girl you've waited so long to marry. All
+she wants is a clinic of her own so that she can help the maladjusted.
+But don't forget--she holds a _priceless_ patent. Keep your blaster,
+my friend. I've an idea you may need it."
+
+He gripped her wrist. "You know something about this?"
+
+"I know the world we live in--nothing more."
+
+"But you're guessing--"
+
+"Later, Captain, after you start putting some facts together on your
+own." She pulled away from him. "If you want to find me again--and I
+think you will--look for me in Number thirty-four on the amusement
+level. Ask for Dawn."
+
+Suddenly, for no reason that he could explain, he had for her a great
+sympathy. She was no ordinary woman. Her discernment was
+extraordinary, and she possessed, in addition, a strangely elusive
+charm.
+
+They rode the lift as it moved up through the city level in its
+transparent, fairy-world shaft. Dawn got out first, at the mid-city
+walk-way where the cheapest shops and the gaudiest entertainment
+houses were crammed together. Dazzling in the glare of colored lights,
+the mid-city never slept. It was always thronged. It was the only area
+of the heartland--except for the top level casinos--open to every
+citizen without restriction.
+
+On the levels immediately above it were the specialty shops, dealing
+in luxuries for the suburbanites who had fought, schemed and bribed
+their way out of the minimum housing. Higher still was the sector
+given over to the less expensive commercial hotels.
+
+The upper levels were occupied by cartel executive offices and at the
+top, high enough to escape the smog and feel the warmth of the sun,
+were the fabulous casino resorts, the mansions built by the family
+dynasts who controlled the cartels, and the modest, limestone building
+housing the mockery which passed as government.
+
+
+IV
+
+Captain Hunter left the lift at Level Nineteen. An automatic entry
+probe accepted his blue-tinted executive card, and he walked the short
+distance to the hotel which specialized in catering to spacemen. It
+was traditionally neutral ground, where the mercenaries of
+Consolidated or United Research met as friends, although a week before
+they might have been firing radiation fire at each other in the outer
+reaches of space. The frontier conflict was a business to the
+spaceman. Hunter was too well-adjusted to become emotionally involved
+in it himself.
+
+The spacemen called their hotel the Roost, a contraction lifted from
+the public micropic code. The full name was the _Roosevelt_, lettered
+on the entry. The hotel was popularly supposed to have been built
+close to the site of a twentieth century Los Angeles hotel of the
+same name, destroyed in the last convulsive war that had shattered the
+earth.
+
+By micropic Hunter had made his customary reservation. His room was
+high in an upper floor overlooking Level Twenty-three. Through the
+visipanel he could see the walk-ways thronged by the various
+classifications of executives who worked in the central offices of the
+cartels--lawyers, engineers, administrators, directors,
+astrogeographers, designers, statisticians, researchers.
+
+Somewhere in the crowd, perhaps, were the two men who ruled the
+cartels and directed the struggle for the Galactic empire. Glenn
+Farren of Consolidated Solar and Werner von Rausch of United
+Researchers. Max Hunter had never seen either of the men or any of
+their dynastic families. He knew little about them. Their pictures
+were never published.
+
+Yet Farren and Von Rausch held in their hands more despotic power,
+more real wealth and military might, than any ancient Khan or Caesar
+had ever dreamed of.
+
+Did they now want Ann Saymer's patent? The answer, Hunter realized,
+was obvious. With Ann's Exorciser, they could enslave the centers of
+civilization as they had enslaved the frontier. In itself that was a
+minor factor, already accomplished by man's acceptance of the jungle
+ethics of the cartels. Far more important, if one of the cartels
+controlled the patent, it had a weapon that would ultimately destroy
+the other.
+
+With trembling fingers, Hunter took Ann's last micropic from his bag
+and rolled the tiny film into a wall-scanner. He could have recited it
+by heart; yet, by reading it again, he somehow expected to extract a
+new meaning. The code he and Ann used, contrived for economy rather
+than secrecy, was merely a telescoping of common phrases into single
+word symbols.
+
+IHTKN, at the beginning, was easily interpreted as "I have taken," and
+COMJB became "commission-job." The micropic transmission monopoly
+arbitrarily limited all code words to five letters or less, counting
+additional letters as whole words. But because of the simplicity of
+the technique, some of Ann's symbols were open to a number of
+interpretations.
+
+Hunter was sure of one thing. Ann had not specifically named the
+clinic where she was working. She said she had gone to work for the
+biggest--or possibly the symbol meant best--of the private clinics.
+Either term could apply to the clinics run by the two cartels; or, for
+that matter, to the largest of them all, operated by Eric Young's
+union.
+
+But Ann, having invented the Exorciser, would know all its possible
+misuses--a factor which had not occurred to Hunter until Dawn spelled
+it out for him. Would Ann, then, have been fool enough to let herself
+fall into the hands of the cartels?
+
+That line of reasoning gave Hunter new hope. If one of the cartels
+tried to trap her, Ann would simply go into hiding. It would
+complicate the problem of finding her, but at least he could assure
+himself she was safe. Ann had brains to match her ambition. She
+couldn't otherwise have earned a First in Psychiatry. No, Hunter was
+certain the cartels didn't have her.
+
+The telescreen buzzer gave a plaintive bleep. Hunter jerked down the
+response toggle. Surprisingly, the screen remained dark, but Hunter
+heard a man's voice say clearly, "You are anxious to find Ann Saymer,
+Captain Hunter?"
+
+Apparently the transmission from Hunter's screen was unimpaired, for
+the speaker seemed to recognize him.
+
+"Who is this?" Hunter asked, his mouth suddenly dry.
+
+"A friend. We have your interest at heart, Captain. We suggest that
+you investigate United Researchers' clinic when you start looking for
+Miss Saymer."
+
+The contact snapped off. Hunter sat down slowly, his mind reeling.
+Since only his screen had been neutralized, the machine was not at
+fault. Only a top-ranking cartel executive could arrange for a
+deliberate interruption of service. The rest followed logically. No
+one in United would have given him the information.
+
+So Ann had fallen into their hands after all! Someone in
+Consolidated--perhaps Glenn Farren himself--was setting him on Ann's
+trail, on the chance that Hunter could find her when Consolidated's
+operatives had failed.
+
+Hunter was used to the risk of long odds. He had a ten-year
+apprenticeship in the treachery and in-fighting of the frontier. There
+was a good chance that he could play one cartel against the other, and
+in the process get Ann away from both of them.
+
+One more thing he wanted before he planned his opening attack against
+United Researchers--the note Ann had sent to Mrs. Ames. It might give
+him a clue as to where United had taken her. Hunter wasn't naive
+enough to suppose they had kept her in center-city. But perhaps she
+was not even in Sector West.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Each of the eleven sectors into which the Earth was divided was
+controlled by one of the two cartels, as an agricultural or industrial
+appendage of the western metropolis. It was a paternal relationship,
+although no comparable city had been permitted to develop and company
+mercenaries policed the sectors.
+
+Children who exhibited any spark of initiative or ability were skimmed
+off from the hinterland to Sector West and thrown into the competitive
+struggle of the general school. If they fought to the top there, they
+were integrated as adults into the hierarchy of the cartels.
+
+The rest became the labor force of Sector West, enrolled in Eric
+Young's union and crowded into the minimum housing. The teeming
+millions left in the hinterland were a plodding, uninspired mass
+content with trivialities. They felt neither ambition nor frustration.
+While the number of the mentally ill continued to multiply in Sector
+West, only a fraction of the hinterland population suffered the mental
+decay.
+
+Hunter fervently hoped United had taken Ann to one of the other
+sectors. Rescue would be easy. An experienced spaceman could out-talk,
+out-maneuver, and out-fight an entire hinterland battalion.
+
+Max Hunter took an autojet from the Roost to Mrs. Ames' residential
+apartment. Conservation of his capital no longer counted, but time
+did. If United had Ann's patent, Ann herself was expendable. Hunter
+had to make his move to save her before they knew what he was up to.
+It would be a difficult deal to pull off in the capital city, where
+operatives of both cartels swarmed everywhere.
+
+He left his blaster in his hotel room, to avoid an interrogation at
+any other metro-entry. Mrs. Ames' apartment residence was one place in
+the city where he had no need to go armed.
+
+Just outside center-city a single street of twentieth century houses,
+sheltered by the Palos Verdes Hills, had survived the devastation of
+the last war. In the beginning the street had been preserved as a
+museum piece while the cartel city had grown up around it. But with
+each passing generation, popular interest had waned. Eventually the
+houses had been sold.
+
+One was now operated by a religious cult. Two were enormously
+profitable party houses, where clients masqueraded in the amusing
+twentieth century costumes and passed a few short hours living with
+the quaint inconveniences of the past. The game had become so
+attractive that reservations were booked months in advance. The fourth
+relic remained unsold, slowly falling into ruin. The fifth belonged to
+Mrs. Ames.
+
+To satisfy a whim--originally it was no more than that, Mrs. Ames had
+assured Hunter many times--she had asked her husband to buy it for her
+some fifty years ago. After a space-liner accident left her a widow at
+thirty-five, she had moved into the house as a means of
+psychologically withdrawing from her grief.
+
+She never left it again. She found the old house an island in time, a
+magic escape from the chaos of her world.
+
+She took in four residents because she needed their credits to augment
+the income from her husband's estate, and the house was then
+officially listed as an apartment. Chance worked her a miracle--or
+perhaps the house did possess a magic of its own--for the residents
+were as charmed by its inconveniences as Mrs. Ames had been. Ann
+wouldn't consider living anywhere else, although the house was more
+than a mile from her university. Even Hunter felt the indefinable
+spell, when he was in from a flight and went to see Ann.
+
+It was a house that invited relaxation. It was a house where time
+seemed to be stated in a value that could not be measured with
+credits. It was a house that whispered, "I saw one world fall into
+dust; yours is no more eternal"--and, for a moment, that whisper made
+the cartel-jungle meaningless.
+
+
+V
+
+Hunter left his autojet on the parking flat behind the house. He fed
+enough coins in the meter to hold the car for twenty-four hours. He
+didn't know how fast he'd want an autojet after he talked to Mrs.
+Ames, but he didn't want a chance passer-by to pick up his car if the
+charter expired.
+
+It was necessary for him to ring a bell manually, by means of a metal
+button fixed to the wooden frame of the front door. No scanner
+announced his arrival, nor did any soundless auto-door respond to a
+beam transmitted from within the house. After a time Hunter heard
+footsteps. A strange woman--probably a new resident who had taken
+Ann's place--opened the door.
+
+"I'm Captain Hunter," he said. "I came to see Mrs. Ames."
+
+"Won't you come in, Captain?" the woman replied.
+
+She led him into a front room which, Ann had once told him, had been
+called a living room. A peculiar name, surely, for the room appeared
+to have been designed solely as a place to sit while watching
+Tri-D--or flat-screen television, as it had been called in its early
+developmental stage when the house was new--or to hear someone play
+the bulky instrument known as a piano.
+
+The room was an example of the appalling waste of space so common to
+the twentieth century. It was extremely spacious, but neither food
+tubes nor bed drawers were concealed in the walls.
+
+Hunter had always been curious about the piano. It amazed him that it
+had been operated entirely by hand. There was no electric scanner to
+read the mood of the player and interpret it in melody. Driven to
+contrive his own harmonics, how could the twentieth century man have
+derived any satisfaction at all from music? His sensibilities had been
+immature, of course. But even so, an instrument which demanded so much
+individual creativeness must have been an enormous frustration.
+
+Since so many surviving twentieth century machines made the same
+demand on the individual--their automobiles, for example, had been
+individually directed, without any sort of electronic safety
+control--it had puzzled both Hunter and Ann that the incidence of
+maladjustment in the past had been so low.
+
+The captain dropped into a comfortable, chintz-covered rocking
+chair--one relic in this island of time that he really enjoyed. "Will
+you tell Mrs. Ames I'm here?" he asked the stranger.
+
+"I'm Mrs. Ames."
+
+"I mean Mrs. _Janice_ Ames--the owner of the house."
+
+The woman smiled woodenly. "You're speaking to her, Captain, though I
+must say I don't remember ever having met you before."
+
+"You don't remember--"
+
+Fear clutched at his heart. He sprang up, moving toward her with
+clenched fists. "An hour ago I called Mrs. Ames from the spaceport. I
+saw her. Here--in this room."
+
+"I've owned this house all my life, Captain." Her expression was more
+than good acting. She spoke with utter conviction, and seemed
+completely sure of herself. "You must be--" She hesitated and looked
+at him sharply. "Have you checked your adjustment index recently?"
+
+"I haven't lost my mind, if that's what you're getting at," he said.
+"Where's Ann Saymer?"
+
+"Believe me, please. The name is totally unfamiliar to me." The woman
+was painfully sympathetic--and frankly scared. She backed away from
+him. "You need help from the clinic, Captain. Will you let me call
+them for you?"
+
+Suddenly the light fell full on her face, and Hunter saw the tiny,
+still-unhealed scalpel wounds on both sides of her skull. The light
+glowed on the microscopic filament of platinum wire clumsily left
+projecting through the incision.
+
+He understood, then. This woman was wearing one of Ann's patented
+grids, sealed into her cerebral cortex. It made her into a robot,
+responding with unquestioning obedience to the direction of Ann's
+transmitter. And Hunter had no doubt that United manipulated the
+transmission.
+
+Simultaneously he realized something else. If the cartel went to this
+extreme to forestall his search for Ann, she must still be alive. For
+some reason they still needed her. Possibly her patent drawings had
+been submitted for government registry in such a way that only Ann
+understood them.
+
+Ann had been through the general school, and knew what the score was.
+She would have protected her invention--and incidentally insured her
+own survival--if she could have possibly done so, even at a fearful
+risk to herself.
+
+Hunter swung toward the door. It did not occur to him to call the
+police, since they were all cartel mercenaries. Whatever he did to
+help Ann, he would have to do on his own. Until he found her, he could
+count on help from Consolidated. After that--nothing.
+
+He jerked open the front door--and froze. Three men were waiting on
+the porch with drawn blasters. Hunter had no time to recognize facial
+features which it might have been to his advantage to remember later,
+no time to find any identifying insignia on their tunics. With a
+barely visible flickering fire arced from one of the weapons, and pain
+exploded in his body, unconsciousness washed into his brain.
+
+His first sensation when the paralysis began to wear off was the dull
+ache of visceral nausea. He opened his eyes, and saw, bleakly
+shadowed, the living room of the Ames house. It was after dark, which
+could only mean that he had lain there nearly four hours. To knock him
+out for that period of time, they must have given him a nearly lethal
+charge from the blaster calculated just under the limit of physical
+endurance.
+
+His motor control and his sense of touch returned more slowly. For a
+quarter of an hour he lay helpless in the chintz-covered rocker,
+feeling nothing but a tingling, like pin-pricks of fire, in his arms
+and legs.
+
+He looked down and saw that he held a blaster in his hand--his own
+blaster, which he had left in his room in the Roost. He did not yet
+have the neural control to release his fingers from the firing dial.
+
+As his sense of hearing was restored, he became aware that the Tri D
+had been left on. The screen pictured the swirling confusion of a mob.
+An announcer was describing the sudden outburst of labor violence
+which had occurred in the industrial district that afternoon. Eric
+Young's U.F.W. had gone on strike against a dozen separate plants.
+
+Essential plants, naturally. Everything was always essential, and
+government spokesmen always made pretty speeches deploring the
+situation. It was a pattern familiar to Hunter for years. One of the
+cartels would pay Young to strike factories belonging to the other.
+Then a second bribe, paid by the struck cartel, bought off the strike.
+Occasionally a sop of bonus credits had to be dished out to the
+faithful.
+
+It was not a maneuver either Consolidated or United used frequently,
+because the advantage was transitory, and the only long-term winner
+was Eric Young.
+
+This time there was a slight variation in the formula. Young had
+struck plants of both cartels. That puzzled Hunter, but any curiosity
+he felt was subordinate to his disgust. How much longer would this
+farce go on before it dawned on the rank and file of the U.F.W. that
+Eric Young was playing them all for suckers? Hunter tried to get up to
+snap off the telecast. He managed only to throw himself awkwardly over
+the arm of the chair.
+
+And then he saw the body on the floor--the body of the genuine Mrs.
+Ames, charred by a ragged blaster wound seared through her breast.
+They had murdered her--naturally with his blaster--and left him at the
+scene, neatly framed for the crime.
+
+Hunter heard--right on cue--the whine of a police siren outside.
+Everything timed to trap him just as the motor paralysis wore off!
+With an effort that brought beads of sweat to his forehead, he dropped
+his blaster and pushed himself out of the chair. His feet were numb.
+He moved a few steps and banged into the piano. Clawing for support,
+his hands crashed in jangling discord on the keys.
+
+The siren swelled loud in front of the house. Hunter heard the
+drum-beat of boots on the porch. He stumbled toward the kitchen--and
+fell into the arms of two police officers who had entered from the
+rear of the house.
+
+He swung his fist; the fingers felt like clods of wet clay. One of the
+mercenaries caught his wrist and held it easily. In the gloom Hunter
+saw the Consolidated insignia on the man's jacket, and the guard
+whispered quickly, "This deal was a set-up, Hunter--packaged evidence,
+dropped at headquarters ten minutes ago."
+
+Hunter stared. "Accusing me by name? Get this straight! Four hours ago
+they put me under with a blaster and--"
+
+"It's a United frame," the guard said. "They want you out for good.
+The top brass of Consolidated is giving you the green right down the
+line. The fastest out Jake and I could figure--" He jerked his head
+toward his companion. "--was to give the United boys on our team the
+front of the house, and let you make a break for it from the back.
+We'll fake enough here to protect ourselves."
+
+They pushed a blaster into Hunter's hands. He stumbled through the
+kitchen as the front door gave and two United mercenaries burst into
+the house. Hunter ran awkwardly, without full control of his legs.
+
+He saw, looming black against the night shadows, the oval silhouette
+of the autojet on the Ames flat, still held under his twenty-four hour
+charter. It offered a tempting means of escape, but a public car was
+too easily traced and brought down by police tracers. However, it
+could perform a miracle as a diversion.
+
+
+VI
+
+Hunter slid into the car, punched out a destination blindly, and
+engaged the flight gear. With the customary roar of power, the car
+shot up from the flat. Hunter leaped free. His feet struck the cement.
+The lingering trace of paralysis, destroying his normal co-ordination,
+made the fall very painful.
+
+Hunter flung himself flat in the shadow of the ornamental shrubs along
+the edge of the parking flat. The four police mercenaries sprinted out
+of the house and leaped into the police jet. With sirens screaming,
+it soared up in pursuit of the empty autojet.
+
+Hunter estimated that he had perhaps thirty minutes before they sent
+out a general alarm. A painfully small margin of safety. Where could
+he hide that the machines of detection--the skilled, emotionless,
+one-track, electronic brains--would not eventually find him? And what
+of Ann Saymer? What could he do as a fugitive to save her?
+
+United had planned it all down to the smallest detail. But that was
+the way the cartels operated. It was the system Hunter was accustomed
+to. He felt neither anger not resentment, simply a determination to
+out-plan and out-play the enemy.
+
+If he accepted defeat he would admit frustration, and for Captain Max
+Hunter that was impossible. Hadn't he survived a decade of frontier
+conflict with an adjustment index of zero-zero? Instead of hopelessly
+weighing the odds stacked against him, he counted the advantage which
+a single man held in maneuverability and rapid change of pace.
+
+He walked along the museum street, the blaster in his hand. A block
+away rose the bulk of a factory building and behind it towered the
+monster of center-city, transformed into a fairyland by the glow of
+lights on the many levels. Hunter's eye followed the pattern up toward
+the top, hidden above the blanket of haze.
+
+The top! Luxury casinos and the castles of the cartels. Werner von
+Rausch and his empire of United Researchers. Werner von Rausch, who
+gave orders and Ann Saymer disappeared. Werner von Rausch, who gave
+new orders and Mrs. Ames lay murdered in her living room.
+
+But behind the façade of his spacefleet and his private army, behind
+his police mercenaries, Werner von Rausch was one man--an old man,
+Hunter had been told--and a vulnerable target. Hunter weighed his
+changes, and the margin of success seemed to be balanced in his favor.
+
+It was not what they would expect him to do. They had framed him for
+murder and he should now be running for his life. The hunted turned
+hunter. Hunter grinned savagely, enjoying his pun.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He slipped the blaster under his belt, leaving the scarlet jacket open
+to his navel so that the loose folds would conceal the outline of the
+weapon. He would have no trouble reaching the top level.
+
+The resort casinos, like the mid-city amusement area, were open to any
+citizen. Special autojets, with destinations pre-set for the casino
+flat, were available in every monorail terminal. Hunter could by-pass
+a probe inspection at a regular metro-entry. The nearest terminal,
+from the north-coast line, was less than a quarter of a mile away.
+
+As Hunter entered the industrial district he heard the turmoil of an
+angry crowd. He came upon them suddenly, swarming at the gates of a
+factory close to the terminal.
+
+Eric Young's trouble-makers, he thought with a worried frown, jumping
+obediently when the big boss spoke the word. In less than five years
+Eric Young had turned the union into a third cartel, more powerful
+than Consolidated or United because the commodity Young
+controlled--human labor--was essential to the other two.
+
+A third cartel! Suddenly Max Hunter understood why the cartels had to
+have Ann's patent at any cost. The absolute control of the human mind!
+It was the only weapon which Consolidated or United could use to break
+Young's power.
+
+Hunter shouldered his way through the strikers toward the terminal.
+Though he wore no U.F.W. disc, he felt no alarm. Eric Young's strike
+riots were always well-managed. None of the violence was real and no
+one was ever seriously hurt.
+
+But these trouble-makers seemed absurdly well-disciplined. They stood
+in drill-team ranks, moving and shouting abuse in perfect unison. Then
+Hunter saw their faces, as blank as death masks--and in all their
+skulls the still unhealed scalpel wound, as well as an occasional
+projecting platinum strand which sometimes caught the reflected light.
+
+Max Hunter felt a chill of terror. He was walking in a human graveyard
+of living automatons, responding to the transmission from Ann's
+machine. United had lost no time in putting the thing to work. This
+was no ordinary strike, but the opening skirmish in the conflict that
+would wreck both Consolidated and the Union of Free Workers.
+
+Hunter entered the monorail terminal. It was deserted except for a
+woman who stood by the window looking out at the crowd. She was
+wearing a demure, pink dress. Her face was plain, and she had used no
+cosmetic plasti-skin to make it more striking. Her brown hair,
+streaked with a gray which she took no trouble to hide, was pulled
+into a bun at the back of her neck.
+
+Surprisingly, Hunter thought she was pretty, perhaps because she was
+so different from the eternal, baby-faced adolescent who thronged the
+city in a million identical duplications.
+
+Hunter knew he had seen her before. He couldn't remember where. She
+shifted her position slightly and the light cast a sharp, angular
+shadow on her face. Then he knew.
+
+"Dawn!" he cried.
+
+Startled, she turned to face him with a strange look in her eyes.
+
+"I was hoping you wouldn't recognize me, Captain Hunter," she said.
+
+"What are you doing here--dressed like some dowdy just in from a farm
+sector?" he asked, his gaze incredulous.
+
+"We're all of us a mixture of different personalities," she replied.
+"I work for an entertainment house, yes. But I also have some of the
+qualities of your Ann Saymer. Don't take offense, please. Ann and I
+are both interested in the maladjusted. She wants a quick cure. I'm
+looking for the cause."
+
+"Here?"
+
+"Wherever there are people who face an emotional crisis--the men who
+come to Number thirty-four, or a mob of strikers. I want to know why
+we react in the way we do, and what makes up the frustration pattern
+that crowds us across the borderline into insanity."
+
+"You sound like a psychiatrist," he said.
+
+"I hold a First, Captain Hunter."
+
+"And you work in an entertainment house?"
+
+"Tell me about yourself, Captain. Have you found Ann yet?"
+
+He looked away quickly.
+
+"No," he said, his face hardening.
+
+"And you still haven't had a chance to use your blaster?"
+
+He directed an appraising glance at her. The question might imply a
+great deal. Did she somehow know what had happened at Mrs. Ames'? Did
+she know he was a fugitive?
+
+A dozen police mercenaries appeared abruptly at the end of the street.
+Since the police had never been used to break a strike, Hunter guessed
+that this was Consolidated's answer to Werner von Rausch's new weapon.
+
+The mercenaries drew their blasters and ordered the mob to disperse.
+The automatons turned to face them. And as they turned they fell
+silent--the cloying, choking silence of the tomb. Like marching
+puppets, the mob moved toward the police. Clearly Hunter could hear a
+shrill voice ordering them to halt.
+
+Hunter felt a sickening inner horror. How could the mob obey when they
+heard nothing but the enslaving grid, and responded to neither fear
+nor reason? Still they moved forward, in a robot death march. Whatever
+happened, it was a situation Young could turn to his advantage. If the
+mercenaries killed unarmed workers, it could be turned into superb
+propaganda. And ultimately, by sheer weight of numbers, the
+defenseless mob could overwhelm the mercenaries.
+
+White fire leaped from the blasters. The first rank fell, but the mob
+marched blindly across the smoking corpses. The mercenaries fired
+again. It was slaughter--brutal and pointless--of slaves unaware of
+their danger, unable to save themselves.
+
+Without understanding his own motivation--and without caring--Max
+Hunter leaped into the sill of the terminal window. There he was in a
+position to fire over the heads of the mob. The blast from his weapon
+arrowed into the line of police mercenaries.
+
+Three fell in the agony of the flames. The rest, glad for an excuse to
+stop the slaughter, turned and fled. Like clockwork things, the mob
+turned back and resumed its precision demonstration in front of the
+factory.
+
+Hunter slipped white-faced into a terminal bench. His hand trembled as
+he jammed the blaster back beneath his belt.
+
+"Why did you do it, Captain?" Dawn asked.
+
+How could he answer her, without saying he had seen the grids in their
+skulls? And he wasn't ready to trust Dawn to that extent.
+
+"The people couldn't help themselves," he said ambiguously.
+
+"Because they're in the U.F.W. and Eric Young cracks the whip. Is that
+what you mean?"
+
+"They weren't aware of their own danger."
+
+"Miscalculating the risks then? But that's part of the system,
+Captain. If you can't fight your way up to the top--"
+
+"Then the system is utterly vicious."
+
+"You don't mean that," she said.
+
+"Why not? We're living in a jungle society. It's nothing but
+conflict--conflict on the frontier and conflict here from the time
+they put you in the general school."
+
+"Only the children who have the intelligence--"
+
+"But why?" he interrupted fiercely. "Where does it get us?"
+
+"We have a stable society," she told him. "Peace of a sort. Law
+enforcement, too, and a chance to build something better when we learn
+how."
+
+"Something better?" He laughed as he stood up. "We'll get that when we
+pull this hell apart, and not before."
+
+She put her hand on his arm. "No, Captain. It's not realistic to say
+that. Over and over again in the past we wrecked civilization because
+good-hearted and conscientious people thought there was no other way
+to create a finer world. It didn't work, because violence is madness.
+This time we have to begin where we are and build rationally. We can,
+you know, when we understand what we have to build with."
+
+"What else do we need to know, Dawn? You're falling back on the
+typical double-talk of the psychiatrists. With all the application of
+physical science that we have--"
+
+"I wasn't thinking of technology, Captain. Civilization isn't
+machines. It's people. Our accumulation of knowledge is tremendous,
+but essentially it means nothing because we know so little about
+ourselves. It's absurd to talk of making something better until we
+really know the individual we're making it for."
