The Man Who Staked the Stars Read online

usual hauntswill be booby trapped. Better stay out of routine."

  That night, in the spacehands end of the city, they ate the dinnerthat he usually had with Mona at a nightclub, or alone looking for agood pickup in an expensive cocktail lounge. It was in the shippingarea around the docks, at the opposite end of the city from his usualhaunts. The ceiling was low and the glasses shivered and danced withthe constant muted thunder of jets that shuddered through the floorfrom the nearby landing fields.

  His new assistant and bodyguard was pleasantly deferential, lightingcigarettes for him, listening respectfully to his opinions, drawinghim out with questions that showed he understood what he was listeningto.

  Bryce could not remember having had such a good time talking since heleft the company of the meteorite miners at the Belt. Everything hesaid seemed right and even brilliant. As he talked and told anecdotesof his life and sketched some of his plans he saw his past life withpeculiar vividness as if he were a stranger seeing it for the firsttime. In the reflected light of the interest and enthusiasm of hisaudience, events took on a new glow of entertainment and adventure andsuccess where they had seemed to be just work and risk and routine atthe time.

  They had an evening to pass. Somehow Pierce got into conversation witha little Egyptian who could have stood for Cyrano and had the samemerry impetuous way about him. Raz Anna was his name. He claimed to bethe Caliph of Baghdad, still incognito, or perhaps a professionalexplorer disguised as a native. After a few drinks he enlisted them,somewhat confusedly, as the two missing musketeers and they foundthemselves wandering arm in arm from bar to bar and up and down darkalleys interviewing the heathen natives.

  Bryce realized that he was laughing steadily and enjoying himself in away that had nothing to do with the small number of drinks he had had.

  He couldn't get any deference out of Raz. Raz wouldn't have deferredto God himself, and it was no use trying to impress him, for nothingimpressed him. Apparently the hook-nosed, merry little man had noambition and no envy of anyone, and wanted no better of life than hehad at the moment.

  It was a strange new world they led Bryce through--Not the ragged,starving, crowded viciousness of his childhood--not the fightingequality of spacemen and rock miners, many of them wanted by thelaw--not the simple barren hospitality of the settlers in the Belt whoowed him money, and who invited him to their sparse dinners ingratitude--Those he had always managed to keep in their places andexact a certain measure of respect.

  Even the smooth powerful men of wealth around him now accorded him acertain measure of deference that was an acknowledgement of strength.But the two musketeers he was with and the world they opened for himseemed to respect neither distance nor politeness, nor hold any fearfor strength. Friendly insults, and uncritical friendliness mingledoddly with the mock-solemn pretense of the fairy tale, and that partwas genuine and spontaneous. It didn't seem to be a different kind ofpeople he was meeting exactly: it was the same kind of peopleapproached differently. He didn't know exactly how it was done, and helet the other two take the lead.

  Perhaps he had drunk too much, he thought as he rode the hotelelevator. For in retrospect, the evening was a haze of pleasure thatwas hard to pin his attention to. Everything he had said, everythingthat had happened seemed profoundly right, an atmosphere which he hadencountered rarely before and only then in the last stage ofdrunkenness. But he was sober. He had had only a few drinks, and hisperceptions seemed sharpened rather than blurred. Yet, where thereshould have been critical thoughts and regrets for errors and restlessplans in his mind, there was only a pleasant empty buzz.

  "Too much talk," he thought, yawning as he walked down the luxurioushotel corridor to his room.

  * * * * *

  It was that night that he first noticed something wrong with themirror.

  He glanced into it casually while undressing, then not so casually,walking up to it and inspecting his face. A slight, unpleasant tinglecoursed along his nerves.

  A stranger--When he tried to focus on what was wrong he could findnothing that looked any different, yet the total effect was completelywrong. He decided that it must be the mirror, some subtle distortionof the reflection. The old one must have been broken in cleaning and anew one put in.

  The chill passed and still the good blank feeling lasted. He went tobed reviewing the evening and smiling, and went to sleep withoutresorting to the mental arithmetic that he generally used to clear hismind of dissatisfactions.

