of impact, sensation returned tingling in his fingers, and pain was beginning to burn in his shoulder. Bryce waited a few more seconds, feeling the control returning to his fingers, not changing the glazed off focus of his eyes. How many duels had Beldman won like this? The impact of one of those heavy slugs hitting bone was a dazing blow, enough to stun some men, and he probably counted on that effect.
The square figure lumbered closer, a lumpish clumsy caricature of the self-made man, brutally strong, unashamedly misfit to the society of the smooth-wise, smiling, easy mannered people that he and Bryce had joined; a model of everything that Bryce was trying to destroy in himself.
With a quick twist of the wrist Bryce swung his palm flat up flipping the magnomatic muzzle into line with it and put a bullet into the round face.
In that position of his hand the back kick of the shot twisted his arm back in its broken shoulder and pulled the maggy from his hand, but it didn’t matter. The duel was over.
The motionless crowd dissolved again into talking individuals going to lunch.
Pierce picked up the maggy and made the usual query of those who chose to remain.
“Which of you has any complaint of unfairness or advantage taken by either party of this duel?”
Most of them were leaving, anticipating the arrival of the police with their time-consuming questions, but twenty or so crowded close around Bryce and the corpse. “Press a thumb on your shoulder sub-clavian, man,” someone advised Bryce. “You’re bleeding like a faucet.”
Pierce’s clear voice said the standard words over the murmur and shuffle of feet. “No unfairness having been observed, when called to give testimony you can then say that he shot in self-defense and under duress.”
A low wail of sirens was heard.
“Who was that character?” Pierce asked later, sitting beside the table while a surgeon patiently pieced together the three or four shattered pieces of Bryce’s collarbone and fastened them with ingenious plastic bolts.
Bryce absently watched the process in a large tilted mirror slung overhead. Medicine bored him. “J. H. Beldman, member of the Board of Directors,” he explained, and for the benefit of the policeman standing beside the door he added, “Bad tempered as they come.” He looked into the mirror uneasily, trying to focus on his face.
His clothes were being cleaned of blood and dried somewhere. When the doctor had finished sewing and patching Bryce showered and dressed in a small dressing room beside the emergency ward, where he found his clothes hanging neatly in a drying closet.
As he finished a man in plain clothes entered and dismissed the cop with a word, and handed Bryce a printed notice and his magnomatic; “You’re clear,” he said, leaving again with a friendly half salute. “No charges.” The police had already recorded the testimony of the witnesses and inspected the weapons used. It had been a fair duel and the survivor was clear with a standard case for self-defense. The printed notice called him to testify at the coroner’s inquest into the death of J. H. Beldman during the next Saturday, but there would be no charges and no investigation.
There would be no trouble from Beldman, but who else knew what he had known, that Bryce Carter was responsible for the corruption of UT? How had he learned it? If someone else knew, there was going to be trouble.
Coming out of the emergency ward, he checked his watch.
One-fifteen. Too late to find Sheila Wesley still at Geiger’s Counter. But he knew he could see her another day—and with a good story to explain why he had not turned up the first time.
They ate at the nearest stand and went back to work. Trying to write was almost impossible, and even using his left hand for minor tasks was difficult. In spite of quick healing of muscle and flesh from the amino and nucleic acid powders the doctor had packed in, the shoulder ached with a tightness that spoiled his coordination. He shifted to writing clumsily with his right hand.
After twenty minutes he abandoned the pretense of working and began thoughtfully doing practice draws with his right hand. It was stiff and clumsy, and there was no holster in his right pocket to make grasping easy. The second time the maggy caught on his pocket edge and slipped from his hand he left it on the rug where it had fallen, sitting looking at it thoughtfully for a moment. Today was the day he would meet Orillo.
“How well can you handle a four tube cabin cruiser?”
“Line of sight only. I’m no navigator,” Pierce responded.
Bryce said soberly, realizing what he had decided, “This is a good day to have a bodyguard who’s a good shot. I have an appointment to meet a friend—and I’m not sure he’s a friend.”
“I shoot,” Pierce said, writing at one of the letters he had been set to. “Happy to oblige. Shall I wear my bulletproof clothes?”
“You could do with something like that,” Bryce said soberly.
Pierce looked up from the letters. “Would this be the man behind all these bullets, and you’re meeting him in space?”
“Yes.”
“In armor plated tanks with heavy artillery?”
“No.”
“No light and heavy cruisers. No marines?”
“Just you.” Bryce was smiling at Pierce’s mock astonishment. He knew that the kid didn’t care in the slightest where Bryce led him as long as there was a fight at the end of it, and he left it to Bryce to choose the odds.
The odds might be even enough. Orillo himself, if he came with murder as his intention, would bring no helpers for witnesses, and he would expect Bryce to bring none. Or if he had hired assassins, he would not come himself, and they would not know who had hired them, but they would have been told to expect one man only.
The secrecy of any meeting in space is practically absolute. If there is one thing which space has plenty of, it’s distance—distance enough to lose things in, distance enough to hide in, distance enough so that even if you know where something is by all the figures of its coordinates, if it’s smaller than a planet you can’t find it even when you are there. To put it crudely, what space has is space. And finding something that doesn’t want to be found in space is like looking for a missing germ in the Atlantic.
He had the coordinates of the beacon he had chosen for his appointment point and the robot pilot took him to that area with automatic precision. But once there he had to cruise manually back and forth three times through the perpendicular plane of Earth’s equator before picking up the radar pip of the buoy, which was set to broadcast its presence by a circular sweep of radar pulses on a flat plane corresponding to the Earth equatorial average.
He found it no later than expected, which was over an hour early, on the principle that he who arrives first finds no ambush.
He left Pierce with certain instructions and floated from the ship to the familiar globe that spun so placidly on the anchoring rod that attached it to the controlling buoy. The buoy was powered strongly enough to have controlled the orbits of fifty such globes without strain. Buoys of that type were just beginning to be popular in the Belt.
Once inside he opened his faceplate, looking around with the same pleasure he always felt on his visits here. It was like being back at the Belt for a time. After the raw harshness of the moon and the artificial luxuries of its cities, after the agoraphobic vastness of Earth’s giant surface, to be within this little close-knit familiar world was soothing and relaxing. It was a green glade of leaves and branches, greenness underfoot and overhead, a brown metal cliff with vines and a door to his left, a larger brown metal cliff like the round head of a barrel with doors in it to his right, and a circular silver door in the center. Behind the small right hand cliff was the small amount of regulating machinery required, behind the doors of the larger cliff was a small kitchen, and convertible study- bedrooms. Behind the silver door was a corridor leading to the airlock and space. It was forty feet from cliff to cliff, and from the growing greenery underfoot to the growing greenery overhead, as spacious as a wide glade in the woods of Earth.
He picked his way among the vines and shrubs to a carpetlike patch of green moss and sat down comfortably to wait. Pierce had drawn the ship off beyond detector range by now, and it would seem to any ship approaching that he had not yet arrived.
It was peaceful there, no breeze stirred the leaves. Twenty feet above, fixed in the air on clear spokes of