+
+"Go ahead," he countered angrily. "Pussy-foot around with your
+cautious experiments, make sure nobody gets hurt--and you'll all end
+up slaves. As for me, I'm going to find Ann and get out while there's
+still time."
+
+"Always the same two alternatives," Dawn said wearily. "Pull down the
+world, or run away from it. We need the courage to try something
+different. We need men who will act like men. I thought, Captain, by
+this time--" She looked up into his eyes. "Where are you going?"
+
+"To the top--the casinos." Her abrupt question took him off balance
+and almost surprised him into telling the whole truth.
+
+"Top level." She paused, studying his face. "That's logical, of
+course. You'll rescue your woman and run away--perhaps to the
+frontier, or to a forgotten world too insignificant to be claimed by
+either cartel. It all sounds so easy, doesn't it? You have friends in
+the service. They'll smuggle you away from Sector West." She hesitated
+again. "Running away is insanity, too, Captain. But that is one thing
+you still have to learn."
+
+
+VII
+
+Max Hunter rode the autojet to the casino. As the machine rose past
+the city levels, he found himself thinking less about Ann and a good
+deal more about Dawn--a Recreational companion woman who was
+simultaneously a psychiatrist. Where did she really fit in the subtle
+battle between the titan cartels? Which of them was her ally--or did
+Dawn represent another element as yet unidentified?
+
+Knowing Ann Saymer had taught Hunter a wholesome respect for the
+thinking of a First in Psychiatry. They operated with a deviousness
+that made cartel treacheries seem like child's play. He knew that Dawn
+had manipulated their conversation in the terminal to her own ends.
+Behind that deftly-phrased patter of words, what else had she tried to
+tell him? And what had she tried to find out? "Top level," she had
+said. "That's logical." Why logical? Logical to whom? Did she know
+where he was going and why?
+
+The autojet thudded on the casino flat. A female attendant, robed in a
+skin-colored sheath bright with amber jewels, held open the cab door
+for him. Hunter entered the nearest casino. At the door he showed his
+saving record in the Solar First National Fund, and a casino teller
+issued him a ten thousand credit limit, the smallest denomination
+available. The resorts weren't wasting effort on pikers.
+
+Although the casinos everywhere in the system were popular with
+spacemen, Hunter had never been to the top level before because Ann
+had seen to it that his surplus credits went into their savings.
+
+It was Hunter's opinion that he hadn't missed much. The Los Angeles
+resorts duplicated, on an elaborate scale, the most unsavory
+establishments of the frontier. Anything which by any stretch of a
+perverted imagination could be defined as entertainment was
+available--at a price.
+
+It was early and the crowd was still small. It consisted of spacemen
+on the usual furlough binge, a handful of suburbanites who had
+hoarded a half-year's savings for this one-night fling in the big
+resorts, and a dozen bright-faced executives from the lower levels of
+the cartel hierarchy. The big brass would turn up later on, at a more
+fashionable hour.
+
+At all costs, Hunter had to keep himself inconspicuous. His uniform
+was not entirely out of place, although Consolidated did issue its
+commanders a formal outfit--more gold braid, a jeweled insignia, and a
+jacket cut to emphasize the broad shoulders.
+
+Hunter stopped at the snack bar and wolfed a plate of cold cuts, the
+first food he had eaten since morning. Then he moved indirectly across
+the pillared gambling pavilion, pausing at two tables to place bets.
+His objective was to find a vantage point in the upper floor of the
+casino where he could observe the geographic layout of the top level.
+
+He slipped quickly into the dark well of an emergency stairway,
+feeling reasonably sure that no one had seen him leave the game room.
+More than half an hour had passed since he had fled Mrs. Ames' rooming
+house and he was convinced that very shortly--if they had not done so
+already--the police would put out a general alarm.
+
+As a matter of course, there would be inquiries at the top level, but
+at first they would be made by police mercenaries. No one in the
+casino had any reason to identify Hunter as the fugitive. Later on, of
+course, when the police used electronic trackers, he wouldn't stand a
+chance. But before that happened he intended to make a deal with
+Werner von Rausch.
+
+At the top of the stairs he found a tower window which afforded a
+crow's nest view of the top level. The twelve casinos, bright with
+lights, occupied more than half the area. Beyond the resort parkland
+was the small, white government building, dignified by its simplicity
+among so much ostentation. Beside it was the transparent semi-sphere
+housing the top landing of the center-city lifts. A third structure--a
+grotesque mechanical monster trapped in the heart of a spider-web of
+converging wires--was the power distribution center for the top level.
+
+In back of the government building a high, metal-faced fence knifed
+across the level. That fence guarded the forbidden home-ground of the
+titans. Hunter could see the silhouette of the cartel castles rising
+against the sky, two gigantic masses of stone. The one on the west was
+Farren's; the eastern one, Von Rausch's. That much and no more was
+common knowledge.
+
+Were the two families, who had fought for so long to control the
+empire beyond the stars, on speaking terms here? Did they observe the
+social amenities in the same spirit that their companies enforced the
+sham peace on earth? In their lonely, lofty isolation, what
+amusements did they enjoy? What contributed to the enrichment of the
+lives of those fragile beings who possessed the wealth of the galaxy?
+
+Hunter was sure no armed guards patrolled the forbidden paradise.
+There was no need for them, for scanners formed a protective grid over
+the area. An autojet, attempting a landing from any direction, would
+break a beam and instantly become the target for the autoblasters
+erected at intervals along the fence. A man attempting to scale the
+wall would meet the same lethal charge.
+
+Hunter saw one small gate with an identification screen mounted in
+front of it. Obviously the gate would open to the handprint of a Von
+Rausch or a Farren. But a stranger would find himself standing in the
+line of fire of two blasters, conspicuous over the gate.
+
+The scanners, the blasters, the identification screen--all the
+complex, electronic watchdogs--depended solely upon power. Countless
+other people, Hunter knew, had realized that. Only mechanically
+produced power made the area invulnerable. Anyone could break through
+the fence. It hadn't been done before, perhaps, because no other man
+had ever had Hunter's motivation. None had been a fugitive on the run.
+
+Hunter made his way out of the casino and crossed the park in the
+direction of the government building. Sheltered by the trees from the
+blaze of light, he was able to see the stars, bright in the velvet
+sky. The endless universe! Somewhere he could find a haven for himself
+and Ann, a pinprick of light in the high-arching firmament which the
+cartels had overlooked.
+
+Dawn had said that running away was madness. But what alternative did
+he have? To stay, and attempt to make the cartel rat-race over,
+sweetly and rationally so that no one would be hurt? Hunter laughed
+bitterly. Von Rausch had the Exorciser, and he could keep it. It would
+be part of the bargain the captain thought he could make to save Ann.
+With that weapon, Von Rausch would sooner or later tear his own world
+to shreds. No man in his right mind would want to stay around to pick
+up the pieces--if any. He drew his blaster and took careful aim at the
+power distribution center.
+
+The machine exploded. Burning wires sang in the air. In the casinos
+the lights winked out, and the entertainment machines went dark.
+Hunter heard the shrill screaming of the trapped crowd. He knew that
+it would bring the police running, but he also knew they would have
+arrived shortly in any case. The important thing was that the
+electronic watchdogs on the wall were now lifeless.
+
+Hunter blasted open the gate, and took the path that led east.
+
+The Von Rausch castle--and the word was scarcely a metaphor--was
+something lifted bodily out of a Tri-D historical romance, complete
+with porticos, battlements, stone-walled towers and an imitation moat
+where mechanical swans floated on the dark water.
+
+He crossed the moat on a rustic footbridge of plastic cleverly
+fabricated to seem like crudely hewn wood. Through a high, narrow
+window he saw a pale flicker of light. The pane was thick with grime.
+
+Hunter could distinguish nothing in the room except a thin, elderly
+woman who seemed to be moving around a table where six candles burned
+in a silver candelabrum.
+
+He kicked open the window. The woman looked at him, neither frightened
+nor alarmed. She was wearing an odd black dress, long-sleeved,
+high-necked, with a hemline that touched the floor. Her face was pale
+and wrinkled, unrelieved by any sort of cosmetic.
+
+She held out her fragile hands. "You did come, Karl! I knew you
+wouldn't disappoint Auntie."
+
+Hunter cried through clenched teeth, "I want Werner von Rausch. Where
+is he?"
+
+"Goodness, dear, how should I know? Werner never comes to my parties."
+
+Hunter noticed the table, then, set for eight, its gleaming silver and
+gold-rimmed china glowing in the soft candle light.
+
+"Your Cousin Charlotte's already here, Karl." The woman gestured
+gracefully toward the table. "And little Helmig. They know how
+important it is to come on time."
+
+He felt horror--and unconscious pity--as he realized the truth. Yet he
+tried once more to get from her the information he wanted.
+
+"Oh, bother with Werner," she answered, pouting. "If you must know, I
+didn't even invite him. He's such a bore among young people."
+
+She saw the blaster in Hunter's hand and pushed it aside gently, with
+a grimace of disapproval. "I don't like you to have these toys, Karl.
+Next thing, you'll be wanting to join the army."
+
+Hunter flung himself out of that room, into a dark and musty hall.
+Behind him he heard the woman still talking, as if he had never left
+her. He blundered from one bleak room to another, rooms that were like
+tombs smelling of dust and decay.
+
+On the second floor he came upon a small, balding man who sat reading
+at a desk in a room crammed with tottering stacks of old books. The
+light came from an antiquated electric lamp. Obviously the house had
+its own generating plant, independent of the power center Hunter had
+destroyed.
+
+Hunter jerked up his blaster again. "Werner von Rausch?"
+
+"One moment," the man said. Ignoring Hunter, the man quietly finished
+what he was reading, slipped a leather placemark into the book, and
+put it on top of a stack beside the desk. The pile promptly collapsed
+in a cloud of dust at Hunter's feet.
+
+Max saw some of the title pages. The books were extraordinarily old,
+some of them with a printing date a thousand years in the past. The
+man pinched a pair of eye-glasses on his nose and studied Hunter
+carefully.
+
+"You're from the police, I presume?" he asked.
+
+"If you are Werner von Rausch--"
+
+"I'm Heinrich. I sent in the report. Though, I must say, you couldn't
+have come at a more inconvenient time. I'm collating the spells
+tonight. I have them all, right here at my fingertips. And when I'm
+finished--" He seized the captain's jacket and his voice was suddenly
+shrill. "--I'll have the power to summon up any demon from hell. Think
+what that means! I'll be greater than Faust. I'll have more power
+than--"
+
+"Where can I find Werner von Rausch?"
+
+"Yes, Werner. Poor boy." Heinrich was calm again. "You'll have to do
+your duty, officer. He's been annoying me all afternoon. So much
+noise--a man can't think. He's in his shop at the end of the hall. But
+don't be too severe with him. Perhaps this time just a warning will
+make him see reason."
+
+Hunter went back to the corridor, feeling again the shadow of horror
+at this sick distortion of reality. In the distance, beyond the metal
+fence, he heard the scream of sirens, and realized he had at best
+another three minutes before the police would be there. Three minutes
+to make a deal with Werner and save Ann.
+
+Hunter pushed back the nightmare that welled up from the depths of his
+mind. It wasn't true; it couldn't be true. If it were, nothing in the
+jungle made sense.
+
+
+VIII
+
+As he felt his way along the hall, he passed the cage of a lift, a
+private transit between the house and the cartel offices on the city
+levels below. He noted it subconsciously, as a possible means of
+escape. But he was through running. He could make a deal with Von
+Rausch. After that the police wouldn't matter.
+
+At the end of the corridor he came upon a paneled door. Behind it he
+could hear the hum of a motor, and knew that he had found Werner's
+shop, and the source of the noise that had disturbed Heinrich's
+research.
+
+Hunter flung open the door. The light was bright and gay. On the
+floor, a fat old man sat hunched over the remote control console of a
+toy monorail system. Toy space liners and fighting ships buzzed in the
+air.
+
+"Werner von Rausch?" Hunter whispered.
+
+"You've come to play with me!" The fat, old man flashed the cherubic
+smile of a child. "And you brought me a blaster. Oh, let me see it!
+Let me see it!"
+
+He clapped his hands eagerly.
+
+Hunter turned and fled. The scream of the sirens still seemed no
+closer, but without assessing his chances Hunter sprang into the
+private lift. It dropped downward toward its unknown destination. What
+that was, Hunter didn't care. Anything to escape from so hideous a
+madhouse.
+
+The Von Rausch clan: an old lady who lived with ghosts; a scholar of
+demonology; a patriarch lost in an eternal childhood. All of them
+running away into their own private fantasies.
+
+But this Was the family which ruled a cartel and directed the conquest
+of half the galaxy; these were the most powerful human beings who had
+ever lived. And they were escaping into insanity. Escaping what?
+Responsibility? The jungle of the cartels?
+
+"Two alternatives," Dawn had said. "Pull down the world or run away
+from it." The Von Rausches had made this mess and then fled in horror
+from their own brutal and destructive creation.
+
+The lift cage jerked to a stop. The door opened on a warmly lighted
+executive office where a white-haired man sat at a desk which had been
+cut from a single slab of Venusian crystal. A much enlarged projection
+of the United Researchers' emblem glowed from the Wall. Hunter raised
+his weapon.
+
+The old man gestured imperiously. "Don't be a fool, Captain. I
+wouldn't be here unless I had adequate protection. There are blasters
+in the wall, which I can trigger with a single spoken word."
+
+"You want to finish the job your men bungled this afternoon?"
+
+"Not our men, Captain. We got in on this deal a little late. We knew
+nothing about this psychiatric patent until the strikes started
+today."
+
+"But Ann Saymer--"
+
+"Unfortunately, we do not have her. It's Consolidated. We sent our men
+out to bring you in, Captain. We wanted your help. When you got away,
+it didn't occur to me that you would go to the top level. Not until we
+heard the report of the destruction of the power distributor. It was
+easy enough to anticipate your moves after that.
+
+"If you hadn't used the private Von Rausch lift, you would have gone
+out again through the gate, where my men were waiting. Naturally we
+couldn't send them inside. You can understand why, of course."
+
+Hunter heard only vaguely what the man was saying, for abruptly the
+pattern fell into place. Neither Consolidated nor United had Ann or
+the Exorciser. Each cartel suspected the other because they hadn't yet
+adjusted to the idea that a third cartel existed: Eric Young's union.
+
+Ann's micropic had told the literal truth. She had taken her
+commission-job with the biggest private clinic, operated by the
+U.F.W. It was a dead giveaway when Young struck both cartels
+simultaneously, if Hunter had read the data correctly.
+
+Hunter moved toward the crystal desk. "I know where Ann is, sir," he
+said. "I can--"
+
+"You can stay where you are," the old man interrupted. "One hour ago,
+my friend, I was ready to offer you a deal. Since then you've seen--"
+He raised his eyes toward the ceiling. "You've seen what's up there.
+Only four of us know that secret. We don't relish sharing it with a
+fifth."
+
+"Unless you destroy Ann's patent, you're finished anyway."
+
+"Destroy, Captain?" The senile voice turned silky. "No, we want that
+machine intact."
+
+"If you'll guarantee Ann's safety and mine--"
+
+"You have an exaggerated idea of your own importance. You would have
+been useful to us, particularly since you have been a Consolidated
+employee. But this thing you blundered into up there destroys your
+value entirely. It makes you potentially as dangerous as the Saymer
+patent. That's my opinion.
+
+"The other three who share the Von Rausch secret have an equal vote in
+deciding the issue. They may reverse my decision. I've asked them to
+come here, and I'm waiting for them now."
+
+The old man was so intent upon making a logical explanation of the
+death sentence he pronounced--without putting it into words--that he
+didn't notice Hunter edging closer to the desk. Captain Hunter saw no
+chance for a reprieve when the other three arrived. Why wait? Having
+fought on the frontier, Hunter was aware of a property of the Venusian
+crystal which possibly the old man did not know. It was impervious to
+blaster fire.
+
+Hunter acted with the split-second timing of an experienced spaceman.
+He swung his body in a flying tackle against the old man's chair and
+in the same swift motion pushed himself into the leg cubicle carved in
+the crystal.
+
+As the chair toppled and before he realized his own danger, the old
+man cried the code word that triggered the wall blasters. He was
+instantly caught in the deadly cross-fire.
+
+As the weapons slid back into the wall slots, Hunter leaped for the
+door, and passed quickly through it. The outer hall was empty. He
+sprinted for the walk-way, the echoes of the blast still ringing in
+his ears.
+
+A destination marker glowed above a nearby metro-entry. It told him he
+was on the Twenty-eighth level of center-city. On a large, public
+Tri-D screen Hunter saw a picture of the strike mob in the industrial
+area. That was all the data he needed. If the mob was still in the
+streets, Eric Young was still manipulating the transmitter.
+
+Hunter took an unchartered autojet and dialed as his destination the
+U.F.W. clinic. It was the largest structure in the industrial area,
+made from luminous, pink, Martian stone, which had been imported at
+great cost--and with a blaze of publicity.
+
+Completed only three years before, the U.F.W. clinic had been given a
+continuous flood of publicity. Numerous Tri-D public service programs
+had explored its wards, its laboratories, and its service centers, and
+even in a distant spaceship Hunter had not remained in ignorance of
+the build-up. The knowledge served to his advantage now, for he knew
+just where Young's personal penthouse was located and exactly how to
+reach it.
+
+There were no armed guards or automatic probes in the clinic. Such an
+outward display of force wouldn't have jibed with Young's public
+personality. He was the much-loved official head of a union whose
+membership totaled millions.
+
+Any protective device would have distorted the illusion and destroyed
+the legend completely.
+
+Young's penthouse, thirty floors above street level, was the modest
+garden cottage which had been so widely publicized and that, too, was
+a part of his illusion. When Hunter saw the tiny house he was able to
+appreciate Young's showmanship, his insight into the mental processes
+of the credulous.
+
+Hunter moved toward the door. Light glowed inside the cottage, but
+through the broad, front window he could see no one. He felt a
+momentary doubt. Had he guessed wrong? Was Young holding Ann somewhere
+else?
+
+But Hunter was sure Young had not taken that precaution. It would have
+involved risks he would not have to contend with at the clinic, unless
+he had been reasonably certain he would be found out. And Young had
+expected to prevent that by keeping Consolidated and United at each
+other's throats.
+
+Hunter kicked open the door. The three small rooms in the cottage were
+empty--until a man wearing a union smock emerged from the narrow
+galley. He hadn't been there a moment before when Hunter examined the
+cubicle, and there was no rear entry to the cottage.
+
+"Mr. Young isn't here, sir." The man said, gliding swiftly toward him.
+"If you wish to leave a message--"
+
+Hunter saw the telltale grid wire in the stranger's forehead. He
+ducked aside instinctively as the knife gleamed in the man's hand.
+With an odd, sighing sound, the blade arched through the air, smashing
+the picture window. Hunter's fist shot out, and the man dropped
+unconscious.
+
+Hunter went into the galley and found what he had missed before--the
+false bank of food slots which masked a narrow stairway. He ran
+quickly down the steps, and found the opulent living quarters Eric
+Young had concealed on the clinic floor beneath the innocent garden
+cottage. Here in gaudy splendor, in the tasteless clutter of objects
+assembled from every quarter of the cartel empire, was the true index
+to the infinite ambition of the U.F.W. boss.
+
+A dozen men and women lurched at Hunter from an open hall. They wore
+white hospital robes and their foreheads were still bandaged.
+Obviously they were patients with recently grafted slave grids.
+Obedient to the transmission, they fought with a desperate, savage
+fury--and a clumsy lack of co-ordination which caricatured normal
+human behavior.
+
+Hunter repulsed their attack without difficulty. Yet he felt an inner
+disgust and loathing as if he were using his strength to defeat
+helpless children. In two minutes it was over. One of the men was
+dead, his head bandage torn loose, and the grid ripped out of his
+skull. Three more lay sprawled out on the floor, bleeding badly from
+freshly opened incisions.
+
+Hunter drew his blaster and entered the thickly-carpeted hall, glowing
+with the soft, pink light of the luminous, Martian stone. He cried
+Ann's name. His voice fell hollowly in the silence, but there was no
+response. He moved to the end of the hall and pushed open a narrow
+door.
+
+He saw the white-tiled laboratory, Ann's transmitter standing on a
+long table with new platinum grids piled by the dozen beside it, and
+the barrack rows of hospital beds. From the angle of the room which
+was hidden by the half-open door, Ann Saymer ran toward him with
+outstretched hands, crying his name. He took a step toward her. And
+something struck the back of his head.
+
+
+IX
+
+Hunter's mind rocked. He felt himself falling down the long spiral
+into unconsciousness. The blaster slipped from his hand and his knees
+buckled. But he clawed blindly, with animal instinct, at the hands
+closing on his throat.
+
+His head cleared. He saw Eric Young's dark face close to his. Hunter
+swung his fist into Young's stomach, and the hands slid away from his
+throat. Captain Hunter sprang to his feet, crouching low to meet
+Young's next attack. Young's swing went wild. Hunter's fist struck at
+the flabby jaw. Eric Young backed away, reeling under the hammer
+blows, until he came up against the laboratory table.
+
+Suddenly he slashed at Hunter with a scalpel. The blade nicked Max's
+shoulder and cut across his jacket. The cloth parted, sliding down his
+arms and pinning his hands together. In the split-second it took
+Hunter to free himself from the torn jacket, Young swung the scalpel
+again. Hunter dodged. Miscalculating his aim, Eric Young tripped over
+Hunter's outstretched leg and fell, screaming, upon the point of his
+own weapon.
+
+Hunter stood for an instant with his legs spread wide, looking down at
+Young. Then he dropped to his knees and rolled the grievously wounded
+man over on his back. The hand grasping the scalpel slowly pulled the
+blade from the abdominal wound. Blood pulsed out upon the white tile.
+Young was still barely alive.
+
+Hunter walked toward the transmitter, where Ann stood, saying nothing,
+her eyes wide and staring. A tremendous conflict was raging within
+him. Running away was no solution, but what if he could destroy the
+system itself? Break the mold and start anew.
+
+He had the instrument that would do it, the hundreds of obedient
+slaves Young had already turned loose on the streets. With Ann's
+transmitter he could transform the disciplined strike of human
+automatons into a civic disaster. Terror and violence uprooting the
+foundations of the city.
+
+But a moment's madness could not overthrow the enduring rationality of
+Hunter's adjustment index. To loose that horror was to set himself in
+judgment upon the dreams and hopes, the perversion and the sublimity,
+of his fellow men. To play at God--a delusion no different from Eric
+Young's.
+
+Savagely Hunter lifted a chair and started to swing it at the
+transmitter. Instantly, Ann Saymer turned to face him, the blaster
+clasped tightly in her hand.
+
+"No, Max."
+
+"But, Ann, those people outside are in desperate danger--"
+
+"I've gone this far. I _won't_ turn back." In her voice was the
+familiar drive, the ambition he knew so well. But now it seemed
+different, a twisted distortion of something he had once admired.
+
+"We don't need Eric Young," she said. "He's bungled everything. You
+and I, Max--" She caressed the transmitter affectionately. "With this,
+we'll possess unlimited power."
+
+"You mean, Ann--" He choked on the words. "You came here of your own
+free will? You deliberately planned Mrs. Ames' murder?"
+
+"She was dangerous, Max. She guessed too much. We knew that when we
+monitored the call you made from the spaceport. But in the beginning
+we weren't going to make you responsible. We thought the strangers in
+the house--your attempt to expose the other woman who called herself
+Mrs. Ames--would be enough to get you committed to a clinic. I didn't
+want you to be hurt, Max."
+
+"Why, Ann?" His voice was dead, emotionless. "Because you loved me? Or
+because you wanted me to be your ace in the hole, if you failed to
+manage Eric Young the way you thought you could?"
+
+"That doesn't matter now, Max, dear. I thought Eric had what I
+needed. But I was misjudging you all along."
+
+"You're still misjudging me, Ann. I'm going to smash this machine and
+afterward--"
+
+"No you aren't, Max," she said coldly. "I'll kill you first."
+
+Calmly she turned the dial on the blaster. He lifted the chair again,
+watching her face, still unable to accept what he knew was true. This
+was Ann Saymer, the woman he had loved. It was the same Ann whose
+ambition had driven her from the general school to a First in
+Psychiatry.
+
+With a fighting man's instinct, Hunter calculated his chances as he
+held the chair high above his head. It was Ann who had to die. He
+would accomplish nothing if he smashed her transmitter. She knew how
+to build another. If he threw the chair at her rather than the
+Exorciser and if he threw it hard enough--
+
+From the door a fan of flame blazed out, gently touching Ann. She
+stood rigid in the first muscular tension of paralysis. Hunter dropped
+the chair, shattering the transmitter. He turned and saw Dawn in the
+doorway. Somewhere deep in his subconscious mind he had expected her.
+He was glad she was there.
+
+"We've known for a long time we would have to break up their little
+partnership," Dawn explained. "After I talked to you this morning,
+Captain, I persuaded the others to hold off for another day or so. A
+clinical experiment of my own.
+
+"It was unkind of me, I suppose, to make you the guinea pig. But I
+wanted to watch your reactions while you fought your way to the truth.
+Now you know it all--more than you bargained for. And you know what
+we're trying to do. Are you willing to join us?"
+
+He looked at her.
+
+"In your third alternative--the cautious, rational rebuilding?"
+
+"After men understand themselves. When we're able to answer one
+question: why did you and Ann Saymer, with identical backgrounds, and
+intelligence, and an identical socio-economic incentive, become such
+different personalities? What gives you a zero-zero adjustment index
+that nothing can shake? Not the psychiatric shock of war, Captain. Not
+physical pain alone or the treachery of the girl you love. We need
+you, Captain. We need to know what makes you tick."
+
+"That 'we' of yours. Just what does that embrace?"
+
+"A cross-section of us all," she told him. "Psychiatrists, executives
+in both cartels, union officials. We've been working at this for a
+good many years. We want to make our world over, yes. But this time
+with reason and without violence--without sacrificing the good we
+already have."
+
+"And you yourself, Dawn. Who are you?"
+
+"I represent that nonentity called the government, Captain."
+
+"A nonentity wouldn't make you what you are, Dawn."
+
+"My name, Captain--" She drew a long breath. "My name is Dawn Farren.
+The rest of my family is dying out as the Von Rausches are. Unlimited
+power has a way of poisoning the human mind. If wealth is our only
+ethical goal, what do we really have when we possess it all? Madness.
+Both cartels are shams, Captain Hunter, just as your frontier wars are
+shams.
+
+"Yes, you may as well know that, too. Neither fleet has actually
+fought the other for a good many years. The planets you blast are
+hulks already long dead. It's all a sham, but we have to keep it
+alive. We have to make it _seem_ real--until we're sure we've found
+something better and more workable for all of us."
+
+The tension in Ann Saymer's muscles started to relax. Very slowly her
+body began to slump, in the secondary stage of paralysis.
+
+"What about her?" Hunter asked. "She can still make another
+Exorciser--"
+
+"The dream of enslaving mankind is _always_ insanity. We'll put her in
+a public clinic, of course. We may have to use her own machine once
+more to erase the memory of its structure from her mind. After that
+the patent drawings will be destroyed. It's not a superficial cure for
+maladjustment that we're after, Captain Hunter, but the cause. All of
+Ann's research was up a blind alley--a brilliant waste."
