lly just for
the rare curt acknowledgement that he had done well. Three years of
managing had made him a good lieutenant, completely faithful. When
Bryce quit Union Transport Kesby would follow him.

IV

He went into his luxurious inner office with its deep rugs and
eye-relaxing colors and its comfortable wide desk with its speaker box
and telephones that were like the nerve wires of power, and sat down
comfortably like a king on a throne or a mule skinner in the driver's
seat with ten pairs of reins in each hand. He never felt completely
awake and up to his full size in the morning until he was here.

There was a good stack of letters and memos on the desk waiting for
him. On top of the mail stack was a letter labeled PRIVATE in a beamed
spacegram envelope. He did not recognize the name at the head of it
but the return address was General Delivery, Reef Three, The Belt. It
read:

_Something urgent has come up. Must see you. Arrange when. Bob._
Roberto Orillo, who had been his manager in the small line that UT had
taken from him, now the owner of a tiny line of his own which
carefully avoided competition with UT in the Belt.

"Arrange when." They could only meet in secret. What would Orillo want
to discuss?

The theory he had held in the back of his mind for three days gave
answer--Murder! It was Orillo who was behind the attempted attack on
Earth. This meeting was another trap. Orillo wanted him dead.

Roberto Orillo had been his first helper with the shipping and
delivery service Bryce had built up from the days when he had been
merely an asteroid prospector with a ship overstocked with supplies
and an obliging willingness to sell his surplus.

After he put his traveling stores on schedule he noticed that an
increasing number of people began moving into the Belt to settle along
his route without investing in the proper ship or supplies, depending
on him, using his ship for a store and bus service, swelling his
profits. He found that wherever he chose to extend a route and offer
credit for a stake settlers would appear and a community begin to
grow.

He absorbed that lesson and laid plans.

UT blocked them. Running his store ships on their regular rounds,
making loans, mediating deals, taking half interests in ideas that
looked profitable, selling fuel and power, subtly binding his
customers to him with bonds of dependency deeper than peonage, Bryce
found suddenly that UT, whose trade mark had never bee