the glare of colored lights,
the mid-city never slept. It was always thronged. It was the only area
of the heartland--except for the top level casinos--open to every
citizen without restriction.

On the levels immediately above it were the specialty shops, dealing
in luxuries for the suburbanites who had fought, schemed and bribed
their way out of the minimum housing. Higher still was the sector
given over to the less expensive commercial hotels.

The upper levels were occupied by cartel executive offices and at the
top, high enough to escape the smog and feel the warmth of the sun,
were the fabulous casino resorts, the mansions built by the family
dynasts who controlled the cartels, and the modest, limestone building
housing the mockery which passed as government.

IV

Captain Hunter left the lift at Level Nineteen. An automatic entry
probe accepted his blue-tinted executive card, and he walked the short
distance to the hotel which specialized in catering to spacemen. It
was traditionally neutral ground, where the mercenaries of
Consolidated or United Research met as friends, although a week before
they might have been firing radiation fire at each other in the outer
reaches of space. The frontier conflict was a business to the
spaceman. Hunter was too well-adjusted to become emotionally involved
in it himself.

The spacemen called their hotel the Roost, a contraction lifted from
the public micropic code. The full name was the _Roosevelt_, lettered
on the entry. The hotel was popularly supposed to have been built
close to the site of a twentieth century Los Angeles hotel of the
same name, destroyed in the last convulsive war that had shattered the
earth.

By micropic Hunter had made his customary reservation. His room was
high in an upper floor overlooking Level Twenty-three. Through the
visipanel he could see the walk-ways thronged by the various
classifications of executives who worked in the central offices of the
cartels--lawyers, engineers, administrators, directors,
astrogeographers, designers, statisticians, researchers.

Somewhere in the crowd, perhaps, were the two men who ruled the
cartels and directed the struggle for the Galactic empire. Glenn
Farren of Consolidated Solar and Werner von Rausch of United
Researchers. Max Hunter had never seen either of the men or any of
their dynastic families. He knew little about them. Their pictures
were never published.

Yet Farren and Von Rausch held in th