+
+Suddenly Dawn screamed a warning and leveled her blaster at Eric
+Young. Hunter sprang back as Dawn fired. But her timing was a second
+too late. In a last, blazing agony of life-before-death Young had
+regained consciousness long enough to hurl the scalpel at Hunter's
+back. Ebbing strength distorted his aim. The blade plunged into Ann's
+heart as she slumped against the wall.
+
+After a long pause, Max Hunter moved toward Dawn and took her arm. He
+clenched his jaw tight and drew her quickly into the hall. "I want
+out, Dawn. There's no healing here. I won't feel free again until I
+can look up at the stars."
+
+"The stars. Then you're going back to the service, Captain? You're
+running away?"
+
+He didn't answer her until they stood in Eric Young's garden.
+
+"Sham battles for shadow cartels," he said. "That's a child's
+subterfuge for the Tri-D space heroes. No, Dawn, the real war is here
+in the struggle for information about ourselves so that we can build a
+new world of freedom and human dignity. You say you need me. All
+right, Dawn, you've enrolled a recruit."
+
+"It will be a long, slow war, Captain," she said, her eyes shining.
+"We may never see a victory, and--we can never make a truce. But at
+least we've learned how to go about solving the problem--after ten
+millennia of trial and error."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+
+
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+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Cartels Jungle, by Irving E. Cox, Jr.
+
+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: The Cartels Jungle
+
+Author: Irving E. Cox, Jr.
+
+Release Date: March 16, 2010 [EBook #31062]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CARTELS JUNGLE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Sankar Viswanathan, Greg Weeks, and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+<div class="tr"><p class="center">Transcriber's Note:</p>
+<p class="center">This etext was produced from Fantastic Universe September 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.</p></div>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;">
+<img src="images/cover.jpg" width="400" height="562" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<div class="sidenote"><i>In most ideally conceived Utopias the world as it exists
+is depicted as a mushrooming horror of maladjustment, cruelty and
+crime. In this startlingly original short novel that basic premise is
+granted, but only to pave the way for an approach to Utopia over a
+highway of the mind so daringly unusual we predict you'll forget
+completely that you're embarking on a fictional excursion into the
+future by one of the most gifted writers in the field. And that
+forgetfulness will be accompanied by the startling realization that
+Irving E. Cox has a great deal more than a storyteller's magic to
+impart.</i></div>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<h1>
+the<br />
+cartels<br />
+jungle
+</h1>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h2><i>by ... Irving E. Cox, Jr.</i></h2>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>It was a world of greedy Dynasts&mdash;each contending for the
+right to pillage and enslave. But one man's valor became a
+shining shield.</p></div>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><i>... and he who overcomes an enemy by fraud is as much to be
+praised as he who does so by force.</i></p></div>
+
+<p class="p1">Machiavelli, <span class="smcap">Discorsi</span>, III, 1531</p>
+
+
+<p>The captain walked down the ramp carrying a lightweight bag. To a
+discerning eye, that bag meant only one thing: Max Hunter had quit the
+service. A spaceman on leave never took personal belongings from his
+ship, because without a bag he could by-pass the tedious wait for a
+customs clearance.</p>
+
+<p>From the foot of the ramp a gray-haired port hand called up to Hunter,
+"So you're really through, Max?"</p>
+
+<p>"I always said, by the time I was twenty-six&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Lots of guys think they'll make it. I did once myself. Look at me
+now. I'm no good in the ships any more, so they bust me back to port
+hand. It's too damn easy to throw your credits away in the
+crumb-joints."</p>
+
+<p>"I'm getting married," Hunter replied. "Ann and I worked this out when
+I joined the service. Now we have the capital to open her clinic&mdash;and
+ninety-six thousand credits, salted away in the Solar First National
+Fund."</p>
+
+<p>"Every youngster starts out like you did, but something always
+happens. The girl doesn't wait, maybe. Or he gets to thinking he can
+pile up credits faster in the company casinos." The old man saluted.
+"So long, boy. It does my soul good to meet one guy who's getting out
+of this crazy space racket."</p>
+
+<p>Max Hunter strode along the fenced causeway toward the low,
+pink-walled municipal building, shimmering in the desert sun. Behind
+him the repair docks and the launching tubes made a ragged silhouette
+against the sky.</p>
+
+<p>Hunter felt no romantic inclination to look back. He had always been
+amused by the insipid, Tri-D space operas. To Hunter it had been a
+business&mdash;a job different from other occupations only because the
+risks were greater and the bonus scale higher.</p>
+
+<p>Ann would be waiting in the lobby, as she always was when he came in
+from a flight. But today when they left the field, it would be for
+keeps. Anticipation made his memory of Ann Saymer suddenly vivid&mdash;the
+caress of her lips, the delicate scent of her hair, her quick smile
+and the pert upturn of her nose.</p>
+
+<p>Captain Hunter thought of Ann as small and delicate, yet neither term
+was strictly applicable except subjectively in relation to himself.
+Hunter towered a good four inches above six feet. His shoulders were
+broad and powerful, his hips narrow, and his belly flat and hard. He
+moved with the co-ordination that had become second nature to him
+after a decade of frontier war. He was the typical spaceman, holding a
+First in his profession.</p>
+
+<p>As was his privilege, he still wore his captain's uniform&mdash;dress boots
+of black plastic, tight-fitting trousers, and a scarlet jacket bearing
+the gold insignia of Consolidated Solar Industries.</p>
+
+<p>Hunter entered the municipal building and joined the line of people
+moving slowly toward the customs booth. Anxiously he scanned the mass
+of faces in the lobby. Ann Saymer wasn't there.</p>
+
+<p>He felt the keen, knife-edge disappointment, and something
+else&mdash;something he didn't want to put into words. He had sent Ann a
+micropic telling her when his ship would be in. Of course, there was
+that commission-job she had taken&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>Abruptly he was face to face again with the vague fear that had nagged
+at his mind for nearly a month. This wasn't like Ann. Always before
+she had sent him every two or three days a chatty micropic, using the
+private code they had invented to cut the unit cost of words. But four
+weeks had now passed since he had last heard from her.</p>
+
+<p>In an attempt at self-assurance, he recalled to mind just how exacting
+a commission-job could be. Perhaps Ann had been working so hard she
+had simply not had the time to send him a message.</p>
+
+<p>Not even five minutes to send a micropic?</p>
+
+<p>It didn't occur to him that she might be ill, for preventive medicine
+had long ago made physical disease a trivial factor in human affairs.
+A maladjustment then, with commitment to a city clinic? But Ann Saymer
+held a First in Psychiatry.</p>
+
+<p>Hunter fingered the Saving Fund record in his pocket&mdash;the goal he and
+Ann had worked for so long. Nothing could go wrong now, nothing! He
+said the words over in his mind as he might have repeated the litany
+of a prayer, although Max Hunter did not consider himself a religious
+man.</p>
+
+<p>At sixteen he and Ann Saymer had fallen in love, while they had both
+been in the last semester of the general school. They could have
+married then, or they might have registered for the less permanent
+companionship-union.</p>
+
+<p>In either case, both of them would have had to go to work. Hunter
+could not have entered the space service, which enrolled only single
+men and Ann could not have afforded the university.</p>
+
+<p>It hadn't mattered to Hunter. But Ann had possessed enough ambition
+for them both. She knew she had the ability to earn a First in
+Psychiatry, and would settle for nothing less. The drive that kept
+their goal alive was hers. She was determined to establish a clinic of
+her own. The plan she worked out was very practical&mdash;for Ann was in
+all respects the opposite of an idle dreamer.</p>
+
+<p>Hunter was to join a commercial spacefleet. His bonus credits would
+accumulate to supply their capital, while he paid her university
+tuition from his current earnings. After they married, Hunter was to
+manage the finances of the clinic while Ann became the resident
+psychiatrist.</p>
+
+<p>Even at sixteen Ann Saymer had very positive ideas about curing mental
+illness, which was the epidemic sickness of their world. Eight years
+later, while she was still serving her internship in a city clinic,
+Ann had invented the tiny machine which, with wry humor, she called an
+Exorciser.</p>
+
+<p>She had never used the device in the public clinic. If she had, she
+would have lost the patent, since she had built the Exorciser while
+she was still serving out her educational apprenticeship in the city
+clinic.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm no fool, Max," she told Hunter. "Why should I give it away? We'll
+coin credits in our own clinic with that little gadget."</p>
+
+<p>Hunter had no objection to her aggressive selfishness. In fact, the
+term "selfishness" did not even occur to him. Ann was simply
+expressing the ethic of their society. He admired her brilliance, her
+cleverness; and he knew that her Exorciser, properly exploited, would
+be the touchstone to a fortune.</p>
+
+<p>During one of his furloughs Ann demonstrated what the machine could
+do. After a minor surgical operation, a fragile filigree of
+microscopic platinum wires was planted in the cerebral cortex of a
+patient's skull. From a multi-dialed console Ann verbally transmitted
+a new personality directly into the maladjusted mind. After twenty
+minutes she removed the wire grid, and the disorganized personality
+was whole again, with an adjustment index testing at zero-zero.</p>
+
+<p>"A cure that leaves out the long probe for psychic causes," she said
+enthusiastically. "In minutes, Max, we'll be able to do what now takes
+weeks or months. They'll swarm into our clinic."</p>
+
+<p>Hunter reasoned that Ann had taken the commission-job in order to
+experiment with her machine in a privately-operated clinic. Her
+internship had ended a month before, and it had been an altogether
+legal thing for her to do. The fact that she had taken a commission
+meant she would work for only a specific contract period. And because
+a commission-job carried a professional classification, Ann had not
+been compelled to join the union.</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless the haze of anxiety still lay oppressively over Captain
+Hunter's mind. No matter what the requirements of Ann's commission may
+have been, she could have met him at the spaceport. She knew when his
+ship was due, and had never failed to show up before.</p>
+
+
+<h2>II</h2>
+
+<p>The line of people continued to move steadily toward the customs
+booth. Hunter stopped at last in front of a counter where a male
+clerk, wearing on his tunic the identification disc of his U.F.W.
+union local, typed out the customs forms, took Hunter's thumbprint,
+and carefully checked his medical certificate.</p>
+
+<p>"You had your last boosters in the Mars station, is that correct?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, last January," Hunter replied.</p>
+
+<p>"That gives you an eight months' clearance." The clerk smiled. "Plenty
+of time for a spaceman's furlough."</p>
+
+<p>"I'm making a permanent separation," Hunter affirmed.</p>
+
+<p>The clerk glanced at him sharply. "Then I'd better issue a temporary
+health card." He ran a red-tinted, celluloid rectangle through a
+stamping machine and Hunter pressed his thumbprint upon the signature
+square. "Can you give me your home address, Captain?"</p>
+
+<p>"I'll be staying at the Roost for a day or so. After that I'm getting
+married."</p>
+
+<p>"I'll assign your health file to the Los Angeles Clinic then," the
+clerk said. "You can apply for an official reassignment later, if
+necessary."</p>
+
+<p>He made a photo-copy of the health card, pushed it into a pneumatic
+tube and handed the original to Hunter. Then he rolled the customs
+form back into the typewriter.</p>
+
+<p>"Since you're quitting the service, Captain, I'll have to have
+additional information for the municipal file. Do you have union
+affiliation?"</p>
+
+<p>"No. Spacemen aren't required to join the U.F.W."</p>
+
+<p>"If you want to give me a part payment on the initiation fee, I'll be
+glad to issue&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"It'll be a long, hard winter before Eric Young gets any of my
+credits," Hunter said, his eyes narrowing. Considering how Hunter felt
+about the Union of Free Workers and the labor czar, Eric Young, he
+thought he had phrased his answer with remarkable restraint.</p>
+
+<p>"Anti-labor," the clerk said, and typed the designation on the form.</p>
+
+<p>"No," Hunter snapped, "and I won't be labeled that. As far as the
+individual goes, I believe he has every right to organize. No one can
+stand up against the cartels in any other way. But this exploitation
+by Young&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"You either join the U.F.W., or you're against us." The clerk shrugged
+disinterestedly. "It's all one and the same thing to me, Captain.
+However, if you expect a job in the city, you'll have to get it
+through the union." He typed again on the customs form. "According to
+a new regulation, I'm obliged to classify you as unemployed, and that
+restricts you to limited areas of Los Angeles as well as&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"When the hell did they put over a law like that?"</p>
+
+<p>"Two weeks ago, sir. It gives the clinics a closer control over the
+potentially maladjusted, and it should help ease the pressure&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"There are no exceptions?"</p>
+
+<p>"The executive classifications, naturally&mdash;professionals, and
+spacemen. That would have included you, Captain Hunter, but you say
+you've left the service."</p>
+
+<p>Hunter gritted his teeth. It had been like this for as long as he
+could remember. Whenever he returned from a long flight there was
+always a new form of regimentation to adjust to. And always for the
+same reason&mdash;to stop the steadily rising incidence of psychotic
+maladjustment.</p>
+
+<p>"How does the law define an executive?" Hunter asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Job bracket with one of the cartels," the clerk replied. "Or the
+total credits held on deposit with a recognized fund."</p>
+
+<p>The captain flung his savings book on the counter. The clerk glanced
+at the balance and X'ed out the last word he had typed on the customs
+form.</p>
+
+<p>"You qualify, sir&mdash;with a thousand credits to spare. I'll give you a
+city-wide clearance as an executive. But I can only make it
+temporary. You'll have to check once each week with the U.F.W. office.
+If your balance drops below ninety-five thousand, you'll be
+reclassified."</p>
+
+<p>The clerk ran another celluloid card&mdash;this time it was blue&mdash;through
+the stamping machine and passed it across to Hunter. Captain Hunter
+picked up his bag and entered the customs booth, which by that time
+was empty. The probe lights glowed from the walls and ceiling,
+efficiently X-raying his bag and his clothing for any prohibited
+imports. Within seconds the alarm bell clanged and the metal doors
+banged shut, imprisoning Hunter in the booth.</p>
+
+<p>Now what? he asked himself. What regulation had he violated this time?
+In his mind he inventoried the contents of his bag. It contained only
+a handful of personal belongings, and the tools of trade which he had
+needed as a captain of a fighting ship. Everything was legitimate and
+above-board. Hunter hadn't even brought Ann a souvenir from the
+frontier.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>After a time, the booth door swung open. A senior inspector, carrying
+a blaster, crowded into the cubicle.</p>
+
+<p>"Open your bag!" The inspector commanded, motioning with his weapon.</p>
+
+<p>Hunter saw that the blaster dial was set to fire the death charge, not
+the weaker dispersal charge which produced only an hour's paralysis.</p>
+
+<p>Hunter thumbed the photocell lock. It responded to the individual
+pattern of his thumbprint, and the bag fell open. The inspector picked
+up the worn blaster which lay under Hunter's shipboard uniform.</p>
+
+<p>"Smuggling firearms, Captain, is a violation of the city code. The
+fine is&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Smuggling?" Hunter exploded. "That blaster was registered to me nine
+years ago." He snapped open his wallet.</p>
+
+<p>The inspector frowned over the registration form, biting indecisively
+at his lower lip.</p>
+
+<p>"That was issued before my time," he alibied. "I'll have to check the
+regulations. It may take a while."</p>
+
+<p>He left the booth. He was gone for a quarter of an hour. When he
+returned, both metal doors snapped open. "Your permit is valid,
+Captain Hunter," the inspector admitted. "Unrestricted registrations
+like yours have not been issued for the past five years. That's why
+the probe was not adjusted to the special conditions which apply in
+your case. Your permit is revocable if you are committed for
+maladjustment."</p>
+
+<p>Hunter grinned. "I wouldn't count on that. My adjustment index is
+zero-zero."</p>
+
+<p>"A paragon, Captain." The voice was dry and biting. "But you may find
+conditions on the Earth a little trying. You haven't had a chance to
+get really well-acquainted with your own world since you were a kid of
+sixteen."</p>
+
+<p>Hunter's customs clearance had taken more than an hour. Before he left
+the municipal building, he made a quick tour of the lobby, searching
+again for Ann Saymer. Satisfied that she had not come, he put in a
+call from a public tele-booth to Ann's apartment residence. After a
+moment, Mrs. Ames' face came into sharp focus on the screen, the light
+coalescing about her hair.</p>
+
+<p>A warm, motherly widow of nearly eighty, Mrs. Ames had been the
+residence's owner for a decade, and had taken a great deal of
+vicarious pleasure in Ann's romance with the captain. "It's so
+different," she said once to Hunter, "your faith in each other, the
+way you work together for a goal you both want. If the rest of us
+could only learn to have some honest affection for each other. But,
+there, I'm an old woman, living too much in the past."</p>
+
+<p>As soon as Hunter saw her face on the screen, he knew that something
+was wrong. She was tense and nervous, tied in the emotional knots of
+an anxiety neurosis. And Mrs. Ames was not the woman to fall easy
+victim to mental illness. If Hunter had been guessing the odds, he
+would have put her adjustment index on a par with his own.</p>
+
+<p>"I haven't seen Ann for a month," she told him.</p>
+
+<p>"Where is she? My last micropic from her said something about a
+commission-job&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"She's all right, Max. Did you join the U.F.W.?"</p>
+
+<p>"I'll be damned if I will."</p>
+
+<p>Why had she asked him that? Her question seemed totally unrelated to
+her reassurance as to Ann&mdash;another clear symptom of her emotional
+unbalance.</p>
+
+<p>"About Ann, Mrs. Ames," he persisted. "Do you know what clinic gave
+her the commission?"</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Ames stared at him in surprise. "Ann didn't tell you in her
+micropic?"</p>
+
+<p>"We use a personal code," he explained. "That makes a certain type of
+communication extremely difficult."</p>
+
+<p>"I didn't see her, Max. After she took the commission some men came
+for her things. They brought me a note from Ann, but it didn't tell me
+where she was. It just authorized the men to move out her belongings."</p>
+
+<p>"Is the work outside of Los Angeles? Do you know that much?"</p>
+
+<p>"At first I guessed&mdash;" She broke off, biting her lip, and her face
+twisted in an agony of intense feeling. "No, Max, an old woman's
+guesses won't help. I can't tell you any more about it."</p>
+
+<p>"I'll come out and see you this afternoon, Mrs. Ames," he promised,
+"after I check in at the Roost. I want to look at that note you had
+from Ann."</p>
+
+
+<h2>III</h2>
+
+<p>Captain Hunter left the municipal building and stood on the transit
+platform. It was blazing hot in the noon sun, and he considered
+chartering an autojet to the city, as he always had before. But though
+a jet was faster than the monorail it was also more expensive. Acutely
+mindful that he had left the service and would earn no more juicy
+credit bonuses, he took the monorail instead.</p>
+
+<p>He had only a ten-minute wait before a crowded car screamed to a stop
+at the port station. Hunter went aboard, along with four passengers
+from recent inbound flights&mdash;laboring class tourists returning from
+vacations on one of the planetoid resorts. Since a majority of the
+people who passed through the spaceport were executives or
+professionals, they used the autojets.</p>
+
+<p>Hunter's uniform set him apart. A spaceman was expected to live high,
+to throw away credits like the glamor heroes on the Tri-D space
+dramas.</p>
+
+<p>The monorail car was crowded, primarily with afternoon-shift workers
+on their way to the industrial area. They all wore on their tunics the
+discs of the Union of Free Workers. The four tourists who went aboard
+at the spaceport with Hunter pulled out their U.F.W. badges and pinned
+them on. They belonged. Hunter didn't.</p>
+
+<p>He found an empty chair at the rear of the car, beside a gaudily
+attired woman, whose union disc proclaimed her a member of Local 47,
+the Recreational Companion Union. What miracles we perform, Hunter
+thought, with a judicial selection of innocuous words!</p>
+
+<p>He glanced at the woman. She was past the first bloom of youth and her
+face, under her makeup, was heavily lined, her eyes shrewd and
+observing. Had he known that she had been shadowing him almost from
+the instant of his arrival in Los Angeles, and had been awaiting his
+return to Earth in obedience to carefully formulated instructions he
+would not have regarded her so complacently.</p>
+
+<p>The monorail shot up toward the Palms-Pine pass of the San Jacinto
+Mountains. From the crest of the grade Hunter could look back at the
+flat, cemented field of the spaceport and the ragged teeth of the
+launching tubes rearing high on the Mojave. Ahead of him, misted by
+the blue haze of industrial smog, was Los Angeles, the capital city of
+Sector West&mdash;and indirectly the capital of the entire planet.</p>
+
+<p>Almost indistinct against the horizon were the soaring, Babel towers,
+the tangled network of walk-levels, jet-ways and private landing
+flats, which was the center-city. The lower, bulky factory buildings
+squatted under the towers and spreading outward from them, like
+concentric rings made by a stone hurled into a quiet pool, was the
+monotonous clutter of the minimum-housing.</p>
+
+<p>The city sprawled from San Diego to Santa Barbara, and it lapped
+against the arid Mojave to the east. Beyond were the suburban homes of
+laborers and low-echelon executives who had carved brass-knuckled
+niches for themselves in the medium-income bracket.</p>
+
+<p>Hunter saw the panoramic view of Sector West for only a split-second
+before the monorail car screamed down through the layer of gray haze.
+For thirty minutes the car shot across the minimum-housing area,
+stopping from time to time at high-platformed stations.</p>
+
+<p>In the industrial district the car emptied rapidly. Only Hunter and
+his faded seat companion got out at the turnaround terminal and took
+the slideway to center-city. In the metro-entry at the top of the
+stairs they went through a security check station manned by six
+blaster-armed police guards.</p>
+
+<p>Half of the guards wore the insignia of Consolidated Solar Industries
+and half of United Research, the two titan cartels which were locked
+in deadly battle for the empire beyond the stars.</p>
+
+<p>The government played it safe, Hunter thought with bitterness, using
+an equal number of police from each organization. On Earth the pacific
+balance of commercial power was never disturbed&mdash;not, at least, on the
+surface. The two imperial giants lived side by side in a tactful
+display of peace.</p>
+
+<p>On the frontier the real conflict raged, fought with all the weapons
+of treachery and an arsenal of highly refined atomic weapons&mdash;the
+blaster which could tear a man into component elements, and the
+L-bombs that were capable of turning a young sun into a nova.</p>
+
+<p>The woman passed through the security check with no trouble. The men
+knew her and made only a perfunctory examination of her cards. But
+Hunter again had difficulty because of the blaster in his bag. His
+registered permit carried no weight with the guards. It was not their
+duty to execute existing law, but to protect their private employers.</p>
+
+<p>However, the Consolidated insignia on Hunter's jacket made the three
+Consolidated guards ready to honor his permit. Eventually they
+persuaded the opposition to pass Hunter into the city, on the ground
+that the captain's zero-zero adjustment index indicated that it was
+safe for him to carry arms.</p>
+
+<p>When Hunter went through the probe, he found the woman waiting for
+him. During the half-hour ride from the spaceport, he had tried twice
+to start a conversation with her, and failed. Now, abruptly, her face
+was animated with interest. She put her arm through his and walked
+with him to the lift shaft.</p>
+
+<p>"So you got away with it, Captain." Since it was long-standing
+fashion, she had trained her voice to sound low-pitched and husky. "I
+mean, bringing a blaster into center-city."</p>
+
+<p>"Why all this fuss about a gun?" Hunter asked.</p>
+
+<p>"It's a new government regulation," she told him.</p>
+
+<p>"The government doesn't make the law," he reminded her. "The cartels
+do."</p>
+
+<p>"The last fiscal mental health report showed the percentage of
+maladjusted&mdash;" She laughed throatily. "I wish we'd use words honestly!
+The survey showed the <i>lunatic</i> percentage is still increasing. The
+cartels are using that report as an excuse to keep the people
+unarmed."</p>
+
+<p>Hunter was regarding her steadily. "Why?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>"We're not as content with our world as we're supposed to be," she
+said. "Eric Young can't keep all of us in line forever. Captain, we
+could use your blaster. It's next to impossible to get one these days.
+I could make it worth your while&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"It's registered to me," Hunter pointed out.</p>
+
+<p>"I'll change the serial," was her instant reply. "Your name wouldn't
+be involved."</p>
+
+<p>"No, I want to keep it."</p>
+
+<p>"To use yourself?"</p>
+
+<p>"Don't talk nonsense," he said. "This isn't the frontier."</p>
+
+<p>He made the denial vehemently, but deep in his mind he had an
+uncertain feeling that her guess was right. Earth was not the
+battle-ground, but it had spawned the conflict. The appearance of
+peace was a sham. Here the battle was fought with more subtlety, but
+the objective remained the same.</p>
+
+<p>If Ann Saymer had somehow been caught in the no-man's-land between the
+two cartels&mdash;It was the first time that thought had occurred to
+Hunter, and it filled him with a dread foreboding.</p>
+
+<p>The woman sensed his feeling. He saw a smile on her curving lips. She
+said softly, "So even a spaceman sometimes has his doubts."</p>
+
+<p>"I left the service this morning," he said. Suddenly he was telling
+her all about himself and Ann. It was unwise, perhaps even dangerous.
+But he had to unburden himself to someone or run the risk of losing
+his emotional control.</p>
+
+<p>"So now you've lost this&mdash;this ambitious woman of yours," she said
+when he had finished.</p>
+
+<p>"No," he protested. "I won't let myself believe that. Once I did&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"As well as her interesting invention&mdash;the Exorciser," she went on
+relentlessly. "Have you ever wondered, Captain Hunter, what might
+happen if the platinum grid was <i>not</i> removed from a patient's brain?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, but I suppose&mdash;I suppose he'd remain in control of the operator
+of the transmitter."</p>
+
+<p>She nodded. "He'd become a perfectly adjusted specimen with a
+zero-zero index, but&mdash;he'd also become a human robot with no will of
+his own."</p>
+
+<p>"But Ann wouldn't&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Not Ann, Captain. Not the girl you've waited so long to marry. All
+she wants is a clinic of her own so that she can help the maladjusted.
