fe--for a while longer."

"But, sir, the big boss has gone! What can you do--with him flown the
coop?"

"Do now? I've already done it. Dollard thought of me as a fool, but
instead--I've shown him up as the real fool. A simpleton, tricked by
carelessness. There's a damned big surprise waiting for him in space."

Garth looked up into the twilight sky where a few brilliant stars were
now shining. His face bore an expression of exultant triumph. "Yes,"
he said softly, "a real surprise is just around the next curve for
you, Edwin Dollard. I hope you enjoy it as well as you've enjoyed
buying and selling men's souls...."

* * * * *

Five hundred miles above the sun-mirroring Pacific Ocean, Dollard
wiped great beads of perspiration from his shiny jowls. His thick
hands tugged and wrestled with stubborn knobs that finally yielded,
enabling him to apply greater thrust to his stern rockets.

From the moment of take-off, it had seemed to him that the grim bowl
of Terra below him was taking a bigger bite out of his acceleration
than it should. Naturally, he hadn't expected his craft to operate
with one hundred per cent efficiency, considering the caliber of the
technical help employed on its refitting; but still, his _tau_ curve
should have brought him to his first coasting point four or five
minutes earlier.

By virtue of being his own pilot, he was obliged to astrogate by
rule-of-thumb and occasional directive spurts from the course-calculator.
If mechanical troubles piled on top of him now, he'd have to surrender
control to his gyromatic pilot, while he moved aft to track down the
power-robbing malfunction. No mean task, armed in this case only with a
slide rule and what engineering knowledge remained to him after thirty
years of high finance.

Whatever the gremlin was, it wasn't exactly an auspicious start for a
fifty million-mile hop. He grunted and pressed his secondary firing
buttons, boosting space velocity by a percentage that should shake the
kinks out.

At the four thousand-mile mark, the earth had retreated to a green
ball that floated atop a stream of unbearably bright stars. From this
height above the planet's surface, not even the most powerful
telescope would have revealed the scenes of rampant disease and
flaming destruction being enacted on the broad continents below.

The entire vessel shook in a kind of bone-cracking vibration, lurching
and lumbering as if some malign i