arching his mind for a way
to counterattack. He still had enough stock to keep him comfortable if
he lived another hundred years. But he no longer had the power, and he
thirsted for that. He turned it around and around in his brain, trying
to figure out how he could do it, and the one thing he finally knew, the
one certain thing, was that if he used enough drive, enough strength,
then he would regain control of the company he had built with his own
hands and mind.

He paced the library and the long living room and the dining room, and
his eyes were lost, until he saw, through the doorway of the sewing
room, that desk and that chair, and he remembered he hadn't done
anything about that.

He paused only briefly, because he had not lost an ounce of his ability
to make a sudden decision, and then he removed that disk and carried it
to the library and fitted it under the cushion of the large, worn,
leather chair.

By fall, he had done nothing to regain control, and he was less certain
of how he should act than he had been months before. He kept driving by
the plant and looking at it, but he did so carefully, so that no one
would see him, and he was surprised to find that, above all, he didn't
want to face Harry Linden. The memory of the man's firm look, the sharp,
bold eyes, frightened him, and the knowledge of his fright crushed him
inside. He wished desperately that Mary were back with him, and he even
wrote her letters, pleading letters, but they came back, unopened.

Finally he went to see Robert Quay, because Quay was the only man in his
memory whom he somehow didn't fear talking to. He found Quay in a small
cottage near the beach. There was a six-day old infant in a crib in the
bedroom, and Quay's wife was a sparkling-eyed girl with a smile that
made Cutter feel relatively at ease for the first time in weeks.

She politely left them alone, and Cutter sat there, embarrassed faintly,
but glad to be in Quay's home and presence. They talked of how it had
been, when Quay was with the company, and finally Cutter pushed himself
into asking about it:

"I've often wondered, Bob, why you left?"

Quay blushed slightly, then grinned. "I might as well admit it. I got
one of those things from Bolen, and had it installed in my own chair."

Cutter thought about it, surprised. He cleared his throat. "And then you
quit?"

"Sure," Quay said. "All my life, I'd wanted to do just what I'm doing.
But things just came easy to me,