  The next morning the mirror still looked peculiar. There seemed to benothing wrong with the reflected image of the room, but when he gavehimself the usual inspection before stepping out into the corridor thefeeling of strangeness returned and his eyes felt as if they wereblurring.

  He put his hand up to his eyes instinctively and felt a distinct shockwhen the mirrored image did the same.

  Odd.

  A slender smiling young man joined him in the lobby, rising andfalling into step with him as he passed, going through doors beforehim with the inconspicuous alertness and precaution. He did his dutiesas a bodyguard well, Bryce noted, but that was only to be expected.Efficiency is, and should be, unnoticeable.

  One thing he discovered during the working morning at the office.There had been nothing wrong with the mirror in his hotel room. Thewashroom mirror was worse!

  He stood for a while, frozen in midstep, while he looked at a leantanned and freckled face which looked like a color movie of his, everyfeature in its proper place as he remembered it, but yet not his. Itdidn't belong to him. He made faces at it, and it made faces back asif it were his, while he tried to believe that he was looking out ofthe gray eyes which looked back at him, then he heard someone comingin and left suddenly and sheepishly.

  That afternoon, after Pierce got into the swing of the work, he beganto be useful, fitting himself into the work routine as though he hadalways been part of it, making the right calls and contacts andappointments on the barest hints, handing him the phone intuitively ashe needed it, always at the right time with almost telepathicinstinct. While checking over the decisions and plans of Kesby and thestaff that needed his okay, and signing typed letters Bryce talked thethoughts and plans which came half formed to mind, almost thinkingaloud. And when his remarks struck something that sounded like itwould be good to do soon, he saw Pierce jotting them down, laterdetailing the preliminary steps for Bryce's use.

  And too, all the small tasks were being taken from him with easynaturalness, saving him much time. His assistant was being what he hadclaimed he would be, a genuinely useful left hand. Bryce found himselfproud of the kid's manifest efficiency, for he was a product of thesame school that Bryce himself had climbed from.

  On the way back to the hotel, after work, he caught Pierce glancing athim with a thoughtful expression, and realized that he had beenfaltering and giving a second glance to every public mirror that hehad passed. He was momentarily embarrassed, wondering if any strainhad showed on his expression.

  There was a party he had to go to that night so he changed to formalclothes and stepped off again for the home of the FN AdministrativeGovernor of the Moon.

  He did not want to attend. It would be another of those stiff,lonesome dinners he had suffered through before, but he had to learnto make friends on his own social level, and be easy and convivialwith the kind of people he would be associating with the rest of hislife.

  After the first hour had given him a good test, Bryce decided that theevening was as bad as he had anticipated. He stood on the outskirts ofa small group, holding a drink and watching resentfully as astartlingly beautiful woman laughed and talked with the others of thegroup and not with him. She had been introduced to him as SheilaWesley. The jokes she had with the others were quick and subtleflashes of wit and insight, and seemed to be based on a mutualunderstanding that he could not share, even though some of the othershad just been introduced and had been strangers to each other a fewminutes back; it was something he grasped vaguely as a commonbackground
and approach to life that they shared, perhaps througheducation.

  There were quick references to political situations they all seemedfamiliar with, or a name that could have been some character in a bookthey might all have read, or could have been somebody in history, eachreference followed by a subdued laugh and an added witty statementfrom some other quarter. No one of them gave a word to him or noticedthat he was there.

  Why should they? He was dressed well and expensively, but so were theyall. He was a person of prominence and power, but so were they all,and bored by it. He could not talk like the others. Then what could hedo to make Sheila Wesley smile at him the way she smiled down at theridiculous little fat man beside her as he excitably stuttered out hisopinions.

  * * * * *

  Sheila Wesley was not like Mona, to be captured by money and clothesand influence. Would she be impressed even by the power he would havelater? He tried to picture her as tremulous and awed, hanging on hiswords and flattering him, but he