+But don't forget&mdash;she holds a <i>priceless</i> patent. Keep your blaster,
+my friend. I've an idea you may need it."</p>
+
+<p>He gripped her wrist. "You know something about this?"</p>
+
+<p>"I know the world we live in&mdash;nothing more."</p>
+
+<p>"But you're guessing&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Later, Captain, after you start putting some facts together on your
+own." She pulled away from him. "If you want to find me again&mdash;and I
+think you will&mdash;look for me in Number thirty-four on the amusement
+level. Ask for Dawn."</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly, for no reason that he could explain, he had for her a great
+sympathy. She was no ordinary woman. Her discernment was
+extraordinary, and she possessed, in addition, a strangely elusive
+charm.</p>
+
+<p>They rode the lift as it moved up through the city level in its
+transparent, fairy-world shaft. Dawn got out first, at the mid-city
+walk-way where the cheapest shops and the gaudiest entertainment
+houses were crammed together. Dazzling in the glare of colored lights,
+the mid-city never slept. It was always thronged. It was the only area
+of the heartland&mdash;except for the top level casinos&mdash;open to every
+citizen without restriction.</p>
+
+<p>On the levels immediately above it were the specialty shops, dealing
+in luxuries for the suburbanites who had fought, schemed and bribed
+their way out of the minimum housing. Higher still was the sector
+given over to the less expensive commercial hotels.</p>
+
+<p>The upper levels were occupied by cartel executive offices and at the
+top, high enough to escape the smog and feel the warmth of the sun,
+were the fabulous casino resorts, the mansions built by the family
+dynasts who controlled the cartels, and the modest, limestone building
+housing the mockery which passed as government.</p>
+
+
+<h2>IV</h2>
+
+<p>Captain Hunter left the lift at Level Nineteen. An automatic entry
+probe accepted his blue-tinted executive card, and he walked the short
+distance to the hotel which specialized in catering to spacemen. It
+was traditionally neutral ground, where the mercenaries of
+Consolidated or United Research met as friends, although a week before
+they might have been firing radiation fire at each other in the outer
+reaches of space. The frontier conflict was a business to the
+spaceman. Hunter was too well-adjusted to become emotionally involved
+in it himself.</p>
+
+<p>The spacemen called their hotel the Roost, a contraction lifted from
+the public micropic code. The full name was the <i>Roosevelt</i>, lettered
+on the entry. The hotel was popularly supposed to have been built
+close to the site of a twentieth century Los Angeles hotel of the
+same name, destroyed in the last convulsive war that had shattered the
+earth.</p>
+
+<p>By micropic Hunter had made his customary reservation. His room was
+high in an upper floor overlooking Level Twenty-three. Through the
+visipanel he could see the walk-ways thronged by the various
+classifications of executives who worked in the central offices of the
+cartels&mdash;lawyers, engineers, administrators, directors,
+astrogeographers, designers, statisticians, researchers.</p>
+
+<p>Somewhere in the crowd, perhaps, were the two men who ruled the
+cartels and directed the struggle for the Galactic empire. Glenn
+Farren of Consolidated Solar and Werner von Rausch of United
+Researchers. Max Hunter had never seen either of the men or any of
+their dynastic families. He knew little about them. Their pictures
+were never published.</p>
+
+<p>Yet Farren and Von Rausch held in their hands more despotic power,
+more real wealth and military might, than any ancient Khan or Caesar
+had ever dreamed of.</p>
+
+<p>Did they now want Ann Saymer's patent? The answer, Hunter realized,
+was obvious. With Ann's Exorciser, they could enslave the centers of
+civilization as they had enslaved the frontier. In itself that was a
+minor factor, already accomplished by man's acceptance of the jungle
+ethics of the cartels. Far more important, if one of the cartels
+controlled the patent, it had a weapon that would ultimately destroy
+the other.</p>
+
+<p>With trembling fingers, Hunter took Ann's last micropic from his bag
+and rolled the tiny film into a wall-scanner. He could have recited it
+by heart; yet, by reading it again, he somehow expected to extract a
+new meaning. The code he and Ann used, contrived for economy rather
+than secrecy, was merely a telescoping of common phrases into single
+word symbols.</p>
+
+<p>IHTKN, at the beginning, was easily interpreted as "I have taken," and
+COMJB became "commission-job." The micropic transmission monopoly
+arbitrarily limited all code words to five letters or less, counting
+additional letters as whole words. But because of the simplicity of
+the technique, some of Ann's symbols were open to a number of
+interpretations.</p>
+
+<p>Hunter was sure of one thing. Ann had not specifically named the
+clinic where she was working. She said she had gone to work for the
+biggest&mdash;or possibly the symbol meant best&mdash;of the private clinics.
+Either term could apply to the clinics run by the two cartels; or, for
+that matter, to the largest of them all, operated by Eric Young's
+union.</p>
+
+<p>But Ann, having invented the Exorciser, would know all its possible
+misuses&mdash;a factor which had not occurred to Hunter until Dawn spelled
+it out for him. Would Ann, then, have been fool enough to let herself
+fall into the hands of the cartels?</p>
+
+<p>That line of reasoning gave Hunter new hope. If one of the cartels
+tried to trap her, Ann would simply go into hiding. It would
+complicate the problem of finding her, but at least he could assure
+himself she was safe. Ann had brains to match her ambition. She
+couldn't otherwise have earned a First in Psychiatry. No, Hunter was
+certain the cartels didn't have her.</p>
+
+<p>The telescreen buzzer gave a plaintive bleep. Hunter jerked down the
+response toggle. Surprisingly, the screen remained dark, but Hunter
+heard a man's voice say clearly, "You are anxious to find Ann Saymer,
+Captain Hunter?"</p>
+
+<p>Apparently the transmission from Hunter's screen was unimpaired, for
+the speaker seemed to recognize him.</p>
+
+<p>"Who is this?" Hunter asked, his mouth suddenly dry.</p>
+
+<p>"A friend. We have your interest at heart, Captain. We suggest that
+you investigate United Researchers' clinic when you start looking for
+Miss Saymer."</p>
+
+<p>The contact snapped off. Hunter sat down slowly, his mind reeling.
+Since only his screen had been neutralized, the machine was not at
+fault. Only a top-ranking cartel executive could arrange for a
+deliberate interruption of service. The rest followed logically. No
+one in United would have given him the information.</p>
+
+<p>So Ann had fallen into their hands after all! Someone in
+Consolidated&mdash;perhaps Glenn Farren himself&mdash;was setting him on Ann's
+trail, on the chance that Hunter could find her when Consolidated's
+operatives had failed.</p>
+
+<p>Hunter was used to the risk of long odds. He had a ten-year
+apprenticeship in the treachery and in-fighting of the frontier. There
+was a good chance that he could play one cartel against the other, and
+in the process get Ann away from both of them.</p>
+
+<p>One more thing he wanted before he planned his opening attack against
+United Researchers&mdash;the note Ann had sent to Mrs. Ames. It might give
+him a clue as to where United had taken her. Hunter wasn't naive
+enough to suppose they had kept her in center-city. But perhaps she
+was not even in Sector West.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>Each of the eleven sectors into which the Earth was divided was
+controlled by one of the two cartels, as an agricultural or industrial
+appendage of the western metropolis. It was a paternal relationship,
+although no comparable city had been permitted to develop and company
+mercenaries policed the sectors.</p>
+
+<p>Children who exhibited any spark of initiative or ability were skimmed
+off from the hinterland to Sector West and thrown into the competitive
+struggle of the general school. If they fought to the top there, they
+were integrated as adults into the hierarchy of the cartels.</p>
+
+<p>The rest became the labor force of Sector West, enrolled in Eric
+Young's union and crowded into the minimum housing. The teeming
+millions left in the hinterland were a plodding, uninspired mass
+content with trivialities. They felt neither ambition nor frustration.
+While the number of the mentally ill continued to multiply in Sector
+West, only a fraction of the hinterland population suffered the mental
+decay.</p>
+
+<p>Hunter fervently hoped United had taken Ann to one of the other
+sectors. Rescue would be easy. An experienced spaceman could out-talk,
+out-maneuver, and out-fight an entire hinterland battalion.</p>
+
+<p>Max Hunter took an autojet from the Roost to Mrs. Ames' residential
+apartment. Conservation of his capital no longer counted, but time
+did. If United had Ann's patent, Ann herself was expendable. Hunter
+had to make his move to save her before they knew what he was up to.
+It would be a difficult deal to pull off in the capital city, where
+operatives of both cartels swarmed everywhere.</p>
+
+<p>He left his blaster in his hotel room, to avoid an interrogation at
+any other metro-entry. Mrs. Ames' apartment residence was one place in
+the city where he had no need to go armed.</p>
+
+<p>Just outside center-city a single street of twentieth century houses,
+sheltered by the Palos Verdes Hills, had survived the devastation of
+the last war. In the beginning the street had been preserved as a
+museum piece while the cartel city had grown up around it. But with
+each passing generation, popular interest had waned. Eventually the
+houses had been sold.</p>
+
+<p>One was now operated by a religious cult. Two were enormously
+profitable party houses, where clients masqueraded in the amusing
+twentieth century costumes and passed a few short hours living with
+the quaint inconveniences of the past. The game had become so
+attractive that reservations were booked months in advance. The fourth
+relic remained unsold, slowly falling into ruin. The fifth belonged to
+Mrs. Ames.</p>
+
+<p>To satisfy a whim&mdash;originally it was no more than that, Mrs. Ames had
+assured Hunter many times&mdash;she had asked her husband to buy it for her
+some fifty years ago. After a space-liner accident left her a widow at
+thirty-five, she had moved into the house as a means of
+psychologically withdrawing from her grief.</p>
+
+<p>She never left it again. She found the old house an island in time, a
+magic escape from the chaos of her world.</p>
+
+<p>She took in four residents because she needed their credits to augment
+the income from her husband's estate, and the house was then
+officially listed as an apartment. Chance worked her a miracle&mdash;or
+perhaps the house did possess a magic of its own&mdash;for the residents
+were as charmed by its inconveniences as Mrs. Ames had been. Ann
+wouldn't consider living anywhere else, although the house was more
+than a mile from her university. Even Hunter felt the indefinable
+spell, when he was in from a flight and went to see Ann.</p>
+
+<p>It was a house that invited relaxation. It was a house where time
+seemed to be stated in a value that could not be measured with
+credits. It was a house that whispered, "I saw one world fall into
+dust; yours is no more eternal"&mdash;and, for a moment, that whisper made
+the cartel-jungle meaningless.</p>
+
+
+<h2>V</h2>
+
+<p>Hunter left his autojet on the parking flat behind the house. He fed
+enough coins in the meter to hold the car for twenty-four hours. He
+didn't know how fast he'd want an autojet after he talked to Mrs.
+Ames, but he didn't want a chance passer-by to pick up his car if the
+charter expired.</p>
+
+<p>It was necessary for him to ring a bell manually, by means of a metal
+button fixed to the wooden frame of the front door. No scanner
+announced his arrival, nor did any soundless auto-door respond to a
+beam transmitted from within the house. After a time Hunter heard
+footsteps. A strange woman&mdash;probably a new resident who had taken
+Ann's place&mdash;opened the door.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm Captain Hunter," he said. "I came to see Mrs. Ames."</p>
+
+<p>"Won't you come in, Captain?" the woman replied.</p>
+
+<p>She led him into a front room which, Ann had once told him, had been
+called a living room. A peculiar name, surely, for the room appeared
+to have been designed solely as a place to sit while watching
+Tri-D&mdash;or flat-screen television, as it had been called in its early
+developmental stage when the house was new&mdash;or to hear someone play
+the bulky instrument known as a piano.</p>
+
+<p>The room was an example of the appalling waste of space so common to
+the twentieth century. It was extremely spacious, but neither food
+tubes nor bed drawers were concealed in the walls.</p>
+
+<p>Hunter had always been curious about the piano. It amazed him that it
+had been operated entirely by hand. There was no electric scanner to
+read the mood of the player and interpret it in melody. Driven to
+contrive his own harmonics, how could the twentieth century man have
+derived any satisfaction at all from music? His sensibilities had been
+immature, of course. But even so, an instrument which demanded so much
+individual creativeness must have been an enormous frustration.</p>
+
+<p>Since so many surviving twentieth century machines made the same
+demand on the individual&mdash;their automobiles, for example, had been
+individually directed, without any sort of electronic safety
+control&mdash;it had puzzled both Hunter and Ann that the incidence of
+maladjustment in the past had been so low.</p>
+
+<p>The captain dropped into a comfortable, chintz-covered rocking
+chair&mdash;one relic in this island of time that he really enjoyed. "Will
+you tell Mrs. Ames I'm here?" he asked the stranger.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm Mrs. Ames."</p>
+
+<p>"I mean Mrs. <i>Janice</i> Ames&mdash;the owner of the house."</p>
+
+<p>The woman smiled woodenly. "You're speaking to her, Captain, though I
+must say I don't remember ever having met you before."</p>
+
+<p>"You don't remember&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Fear clutched at his heart. He sprang up, moving toward her with
+clenched fists. "An hour ago I called Mrs. Ames from the spaceport. I
+saw her. Here&mdash;in this room."</p>
+
+<p>"I've owned this house all my life, Captain." Her expression was more
+than good acting. She spoke with utter conviction, and seemed
+completely sure of herself. "You must be&mdash;" She hesitated and looked
+at him sharply. "Have you checked your adjustment index recently?"</p>
+
+<p>"I haven't lost my mind, if that's what you're getting at," he said.
+"Where's Ann Saymer?"</p>
+
+<p>"Believe me, please. The name is totally unfamiliar to me." The woman
+was painfully sympathetic&mdash;and frankly scared. She backed away from
+him. "You need help from the clinic, Captain. Will you let me call
+them for you?"</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly the light fell full on her face, and Hunter saw the tiny,
+still-unhealed scalpel wounds on both sides of her skull. The light
+glowed on the microscopic filament of platinum wire clumsily left
+projecting through the incision.</p>
+
+<p>He understood, then. This woman was wearing one of Ann's patented
+grids, sealed into her cerebral cortex. It made her into a robot,
+responding with unquestioning obedience to the direction of Ann's
+transmitter. And Hunter had no doubt that United manipulated the
+transmission.</p>
+
+<p>Simultaneously he realized something else. If the cartel went to this
+extreme to forestall his search for Ann, she must still be alive. For
+some reason they still needed her. Possibly her patent drawings had
+been submitted for government registry in such a way that only Ann
+understood them.</p>
+
+<p>Ann had been through the general school, and knew what the score was.
+She would have protected her invention&mdash;and incidentally insured her
+own survival&mdash;if she could have possibly done so, even at a fearful
+risk to herself.</p>
+
+<p>Hunter swung toward the door. It did not occur to him to call the
+police, since they were all cartel mercenaries. Whatever he did to
+help Ann, he would have to do on his own. Until he found her, he could
+count on help from Consolidated. After that&mdash;nothing.</p>
+
+<p>He jerked open the front door&mdash;and froze. Three men were waiting on
+the porch with drawn blasters. Hunter had no time to recognize facial
+features which it might have been to his advantage to remember later,
+no time to find any identifying insignia on their tunics. With a
+barely visible flickering fire arced from one of the weapons, and pain
+exploded in his body, unconsciousness washed into his brain.</p>
+
+<p>His first sensation when the paralysis began to wear off was the dull
+ache of visceral nausea. He opened his eyes, and saw, bleakly
+shadowed, the living room of the Ames house. It was after dark, which
+could only mean that he had lain there nearly four hours. To knock him
+out for that period of time, they must have given him a nearly lethal
+charge from the blaster calculated just under the limit of physical
+endurance.</p>
+
+<p>His motor control and his sense of touch returned more slowly. For a
+quarter of an hour he lay helpless in the chintz-covered rocker,
+feeling nothing but a tingling, like pin-pricks of fire, in his arms
+and legs.</p>
+
+<p>He looked down and saw that he held a blaster in his hand&mdash;his own
+blaster, which he had left in his room in the Roost. He did not yet
+have the neural control to release his fingers from the firing dial.</p>
+
+<p>As his sense of hearing was restored, he became aware that the Tri D
+had been left on. The screen pictured the swirling confusion of a mob.
+An announcer was describing the sudden outburst of labor violence
+which had occurred in the industrial district that afternoon. Eric
+Young's U.F.W. had gone on strike against a dozen separate plants.</p>
+
+<p>Essential plants, naturally. Everything was always essential, and
+government spokesmen always made pretty speeches deploring the
+situation. It was a pattern familiar to Hunter for years. One of the
+cartels would pay Young to strike factories belonging to the other.
+Then a second bribe, paid by the struck cartel, bought off the strike.
+Occasionally a sop of bonus credits had to be dished out to the
+faithful.</p>
+
+<p>It was not a maneuver either Consolidated or United used frequently,
+because the advantage was transitory, and the only long-term winner
+was Eric Young.</p>
+
+<p>This time there was a slight variation in the formula. Young had
+struck plants of both cartels. That puzzled Hunter, but any curiosity
+he felt was subordinate to his disgust. How much longer would this
+farce go on before it dawned on the rank and file of the U.F.W. that
+Eric Young was playing them all for suckers? Hunter tried to get up to
+snap off the telecast. He managed only to throw himself awkwardly over
+the arm of the chair.</p>
+
+<p>And then he saw the body on the floor&mdash;the body of the genuine Mrs.
+Ames, charred by a ragged blaster wound seared through her breast.
+They had murdered her&mdash;naturally with his blaster&mdash;and left him at the
+scene, neatly framed for the crime.</p>
+
+<p>Hunter heard&mdash;right on cue&mdash;the whine of a police siren outside.
+Everything timed to trap him just as the motor paralysis wore off!
+With an effort that brought beads of sweat to his forehead, he dropped
+his blaster and pushed himself out of the chair. His feet were numb.
+He moved a few steps and banged into the piano. Clawing for support,
+his hands crashed in jangling discord on the keys.</p>
+
+<p>The siren swelled loud in front of the house. Hunter heard the
+drum-beat of boots on the porch. He stumbled toward the kitchen&mdash;and
+fell into the arms of two police officers who had entered from the
+rear of the house.</p>
+
+<p>He swung his fist; the fingers felt like clods of wet clay. One of the
+mercenaries caught his wrist and held it easily. In the gloom Hunter
+saw the Consolidated insignia on the man's jacket, and the guard
+whispered quickly, "This deal was a set-up, Hunter&mdash;packaged evidence,
+dropped at headquarters ten minutes ago."</p>
+
+<p>Hunter stared. "Accusing me by name? Get this straight! Four hours ago
+they put me under with a blaster and&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"It's a United frame," the guard said. "They want you out for good.
+The top brass of Consolidated is giving you the green right down the
+line. The fastest out Jake and I could figure&mdash;" He jerked his head
+toward his companion. "&mdash;was to give the United boys on our team the
+front of the house, and let you make a break for it from the back.
+We'll fake enough here to protect ourselves."</p>
+
+<p>They pushed a blaster into Hunter's hands. He stumbled through the
+kitchen as the front door gave and two United mercenaries burst into
+the house. Hunter ran awkwardly, without full control of his legs.</p>
+
+<p>He saw, looming black against the night shadows, the oval silhouette
+of the autojet on the Ames flat, still held under his twenty-four hour
+charter. It offered a tempting means of escape, but a public car was
+too easily traced and brought down by police tracers. However, it
+could perform a miracle as a diversion.</p>
+
+
+<h2>VI</h2>
+
+<p>Hunter slid into the car, punched out a destination blindly, and
+engaged the flight gear. With the customary roar of power, the car
+shot up from the flat. Hunter leaped free. His feet struck the cement.
+The lingering trace of paralysis, destroying his normal co-ordination,
+made the fall very painful.</p>
+
+<p>Hunter flung himself flat in the shadow of the ornamental shrubs along
+the edge of the parking flat. The four police mercenaries sprinted out
+of the house and leaped into the police jet. With sirens screaming,
+it soared up in pursuit of the empty autojet.</p>
+
+<p>Hunter estimated that he had perhaps thirty minutes before they sent
+out a general alarm. A painfully small margin of safety. Where could
+he hide that the machines of detection&mdash;the skilled, emotionless,
+one-track, electronic brains&mdash;would not eventually find him? And what
+of Ann Saymer? What could he do as a fugitive to save her?</p>
+
+<p>United had planned it all down to the smallest detail. But that was
+the way the cartels operated. It was the system Hunter was accustomed
+to. He felt neither anger not resentment, simply a determination to
+out-plan and out-play the enemy.</p>
+
+<p>If he accepted defeat he would admit frustration, and for Captain Max
+Hunter that was impossible. Hadn't he survived a decade of frontier
+conflict with an adjustment index of zero-zero? Instead of hopelessly
+weighing the odds stacked against him, he counted the advantage which
+a single man held in maneuverability and rapid change of pace.</p>
+
+<p>He walked along the museum street, the blaster in his hand. A block
+away rose the bulk of a factory building and behind it towered the
+monster of center-city, transformed into a fairyland by the glow of
+lights on the many levels. Hunter's eye followed the pattern up toward
+the top, hidden above the blanket of haze.</p>
+
+<p>The top! Luxury casinos and the castles of the cartels. Werner von
+Rausch and his empire of United Researchers. Werner von Rausch, who
+gave orders and Ann Saymer disappeared. Werner von Rausch, who gave
+new orders and Mrs. Ames lay murdered in her living room.</p>
+
+<p>But behind the fa&ccedil;ade of his spacefleet and his private army, behind
+his police mercenaries, Werner von Rausch was one man&mdash;an old man,
+Hunter had been told&mdash;and a vulnerable target. Hunter weighed his
+changes, and the margin of success seemed to be balanced in his favor.</p>
+
+<p>It was not what they would expect him to do. They had framed him for
+murder and he should now be running for his life. The hunted turned
+hunter. Hunter grinned savagely, enjoying his pun.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>He slipped the blaster under his belt, leaving the scarlet jacket open
+to his navel so that the loose folds would conceal the outline of the
+weapon. He would have no trouble reaching the top level.</p>
+
+<p>The resort casinos, like the mid-city amusement area, were open to any
+citizen. Special autojets, with destinations pre-set for the casino
+flat, were available in every monorail terminal. Hunter could by-pass
+a probe inspection at a regular metro-entry. The nearest terminal,
+from the north-coast line, was less than a quarter of a mile away.</p>
+
+<p>As Hunter entered the industrial district he heard the turmoil of an
+angry crowd. He came upon them suddenly, swarming at the gates of a
+factory close to the terminal.</p>
+
+<p>Eric Young's trouble-makers, he thought with a worried frown, jumping
+obediently when the big boss spoke the word. In less than five years
+Eric Young had turned the union into a third cartel, more powerful
+than Consolidated or United because the commodity Young
+controlled&mdash;human labor&mdash;was essential to the other two.</p>
+
+<p>A third cartel! Suddenly Max Hunter understood why the cartels had to
+have Ann's patent at any cost. The absolute control of the human mind!
+It was the only weapon which Consolidated or United could use to break
+Young's power.</p>
+
+<p>Hunter shouldered his way through the strikers toward the terminal.
+Though he wore no U.F.W. disc, he felt no alarm. Eric Young's strike
+riots were always well-managed. None of the violence was real and no
+one was ever seriously hurt.</p>
+
+<p>But these trouble-makers seemed absurdly well-disciplined. They stood
+in drill-team ranks, moving and shouting abuse in perfect unison. Then
+Hunter saw their faces, as blank as death masks&mdash;and in all their
+skulls the still unhealed scalpel wound, as well as an occasional
+projecting platinum strand which sometimes caught the reflected light.</p>
+
+<p>Max Hunter felt a chill of terror. He was walking in a human graveyard
+of living automatons, responding to the transmission from Ann's
+machine. United had lost no time in putting the thing to work. This
+was no ordinary strike, but the opening skirmish in the conflict that
+would wreck both Consolidated and the Union of Free Workers.</p>
+
+<p>Hunter entered the monorail terminal. It was deserted except for a
+woman who stood by the window looking out at the crowd. She was
+wearing a demure, pink dress. Her face was plain, and she had used no
+cosmetic plasti-skin to make it more striking. Her brown hair,
+streaked with a gray which she took no trouble to hide, was pulled
+into a bun at the back of her neck.</p>
+
+<p>Surprisingly, Hunter thought she was pretty, perhaps because she was
+so different from the eternal, baby-faced adolescent who thronged the
+city in a million identical duplications.</p>
+
+<p>Hunter knew he had seen her before. He couldn't remember where. She
+shifted her position slightly and the light cast a sharp, angular
+shadow on her face. Then he knew.</p>
+
+<p>"Dawn!" he cried.</p>
+
+<p>Startled, she turned to face him with a strange look in her eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"I was hoping you wouldn't recognize me, Captain Hunter," she said.</p>
+
+<p>"What are you doing here&mdash;dressed like some dowdy just in from a farm
+sector?" he asked, his gaze incredulous.</p>
+
+<p>"We're all of us a mixture of different personalities," she replied.
+"I work for an entertainment house, yes. But I also have some of the
+qualities of your Ann Saymer. Don't take offense, please. Ann and I
+are both interested in the maladjusted. She wants a quick cure. I'm
+looking for the cause."</p>
+
+<p>"Here?"</p>
+
+<p>"Wherever there are people who face an emotional crisis&mdash;the men who
+come to Number thirty-four, or a mob of strikers. I want to know why
+we react in the way we do, and what makes up the frustration pattern
+that crowds us across the borderline into insanity."</p>
+
+<p>"You sound like a psychiatrist," he said.</p>
+
+<p>"I hold a First, Captain Hunter."</p>
+
+<p>"And you work in an entertainment house?"</p>
+
+<p>"Tell me about yourself, Captain. Have you found Ann yet?"</p>
+
+<p>He looked away quickly.</p>
+
+<p>"No," he said, his face hardening.</p>
+
+<p>"And you still haven't had a chance to use your blaster?"</p>
+
+<p>He directed an appraising glance at her. The question might imply a
+great deal. Did she somehow know what had happened at Mrs. Ames'? Did
+she know he was a fugitive?</p>
+
+<p>A dozen police mercenaries appeared abruptly at the end of the street.
+Since the police had never been used to break a strike, Hunter guessed
+that this was Consolidated's answer to Werner von Rausch's new weapon.</p>
+
+<p>The mercenaries drew their blasters and ordered the mob to disperse.
+The automatons turned to face them. And as they turned they fell
+silent&mdash;the cloying, choking silence of the tomb. Like marching
+puppets, the mob moved toward the police. Clearly Hunter could hear a
+shrill voice ordering them to halt.</p>
+
+<p>Hunter felt a sickening inner horror. How could the mob obey when they
+heard nothing but the enslaving grid, and responded to neither fear
+nor reason? Still they moved forward, in a robot death march. Whatever
+happened, it was a situation Young could turn to his advantage. If the
+mercenaries killed unarmed workers, it could be turned into superb
+propaganda. And ultimately, by sheer weight of numbers, the
+defenseless mob could overwhelm the mercenaries.</p>
+
+<p>White fire leaped from the blasters. The first rank fell, but the mob
+marched blindly across the smoking corpses. The mercenaries fired
+again. It was slaughter&mdash;brutal and pointless&mdash;of slaves unaware of
+their danger, unable to save themselves.</p>
+
+<p>Without understanding his own motivation&mdash;and without caring&mdash;Max
+Hunter leaped into the sill of the terminal window. There he was in a
+position to fire over the heads of the mob. The blast from his weapon
+arrowed into the line of police mercenaries.</p>
+
+<p>Three fell in the agony of the flames. The rest, glad for an excuse to
+stop the slaughter, turned and fled. Like clockwork things, the mob
+turned back and resumed its precision demonstration in front of the
+factory.</p>
+
+<p>Hunter slipped white-faced into a terminal bench. His hand trembled as
+he jammed the blaster back beneath his belt.</p>
+
+<p>"Why did you do it, Captain?" Dawn asked.</p>
+
+<p>How could he answer her, without saying he had seen the grids in their
+skulls? And he wasn't ready to trust Dawn to that extent.</p>
+
+<p>"The people couldn't help themselves," he said ambiguously.</p>
+
+<p>"Because they're in the U.F.W. and Eric Young cracks the whip. Is that
+what you mean?"</p>
+
+<p>"They weren't aware of their own danger."</p>
+
+<p>"Miscalculating the risks then? But that's part of the system,
+Captain. If you can't fight your way up to the top&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Then the system is utterly vicious."</p>
+
+<p>"You don't mean that," she said.</p>
+
+<p>"Why not? We're living in a jungle society. It's nothing but
+conflict&mdash;conflict on the frontier and conflict here from the time
+they put you in the general school."</p>
+
+<p>"Only the children who have the intelligence&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"But why?" he interrupted fiercely. "Where does it get us?"</p>
+
+<p>"We have a stable society," she told him. "Peace of a sort. Law
+enforcement, too, and a chance to build something better when we learn
+how."</p>
+
+<p>"Something better?" He laughed as he stood up. "We'll get that when we
+pull this hell apart, and not before."</p>
+
+<p>She put her hand on his arm. "No, Captain. It's not realistic to say
+that. Over and over again in the past we wrecked civilization because
+good-hearted and conscientious people thought there was no other way
+to create a finer world. It didn't work, because violence is madness.
