ve you passed through
your first three cases yet?"

"You are my first," said Roy Pierce, whom he had trusted. "I'm afraid
I was clumsy."

"Oh--you did all right." Bryce shot him then, placing the bullet
carefully in the pit of his stomach where it would hurt. That was for
doing well. For justice. No man has the right to meddle in another
man's mind.

Pierce had been starting to speak. He swayed back a half step with a
flicker of change crossing his face then stood steady and smiling
again. That brief grimace touched Bryce's nerves with a sensation that
was like the jangle of something heavy dropped inside a piano, a sound
he had heard once. But the numbness did not lift from his feelings. He
was still smiling. The third bullet would be between the eyes.

The words were low and rapid but clear.

Bryce did not listen. "This is for doing a good job," he said,
overriding the other voice with his own, and pulled the trigger again,
placing the slug slightly lower this time, in the belly, where if it
entangled in one of the spinal plexus it could hurt past belief.
Pierce swayed slightly. His face went to the clay-blue color that
comes to dark-skinned races when they pale. Bleeding inside somewhere,
and already dead unless he were given help, Bryce figured.

For a moment Bryce saw something like effort in the dark unreadable
eyes. Then suddenly Pierce smiled, his young face disarmingly innocent
and merry. "Oh, come on, Bryce, it's not that serious. Be a good
sport. You don't want to--"

Suddenly Bryce saw the situation as the sheerest humor, a sort of
lunatic farce for the laughter of some cosmic joker. He swung the
gunsights up towards the smiling face. Amusement bubbled in his blood
and he heard himself laugh--heard it with a grim secondary amusement.

"The joke's on you," he said, and pulled the trigger, then laughed
again. The joke was on him.

He had missed. He had missed at a distance of three feet. Yet his hand
was rock-steady. Pierce's control had him. His laughter stopped as the
humor in Pierce's attitude faded down again to the small wry smile
that had been there from the beginning.

Bryce had not lost. He had only to wait a little and he had won.
Unless Pierce could use his control to force him to call help. He set
himself to resist and not to listen. There was not long to go. The
expressionless dark eyes that held his were beginning to widen
slightly in an effort of sight that meant that a private darkn