in gray saw his intention and struggled frantically to break free of the pinioning crowd.

He failed.

A sort of grim satisfaction fell upon Alcorn when the man's face lost its urgency and settled into smiling unconcern. The gift was a weapon of sorts. The way to escape—at least from Jaffers' surveillance—was open.

He fell in beside the spy, paying less attention now to the man himself than to the matter of disposing of him. The garish facade of a nearby joy-bar solved his problem.

"Come with me," Alcorn ordered.

The joy-bar was less than half full at this early hour, but noisy enough for midnight. A concealed battery of robotics ground out a brassy blare of music, integrating random pitches—selected by electronic servo-computers—into the jarring minor cacophony that had become the latest rage.

The early patrons were intently watching the long telescreen above the bar when Alcorn came in. A quarterstaff bout—a frantic, bloody sport revived from God only knew how many centuries before—was in progress there, matching a heavily muscled Nordic with a sandy bristle of hair against a swarthy, hairless Eurasian. The Nordic, from his twisted stance, had a couple of broken ribs already; the Eurasian's right ear dangled redly.

Alcorn seated himself opposite Jaffers' operative in an isolated booth and fed the coin-slot for drinks.

"Drink," he said grimly. "You're going to be drunker, my friend, than you've ever been in your inquisitive life."

The uproar died out before the drinks arrived. Only the blaring music machines and the blood-roar of the telescreen remained, and a suddenly placid bartender turned both down to a murmur.

The rest was routine to Philip Alcorn's experience. Men at the bar turned to each other like old friends, forgetting submerged frustrations as readily as they forgot the vicious slash-and-parry on the screen. The place drowsed in a slow and comfortable silence.

The Jaffers man tossed off his drink and dialed another. Alcorn, raising his own, remembered Janice Wynn's letter in his pocket and set the glass down, untasted.

The clippings, she had said, would give him an idea of what he was up against.

His hands shook so violently when he ripped open the 

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