+This time we have to begin where we are and build rationally. We can,
+you know, when we understand what we have to build with."</p>
+
+<p>"What else do we need to know, Dawn? You're falling back on the
+typical double-talk of the psychiatrists. With all the application of
+physical science that we have&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I wasn't thinking of technology, Captain. Civilization isn't
+machines. It's people. Our accumulation of knowledge is tremendous,
+but essentially it means nothing because we know so little about
+ourselves. It's absurd to talk of making something better until we
+really know the individual we're making it for."</p>
+
+<p>"Go ahead," he countered angrily. "Pussy-foot around with your
+cautious experiments, make sure nobody gets hurt&mdash;and you'll all end
+up slaves. As for me, I'm going to find Ann and get out while there's
+still time."</p>
+
+<p>"Always the same two alternatives," Dawn said wearily. "Pull down the
+world, or run away from it. We need the courage to try something
+different. We need men who will act like men. I thought, Captain, by
+this time&mdash;" She looked up into his eyes. "Where are you going?"</p>
+
+<p>"To the top&mdash;the casinos." Her abrupt question took him off balance
+and almost surprised him into telling the whole truth.</p>
+
+<p>"Top level." She paused, studying his face. "That's logical, of
+course. You'll rescue your woman and run away&mdash;perhaps to the
+frontier, or to a forgotten world too insignificant to be claimed by
+either cartel. It all sounds so easy, doesn't it? You have friends in
+the service. They'll smuggle you away from Sector West." She hesitated
+again. "Running away is insanity, too, Captain. But that is one thing
+you still have to learn."</p>
+
+
+<h2>VII</h2>
+
+<p>Max Hunter rode the autojet to the casino. As the machine rose past
+the city levels, he found himself thinking less about Ann and a good
+deal more about Dawn&mdash;a Recreational companion woman who was
+simultaneously a psychiatrist. Where did she really fit in the subtle
+battle between the titan cartels? Which of them was her ally&mdash;or did
+Dawn represent another element as yet unidentified?</p>
+
+<p>Knowing Ann Saymer had taught Hunter a wholesome respect for the
+thinking of a First in Psychiatry. They operated with a deviousness
+that made cartel treacheries seem like child's play. He knew that Dawn
+had manipulated their conversation in the terminal to her own ends.
+Behind that deftly-phrased patter of words, what else had she tried to
+tell him? And what had she tried to find out? "Top level," she had
+said. "That's logical." Why logical? Logical to whom? Did she know
+where he was going and why?</p>
+
+<p>The autojet thudded on the casino flat. A female attendant, robed in a
+skin-colored sheath bright with amber jewels, held open the cab door
+for him. Hunter entered the nearest casino. At the door he showed his
+saving record in the Solar First National Fund, and a casino teller
+issued him a ten thousand credit limit, the smallest denomination
+available. The resorts weren't wasting effort on pikers.</p>
+
+<p>Although the casinos everywhere in the system were popular with
+spacemen, Hunter had never been to the top level before because Ann
+had seen to it that his surplus credits went into their savings.</p>
+
+<p>It was Hunter's opinion that he hadn't missed much. The Los Angeles
+resorts duplicated, on an elaborate scale, the most unsavory
+establishments of the frontier. Anything which by any stretch of a
+perverted imagination could be defined as entertainment was
+available&mdash;at a price.</p>
+
+<p>It was early and the crowd was still small. It consisted of spacemen
+on the usual furlough binge, a handful of suburbanites who had
+hoarded a half-year's savings for this one-night fling in the big
+resorts, and a dozen bright-faced executives from the lower levels of
+the cartel hierarchy. The big brass would turn up later on, at a more
+fashionable hour.</p>
+
+<p>At all costs, Hunter had to keep himself inconspicuous. His uniform
+was not entirely out of place, although Consolidated did issue its
+commanders a formal outfit&mdash;more gold braid, a jeweled insignia, and a
+jacket cut to emphasize the broad shoulders.</p>
+
+<p>Hunter stopped at the snack bar and wolfed a plate of cold cuts, the
+first food he had eaten since morning. Then he moved indirectly across
+the pillared gambling pavilion, pausing at two tables to place bets.
+His objective was to find a vantage point in the upper floor of the
+casino where he could observe the geographic layout of the top level.</p>
+
+<p>He slipped quickly into the dark well of an emergency stairway,
+feeling reasonably sure that no one had seen him leave the game room.
+More than half an hour had passed since he had fled Mrs. Ames' rooming
+house and he was convinced that very shortly&mdash;if they had not done so
+already&mdash;the police would put out a general alarm.</p>
+
+<p>As a matter of course, there would be inquiries at the top level, but
+at first they would be made by police mercenaries. No one in the
+casino had any reason to identify Hunter as the fugitive. Later on, of
+course, when the police used electronic trackers, he wouldn't stand a
+chance. But before that happened he intended to make a deal with
+Werner von Rausch.</p>
+
+<p>At the top of the stairs he found a tower window which afforded a
+crow's nest view of the top level. The twelve casinos, bright with
+lights, occupied more than half the area. Beyond the resort parkland
+was the small, white government building, dignified by its simplicity
+among so much ostentation. Beside it was the transparent semi-sphere
+housing the top landing of the center-city lifts. A third structure&mdash;a
+grotesque mechanical monster trapped in the heart of a spider-web of
+converging wires&mdash;was the power distribution center for the top level.</p>
+
+<p>In back of the government building a high, metal-faced fence knifed
+across the level. That fence guarded the forbidden home-ground of the
+titans. Hunter could see the silhouette of the cartel castles rising
+against the sky, two gigantic masses of stone. The one on the west was
+Farren's; the eastern one, Von Rausch's. That much and no more was
+common knowledge.</p>
+
+<p>Were the two families, who had fought for so long to control the
+empire beyond the stars, on speaking terms here? Did they observe the
+social amenities in the same spirit that their companies enforced the
+sham peace on earth? In their lonely, lofty isolation, what
+amusements did they enjoy? What contributed to the enrichment of the
+lives of those fragile beings who possessed the wealth of the galaxy?</p>
+
+<p>Hunter was sure no armed guards patrolled the forbidden paradise.
+There was no need for them, for scanners formed a protective grid over
+the area. An autojet, attempting a landing from any direction, would
+break a beam and instantly become the target for the autoblasters
+erected at intervals along the fence. A man attempting to scale the
+wall would meet the same lethal charge.</p>
+
+<p>Hunter saw one small gate with an identification screen mounted in
+front of it. Obviously the gate would open to the handprint of a Von
+Rausch or a Farren. But a stranger would find himself standing in the
+line of fire of two blasters, conspicuous over the gate.</p>
+
+<p>The scanners, the blasters, the identification screen&mdash;all the
+complex, electronic watchdogs&mdash;depended solely upon power. Countless
+other people, Hunter knew, had realized that. Only mechanically
+produced power made the area invulnerable. Anyone could break through
+the fence. It hadn't been done before, perhaps, because no other man
+had ever had Hunter's motivation. None had been a fugitive on the run.</p>
+
+<p>Hunter made his way out of the casino and crossed the park in the
+direction of the government building. Sheltered by the trees from the
+blaze of light, he was able to see the stars, bright in the velvet
+sky. The endless universe! Somewhere he could find a haven for himself
+and Ann, a pinprick of light in the high-arching firmament which the
+cartels had overlooked.</p>
+
+<p>Dawn had said that running away was madness. But what alternative did
+he have? To stay, and attempt to make the cartel rat-race over,
+sweetly and rationally so that no one would be hurt? Hunter laughed
+bitterly. Von Rausch had the Exorciser, and he could keep it. It would
+be part of the bargain the captain thought he could make to save Ann.
+With that weapon, Von Rausch would sooner or later tear his own world
+to shreds. No man in his right mind would want to stay around to pick
+up the pieces&mdash;if any. He drew his blaster and took careful aim at the
+power distribution center.</p>
+
+<p>The machine exploded. Burning wires sang in the air. In the casinos
+the lights winked out, and the entertainment machines went dark.
+Hunter heard the shrill screaming of the trapped crowd. He knew that
+it would bring the police running, but he also knew they would have
+arrived shortly in any case. The important thing was that the
+electronic watchdogs on the wall were now lifeless.</p>
+
+<p>Hunter blasted open the gate, and took the path that led east.</p>
+
+<p>The Von Rausch castle&mdash;and the word was scarcely a metaphor&mdash;was
+something lifted bodily out of a Tri-D historical romance, complete
+with porticos, battlements, stone-walled towers and an imitation moat
+where mechanical swans floated on the dark water.</p>
+
+<p>He crossed the moat on a rustic footbridge of plastic cleverly
+fabricated to seem like crudely hewn wood. Through a high, narrow
+window he saw a pale flicker of light. The pane was thick with grime.</p>
+
+<p>Hunter could distinguish nothing in the room except a thin, elderly
+woman who seemed to be moving around a table where six candles burned
+in a silver candelabrum.</p>
+
+<p>He kicked open the window. The woman looked at him, neither frightened
+nor alarmed. She was wearing an odd black dress, long-sleeved,
+high-necked, with a hemline that touched the floor. Her face was pale
+and wrinkled, unrelieved by any sort of cosmetic.</p>
+
+<p>She held out her fragile hands. "You did come, Karl! I knew you
+wouldn't disappoint Auntie."</p>
+
+<p>Hunter cried through clenched teeth, "I want Werner von Rausch. Where
+is he?"</p>
+
+<p>"Goodness, dear, how should I know? Werner never comes to my parties."</p>
+
+<p>Hunter noticed the table, then, set for eight, its gleaming silver and
+gold-rimmed china glowing in the soft candle light.</p>
+
+<p>"Your Cousin Charlotte's already here, Karl." The woman gestured
+gracefully toward the table. "And little Helmig. They know how
+important it is to come on time."</p>
+
+<p>He felt horror&mdash;and unconscious pity&mdash;as he realized the truth. Yet he
+tried once more to get from her the information he wanted.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, bother with Werner," she answered, pouting. "If you must know, I
+didn't even invite him. He's such a bore among young people."</p>
+
+<p>She saw the blaster in Hunter's hand and pushed it aside gently, with
+a grimace of disapproval. "I don't like you to have these toys, Karl.
+Next thing, you'll be wanting to join the army."</p>
+
+<p>Hunter flung himself out of that room, into a dark and musty hall.
+Behind him he heard the woman still talking, as if he had never left
+her. He blundered from one bleak room to another, rooms that were like
+tombs smelling of dust and decay.</p>
+
+<p>On the second floor he came upon a small, balding man who sat reading
+at a desk in a room crammed with tottering stacks of old books. The
+light came from an antiquated electric lamp. Obviously the house had
+its own generating plant, independent of the power center Hunter had
+destroyed.</p>
+
+<p>Hunter jerked up his blaster again. "Werner von Rausch?"</p>
+
+<p>"One moment," the man said. Ignoring Hunter, the man quietly finished
+what he was reading, slipped a leather placemark into the book, and
+put it on top of a stack beside the desk. The pile promptly collapsed
+in a cloud of dust at Hunter's feet.</p>
+
+<p>Max saw some of the title pages. The books were extraordinarily old,
+some of them with a printing date a thousand years in the past. The
+man pinched a pair of eye-glasses on his nose and studied Hunter
+carefully.</p>
+
+<p>"You're from the police, I presume?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>"If you are Werner von Rausch&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I'm Heinrich. I sent in the report. Though, I must say, you couldn't
+have come at a more inconvenient time. I'm collating the spells
+tonight. I have them all, right here at my fingertips. And when I'm
+finished&mdash;" He seized the captain's jacket and his voice was suddenly
+shrill. "&mdash;I'll have the power to summon up any demon from hell. Think
+what that means! I'll be greater than Faust. I'll have more power
+than&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Where can I find Werner von Rausch?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, Werner. Poor boy." Heinrich was calm again. "You'll have to do
+your duty, officer. He's been annoying me all afternoon. So much
+noise&mdash;a man can't think. He's in his shop at the end of the hall. But
+don't be too severe with him. Perhaps this time just a warning will
+make him see reason."</p>
+
+<p>Hunter went back to the corridor, feeling again the shadow of horror
+at this sick distortion of reality. In the distance, beyond the metal
+fence, he heard the scream of sirens, and realized he had at best
+another three minutes before the police would be there. Three minutes
+to make a deal with Werner and save Ann.</p>
+
+<p>Hunter pushed back the nightmare that welled up from the depths of his
+mind. It wasn't true; it couldn't be true. If it were, nothing in the
+jungle made sense.</p>
+
+
+<h2>VIII</h2>
+
+<p>As he felt his way along the hall, he passed the cage of a lift, a
+private transit between the house and the cartel offices on the city
+levels below. He noted it subconsciously, as a possible means of
+escape. But he was through running. He could make a deal with Von
+Rausch. After that the police wouldn't matter.</p>
+
+<p>At the end of the corridor he came upon a paneled door. Behind it he
+could hear the hum of a motor, and knew that he had found Werner's
+shop, and the source of the noise that had disturbed Heinrich's
+research.</p>
+
+<p>Hunter flung open the door. The light was bright and gay. On the
+floor, a fat old man sat hunched over the remote control console of a
+toy monorail system. Toy space liners and fighting ships buzzed in the
+air.</p>
+
+<p>"Werner von Rausch?" Hunter whispered.</p>
+
+<p>"You've come to play with me!" The fat, old man flashed the cherubic
+smile of a child. "And you brought me a blaster. Oh, let me see it!
+Let me see it!"</p>
+
+<p>He clapped his hands eagerly.</p>
+
+<p>Hunter turned and fled. The scream of the sirens still seemed no
+closer, but without assessing his chances Hunter sprang into the
+private lift. It dropped downward toward its unknown destination. What
+that was, Hunter didn't care. Anything to escape from so hideous a
+madhouse.</p>
+
+<p>The Von Rausch clan: an old lady who lived with ghosts; a scholar of
+demonology; a patriarch lost in an eternal childhood. All of them
+running away into their own private fantasies.</p>
+
+<p>But this Was the family which ruled a cartel and directed the conquest
+of half the galaxy; these were the most powerful human beings who had
+ever lived. And they were escaping into insanity. Escaping what?
+Responsibility? The jungle of the cartels?</p>
+
+<p>"Two alternatives," Dawn had said. "Pull down the world or run away
+from it." The Von Rausches had made this mess and then fled in horror
+from their own brutal and destructive creation.</p>
+
+<p>The lift cage jerked to a stop. The door opened on a warmly lighted
+executive office where a white-haired man sat at a desk which had been
+cut from a single slab of Venusian crystal. A much enlarged projection
+of the United Researchers' emblem glowed from the Wall. Hunter raised
+his weapon.</p>
+
+<p>The old man gestured imperiously. "Don't be a fool, Captain. I
+wouldn't be here unless I had adequate protection. There are blasters
+in the wall, which I can trigger with a single spoken word."</p>
+
+<p>"You want to finish the job your men bungled this afternoon?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not our men, Captain. We got in on this deal a little late. We knew
+nothing about this psychiatric patent until the strikes started
+today."</p>
+
+<p>"But Ann Saymer&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Unfortunately, we do not have her. It's Consolidated. We sent our men
+out to bring you in, Captain. We wanted your help. When you got away,
+it didn't occur to me that you would go to the top level. Not until we
+heard the report of the destruction of the power distributor. It was
+easy enough to anticipate your moves after that.</p>
+
+<p>"If you hadn't used the private Von Rausch lift, you would have gone
+out again through the gate, where my men were waiting. Naturally we
+couldn't send them inside. You can understand why, of course."</p>
+
+<p>Hunter heard only vaguely what the man was saying, for abruptly the
+pattern fell into place. Neither Consolidated nor United had Ann or
+the Exorciser. Each cartel suspected the other because they hadn't yet
+adjusted to the idea that a third cartel existed: Eric Young's union.</p>
+
+<p>Ann's micropic had told the literal truth. She had taken her
+commission-job with the biggest private clinic, operated by the
+U.F.W. It was a dead giveaway when Young struck both cartels
+simultaneously, if Hunter had read the data correctly.</p>
+
+<p>Hunter moved toward the crystal desk. "I know where Ann is, sir," he
+said. "I can&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"You can stay where you are," the old man interrupted. "One hour ago,
+my friend, I was ready to offer you a deal. Since then you've seen&mdash;"
+He raised his eyes toward the ceiling. "You've seen what's up there.
+Only four of us know that secret. We don't relish sharing it with a
+fifth."</p>
+
+<p>"Unless you destroy Ann's patent, you're finished anyway."</p>
+
+<p>"Destroy, Captain?" The senile voice turned silky. "No, we want that
+machine intact."</p>
+
+<p>"If you'll guarantee Ann's safety and mine&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"You have an exaggerated idea of your own importance. You would have
+been useful to us, particularly since you have been a Consolidated
+employee. But this thing you blundered into up there destroys your
+value entirely. It makes you potentially as dangerous as the Saymer
+patent. That's my opinion.</p>
+
+<p>"The other three who share the Von Rausch secret have an equal vote in
+deciding the issue. They may reverse my decision. I've asked them to
+come here, and I'm waiting for them now."</p>
+
+<p>The old man was so intent upon making a logical explanation of the
+death sentence he pronounced&mdash;without putting it into words&mdash;that he
+didn't notice Hunter edging closer to the desk. Captain Hunter saw no
+chance for a reprieve when the other three arrived. Why wait? Having
+fought on the frontier, Hunter was aware of a property of the Venusian
+crystal which possibly the old man did not know. It was impervious to
+blaster fire.</p>
+
+<p>Hunter acted with the split-second timing of an experienced spaceman.
+He swung his body in a flying tackle against the old man's chair and
+in the same swift motion pushed himself into the leg cubicle carved in
+the crystal.</p>
+
+<p>As the chair toppled and before he realized his own danger, the old
+man cried the code word that triggered the wall blasters. He was
+instantly caught in the deadly cross-fire.</p>
+
+<p>As the weapons slid back into the wall slots, Hunter leaped for the
+door, and passed quickly through it. The outer hall was empty. He
+sprinted for the walk-way, the echoes of the blast still ringing in
+his ears.</p>
+
+<p>A destination marker glowed above a nearby metro-entry. It told him he
+was on the Twenty-eighth level of center-city. On a large, public
+Tri-D screen Hunter saw a picture of the strike mob in the industrial
+area. That was all the data he needed. If the mob was still in the
+streets, Eric Young was still manipulating the transmitter.</p>
+
+<p>Hunter took an unchartered autojet and dialed as his destination the
+U.F.W. clinic. It was the largest structure in the industrial area,
+made from luminous, pink, Martian stone, which had been imported at
+great cost&mdash;and with a blaze of publicity.</p>
+
+<p>Completed only three years before, the U.F.W. clinic had been given a
+continuous flood of publicity. Numerous Tri-D public service programs
+had explored its wards, its laboratories, and its service centers, and
+even in a distant spaceship Hunter had not remained in ignorance of
+the build-up. The knowledge served to his advantage now, for he knew
+just where Young's personal penthouse was located and exactly how to
+reach it.</p>
+
+<p>There were no armed guards or automatic probes in the clinic. Such an
+outward display of force wouldn't have jibed with Young's public
+personality. He was the much-loved official head of a union whose
+membership totaled millions.</p>
+
+<p>Any protective device would have distorted the illusion and destroyed
+the legend completely.</p>
+
+<p>Young's penthouse, thirty floors above street level, was the modest
+garden cottage which had been so widely publicized and that, too, was
+a part of his illusion. When Hunter saw the tiny house he was able to
+appreciate Young's showmanship, his insight into the mental processes
+of the credulous.</p>
+
+<p>Hunter moved toward the door. Light glowed inside the cottage, but
+through the broad, front window he could see no one. He felt a
+momentary doubt. Had he guessed wrong? Was Young holding Ann somewhere
+else?</p>
+
+<p>But Hunter was sure Young had not taken that precaution. It would have
+involved risks he would not have to contend with at the clinic, unless
+he had been reasonably certain he would be found out. And Young had
+expected to prevent that by keeping Consolidated and United at each
+other's throats.</p>
+
+<p>Hunter kicked open the door. The three small rooms in the cottage were
+empty&mdash;until a man wearing a union smock emerged from the narrow
+galley. He hadn't been there a moment before when Hunter examined the
+cubicle, and there was no rear entry to the cottage.</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. Young isn't here, sir." The man said, gliding swiftly toward him.
+"If you wish to leave a message&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Hunter saw the telltale grid wire in the stranger's forehead. He
+ducked aside instinctively as the knife gleamed in the man's hand.
+With an odd, sighing sound, the blade arched through the air, smashing
+the picture window. Hunter's fist shot out, and the man dropped
+unconscious.</p>
+
+<p>Hunter went into the galley and found what he had missed before&mdash;the
+false bank of food slots which masked a narrow stairway. He ran
+quickly down the steps, and found the opulent living quarters Eric
+Young had concealed on the clinic floor beneath the innocent garden
+cottage. Here in gaudy splendor, in the tasteless clutter of objects
+assembled from every quarter of the cartel empire, was the true index
+to the infinite ambition of the U.F.W. boss.</p>
+
+<p>A dozen men and women lurched at Hunter from an open hall. They wore
+white hospital robes and their foreheads were still bandaged.
+Obviously they were patients with recently grafted slave grids.
+Obedient to the transmission, they fought with a desperate, savage
+fury&mdash;and a clumsy lack of co-ordination which caricatured normal
+human behavior.</p>
+
+<p>Hunter repulsed their attack without difficulty. Yet he felt an inner
+disgust and loathing as if he were using his strength to defeat
+helpless children. In two minutes it was over. One of the men was
+dead, his head bandage torn loose, and the grid ripped out of his
+skull. Three more lay sprawled out on the floor, bleeding badly from
+freshly opened incisions.</p>
+
+<p>Hunter drew his blaster and entered the thickly-carpeted hall, glowing
+with the soft, pink light of the luminous, Martian stone. He cried
+Ann's name. His voice fell hollowly in the silence, but there was no
+response. He moved to the end of the hall and pushed open a narrow
+door.</p>
+
+<p>He saw the white-tiled laboratory, Ann's transmitter standing on a
+long table with new platinum grids piled by the dozen beside it, and
+the barrack rows of hospital beds. From the angle of the room which
+was hidden by the half-open door, Ann Saymer ran toward him with
+outstretched hands, crying his name. He took a step toward her. And
+something struck the back of his head.</p>
+
+
+<h2>IX</h2>
+
+<p>Hunter's mind rocked. He felt himself falling down the long spiral
+into unconsciousness. The blaster slipped from his hand and his knees
+buckled. But he clawed blindly, with animal instinct, at the hands
+closing on his throat.</p>
+
+<p>His head cleared. He saw Eric Young's dark face close to his. Hunter
+swung his fist into Young's stomach, and the hands slid away from his
+throat. Captain Hunter sprang to his feet, crouching low to meet
+Young's next attack. Young's swing went wild. Hunter's fist struck at
+the flabby jaw. Eric Young backed away, reeling under the hammer
+blows, until he came up against the laboratory table.</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly he slashed at Hunter with a scalpel. The blade nicked Max's
+shoulder and cut across his jacket. The cloth parted, sliding down his
+arms and pinning his hands together. In the split-second it took
+Hunter to free himself from the torn jacket, Young swung the scalpel
+again. Hunter dodged. Miscalculating his aim, Eric Young tripped over
+Hunter's outstretched leg and fell, screaming, upon the point of his
+own weapon.</p>
+
+<p>Hunter stood for an instant with his legs spread wide, looking down at
+Young. Then he dropped to his knees and rolled the grievously wounded
+man over on his back. The hand grasping the scalpel slowly pulled the
+blade from the abdominal wound. Blood pulsed out upon the white tile.
+Young was still barely alive.</p>
+
+<p>Hunter walked toward the transmitter, where Ann stood, saying nothing,
+her eyes wide and staring. A tremendous conflict was raging within
+him. Running away was no solution, but what if he could destroy the
+system itself? Break the mold and start anew.</p>
+
+<p>He had the instrument that would do it, the hundreds of obedient
+slaves Young had already turned loose on the streets. With Ann's
+transmitter he could transform the disciplined strike of human
+automatons into a civic disaster. Terror and violence uprooting the
+foundations of the city.</p>
+
+<p>But a moment's madness could not overthrow the enduring rationality of
+Hunter's adjustment index. To loose that horror was to set himself in
+judgment upon the dreams and hopes, the perversion and the sublimity,
+of his fellow men. To play at God&mdash;a delusion no different from Eric
+Young's.</p>
+
+<p>Savagely Hunter lifted a chair and started to swing it at the
+transmitter. Instantly, Ann Saymer turned to face him, the blaster
+clasped tightly in her hand.</p>
+
+<p>"No, Max."</p>
+
+<p>"But, Ann, those people outside are in desperate danger&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I've gone this far. I <i>won't</i> turn back." In her voice was the
+familiar drive, the ambition he knew so well. But now it seemed
+different, a twisted distortion of something he had once admired.</p>
+
+<p>"We don't need Eric Young," she said. "He's bungled everything. You
+and I, Max&mdash;" She caressed the transmitter affectionately. "With this,
+we'll possess unlimited power."</p>
+
+<p>"You mean, Ann&mdash;" He choked on the words. "You came here of your own
+free will? You deliberately planned Mrs. Ames' murder?"</p>
+
+<p>"She was dangerous, Max. She guessed too much. We knew that when we
+monitored the call you made from the spaceport. But in the beginning
+we weren't going to make you responsible. We thought the strangers in
+the house&mdash;your attempt to expose the other woman who called herself
+Mrs. Ames&mdash;would be enough to get you committed to a clinic. I didn't
+want you to be hurt, Max."</p>
+
+<p>"Why, Ann?" His voice was dead, emotionless. "Because you loved me? Or
+because you wanted me to be your ace in the hole, if you failed to
+manage Eric Young the way you thought you could?"</p>
+
+<p>"That doesn't matter now, Max, dear. I thought Eric had what I
+needed. But I was misjudging you all along."</p>
+
+<p>"You're still misjudging me, Ann. I'm going to smash this machine and
+afterward&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"No you aren't, Max," she said coldly. "I'll kill you first."</p>
+
+<p>Calmly she turned the dial on the blaster. He lifted the chair again,
+watching her face, still unable to accept what he knew was true. This
+was Ann Saymer, the woman he had loved. It was the same Ann whose
+ambition had driven her from the general school to a First in
+Psychiatry.</p>
+
+<p>With a fighting man's instinct, Hunter calculated his chances as he
+held the chair high above his head. It was Ann who had to die. He
+would accomplish nothing if he smashed her transmitter. She knew how
+to build another. If he threw the chair at her rather than the
+Exorciser and if he threw it hard enough&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>From the door a fan of flame blazed out, gently touching Ann. She
+stood rigid in the first muscular tension of paralysis. Hunter dropped
+the chair, shattering the transmitter. He turned and saw Dawn in the
+doorway. Somewhere deep in his subconscious mind he had expected her.
+He was glad she was there.</p>
+
+<p>"We've known for a long time we would have to break up their little
+partnership," Dawn explained. "After I talked to you this morning,
+Captain, I persuaded the others to hold off for another day or so. A
+clinical experiment of my own.</p>
+
+<p>"It was unkind of me, I suppose, to make you the guinea pig. But I
+wanted to watch your reactions while you fought your way to the truth.
