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.
