rk. Send me that photo of your sister's
new baby."

He hung up the record mouthpiece. One more voter and loyal friend to
pull for him when he was a public figure and the going got rough.

He grinned. It was a strange life and a strange game.

V

When he left the office with Pierce, someone stepped out of a corner
of the corridor and clutched at his sleeve, speaking rapidly. Bryce
brushed off the hand carelessly and walked on.

"A junky," he remarked to Pierce. There was a quick flash of motion
behind them that sent them whirling to one side. Pierce stood aside
with the small needle gun in his palm waiting to see if it would be
needed, while Bryce finished the downstroke of his hand that sent the
knife and the junky reeling to the rubbery corridor flooring.

"Shall I report him?" Pierce asked, making his needle gun vanish in
the same smooth motion it had appeared, and indicating a phone sign.

"No. It doesn't matter," Bryce walked on thoughtfully. "Everyone wants
to kill me at once."

Pierce said, "It's easy to sway a miserable man to the point of
pinning all his troubles and hate on to one name, like Bryce Carter."

"I know," said Bryce. He saw that the smiling dark young man was
alert, walking a little ahead of him and glancing quickly left and
right as they approached corners and intersections and recessed
doorways where a man could wait unseen, doing his job as a bodyguard
efficiently and inconspicuously. "If it's the man I think it is,"
Bryce told him, falling into step again after they passed the turn
into the tube trains, "he's working against a deadline. It's now or
never. There won't be any more of this after next month."

Pierce answered after a glance at a passing mirror to see if they were
followed, and a quick scan of the train platform. "Your usual haunts
will be booby trapped. Better stay out of routine."

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

His new assistant and bodyguard was pleasantly deferential, lighting
cigarettes for him, listening respectfully to his opinions, drawing
him out with