"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-p.r.i.c.ks 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 bra.s.s 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 s.p.a.cefleet 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 amus.e.m.e.nt 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-pa.s.s 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.