ered the cop-psychos the
gangs had warned him about in his scrambling and desperate childhood,
and what they were supposed to do to you when they caught you in a
third offense.

He had been born into an ex-European quarter in a Chinese city, a
descendant of something prideful and forgotten called an Empire
Builder, and grew with the mixed gangs of children of all colors who
roamed the back streets at night, looting and stealing and breaking.
Population control was almost impossible in a land where the only
social security against starvation in old age was sons, and social
security was impossible in a land so corrupted by the desperation of
famines, so little able to spare the necessary taxes. The nation was
too huge to be fed from outside, and so had been left by the FN to
stew in its own misery until its people solved their basic problem.

So, in an enlightened clean and wealthy world, Bryce Carter had grown
up in a slum whose swarming viciousness was a matter of take, steal,
kill, climb or die. Perhaps under those special circumstances police
penal compulsion had to be brutally strong, stronger than the drive
for life itself, as brutal as the lurid tales he had heard. Perhaps in
other countries the methods were different, a hypno-converted man not
a horror to his friends, but he had had no time to study and
investigate if it were so, and the horror and hatred remained.

But there was no need to think about the psycho-hunter the Board had
put on him for by the time the hunter could reach him UT would have
fallen as a legal entity, its corruption would be completely public,
and the psychologist would be called off before discovering anything.
Bryce thought of the slight nervousness he had let show at the first
words of the chairman's announcement. The only witness against him was
himself. His control wasn't perfect. No one's was. But he was safe.

He concentrated on the opening pages of the Basic Principles of
Economies.

* * * * *

In the darkened UT building which could be seen from his window a few
lights still burned where the night shift dealt with emergencies.

In a small projection room on the fifty-fifth floor a man sat and
looked at a film of the UT Board meeting of that day. He played only a
certain small twenty minute interval, listening closely to the
voices--"Gentlemen, your attention please--" Watching the faces--"Do
the police know of this?" ... "Do you think if we o