Chapter III

Captain Hunter left the municipal building and stood on the transit platform. It was blazing hot in the noon sun, and he considered chartering an autojet to the city, as he always had before. But though a jet was faster than the monorail it was also more expensive. Acutely mindful that he had left the service and would earn no more juicy credit bonuses, he took the monorail instead.

He had only a ten-minute wait before a crowded car screamed to a stop at the port station. Hunter went aboard, along with four passengers from recent inbound flights--laboring class tourists returning from vacations on one of the planetoid resorts. Since a majority of the people who passed through the spaceport were executives or professionals, they used the autojets.

Hunter’s uniform set him apart. A spaceman was expected to live high, to throw away credits like the glamor heroes on the Tri-D space dramas.

The monorail car was crowded, primarily with afternoon-shift workers on their way to the industrial area. They all wore on their tunics the discs of the Union of Free Workers. The four tourists who went aboard at the spaceport with Hunter pulled out their U.F.W. badges and pinned them on. They belonged. Hunter didn’t.

He found an empty chair at the rear of the car, beside a gaudily attired woman, whose union disc proclaimed her a member of Local 47, the Recreational Companion Union. What miracles we perform, Hunter thought, with a judicial selection of innocuous words!

He glanced at the woman. She was past the first bloom of youth and her face, under her makeup, was heavily lined, her eyes shrewd and observing. Had he known that she had been shadowing him almost from the instant of his arrival in Los Angeles, and had been awaiting his return to Earth in obedience to carefully formulated instructions he would not have regarded her so complacently.

The monorail shot up toward the Palms-Pine pass of the San Jacinto Mountains. From the crest of the grade Hunter could look back at the flat, cemented field of the spaceport and the ragged teeth of the launching tubes rearing high on the Mojave. Ahead of him, misted by the blue haze of industrial smog, was Los Angeles, the capital city of Sector West--and indirectly the capital of the entire planet.

Almost indistinct against the horizon were the soaring, Babel towers, the tangled network of walk-levels, jet-ways and private landing flats, which was the center-city. The lower, bulky factory buildings squatted under the towers and spreading outward from them, like concentric rings made by a stone hurled into a quiet pool, was the monotonous clutter of the minimum-housing.

The city sprawled from San Diego to Santa Barbara, and it lapped against the arid Mojave to the east. Beyond were the suburban homes of laborers and low-echelon executives who had carved brass-knuckled niches for themselves in the medium-income bracket.

Hunter saw the panoramic view of Sector West for only a split-second before the monorail car screamed down through the layer of gray haze. For thirty minutes the car shot across the minimum-housing area, stopping from time to time at high-platformed stations.

In the industrial district the car emptied rapidly. Only Hunter and his faded seat companion got out at the turnaround terminal and took the slideway to center-city. In the metro-entry at the top of the stairs they went through a security check station manned by six blaster-armed police guards.

Half of the guards wore the insignia of Consolidated Solar Industries and half of United Research, the two titan cartels which were locked in deadly battle for the empire beyond the stars.

The government played it safe, Hunter thought with bitterness, using an equal number of police from each organization. On Earth the pacific balance of commercial power was never disturbed--not, at least, on the surface. The two imperial giants lived side by side in a tactful display of peace.

On the frontier the real conflict raged, fought with all the weapons of treachery and an arsenal of highly refined atomic weapons--the blaster which could tear a man into component elements, and the L-bombs that were capable of turning a young sun into a nova.

The woman passed through the security check with no trouble. The men knew her and made only a perfunctory examination of her cards. But Hunter again had difficulty because of the blaster in his bag. His registered permit carried no weight with the guards. It was not their duty to execute existing law, but to protect their private employers.

However, the Consolidated insignia on Hunter’s jacket made the three Consolidated guards ready to honor his permit. Eventually they persuaded the opposition to pass Hunter into the city, on the ground that the captain’s zero-zero adjustment index indicated that it was safe for him to carry arms.

When Hunter went through the probe, he found the woman waiting for him. During the half-hour ride from the spaceport, he had tried twice to start a conversation with her, and failed. Now, abruptly, her face was animated with interest. She put her arm through his and walked with him to the lift shaft.