+Now you know it all&mdash;more than you bargained for. And you know what
+we're trying to do. Are you willing to join us?"</p>
+
+<p>He looked at her.</p>
+
+<p>"In your third alternative&mdash;the cautious, rational rebuilding?"</p>
+
+<p>"After men understand themselves. When we're able to answer one
+question: why did you and Ann Saymer, with identical backgrounds, and
+intelligence, and an identical socio-economic incentive, become such
+different personalities? What gives you a zero-zero adjustment index
+that nothing can shake? Not the psychiatric shock of war, Captain. Not
+physical pain alone or the treachery of the girl you love. We need
+you, Captain. We need to know what makes you tick."</p>
+
+<p>"That 'we' of yours. Just what does that embrace?"</p>
+
+<p>"A cross-section of us all," she told him. "Psychiatrists, executives
+in both cartels, union officials. We've been working at this for a
+good many years. We want to make our world over, yes. But this time
+with reason and without violence&mdash;without sacrificing the good we
+already have."</p>
+
+<p>"And you yourself, Dawn. Who are you?"</p>
+
+<p>"I represent that nonentity called the government, Captain."</p>
+
+<p>"A nonentity wouldn't make you what you are, Dawn."</p>
+
+<p>"My name, Captain&mdash;" She drew a long breath. "My name is Dawn Farren.
+The rest of my family is dying out as the Von Rausches are. Unlimited
+power has a way of poisoning the human mind. If wealth is our only
+ethical goal, what do we really have when we possess it all? Madness.
+Both cartels are shams, Captain Hunter, just as your frontier wars are
+shams.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, you may as well know that, too. Neither fleet has actually
+fought the other for a good many years. The planets you blast are
+hulks already long dead. It's all a sham, but we have to keep it
+alive. We have to make it <i>seem</i> real&mdash;until we're sure we've found
+something better and more workable for all of us."</p>
+
+<p>The tension in Ann Saymer's muscles started to relax. Very slowly her
+body began to slump, in the secondary stage of paralysis.</p>
+
+<p>"What about her?" Hunter asked. "She can still make another
+Exorciser&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"The dream of enslaving mankind is <i>always</i> insanity. We'll put her in
+a public clinic, of course. We may have to use her own machine once
+more to erase the memory of its structure from her mind. After that
+the patent drawings will be destroyed. It's not a superficial cure for
+maladjustment that we're after, Captain Hunter, but the cause. All of
+Ann's research was up a blind alley&mdash;a brilliant waste."</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly Dawn screamed a warning and leveled her blaster at Eric
+Young. Hunter sprang back as Dawn fired. But her timing was a second
+too late. In a last, blazing agony of life-before-death Young had
+regained consciousness long enough to hurl the scalpel at Hunter's
+back. Ebbing strength distorted his aim. The blade plunged into Ann's
+heart as she slumped against the wall.</p>
+
+<p>After a long pause, Max Hunter moved toward Dawn and took her arm. He
+clenched his jaw tight and drew her quickly into the hall. "I want
+out, Dawn. There's no healing here. I won't feel free again until I
+can look up at the stars."</p>
+
+<p>"The stars. Then you're going back to the service, Captain? You're
+running away?"</p>
+
+<p>He didn't answer her until they stood in Eric Young's garden.</p>
+
+<p>"Sham battles for shadow cartels," he said. "That's a child's
+subterfuge for the Tri-D space heroes. No, Dawn, the real war is here
+in the struggle for information about ourselves so that we can build a
+new world of freedom and human dignity. You say you need me. All
+right, Dawn, you've enrolled a recruit."</p>
+
+<p>"It will be a long, slow war, Captain," she said, her eyes shining.
+"We may never see a victory, and&mdash;we can never make a truce. But at
+least we've learned how to go about solving the problem&mdash;after ten
+millennia of trial and error."</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Cartels Jungle, by Irving E. Cox, Jr.
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Cartels Jungle, by Irving E. Cox, Jr.
+
+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: The Cartels Jungle
+
+Author: Irving E. Cox, Jr.
+
+Release Date: March 16, 2010 [EBook #31062]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CARTELS JUNGLE ***
+
+
+
+
+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 Fantastic Universe September 1955.
+    Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.
+    copyright on this publication was renewed.
+
+
+[_In most ideally conceived Utopias the world as it exists
+  is depicted as a mushrooming horror of maladjustment, cruelty and
+  crime. In this startlingly original short novel that basic premise is
+  granted, but only to pave the way for an approach to Utopia over a
+  highway of the mind so daringly unusual we predict you'll forget
+  completely that you're embarking on a fictional excursion into the
+  future by one of the most gifted writers in the field. And that
+  forgetfulness will be accompanied by the startling realization that
+  Irving E. Cox has a great deal more than a storyteller's magic to
+  impart._]
+
+
+                          the cartels jungle
+
+
+                     _by ... Irving E. Cox, Jr._
+
+
+     It was a world of greedy Dynasts--each contending for the
+     right to pillage and enslave. But one man's valor became a
+     shining shield.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+     _... and he who overcomes an enemy by fraud is as much to be
+      praised as he who does so by force._
+
+                                        Machiavelli, DISCORSI, III, 1531
+
+
+The captain walked down the ramp carrying a lightweight bag. To a
+discerning eye, that bag meant only one thing: Max Hunter had quit the
+service. A spaceman on leave never took personal belongings from his
+ship, because without a bag he could by-pass the tedious wait for a
+customs clearance.
+
+From the foot of the ramp a gray-haired port hand called up to Hunter,
+"So you're really through, Max?"
+
+"I always said, by the time I was twenty-six--"
+
+"Lots of guys think they'll make it. I did once myself. Look at me
+now. I'm no good in the ships any more, so they bust me back to port
+hand. It's too damn easy to throw your credits away in the
+crumb-joints."
+
+"I'm getting married," Hunter replied. "Ann and I worked this out when
+I joined the service. Now we have the capital to open her clinic--and
+ninety-six thousand credits, salted away in the Solar First National
+Fund."
+
+"Every youngster starts out like you did, but something always
+happens. The girl doesn't wait, maybe. Or he gets to thinking he can
+pile up credits faster in the company casinos." The old man saluted.
+"So long, boy. It does my soul good to meet one guy who's getting out
+of this crazy space racket."
+
+Max Hunter strode along the fenced causeway toward the low,
+pink-walled municipal building, shimmering in the desert sun. Behind
+him the repair docks and the launching tubes made a ragged silhouette
+against the sky.
+
+Hunter felt no romantic inclination to look back. He had always been
+amused by the insipid, Tri-D space operas. To Hunter it had been a
+business--a job different from other occupations only because the
+risks were greater and the bonus scale higher.
+
+Ann would be waiting in the lobby, as she always was when he came in
+from a flight. But today when they left the field, it would be for
+keeps. Anticipation made his memory of Ann Saymer suddenly vivid--the
+caress of her lips, the delicate scent of her hair, her quick smile
+and the pert upturn of her nose.
+
+Captain Hunter thought of Ann as small and delicate, yet neither term
+was strictly applicable except subjectively in relation to himself.
+Hunter towered a good four inches above six feet. His shoulders were
+broad and powerful, his hips narrow, and his belly flat and hard. He
+moved with the co-ordination that had become second nature to him
+after a decade of frontier war. He was the typical spaceman, holding a
+First in his profession.
+
+As was his privilege, he still wore his captain's uniform--dress boots
+of black plastic, tight-fitting trousers, and a scarlet jacket bearing
+the gold insignia of Consolidated Solar Industries.
+
+Hunter entered the municipal building and joined the line of people
+moving slowly toward the customs booth. Anxiously he scanned the mass
+of faces in the lobby. Ann Saymer wasn't there.
+
+He felt the keen, knife-edge disappointment, and something
+else--something he didn't want to put into words. He had sent Ann a
+micropic telling her when his ship would be in. Of course, there was
+that commission-job she had taken--
+
+Abruptly he was face to face again with the vague fear that had nagged
+at his mind for nearly a month. This wasn't like Ann. Always before
+she had sent him every two or three days a chatty micropic, using the
+private code they had invented to cut the unit cost of words. But four
+weeks had now passed since he had last heard from her.
+
+In an attempt at self-assurance, he recalled to mind just how exacting
+a commission-job could be. Perhaps Ann had been working so hard she
+had simply not had the time to send him a message.
+
+Not even five minutes to send a micropic?
+
+It didn't occur to him that she might be ill, for preventive medicine
+had long ago made physical disease a trivial factor in human affairs.
+A maladjustment then, with commitment to a city clinic? But Ann Saymer
+held a First in Psychiatry.
+
+Hunter fingered the Saving Fund record in his pocket--the goal he and
+Ann had worked for so long. Nothing could go wrong now, nothing! He
+said the words over in his mind as he might have repeated the litany
+of a prayer, although Max Hunter did not consider himself a religious
+man.
+
+At sixteen he and Ann Saymer had fallen in love, while they had both
+been in the last semester of the general school. They could have
+married then, or they might have registered for the less permanent
+companionship-union.
+
+In either case, both of them would have had to go to work. Hunter
+could not have entered the space service, which enrolled only single
+men and Ann could not have afforded the university.
+
+It hadn't mattered to Hunter. But Ann had possessed enough ambition
+for them both. She knew she had the ability to earn a First in
+Psychiatry, and would settle for nothing less. The drive that kept
+their goal alive was hers. She was determined to establish a clinic of
+her own. The plan she worked out was very practical--for Ann was in
+all respects the opposite of an idle dreamer.
+
+Hunter was to join a commercial spacefleet. His bonus credits would
+accumulate to supply their capital, while he paid her university
+tuition from his current earnings. After they married, Hunter was to
+manage the finances of the clinic while Ann became the resident
+psychiatrist.
+
+Even at sixteen Ann Saymer had very positive ideas about curing mental
+illness, which was the epidemic sickness of their world. Eight years
+later, while she was still serving her internship in a city clinic,
+Ann had invented the tiny machine which, with wry humor, she called an
+Exorciser.
+
+She had never used the device in the public clinic. If she had, she
+would have lost the patent, since she had built the Exorciser while
+she was still serving out her educational apprenticeship in the city
+clinic.
+
+"I'm no fool, Max," she told Hunter. "Why should I give it away? We'll
+coin credits in our own clinic with that little gadget."
+
+Hunter had no objection to her aggressive selfishness. In fact, the
+term "selfishness" did not even occur to him. Ann was simply
+expressing the ethic of their society. He admired her brilliance, her
+cleverness; and he knew that her Exorciser, properly exploited, would
+be the touchstone to a fortune.
+
+During one of his furloughs Ann demonstrated what the machine could
+do. After a minor surgical operation, a fragile filigree of
+microscopic platinum wires was planted in the cerebral cortex of a
+patient's skull. From a multi-dialed console Ann verbally transmitted
+a new personality directly into the maladjusted mind. After twenty
+minutes she removed the wire grid, and the disorganized personality
+was whole again, with an adjustment index testing at zero-zero.
+
+"A cure that leaves out the long probe for psychic causes," she said
+enthusiastically. "In minutes, Max, we'll be able to do what now takes
+weeks or months. They'll swarm into our clinic."
+
+Hunter reasoned that Ann had taken the commission-job in order to
+experiment with her machine in a privately-operated clinic. Her
+internship had ended a month before, and it had been an altogether
+legal thing for her to do. The fact that she had taken a commission
+meant she would work for only a specific contract period. And because
+a commission-job carried a professional classification, Ann had not
+been compelled to join the union.
+
+Nevertheless the haze of anxiety still lay oppressively over Captain
+Hunter's mind. No matter what the requirements of Ann's commission may
+have been, she could have met him at the spaceport. She knew when his
+ship was due, and had never failed to show up before.
+
+
+II
+
+The line of people continued to move steadily toward the customs
+booth. Hunter stopped at last in front of a counter where a male
+clerk, wearing on his tunic the identification disc of his U.F.W.
+union local, typed out the customs forms, took Hunter's thumbprint,
+and carefully checked his medical certificate.
+
+"You had your last boosters in the Mars station, is that correct?"
+
+"Yes, last January," Hunter replied.
+
+"That gives you an eight months' clearance." The clerk smiled. "Plenty
+of time for a spaceman's furlough."
+
+"I'm making a permanent separation," Hunter affirmed.
+
+The clerk glanced at him sharply. "Then I'd better issue a temporary
+health card." He ran a red-tinted, celluloid rectangle through a
+stamping machine and Hunter pressed his thumbprint upon the signature
+square. "Can you give me your home address, Captain?"
+
+"I'll be staying at the Roost for a day or so. After that I'm getting
+married."
+
+"I'll assign your health file to the Los Angeles Clinic then," the
+clerk said. "You can apply for an official reassignment later, if
+necessary."
+
+He made a photo-copy of the health card, pushed it into a pneumatic
+tube and handed the original to Hunter. Then he rolled the customs
+form back into the typewriter.
+
+"Since you're quitting the service, Captain, I'll have to have
+additional information for the municipal file. Do you have union
+affiliation?"
+
+"No. Spacemen aren't required to join the U.F.W."
+
+"If you want to give me a part payment on the initiation fee, I'll be
+glad to issue--"
+
+"It'll be a long, hard winter before Eric Young gets any of my
+credits," Hunter said, his eyes narrowing. Considering how Hunter felt
+about the Union of Free Workers and the labor czar, Eric Young, he
+thought he had phrased his answer with remarkable restraint.
+
+"Anti-labor," the clerk said, and typed the designation on the form.
+
+"No," Hunter snapped, "and I won't be labeled that. As far as the
+individual goes, I believe he has every right to organize. No one can
+stand up against the cartels in any other way. But this exploitation
+by Young--"
+
+"You either join the U.F.W., or you're against us." The clerk shrugged
+disinterestedly. "It's all one and the same thing to me, Captain.
+However, if you expect a job in the city, you'll have to get it
+through the union." He typed again on the customs form. "According to
+a new regulation, I'm obliged to classify you as unemployed, and that
+restricts you to limited areas of Los Angeles as well as--"
+
+"When the hell did they put over a law like that?"
+
+"Two weeks ago, sir. It gives the clinics a closer control over the
+potentially maladjusted, and it should help ease the pressure--"
+
+"There are no exceptions?"
+
+"The executive classifications, naturally--professionals, and
+spacemen. That would have included you, Captain Hunter, but you say
+you've left the service."
+
+Hunter gritted his teeth. It had been like this for as long as he
+could remember. Whenever he returned from a long flight there was
+always a new form of regimentation to adjust to. And always for the
+same reason--to stop the steadily rising incidence of psychotic
+maladjustment.
+
+"How does the law define an executive?" Hunter asked.
+
+"Job bracket with one of the cartels," the clerk replied. "Or the
+total credits held on deposit with a recognized fund."
+
+The captain flung his savings book on the counter. The clerk glanced
+at the balance and X'ed out the last word he had typed on the customs
+form.
+
+"You qualify, sir--with a thousand credits to spare. I'll give you a
+city-wide clearance as an executive. But I can only make it
+temporary. You'll have to check once each week with the U.F.W. office.
+If your balance drops below ninety-five thousand, you'll be
+reclassified."
+
+The clerk ran another celluloid card--this time it was blue--through
+the stamping machine and passed it across to Hunter. Captain Hunter
+picked up his bag and entered the customs booth, which by that time
+was empty. The probe lights glowed from the walls and ceiling,
+efficiently X-raying his bag and his clothing for any prohibited
+imports. Within seconds the alarm bell clanged and the metal doors
+banged shut, imprisoning Hunter in the booth.
+
+Now what? he asked himself. What regulation had he violated this time?
+In his mind he inventoried the contents of his bag. It contained only
+a handful of personal belongings, and the tools of trade which he had
+needed as a captain of a fighting ship. Everything was legitimate and
+above-board. Hunter hadn't even brought Ann a souvenir from the
+frontier.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After a time, the booth door swung open. A senior inspector, carrying
+a blaster, crowded into the cubicle.
+
+"Open your bag!" The inspector commanded, motioning with his weapon.
+
+Hunter saw that the blaster dial was set to fire the death charge, not
+the weaker dispersal charge which produced only an hour's paralysis.
+
+Hunter thumbed the photocell lock. It responded to the individual
+pattern of his thumbprint, and the bag fell open. The inspector picked
+up the worn blaster which lay under Hunter's shipboard uniform.
+
+"Smuggling firearms, Captain, is a violation of the city code. The
+fine is--"
+
+"Smuggling?" Hunter exploded. "That blaster was registered to me nine
+years ago." He snapped open his wallet.
+
+The inspector frowned over the registration form, biting indecisively
+at his lower lip.
+
+"That was issued before my time," he alibied. "I'll have to check the
+regulations. It may take a while."
+
+He left the booth. He was gone for a quarter of an hour. When he
+returned, both metal doors snapped open. "Your permit is valid,
+Captain Hunter," the inspector admitted. "Unrestricted registrations
+like yours have not been issued for the past five years. That's why
+the probe was not adjusted to the special conditions which apply in
+your case. Your permit is revocable if you are committed for
+maladjustment."
+
+Hunter grinned. "I wouldn't count on that. My adjustment index is
+zero-zero."
+
+"A paragon, Captain." The voice was dry and biting. "But you may find
+conditions on the Earth a little trying. You haven't had a chance to
+get really well-acquainted with your own world since you were a kid of
+sixteen."
+
+Hunter's customs clearance had taken more than an hour. Before he left
+the municipal building, he made a quick tour of the lobby, searching
+again for Ann Saymer. Satisfied that she had not come, he put in a
+call from a public tele-booth to Ann's apartment residence. After a
+moment, Mrs. Ames' face came into sharp focus on the screen, the light
+coalescing about her hair.
+
+A warm, motherly widow of nearly eighty, Mrs. Ames had been the
+residence's owner for a decade, and had taken a great deal of
+vicarious pleasure in Ann's romance with the captain. "It's so
+different," she said once to Hunter, "your faith in each other, the
+way you work together for a goal you both want. If the rest of us
+could only learn to have some honest affection for each other. But,
+there, I'm an old woman, living too much in the past."
+
+As soon as Hunter saw her face on the screen, he knew that something
+was wrong. She was tense and nervous, tied in the emotional knots of
+an anxiety neurosis. And Mrs. Ames was not the woman to fall easy
+victim to mental illness. If Hunter had been guessing the odds, he
+would have put her adjustment index on a par with his own.
+
+"I haven't seen Ann for a month," she told him.
+
+"Where is she? My last micropic from her said something about a
+commission-job--"
+
+"She's all right, Max. Did you join the U.F.W.?"
+
+"I'll be damned if I will."
+
+Why had she asked him that? Her question seemed totally unrelated to
+her reassurance as to Ann--another clear symptom of her emotional
+unbalance.
+
+"About Ann, Mrs. Ames," he persisted. "Do you know what clinic gave
+her the commission?"
+
+Mrs. Ames stared at him in surprise. "Ann didn't tell you in her
+micropic?"
+
+"We use a personal code," he explained. "That makes a certain type of
+communication extremely difficult."
+
+"I didn't see her, Max. After she took the commission some men came
+for her things. They brought me a note from Ann, but it didn't tell me
+where she was. It just authorized the men to move out her belongings."
+
+"Is the work outside of Los Angeles? Do you know that much?"
+
+"At first I guessed--" She broke off, biting her lip, and her face
+twisted in an agony of intense feeling. "No, Max, an old woman's
+guesses won't help. I can't tell you any more about it."
+
+"I'll come out and see you this afternoon, Mrs. Ames," he promised,
+"after I check in at the Roost. I want to look at that note you had
+from Ann."
+
+
+III
+
+Captain Hunter left the municipal building and stood on the transit
+platform. It was blazing hot in the noon sun, and he considered
+chartering an autojet to the city, as he always had before. But though
+a jet was faster than the monorail it was also more expensive. Acutely
+mindful that he had left the service and would earn no more juicy
+credit bonuses, he took the monorail instead.
+
+He had only a ten-minute wait before a crowded car screamed to a stop
+at the port station. Hunter went aboard, along with four passengers
+from recent inbound flights--laboring class tourists returning from
+vacations on one of the planetoid resorts. Since a majority of the
+people who passed through the spaceport were executives or
+professionals, they used the autojets.
+
+Hunter's uniform set him apart. A spaceman was expected to live high,
+to throw away credits like the glamor heroes on the Tri-D space
+dramas.
+
+The monorail car was crowded, primarily with afternoon-shift workers
+on their way to the industrial area. They all wore on their tunics the
+discs of the Union of Free Workers. The four tourists who went aboard
+at the spaceport with Hunter pulled out their U.F.W. badges and pinned
+them on. They belonged. Hunter didn't.
+
+He found an empty chair at the rear of the car, beside a gaudily
+attired woman, whose union disc proclaimed her a member of Local 47,
+the Recreational Companion Union. What miracles we perform, Hunter
+thought, with a judicial selection of innocuous words!
+
+He glanced at the woman. She was past the first bloom of youth and her
+face, under her makeup, was heavily lined, her eyes shrewd and
+observing. Had he known that she had been shadowing him almost from
+the instant of his arrival in Los Angeles, and had been awaiting his
+return to Earth in obedience to carefully formulated instructions he
+would not have regarded her so complacently.
+
+The monorail shot up toward the Palms-Pine pass of the San Jacinto
+Mountains. From the crest of the grade Hunter could look back at the
+flat, cemented field of the spaceport and the ragged teeth of the
+launching tubes rearing high on the Mojave. Ahead of him, misted by
+the blue haze of industrial smog, was Los Angeles, the capital city of
+Sector West--and indirectly the capital of the entire planet.
+
+Almost indistinct against the horizon were the soaring, Babel towers,
+the tangled network of walk-levels, jet-ways and private landing
+flats, which was the center-city. The lower, bulky factory buildings
+squatted under the towers and spreading outward from them, like
+concentric rings made by a stone hurled into a quiet pool, was the
+monotonous clutter of the minimum-housing.
+
+The city sprawled from San Diego to Santa Barbara, and it lapped
+against the arid Mojave to the east. Beyond were the suburban homes of
+laborers and low-echelon executives who had carved brass-knuckled
+niches for themselves in the medium-income bracket.
+
+Hunter saw the panoramic view of Sector West for only a split-second
+before the monorail car screamed down through the layer of gray haze.
+For thirty minutes the car shot across the minimum-housing area,
+stopping from time to time at high-platformed stations.
+
+In the industrial district the car emptied rapidly. Only Hunter and
+his faded seat companion got out at the turnaround terminal and took
+the slideway to center-city. In the metro-entry at the top of the
+stairs they went through a security check station manned by six
+blaster-armed police guards.
+
+Half of the guards wore the insignia of Consolidated Solar Industries
+and half of United Research, the two titan cartels which were locked
+in deadly battle for the empire beyond the stars.
+
+The government played it safe, Hunter thought with bitterness, using
+an equal number of police from each organization. On Earth the pacific
+balance of commercial power was never disturbed--not, at least, on the
+surface. The two imperial giants lived side by side in a tactful
+display of peace.
+
+On the frontier the real conflict raged, fought with all the weapons
+of treachery and an arsenal of highly refined atomic weapons--the
+blaster which could tear a man into component elements, and the
+L-bombs that were capable of turning a young sun into a nova.
+
+The woman passed through the security check with no trouble. The men
+knew her and made only a perfunctory examination of her cards. But
+Hunter again had difficulty because of the blaster in his bag. His
+registered permit carried no weight with the guards. It was not their
+duty to execute existing law, but to protect their private employers.
+
+However, the Consolidated insignia on Hunter's jacket made the three
+Consolidated guards ready to honor his permit. Eventually they
+persuaded the opposition to pass Hunter into the city, on the ground
+that the captain's zero-zero adjustment index indicated that it was
+safe for him to carry arms.
+
+When Hunter went through the probe, he found the woman waiting for
+him. During the half-hour ride from the spaceport, he had tried twice
+to start a conversation with her, and failed. Now, abruptly, her face
+was animated with interest. She put her arm through his and walked
+with him to the lift shaft.
+
+"So you got away with it, Captain." Since it was long-standing
+fashion, she had trained her voice to sound low-pitched and husky. "I
+mean, bringing a blaster into center-city."
+
+"Why all this fuss about a gun?" Hunter asked.
+
+"It's a new government regulation," she told him.
+
+"The government doesn't make the law," he reminded her. "The cartels
+do."
+
+"The last fiscal mental health report showed the percentage of
+maladjusted--" She laughed throatily. "I wish we'd use words honestly!
+The survey showed the _lunatic_ percentage is still increasing. The
+cartels are using that report as an excuse to keep the people
+unarmed."
+
+Hunter was regarding her steadily. "Why?" he asked.
+
+"We're not as content with our world as we're supposed to be," she
+said. "Eric Young can't keep all of us in line forever. Captain, we
+could use your blaster. It's next to impossible to get one these days.
+I could make it worth your while--"
+
+"It's registered to me," Hunter pointed out.
+
+"I'll change the serial," was her instant reply. "Your name wouldn't
+be involved."
+
+"No, I want to keep it."
+
+"To use yourself?"
+
+"Don't talk nonsense," he said. "This isn't the frontier."
+
+He made the denial vehemently, but deep in his mind he had an
+uncertain feeling that her guess was right. Earth was not the
+battle-ground, but it had spawned the conflict. The appearance of
+peace was a sham. Here the battle was fought with more subtlety, but
+the objective remained the same.
+
+If Ann Saymer had somehow been caught in the no-man's-land between the
+two cartels--It was the first time that thought had occurred to
+Hunter, and it filled him with a dread foreboding.
+
+The woman sensed his feeling. He saw a smile on her curving lips. She
+said softly, "So even a spaceman sometimes has his doubts."
+
+"I left the service this morning," he said. Suddenly he was telling
+her all about himself and Ann. It was unwise, perhaps even dangerous.
+But he had to unburden himself to someone or run the risk of losing
+his emotional control.
+
+"So now you've lost this--this ambitious woman of yours," she said
+when he had finished.
+
+"No," he protested. "I won't let myself believe that. Once I did--"
+
+"As well as her interesting invention--the Exorciser," she went on
+relentlessly. "Have you ever wondered, Captain Hunter, what might
+happen if the platinum grid was _not_ removed from a patient's brain?"
+
+"No, but I suppose--I suppose he'd remain in control of the operator
+of the transmitter."
+
+She nodded. "He'd become a perfectly adjusted specimen with a
+zero-zero index, but--he'd also become a human robot with no will of
+his own."
+
+"But Ann wouldn't--"
+
+"Not Ann, Captain. Not the girl you've waited so long to marry. All
+she wants is a clinic of her own so that she can help the maladjusted.
+But don't forget--she holds a _priceless_ patent. Keep your blaster,
+my friend. I've an idea you may need it."
+
+He gripped her wrist. "You know something about this?"
+
+"I know the world we live in--nothing more."
+
+"But you're guessing--"
+
+"Later, Captain, after you start putting some facts together on your
+own." She pulled away from him. "If you want to find me again--and I
+think you will--look for me in Number thirty-four on the amusement
+level. Ask for Dawn."
+
+Suddenly, for no reason that he could explain, he had for her a great
+sympathy. She was no ordinary woman. Her discernment was
+extraordinary, and she possessed, in addition, a strangely elusive
+charm.
+
+They rode the lift as it moved up through the city level in its
+transparent, fairy-world shaft. Dawn got out first, at the mid-city
+walk-way where the cheapest shops and the gaudiest entertainment
+houses were crammed together. Dazzling in the glare of colored lights,
+the mid-city never slept. It was always thronged. It was the only area
+of the heartland--except for the top level casinos--open to every
+citizen without restriction.
+
+On the levels immediately above it were the specialty shops, dealing
+in luxuries for the suburbanites who had fought, schemed and bribed
+their way out of the minimum housing. Higher still was the sector
+given over to the less expensive commercial hotels.
+
+The upper levels were occupied by cartel executive offices and at the
+top, high enough to escape the smog and feel the warmth of the sun,
+were the fabulous casino resorts, the mansions built by the family
+dynasts who controlled the cartels, and the modest, limestone building
+housing the mockery which passed as government.
+
+
+IV
+
+Captain Hunter left the lift at Level Nineteen. An automatic entry
+probe accepted his blue-tinted executive card, and he walked the short
+distance to the hotel which specialized in catering to spacemen. It
+was traditionally neutral ground, where the mercenaries of
+Consolidated or United Research met as friends, although a week before
+they might have been firing radiation fire at each other in the outer
+reaches of space. The frontier conflict was a business to the
+spaceman. Hunter was too well-adjusted to become emotionally involved
+in it himself.
+
+The spacemen called their hotel the Roost, a contraction lifted from
+the public micropic code. The full name was the _Roosevelt_, lettered
+on the entry. The hotel was popularly supposed to have been built
+close to the site of a twentieth century Los Angeles hotel of the
+same name, destroyed in the last convulsive war that had shattered the
+earth.
+
+By micropic Hunter had made his customary reservation. His room was
+high in an upper floor overlooking Level Twenty-three. Through the
+visipanel he could see the walk-ways thronged by the various
+classifications of executives who worked in the central offices of the
+cartels--lawyers, engineers, administrators, directors,
+astrogeographers, designers, statisticians, researchers.
+
+Somewhere in the crowd, perhaps, were the two men who ruled the
+cartels and directed the struggle for the Galactic empire. Glenn
+Farren of Consolidated Solar and Werner von Rausch of United
+Researchers. Max Hunter had never seen either of the men or any of
+their dynastic families. He knew little about them. Their pictures
+were never published.
+
+Yet Farren and Von Rausch held in their hands more despotic power,
+more real wealth and military might, than any ancient Khan or Caesar
+had ever dreamed of.
+
+Did they now want Ann Saymer's patent? The answer, Hunter realized,
+was obvious. With Ann's Exorciser, they could enslave the centers of
+civilization as they had enslaved the frontier. In itself that was a
+minor factor, already accomplished by man's acceptance of the jungle
+ethics of the cartels. Far more important, if one of the cartels
+controlled the patent, it had a weapon that would ultimately destroy
+the other.
+
+With trembling fingers, Hunter took Ann's last micropic from his bag
+and rolled the tiny film into a wall-scanner. He could have recited it
+by heart; yet, by reading it again, he somehow expected to extract a
+new meaning. The code he and Ann used, contrived for economy rather
+than secrecy, was merely a telescoping of common phrases into single
+word symbols.
+
+IHTKN, at the beginning, was easily interpreted as "I have taken," and
+COMJB became "commission-job." The micropic transmission monopoly
+arbitrarily limited all code words to five letters or less, counting
+additional letters as whole words. But because of the simplicity of
+the technique, some of Ann's symbols were open to a number of
+interpretations.
+
+Hunter was sure of one thing. Ann had not specifically named the
+clinic where she was working. She said she had gone to work for the
+biggest--or possibly the symbol meant best--of the private clinics.
+Either term could apply to the clinics run by the two cartels; or, for
+that matter, to the largest of them all, operated by Eric Young's
+union.
+
+But Ann, having invented the Exorciser, would know all its possible
+misuses--a factor which had not occurred to Hunter until Dawn spelled
+it out for him. Would Ann, then, have been fool enough to let herself
+fall into the hands of the cartels?
+
+That line of reasoning gave Hunter new hope. If one of the cartels
+tried to trap her, Ann would simply go into hiding. It would
+complicate the problem of finding her, but at least he could assure
+himself she was safe. Ann had brains to match her ambition. She
+couldn't otherwise have earned a First in Psychiatry. No, Hunter was
+certain the cartels didn't have her.
+
+The telescreen buzzer gave a plaintive bleep. Hunter jerked down the
+response toggle. Surprisingly, the screen remained dark, but Hunter
+heard a man's voice say clearly, "You are anxious to find Ann Saymer,
+Captain Hunter?"
+
+Apparently the transmission from Hunter's screen was unimpaired, for
+the speaker seemed to recognize him.
+
+"Who is this?" Hunter asked, his mouth suddenly dry.
+
+"A friend. We have your interest at heart, Captain. We suggest that
+you investigate United Researchers' clinic when you start looking for
+Miss Saymer."
+
+The contact snapped off. Hunter sat down slowly, his mind reeling.
+Since only his screen had been neutralized, the machine was not at
+fault. Only a top-ranking cartel executive could arrange for a
+deliberate interruption of service. The rest followed logically. No
+one in United would have given him the information.
+
+So Ann had fallen into their hands after all! Someone in
+Consolidated--perhaps Glenn Farren himself--was setting him on Ann's
+trail, on the chance that Hunter could find her when Consolidated's
+operatives had failed.
+
+Hunter was used to the risk of long odds. He had a ten-year
+apprenticeship in the treachery and in-fighting of the frontier. There
+was a good chance that he could play one cartel against the other, and
+in the process get Ann away from both of them.
+
+One more thing he wanted before he planned his opening attack against
+United Researchers--the note Ann had sent to Mrs. Ames. It might give
+him a clue as to where United had taken her. Hunter wasn't naive
+enough to suppose they had kept her in center-city. But perhaps she
+was not even in Sector West.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Each of the eleven sectors into which the Earth was divided was
+controlled by one of the two cartels, as an agricultural or industrial
+appendage of the western metropolis. It was a paternal relationship,
+although no comparable city had been permitted to develop and company
+mercenaries policed the sectors.
+
+Children who exhibited any spark of initiative or ability were skimmed
+off from the hinterland to Sector West and thrown into the competitive
+struggle of the general school. If they fought to the top there, they
+were integrated as adults into the hierarchy of the cartels.
+
+The rest became the labor force of Sector West, enrolled in Eric
+Young's union and crowded into the minimum housing. The teeming
+millions left in the hinterland were a plodding, uninspired mass
+content with trivialities. They felt neither ambition nor frustration.
+While the number of the mentally ill continued to multiply in Sector
+West, only a fraction of the hinterland population suffered the mental
+decay.
+
+Hunter fervently hoped United had taken Ann to one of the other
+sectors. Rescue would be easy. An experienced spaceman could out-talk,
+out-maneuver, and out-fight an entire hinterland battalion.
+
+Max Hunter took an autojet from the Roost to Mrs. Ames' residential
+apartment. Conservation of his capital no longer counted, but time
+did. If United had Ann's patent, Ann herself was expendable. Hunter
+had to make his move to save her before they knew what he was up to.
+It would be a difficult deal to pull off in the capital city, where
+operatives of both cartels swarmed everywhere.
+
+He left his blaster in his hotel room, to avoid an interrogation at
+any other metro-entry. Mrs. Ames' apartment residence was one place in
+the city where he had no need to go armed.
+
+Just outside center-city a single street of twentieth century houses,
+sheltered by the Palos Verdes Hills, had survived the devastation of
+the last war. In the beginning the street had been preserved as a
+museum piece while the cartel city had grown up around it. But with
+each passing generation, popular interest had waned. Eventually the
+houses had been sold.
+
+One was now operated by a religious cult. Two were enormously
+profitable party houses, where clients masqueraded in the amusing
+twentieth century costumes and passed a few short hours living with
+the quaint inconveniences of the past. The game had become so
+attractive that reservations were booked months in advance. The fourth
+relic remained unsold, slowly falling into ruin. The fifth belonged to
+Mrs. Ames.
+
+To satisfy a whim--originally it was no more than that, Mrs. Ames had
+assured Hunter many times--she had asked her husband to buy it for her
+some fifty years ago. After a space-liner accident left her a widow at
+thirty-five, she had moved into the house as a means of
+psychologically withdrawing from her grief.
+
+She never left it again. She found the old house an island in time, a
+magic escape from the chaos of her world.
+
+She took in four residents because she needed their credits to augment
+the income from her husband's estate, and the house was then
+officially listed as an apartment. Chance worked her a miracle--or
+perhaps the house did possess a magic of its own--for the residents
+were as charmed by its inconveniences as Mrs. Ames had been. Ann
+wouldn't consider living anywhere else, although the house was more
+than a mile from her university. Even Hunter felt the indefinable
+spell, when he was in from a flight and went to see Ann.
+
+It was a house that invited relaxation. It was a house where time
+seemed to be stated in a value that could not be measured with
+credits. It was a house that whispered, "I saw one world fall into
+dust; yours is no more eternal"--and, for a moment, that whisper made
+the cartel-jungle meaningless.
+
+
+V
+
+Hunter left his autojet on the parking flat behind the house. He fed
+enough coins in the meter to hold the car for twenty-four hours. He
+didn't know how fast he'd want an autojet after he talked to Mrs.
+Ames, but he didn't want a chance passer-by to pick up his car if the
+charter expired.
+
+It was necessary for him to ring a bell manually, by means of a metal
+button fixed to the wooden frame of the front door. No scanner
+announced his arrival, nor did any soundless auto-door respond to a
+beam transmitted from within the house. After a time Hunter heard
+footsteps. A strange woman--probably a new resident who had taken
+Ann's place--opened the door.
+
+"I'm Captain Hunter," he said. "I came to see Mrs. Ames."
+
+"Won't you come in, Captain?" the woman replied.
+
+She led him into a front room which, Ann had once told him, had been
+called a living room. A peculiar name, surely, for the room appeared
+to have been designed solely as a place to sit while watching
+Tri-D--or flat-screen television, as it had been called in its early
+developmental stage when the house was new--or to hear someone play
+the bulky instrument known as a piano.
+
+The room was an example of the appalling waste of space so common to
+the twentieth century. It was extremely spacious, but neither food
+tubes nor bed drawers were concealed in the walls.
+
+Hunter had always been curious about the piano. It amazed him that it
+had been operated entirely by hand. There was no electric scanner to
+read the mood of the player and interpret it in melody. Driven to
+contrive his own harmonics, how could the twentieth century man have
+derived any satisfaction at all from music? His sensibilities had been
+immature, of course. But even so, an instrument which demanded so much
+individual creativeness must have been an enormous frustration.
+
+Since so many surviving twentieth century machines made the same
+demand on the individual--their automobiles, for example, had been
+individually directed, without any sort of electronic safety
+control--it had puzzled both Hunter and Ann that the incidence of
+maladjustment in the past had been so low.
+
+The captain dropped into a comfortable, chintz-covered rocking
+chair--one relic in this island of time that he really enjoyed. "Will
+you tell Mrs. Ames I'm here?" he asked the stranger.
+
+"I'm Mrs. Ames."
+
+"I mean Mrs. _Janice_ Ames--the owner of the house."
+
+The woman smiled woodenly. "You're speaking to her, Captain, though I
+must say I don't remember ever having met you before."
+
+"You don't remember--"
+
+Fear clutched at his heart. He sprang up, moving toward her with
+clenched fists. "An hour ago I called Mrs. Ames from the spaceport. I
+saw her. Here--in this room."
+
+"I've owned this house all my life, Captain." Her expression was more
+than good acting. She spoke with utter conviction, and seemed
+completely sure of herself. "You must be--" She hesitated and looked
+at him sharply. "Have you checked your adjustment index recently?"
+
+"I haven't lost my mind, if that's what you're getting at," he said.
+"Where's Ann Saymer?"
+
+"Believe me, please. The name is totally unfamiliar to me." The woman
+was painfully sympathetic--and frankly scared. She backed away from
+him. "You need help from the clinic, Captain. Will you let me call
+them for you?"
+
+Suddenly the light fell full on her face, and Hunter saw the tiny,
+still-unhealed scalpel wounds on both sides of her skull. The light
+glowed on the microscopic filament of platinum wire clumsily left
+projecting through the incision.
+
+He understood, then. This woman was wearing one of Ann's patented
+grids, sealed into her cerebral cortex. It made her into a robot,
+responding with unquestioning obedience to the direction of Ann's
+transmitter. And Hunter had no doubt that United manipulated the
+transmission.
+
+Simultaneously he realized something else. If the cartel went to this
+extreme to forestall his search for Ann, she must still be alive. For
+some reason they still needed her. Possibly her patent drawings had
+been submitted for government registry in such a way that only Ann
+understood them.
+
+Ann had been through the general school, and knew what the score was.
+She would have protected her invention--and incidentally insured her
+own survival--if she could have possibly done so, even at a fearful
+risk to herself.
+
+Hunter swung toward the door. It did not occur to him to call the
+police, since they were all cartel mercenaries. Whatever he did to
+help Ann, he would have to do on his own. Until he found her, he could
+count on help from Consolidated. After that--nothing.
+
+He jerked open the front door--and froze. Three men were waiting on
+the porch with drawn blasters. Hunter had no time to recognize facial
+features which it might have been to his advantage to remember later,
+no time to find any identifying insignia on their tunics. With a
+barely visible flickering fire arced from one of the weapons, and pain
+exploded in his body, unconsciousness washed into his brain.
+
+His first sensation when the paralysis began to wear off was the dull
+ache of visceral nausea. He opened his eyes, and saw, bleakly
+shadowed, the living room of the Ames house. It was after dark, which
+could only mean that he had lain there nearly four hours. To knock him
+out for that period of time, they must have given him a nearly lethal
+charge from the blaster calculated just under the limit of physical
+endurance.
+
+His motor control and his sense of touch returned more slowly. For a
+quarter of an hour he lay helpless in the chintz-covered rocker,
+feeling nothing but a tingling, like pin-pricks of fire, in his arms
+and legs.
+
+He looked down and saw that he held a blaster in his hand--his own
+blaster, which he had left in his room in the Roost. He did not yet
+have the neural control to release his fingers from the firing dial.
+
+As his sense of hearing was restored, he became aware that the Tri D
+had been left on. The screen pictured the swirling confusion of a mob.
+An announcer was describing the sudden outburst of labor violence
+which had occurred in the industrial district that afternoon. Eric
+Young's U.F.W. had gone on strike against a dozen separate plants.
+
+Essential plants, naturally. Everything was always essential, and
+government spokesmen always made pretty speeches deploring the
+situation. It was a pattern familiar to Hunter for years. One of the
+cartels would pay Young to strike factories belonging to the other.
+Then a second bribe, paid by the struck cartel, bought off the strike.
+Occasionally a sop of bonus credits had to be dished out to the
+faithful.
+
+It was not a maneuver either Consolidated or United used frequently,
+because the advantage was transitory, and the only long-term winner
+was Eric Young.
+
+This time there was a slight variation in the formula. Young had
+struck plants of both cartels. That puzzled Hunter, but any curiosity
+he felt was subordinate to his disgust. How much longer would this
+farce go on before it dawned on the rank and file of the U.F.W. that
+Eric Young was playing them all for suckers? Hunter tried to get up to
+snap off the telecast. He managed only to throw himself awkwardly over
+the arm of the chair.
+
+And then he saw the body on the floor--the body of the genuine Mrs.
+Ames, charred by a ragged blaster wound seared through her breast.
+They had murdered her--naturally with his blaster--and left him at the
+scene, neatly framed for the crime.
+
+Hunter heard--right on cue--the whine of a police siren outside.
+Everything timed to trap him just as the motor paralysis wore off!
+With an effort that brought beads of sweat to his forehead, he dropped
+his blaster and pushed himself out of the chair. His feet were numb.
+He moved a few steps and banged into the piano. Clawing for support,
+his hands crashed in jangling discord on the keys.
+
+The siren swelled loud in front of the house. Hunter heard the
+drum-beat of boots on the porch. He stumbled toward the kitchen--and
+fell into the arms of two police officers who had entered from the
+rear of the house.
+
+He swung his fist; the fingers felt like clods of wet clay. One of the
+mercenaries caught his wrist and held it easily. In the gloom Hunter
+saw the Consolidated insignia on the man's jacket, and the guard
+whispered quickly, "This deal was a set-up, Hunter--packaged evidence,
+dropped at headquarters ten minutes ago."
+
+Hunter stared. "Accusing me by name? Get this straight! Four hours ago
+they put me under with a blaster and--"
+
+"It's a United frame," the guard said. "They want you out for good.
+The top brass of Consolidated is giving you the green right down the
+line. The fastest out Jake and I could figure--" He jerked his head
+toward his companion. "--was to give the United boys on our team the
+front of the house, and let you make a break for it from the back.
+We'll fake enough here to protect ourselves."
+
+They pushed a blaster into Hunter's hands. He stumbled through the
+kitchen as the front door gave and two United mercenaries burst into
+the house. Hunter ran awkwardly, without full control of his legs.
+
+He saw, looming black against the night shadows, the oval silhouette
+of the autojet on the Ames flat, still held under his twenty-four hour
+charter. It offered a tempting means of escape, but a public car was
+too easily traced and brought down by police tracers. However, it
+could perform a miracle as a diversion.
+
+
+VI
+
+Hunter slid into the car, punched out a destination blindly, and
+engaged the flight gear. With the customary roar of power, the car
+shot up from the flat. Hunter leaped free. His feet struck the cement.
+The lingering trace of paralysis, destroying his normal co-ordination,
+made the fall very painful.
+
+Hunter flung himself flat in the shadow of the ornamental shrubs along
+the edge of the parking flat. The four police mercenaries sprinted out
+of the house and leaped into the police jet. With sirens screaming,
+it soared up in pursuit of the empty autojet.
+
+Hunter estimated that he had perhaps thirty minutes before they sent
+out a general alarm. A painfully small margin of safety. Where could
+he hide that the machines of detection--the skilled, emotionless,
+one-track, electronic brains--would not eventually find him? And what
+of Ann Saymer? What could he do as a fugitive to save her?
+
+United had planned it all down to the smallest detail. But that was
+the way the cartels operated. It was the system Hunter was accustomed
+to. He felt neither anger not resentment, simply a determination to
+out-plan and out-play the enemy.
+
+If he accepted defeat he would admit frustration, and for Captain Max
+Hunter that was impossible. Hadn't he survived a decade of frontier
+conflict with an adjustment index of zero-zero? Instead of hopelessly
+weighing the odds stacked against him, he counted the advantage which
+a single man held in maneuverability and rapid change of pace.
+
+He walked along the museum street, the blaster in his hand. A block
+away rose the bulk of a factory building and behind it towered the
+monster of center-city, transformed into a fairyland by the glow of
+lights on the many levels. Hunter's eye followed the pattern up toward
+the top, hidden above the blanket of haze.
+
+The top! Luxury casinos and the castles of the cartels. Werner von
+Rausch and his empire of United Researchers. Werner von Rausch, who
+gave orders and Ann Saymer disappeared. Werner von Rausch, who gave
+new orders and Mrs. Ames lay murdered in her living room.
+
+But behind the facade of his spacefleet and his private army, behind
+his police mercenaries, Werner von Rausch was one man--an old man,
+Hunter had been told--and a vulnerable target. Hunter weighed his
+changes, and the margin of success seemed to be balanced in his favor.
+
+It was not what they would expect him to do. They had framed him for
+murder and he should now be running for his life. The hunted turned
+hunter. Hunter grinned savagely, enjoying his pun.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He slipped the blaster under his belt, leaving the scarlet jacket open
+to his navel so that the loose folds would conceal the outline of the
+weapon. He would have no trouble reaching the top level.
+
+The resort casinos, like the mid-city amusement area, were open to any
+citizen. Special autojets, with destinations pre-set for the casino
+flat, were available in every monorail terminal. Hunter could by-pass
+a probe inspection at a regular metro-entry. The nearest terminal,
+from the north-coast line, was less than a quarter of a mile away.
+
+As Hunter entered the industrial district he heard the turmoil of an
+angry crowd. He came upon them suddenly, swarming at the gates of a
+factory close to the terminal.
+
+Eric Young's trouble-makers, he thought with a worried frown, jumping
+obediently when the big boss spoke the word. In less than five years
+Eric Young had turned the union into a third cartel, more powerful
+than Consolidated or United because the commodity Young
+controlled--human labor--was essential to the other two.
+
+A third cartel! Suddenly Max Hunter understood why the cartels had to
+have Ann's patent at any cost. The absolute control of the human mind!
+It was the only weapon which Consolidated or United could use to break
+Young's power.
+
+Hunter shouldered his way through the strikers toward the terminal.
+Though he wore no U.F.W. disc, he felt no alarm. Eric Young's strike
+riots were always well-managed. None of the violence was real and no
+one was ever seriously hurt.
+
+But these trouble-makers seemed absurdly well-disciplined. They stood
+in drill-team ranks, moving and shouting abuse in perfect unison. Then
+Hunter saw their faces, as blank as death masks--and in all their
+skulls the still unhealed scalpel wound, as well as an occasional
+projecting platinum strand which sometimes caught the reflected light.
+
+Max Hunter felt a chill of terror. He was walking in a human graveyard
+of living automatons, responding to the transmission from Ann's
+machine. United had lost no time in putting the thing to work. This
+was no ordinary strike, but the opening skirmish in the conflict that
+would wreck both Consolidated and the Union of Free Workers.
+
+Hunter entered the monorail terminal. It was deserted except for a
+woman who stood by the window looking out at the crowd. She was
+wearing a demure, pink dress. Her face was plain, and she had used no
+cosmetic plasti-skin to make it more striking. Her brown hair,
+streaked with a gray which she took no trouble to hide, was pulled
+into a bun at the back of her neck.
+
+Surprisingly, Hunter thought she was pretty, perhaps because she was
+so different from the eternal, baby-faced adolescent who thronged the
+city in a million identical duplications.
+
+Hunter knew he had seen her before. He couldn't remember where. She
+shifted her position slightly and the light cast a sharp, angular
+shadow on her face. Then he knew.
+
+"Dawn!" he cried.
+
+Startled, she turned to face him with a strange look in her eyes.
+
+"I was hoping you wouldn't recognize me, Captain Hunter," she said.
+
+"What are you doing here--dressed like some dowdy just in from a farm
+sector?" he asked, his gaze incredulous.
+
+"We're all of us a mixture of different personalities," she replied.
+"I work for an entertainment house, yes. But I also have some of the
+qualities of your Ann Saymer. Don't take offense, please. Ann and I
+are both interested in the maladjusted. She wants a quick cure. I'm
+looking for the cause."
+
+"Here?"
+
+"Wherever there are people who face an emotional crisis--the men who
+come to Number thirty-four, or a mob of strikers. I want to know why
+we react in the way we do, and what makes up the frustration pattern
+that crowds us across the borderline into insanity."
+
+"You sound like a psychiatrist," he said.
+
+"I hold a First, Captain Hunter."
+
+"And you work in an entertainment house?"
+
+"Tell me about yourself, Captain. Have you found Ann yet?"
+
+He looked away quickly.
+
+"No," he said, his face hardening.
+
+"And you still haven't had a chance to use your blaster?"
+
+He directed an appraising glance at her. The question might imply a
+great deal. Did she somehow know what had happened at Mrs. Ames'? Did
+she know he was a fugitive?
+
+A dozen police mercenaries appeared abruptly at the end of the street.
+Since the police had never been used to break a strike, Hunter guessed
+that this was Consolidated's answer to Werner von Rausch's new weapon.
+
+The mercenaries drew their blasters and ordered the mob to disperse.
+The automatons turned to face them. And as they turned they fell
+silent--the cloying, choking silence of the tomb. Like marching
+puppets, the mob moved toward the police. Clearly Hunter could hear a
+shrill voice ordering them to halt.
+
+Hunter felt a sickening inner horror. How could the mob obey when they
+heard nothing but the enslaving grid, and responded to neither fear
+nor reason? Still they moved forward, in a robot death march. Whatever
+happened, it was a situation Young could turn to his advantage. If the
+mercenaries killed unarmed workers, it could be turned into superb
+propaganda. And ultimately, by sheer weight of numbers, the
+defenseless mob could overwhelm the mercenaries.
+
+White fire leaped from the blasters. The first rank fell, but the mob
+marched blindly across the smoking corpses. The mercenaries fired
+again. It was slaughter--brutal and pointless--of slaves unaware of
+their danger, unable to save themselves.
+
+Without understanding his own motivation--and without caring--Max
+Hunter leaped into the sill of the terminal window. There he was in a
+position to fire over the heads of the mob. The blast from his weapon
+arrowed into the line of police mercenaries.
+
+Three fell in the agony of the flames. The rest, glad for an excuse to
+stop the slaughter, turned and fled. Like clockwork things, the mob
+turned back and resumed its precision demonstration in front of the
+factory.
+
+Hunter slipped white-faced into a terminal bench. His hand trembled as
+he jammed the blaster back beneath his belt.
+
+"Why did you do it, Captain?" Dawn asked.
+
+How could he answer her, without saying he had seen the grids in their
+skulls? And he wasn't ready to trust Dawn to that extent.
+
+"The people couldn't help themselves," he said ambiguously.
+
+"Because they're in the U.F.W. and Eric Young cracks the whip. Is that
+what you mean?"
+
+"They weren't aware of their own danger."
+
+"Miscalculating the risks then? But that's part of the system,
+Captain. If you can't fight your way up to the top--"
+
+"Then the system is utterly vicious."
+
+"You don't mean that," she said.
+
+"Why not? We're living in a jungle society. It's nothing but
+conflict--conflict on the frontier and conflict here from the time
+they put you in the general school."
+
+"Only the children who have the intelligence--"
+
+"But why?" he interrupted fiercely. "Where does it get us?"
+
+"We have a stable society," she told him. "Peace of a sort. Law
+enforcement, too, and a chance to build something better when we learn
+how."
+
+"Something better?" He laughed as he stood up. "We'll get that when we
+pull this hell apart, and not before."
+
+She put her hand on his arm. "No, Captain. It's not realistic to say
+that. Over and over again in the past we wrecked civilization because
+good-hearted and conscientious people thought there was no other way
+to create a finer world. It didn't work, because violence is madness.
+This time we have to begin where we are and build rationally. We can,
+you know, when we understand what we have to build with."
+
+"What else do we need to know, Dawn? You're falling back on the
+typical double-talk of the psychiatrists. With all the application of
+physical science that we have--"
+
+"I wasn't thinking of technology, Captain. Civilization isn't
+machines. It's people. Our accumulation of knowledge is tremendous,
+but essentially it means nothing because we know so little about
+ourselves. It's absurd to talk of making something better until we
+really know the individual we're making it for."
+
+"Go ahead," he countered angrily. "Pussy-foot around with your
+cautious experiments, make sure nobody gets hurt--and you'll all end
+up slaves. As for me, I'm going to find Ann and get out while there's
+still time."
+
+"Always the same two alternatives," Dawn said wearily. "Pull down the
+world, or run away from it. We need the courage to try something
+different. We need men who will act like men. I thought, Captain, by
+this time--" She looked up into his eyes. "Where are you going?"
+
+"To the top--the casinos." Her abrupt question took him off balance
+and almost surprised him into telling the whole truth.
+
+"Top level." She paused, studying his face. "That's logical, of
+course. You'll rescue your woman and run away--perhaps to the
+frontier, or to a forgotten world too insignificant to be claimed by
+either cartel. It all sounds so easy, doesn't it? You have friends in
+the service. They'll smuggle you away from Sector West." She hesitated
+again. "Running away is insanity, too, Captain. But that is one thing
+you still have to learn."
+
+
+VII
+
+Max Hunter rode the autojet to the casino. As the machine rose past
+the city levels, he found himself thinking less about Ann and a good
+deal more about Dawn--a Recreational companion woman who was
+simultaneously a psychiatrist. Where did she really fit in the subtle
+battle between the titan cartels? Which of them was her ally--or did
+Dawn represent another element as yet unidentified?
+
+Knowing Ann Saymer had taught Hunter a wholesome respect for the
+thinking of a First in Psychiatry. They operated with a deviousness
+that made cartel treacheries seem like child's play. He knew that Dawn
+had manipulated their conversation in the terminal to her own ends.
+Behind that deftly-phrased patter of words, what else had she tried to
+tell him? And what had she tried to find out? "Top level," she had
+said. "That's logical." Why logical? Logical to whom? Did she know
+where he was going and why?
+
+The autojet thudded on the casino flat. A female attendant, robed in a
+skin-colored sheath bright with amber jewels, held open the cab door
+for him. Hunter entered the nearest casino. At the door he showed his
+saving record in the Solar First National Fund, and a casino teller
+issued him a ten thousand credit limit, the smallest denomination
+available. The resorts weren't wasting effort on pikers.
+
+Although the casinos everywhere in the system were popular with
+spacemen, Hunter had never been to the top level before because Ann
+had seen to it that his surplus credits went into their savings.
+
+It was Hunter's opinion that he hadn't missed much. The Los Angeles
+resorts duplicated, on an elaborate scale, the most unsavory
+establishments of the frontier. Anything which by any stretch of a
+perverted imagination could be defined as entertainment was
+available--at a price.
+
+It was early and the crowd was still small. It consisted of spacemen
+on the usual furlough binge, a handful of suburbanites who had
+hoarded a half-year's savings for this one-night fling in the big
+resorts, and a dozen bright-faced executives from the lower levels of
+the cartel hierarchy. The big brass would turn up later on, at a more
+fashionable hour.
+
+At all costs, Hunter had to keep himself inconspicuous. His uniform
+was not entirely out of place, although Consolidated did issue its
+commanders a formal outfit--more gold braid, a jeweled insignia, and a
+jacket cut to emphasize the broad shoulders.
+
+Hunter stopped at the snack bar and wolfed a plate of cold cuts, the
+first food he had eaten since morning. Then he moved indirectly across
+the pillared gambling pavilion, pausing at two tables to place bets.
+His objective was to find a vantage point in the upper floor of the
+casino where he could observe the geographic layout of the top level.
+
+He slipped quickly into the dark well of an emergency stairway,
+feeling reasonably sure that no one had seen him leave the game room.
+More than half an hour had passed since he had fled Mrs. Ames' rooming
+house and he was convinced that very shortly--if they had not done so
+already--the police would put out a general alarm.
+
+As a matter of course, there would be inquiries at the top level, but
+at first they would be made by police mercenaries. No one in the
+casino had any reason to identify Hunter as the fugitive. Later on, of
+course, when the police used electronic trackers, he wouldn't stand a
+chance. But before that happened he intended to make a deal with
+Werner von Rausch.
+
+At the top of the stairs he found a tower window which afforded a
+crow's nest view of the top level. The twelve casinos, bright with
+lights, occupied more than half the area. Beyond the resort parkland
+was the small, white government building, dignified by its simplicity
+among so much ostentation. Beside it was the transparent semi-sphere
+housing the top landing of the center-city lifts. A third structure--a
+grotesque mechanical monster trapped in the heart of a spider-web of
+converging wires--was the power distribution center for the top level.
+
+In back of the government building a high, metal-faced fence knifed
+across the level. That fence guarded the forbidden home-ground of the
+titans. Hunter could see the silhouette of the cartel castles rising
+against the sky, two gigantic masses of stone. The one on the west was
+Farren's; the eastern one, Von Rausch's. That much and no more was
+common knowledge.
+
+Were the two families, who had fought for so long to control the
+empire beyond the stars, on speaking terms here? Did they observe the
+social amenities in the same spirit that their companies enforced the
+sham peace on earth? In their lonely, lofty isolation, what
+amusements did they enjoy? What contributed to the enrichment of the
+lives of those fragile beings who possessed the wealth of the galaxy?
+
+Hunter was sure no armed guards patrolled the forbidden paradise.
+There was no need for them, for scanners formed a protective grid over
+the area. An autojet, attempting a landing from any direction, would
+break a beam and instantly become the target for the autoblasters
+erected at intervals along the fence. A man attempting to scale the
+wall would meet the same lethal charge.
+
+Hunter saw one small gate with an identification screen mounted in
+front of it. Obviously the gate would open to the handprint of a Von
+Rausch or a Farren. But a stranger would find himself standing in the
+line of fire of two blasters, conspicuous over the gate.
+
+The scanners, the blasters, the identification screen--all the
+complex, electronic watchdogs--depended solely upon power. Countless
+other people, Hunter knew, had realized that. Only mechanically
+produced power made the area invulnerable. Anyone could break through
+the fence. It hadn't been done before, perhaps, because no other man
+had ever had Hunter's motivation. None had been a fugitive on the run.
+
+Hunter made his way out of the casino and crossed the park in the
+direction of the government building. Sheltered by the trees from the
+blaze of light, he was able to see the stars, bright in the velvet
+sky. The endless universe! Somewhere he could find a haven for himself
+and Ann, a pinprick of light in the high-arching firmament which the
+cartels had overlooked.
+
+Dawn had said that running away was madness. But what alternative did
+he have? To stay, and attempt to make the cartel rat-race over,
+sweetly and rationally so that no one would be hurt? Hunter laughed
+bitterly. Von Rausch had the Exorciser, and he could keep it. It would
+be part of the bargain the captain thought he could make to save Ann.
+With that weapon, Von Rausch would sooner or later tear his own world
+to shreds. No man in his right mind would want to stay around to pick
+up the pieces--if any. He drew his blaster and took careful aim at the
+power distribution center.
+
+The machine exploded. Burning wires sang in the air. In the casinos
+the lights winked out, and the entertainment machines went dark.
+Hunter heard the shrill screaming of the trapped crowd. He knew that
+it would bring the police running, but he also knew they would have
+arrived shortly in any case. The important thing was that the
+electronic watchdogs on the wall were now lifeless.
+
+Hunter blasted open the gate, and took the path that led east.
+
+The Von Rausch castle--and the word was scarcely a metaphor--was
+something lifted bodily out of a Tri-D historical romance, complete
+with porticos, battlements, stone-walled towers and an imitation moat
+where mechanical swans floated on the dark water.
+
+He crossed the moat on a rustic footbridge of plastic cleverly
+fabricated to seem like crudely hewn wood. Through a high, narrow
+window he saw a pale flicker of light. The pane was thick with grime.
+
+Hunter could distinguish nothing in the room except a thin, elderly
+woman who seemed to be moving around a table where six candles burned
+in a silver candelabrum.
+
+He kicked open the window. The woman looked at him, neither frightened
+nor alarmed. She was wearing an odd black dress, long-sleeved,
+high-necked, with a hemline that touched the floor. Her face was pale
+and wrinkled, unrelieved by any sort of cosmetic.
+
+She held out her fragile hands. "You did come, Karl! I knew you
+wouldn't disappoint Auntie."
+
+Hunter cried through clenched teeth, "I want Werner von Rausch. Where
+is he?"
+
+"Goodness, dear, how should I know? Werner never comes to my parties."
+
+Hunter noticed the table, then, set for eight, its gleaming silver and
+gold-rimmed china glowing in the soft candle light.
+
+"Your Cousin Charlotte's already here, Karl." The woman gestured
+gracefully toward the table. "And little Helmig. They know how
+important it is to come on time."
+
+He felt horror--and unconscious pity--as he realized the truth. Yet he
+tried once more to get from her the information he wanted.
+
+"Oh, bother with Werner," she answered, pouting. "If you must know, I
+didn't even invite him. He's such a bore among young people."
+
+She saw the blaster in Hunter's hand and pushed it aside gently, with
+a grimace of disapproval. "I don't like you to have these toys, Karl.
+Next thing, you'll be wanting to join the army."
+
+Hunter flung himself out of that room, into a dark and musty hall.
+Behind him he heard the woman still talking, as if he had never left
+her. He blundered from one bleak room to another, rooms that were like
+tombs smelling of dust and decay.
+
+On the second floor he came upon a small, balding man who sat reading
+at a desk in a room crammed with tottering stacks of old books. The
+light came from an antiquated electric lamp. Obviously the house had
+its own generating plant, independent of the power center Hunter had
+destroyed.
+
+Hunter jerked up his blaster again. "Werner von Rausch?"
+
+"One moment," the man said. Ignoring Hunter, the man quietly finished
+what he was reading, slipped a leather placemark into the book, and
+put it on top of a stack beside the desk. The pile promptly collapsed
+in a cloud of dust at Hunter's feet.
+
+Max saw some of the title pages. The books were extraordinarily old,
+some of them with a printing date a thousand years in the past. The
+man pinched a pair of eye-glasses on his nose and studied Hunter
+carefully.
+
+"You're from the police, I presume?" he asked.
+
+"If you are Werner von Rausch--"
+
+"I'm Heinrich. I sent in the report. Though, I must say, you couldn't
+have come at a more inconvenient time. I'm collating the spells
+tonight. I have them all, right here at my fingertips. And when I'm
+finished--" He seized the captain's jacket and his voice was suddenly
+shrill. "--I'll have the power to summon up any demon from hell. Think
+what that means! I'll be greater than Faust. I'll have more power
+than--"
+
+"Where can I find Werner von Rausch?"
+
+"Yes, Werner. Poor boy." Heinrich was calm again. "You'll have to do
+your duty, officer. He's been annoying me all afternoon. So much
+noise--a man can't think. He's in his shop at the end of the hall. But
+don't be too severe with him. Perhaps this time just a warning will
+make him see reason."
+
+Hunter went back to the corridor, feeling again the shadow of horror
+at this sick distortion of reality. In the distance, beyond the metal
+fence, he heard the scream of sirens, and realized he had at best
+another three minutes before the police would be there. Three minutes
+to make a deal with Werner and save Ann.
+
+Hunter pushed back the nightmare that welled up from the depths of his
+mind. It wasn't true; it couldn't be true. If it were, nothing in the
+jungle made sense.
+
+
+VIII
+
+As he felt his way along the hall, he passed the cage of a lift, a
+private transit between the house and the cartel offices on the city
+levels below. He noted it subconsciously, as a possible means of
+escape. But he was through running. He could make a deal with Von
+Rausch. After that the police wouldn't matter.
+
+At the end of the corridor he came upon a paneled door. Behind it he
+could hear the hum of a motor, and knew that he had found Werner's
+shop, and the source of the noise that had disturbed Heinrich's
+research.
+
+Hunter flung open the door. The light was bright and gay. On the
+floor, a fat old man sat hunched over the remote control console of a
+toy monorail system. Toy space liners and fighting ships buzzed in the
+air.
+
+"Werner von Rausch?" Hunter whispered.
+
+"You've come to play with me!" The fat, old man flashed the cherubic
+smile of a child. "And you brought me a blaster. Oh, let me see it!
+Let me see it!"
+
+He clapped his hands eagerly.
+
+Hunter turned and fled. The scream of the sirens still seemed no
+closer, but without assessing his chances Hunter sprang into the
+private lift. It dropped downward toward its unknown destination. What
+that was, Hunter didn't care. Anything to escape from so hideous a
+madhouse.
+
+The Von Rausch clan: an old lady who lived with ghosts; a scholar of
+demonology; a patriarch lost in an eternal childhood. All of them
+running away into their own private fantasies.
+
+But this Was the family which ruled a cartel and directed the conquest
+of half the galaxy; these were the most powerful human beings who had
+ever lived. And they were escaping into insanity. Escaping what?
+Responsibility? The jungle of the cartels?
+
+"Two alternatives," Dawn had said. "Pull down the world or run away
+from it." The Von Rausches had made this mess and then fled in horror
+from their own brutal and destructive creation.
+
+The lift cage jerked to a stop. The door opened on a warmly lighted
+executive office where a white-haired man sat at a desk which had been
+cut from a single slab of Venusian crystal. A much enlarged projection
+of the United Researchers' emblem glowed from the Wall. Hunter raised
+his weapon.
+
+The old man gestured imperiously. "Don't be a fool, Captain. I
+wouldn't be here unless I had adequate protection. There are blasters
+in the wall, which I can trigger with a single spoken word."
+
+"You want to finish the job your men bungled this afternoon?"
+
+"Not our men, Captain. We got in on this deal a little late. We knew
+nothing about this psychiatric patent until the strikes started
+today."
+
+"But Ann Saymer--"
+
+"Unfortunately, we do not have her. It's Consolidated. We sent our men
+out to bring you in, Captain. We wanted your help. When you got away,
+it didn't occur to me that you would go to the top level. Not until we
+heard the report of the destruction of the power distributor. It was
+easy enough to anticipate your moves after that.
+
+"If you hadn't used the private Von Rausch lift, you would have gone
+out again through the gate, where my men were waiting. Naturally we
+couldn't send them inside. You can understand why, of course."
+
+Hunter heard only vaguely what the man was saying, for abruptly the
+pattern fell into place. Neither Consolidated nor United had Ann or
+the Exorciser. Each cartel suspected the other because they hadn't yet
+adjusted to the idea that a third cartel existed: Eric Young's union.
+
+Ann's micropic had told the literal truth. She had taken her
+commission-job with the biggest private clinic, operated by the
+U.F.W. It was a dead giveaway when Young struck both cartels
+simultaneously, if Hunter had read the data correctly.
+
+Hunter moved toward the crystal desk. "I know where Ann is, sir," he
+said. "I can--"
+
+"You can stay where you are," the old man interrupted. "One hour ago,
+my friend, I was ready to offer you a deal. Since then you've seen--"
+He raised his eyes toward the ceiling. "You've seen what's up there.
+Only four of us know that secret. We don't relish sharing it with a
+fifth."
+
+"Unless you destroy Ann's patent, you're finished anyway."
+
+"Destroy, Captain?" The senile voice turned silky. "No, we want that
+machine intact."
+
+"If you'll guarantee Ann's safety and mine--"
+
+"You have an exaggerated idea of your own importance. You would have
+been useful to us, particularly since you have been a Consolidated
+employee. But this thing you blundered into up there destroys your
+value entirely. It makes you potentially as dangerous as the Saymer
+patent. That's my opinion.
+
+"The other three who share the Von Rausch secret have an equal vote in
+deciding the issue. They may reverse my decision. I've asked them to
+come here, and I'm waiting for them now."
+
+The old man was so intent upon making a logical explanation of the
+death sentence he pronounced--without putting it into words--that he
+didn't notice Hunter edging closer to the desk. Captain Hunter saw no
+chance for a reprieve when the other three arrived. Why wait? Having
+fought on the frontier, Hunter was aware of a property of the Venusian
+crystal which possibly the old man did not know. It was impervious to
+blaster fire.
+
+Hunter acted with the split-second timing of an experienced spaceman.
+He swung his body in a flying tackle against the old man's chair and
+in the same swift motion pushed himself into the leg cubicle carved in
+the crystal.
+
+As the chair toppled and before he realized his own danger, the old
+man cried the code word that triggered the wall blasters. He was
+instantly caught in the deadly cross-fire.
+
+As the weapons slid back into the wall slots, Hunter leaped for the
+door, and passed quickly through it. The outer hall was empty. He
+sprinted for the walk-way, the echoes of the blast still ringing in
+his ears.
+
+A destination marker glowed above a nearby metro-entry. It told him he
+was on the Twenty-eighth level of center-city. On a large, public
+Tri-D screen Hunter saw a picture of the strike mob in the industrial
+area. That was all the data he needed. If the mob was still in the
+streets, Eric Young was still manipulating the transmitter.
+
+Hunter took an unchartered autojet and dialed as his destination the
+U.F.W. clinic. It was the largest structure in the industrial area,
+made from luminous, pink, Martian stone, which had been imported at
+great cost--and with a blaze of publicity.
+
+Completed only three years before, the U.F.W. clinic had been given a
+continuous flood of publicity. Numerous Tri-D public service programs
+had explored its wards, its laboratories, and its service centers, and
+even in a distant spaceship Hunter had not remained in ignorance of
+the build-up. The knowledge served to his advantage now, for he knew
+just where Young's personal penthouse was located and exactly how to
+reach it.
+
+There were no armed guards or automatic probes in the clinic. Such an
+outward display of force wouldn't have jibed with Young's public
+personality. He was the much-loved official head of a union whose
+membership totaled millions.
+
+Any protective device would have distorted the illusion and destroyed
+the legend completely.
+
+Young's penthouse, thirty floors above street level, was the modest
+garden cottage which had been so widely publicized and that, too, was
+a part of his illusion. When Hunter saw the tiny house he was able to
+appreciate Young's showmanship, his insight into the mental processes
+of the credulous.
+
+Hunter moved toward the door. Light glowed inside the cottage, but
+through the broad, front window he could see no one. He felt a
+momentary doubt. Had he guessed wrong? Was Young holding Ann somewhere
+else?
+
+But Hunter was sure Young had not taken that precaution. It would have
+involved risks he would not have to contend with at the clinic, unless
+he had been reasonably certain he would be found out. And Young had
+expected to prevent that by keeping Consolidated and United at each
+other's throats.
+
+Hunter kicked open the door. The three small rooms in the cottage were
+empty--until a man wearing a union smock emerged from the narrow
+galley. He hadn't been there a moment before when Hunter examined the
+cubicle, and there was no rear entry to the cottage.
+
+"Mr. Young isn't here, sir." The man said, gliding swiftly toward him.
+"If you wish to leave a message--"
+
+Hunter saw the telltale grid wire in the stranger's forehead. He
+ducked aside instinctively as the knife gleamed in the man's hand.
+With an odd, sighing sound, the blade arched through the air, smashing
+the picture window. Hunter's fist shot out, and the man dropped
+unconscious.
+
+Hunter went into the galley and found what he had missed before--the
+false bank of food slots which masked a narrow stairway. He ran
+quickly down the steps, and found the opulent living quarters Eric
+Young had concealed on the clinic floor beneath the innocent garden
+cottage. Here in gaudy splendor, in the tasteless clutter of objects
+assembled from every quarter of the cartel empire, was the true index
+to the infinite ambition of the U.F.W. boss.
+
+A dozen men and women lurched at Hunter from an open hall. They wore
+white hospital robes and their foreheads were still bandaged.
+Obviously they were patients with recently grafted slave grids.
+Obedient to the transmission, they fought with a desperate, savage
+fury--and a clumsy lack of co-ordination which caricatured normal
+human behavior.
+
+Hunter repulsed their attack without difficulty. Yet he felt an inner
+disgust and loathing as if he were using his strength to defeat
+helpless children. In two minutes it was over. One of the men was
+dead, his head bandage torn loose, and the grid ripped out of his
+skull. Three more lay sprawled out on the floor, bleeding badly from
+freshly opened incisions.
+
+Hunter drew his blaster and entered the thickly-carpeted hall, glowing
+with the soft, pink light of the luminous, Martian stone. He cried
+Ann's name. His voice fell hollowly in the silence, but there was no
+response. He moved to the end of the hall and pushed open a narrow
+door.
+
+He saw the white-tiled laboratory, Ann's transmitter standing on a
+long table with new platinum grids piled by the dozen beside it, and
+the barrack rows of hospital beds. From the angle of the room which
+was hidden by the half-open door, Ann Saymer ran toward him with
+outstretched hands, crying his name. He took a step toward her. And
+something struck the back of his head.
+
+
+IX
+
+Hunter's mind rocked. He felt himself falling down the long spiral
+into unconsciousness. The blaster slipped from his hand and his knees
+buckled. But he clawed blindly, with animal instinct, at the hands
+closing on his throat.
+
+His head cleared. He saw Eric Young's dark face close to his. Hunter
+swung his fist into Young's stomach, and the hands slid away from his
+throat. Captain Hunter sprang to his feet, crouching low to meet
+Young's next attack. Young's swing went wild. Hunter's fist struck at
+the flabby jaw. Eric Young backed away, reeling under the hammer
+blows, until he came up against the laboratory table.
+
+Suddenly he slashed at Hunter with a scalpel. The blade nicked Max's
+shoulder and cut across his jacket. The cloth parted, sliding down his
+arms and pinning his hands together. In the split-second it took
+Hunter to free himself from the torn jacket, Young swung the scalpel
+again. Hunter dodged. Miscalculating his aim, Eric Young tripped over
+Hunter's outstretched leg and fell, screaming, upon the point of his
+own weapon.
+
+Hunter stood for an instant with his legs spread wide, looking down at
+Young. Then he dropped to his knees and rolled the grievously wounded
+man over on his back. The hand grasping the scalpel slowly pulled the
+blade from the abdominal wound. Blood pulsed out upon the white tile.
+Young was still barely alive.
+
+Hunter walked toward the transmitter, where Ann stood, saying nothing,
+her eyes wide and staring. A tremendous conflict was raging within
+him. Running away was no solution, but what if he could destroy the
+system itself? Break the mold and start anew.
+
+He had the instrument that would do it, the hundreds of obedient
+slaves Young had already turned loose on the streets. With Ann's
+transmitter he could transform the disciplined strike of human
+automatons into a civic disaster. Terror and violence uprooting the
+foundations of the city.
+
+But a moment's madness could not overthrow the enduring rationality of
+Hunter's adjustment index. To loose that horror was to set himself in
+judgment upon the dreams and hopes, the perversion and the sublimity,
+of his fellow men. To play at God--a delusion no different from Eric
+Young's.
+
+Savagely Hunter lifted a chair and started to swing it at the
+transmitter. Instantly, Ann Saymer turned to face him, the blaster
+clasped tightly in her hand.
+
+"No, Max."
+
+"But, Ann, those people outside are in desperate danger--"
+
+"I've gone this far. I _won't_ turn back." In her voice was the
+familiar drive, the ambition he knew so well. But now it seemed
+different, a twisted distortion of something he had once admired.
+
+"We don't need Eric Young," she said. "He's bungled everything. You
+and I, Max--" She caressed the transmitter affectionately. "With this,
+we'll possess unlimited power."
+
+"You mean, Ann--" He choked on the words. "You came here of your own
+free will? You deliberately planned Mrs. Ames' murder?"
+
+"She was dangerous, Max. She guessed too much. We knew that when we
+monitored the call you made from the spaceport. But in the beginning
+we weren't going to make you responsible. We thought the strangers in
+the house--your attempt to expose the other woman who called herself
+Mrs. Ames--would be enough to get you committed to a clinic. I didn't
+want you to be hurt, Max."
+
+"Why, Ann?" His voice was dead, emotionless. "Because you loved me? Or
+because you wanted me to be your ace in the hole, if you failed to
+manage Eric Young the way you thought you could?"
+
+"That doesn't matter now, Max, dear. I thought Eric had what I
+needed. But I was misjudging you all along."
+
+"You're still misjudging me, Ann. I'm going to smash this machine and
+afterward--"
+
+"No you aren't, Max," she said coldly. "I'll kill you first."
+
+Calmly she turned the dial on the blaster. He lifted the chair again,
+watching her face, still unable to accept what he knew was true. This
+was Ann Saymer, the woman he had loved. It was the same Ann whose
+ambition had driven her from the general school to a First in
+Psychiatry.
+
+With a fighting man's instinct, Hunter calculated his chances as he
+held the chair high above his head. It was Ann who had to die. He
+would accomplish nothing if he smashed her transmitter. She knew how
+to build another. If he threw the chair at her rather than the
+Exorciser and if he threw it hard enough--
+
+From the door a fan of flame blazed out, gently touching Ann. She
+stood rigid in the first muscular tension of paralysis. Hunter dropped
+the chair, shattering the transmitter. He turned and saw Dawn in the
+doorway. Somewhere deep in his subconscious mind he had expected her.
+He was glad she was there.
+
+"We've known for a long time we would have to break up their little
+partnership," Dawn explained. "After I talked to you this morning,
+Captain, I persuaded the others to hold off for another day or so. A
+clinical experiment of my own.
+
+"It was unkind of me, I suppose, to make you the guinea pig. But I
+wanted to watch your reactions while you fought your way to the truth.
+Now you know it all--more than you bargained for. And you know what
+we're trying to do. Are you willing to join us?"
+
+He looked at her.
+
+"In your third alternative--the cautious, rational rebuilding?"
+
+"After men understand themselves. When we're able to answer one
+question: why did you and Ann Saymer, with identical backgrounds, and
+intelligence, and an identical socio-economic incentive, become such
+different personalities? What gives you a zero-zero adjustment index
+that nothing can shake? Not the psychiatric shock of war, Captain. Not
+physical pain alone or the treachery of the girl you love. We need
+you, Captain. We need to know what makes you tick."
+
+"That 'we' of yours. Just what does that embrace?"
+
+"A cross-section of us all," she told him. "Psychiatrists, executives
+in both cartels, union officials. We've been working at this for a
+good many years. We want to make our world over, yes. But this time
+with reason and without violence--without sacrificing the good we
+already have."
+
+"And you yourself, Dawn. Who are you?"
+
+"I represent that nonentity called the government, Captain."
+
+"A nonentity wouldn't make you what you are, Dawn."
+
+"My name, Captain--" She drew a long breath. "My name is Dawn Farren.
+The rest of my family is dying out as the Von Rausches are. Unlimited
+power has a way of poisoning the human mind. If wealth is our only
+ethical goal, what do we really have when we possess it all? Madness.
+Both cartels are shams, Captain Hunter, just as your frontier wars are
+shams.
+
+"Yes, you may as well know that, too. Neither fleet has actually
+fought the other for a good many years. The planets you blast are
+hulks already long dead. It's all a sham, but we have to keep it
+alive. We have to make it _seem_ real--until we're sure we've found
+something better and more workable for all of us."
+
+The tension in Ann Saymer's muscles started to relax. Very slowly her
+body began to slump, in the secondary stage of paralysis.
+
+"What about her?" Hunter asked. "She can still make another
+Exorciser--"
+
+"The dream of enslaving mankind is _always_ insanity. We'll put her in
+a public clinic, of course. We may have to use her own machine once
+more to erase the memory of its structure from her mind. After that
+the patent drawings will be destroyed. It's not a superficial cure for
+maladjustment that we're after, Captain Hunter, but the cause. All of
+Ann's research was up a blind alley--a brilliant waste."
+
+Suddenly Dawn screamed a warning and leveled her blaster at Eric
+Young. Hunter sprang back as Dawn fired. But her timing was a second
+too late. In a last, blazing agony of life-before-death Young had
+regained consciousness long enough to hurl the scalpel at Hunter's
+back. Ebbing strength distorted his aim. The blade plunged into Ann's
+heart as she slumped against the wall.
+
+After a long pause, Max Hunter moved toward Dawn and took her arm. He
+clenched his jaw tight and drew her quickly into the hall. "I want
+out, Dawn. There's no healing here. I won't feel free again until I
+can look up at the stars."
+
+"The stars. Then you're going back to the service, Captain? You're
+running away?"
+
+He didn't answer her until they stood in Eric Young's garden.
+
+"Sham battles for shadow cartels," he said. "That's a child's
+subterfuge for the Tri-D space heroes. No, Dawn, the real war is here
+in the struggle for information about ourselves so that we can build a
+new world of freedom and human dignity. You say you need me. All
+right, Dawn, you've enrolled a recruit."
+
+"It will be a long, slow war, Captain," she said, her eyes shining.
+"We may never see a victory, and--we can never make a truce. But at
+least we've learned how to go about solving the problem--after ten
+millennia of trial and error."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Cartels Jungle, by Irving E. Cox, Jr.
+
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