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  “It is that,” said Bleys, “but consider it in connection with the need of the Younger Worlds to survive independently of Old Earth’s continual attempt to control us; which nowadays is hidden in their tool for doing just that, which is the Final Encyclopedia.”

  “This is all nonsense!” Harley burst out.

  The majority of those there clearly agreed. There were scowls here and there around the room directed at Bleys, now.

  “What the hell,” said Harley, “does it matter to us what some Exotics or Old Earth and their Final Encyclopedia people think or do? The point is, we’ve got a good society here on our own world; and what we want to know, in plain, unvarnished Basic, is if you’re going to try to disturb it!”

  “Forgive me,” said Bleys. “But my interests are much larger than the situation on any single New World.”

  “So you say,” said Harley. “It doesn’t sound like it to me.”

  He drew a deep breath, looked down, and took the stem of his wineglass between his fingers. He began to twirl the glass, watching it rather than Bleys.

  “You know, Bleys Ahrens,” he said, more quietly, still toying with his wineglass, “New Earth is ours. It’s the world of those of us you’re looking at right now. We’re the top people of this CEO Club. And this CEO Club is the top Club of all those in all our cities. In short, the planet’s more our responsibility than it is anyone else’s, and, of course, with that responsibility goes control.”

  “Of course,” said Bleys gently. “I understand.”

  “We hoped you would,” said Harley, in an even more reasonable voice. Now comes the carrot, thought Bleys. “Particularly, considering what you’ve done so far, you’re the kind of man who realizes the facts of life when you run into them. Now, you’re going to start on this tour of yours soon, aren’t you? Leaving New Earth City for other points around our globe?”

  “The day after tomorrow, for Blue Harbor,” said Bleys. “As my schedule stands now. It could be several days from now, but not many.”

  “Yes,” said Harley. “Well, you understand, then, that once you start your tour, and even now here in New Earth City, you’ll be keeping in mind the fact that we own the hotels you’ll be staying in. Whatever transportation you’ll take, the availability of your meals—wherever you find them—and essentially everything you’ll touch while you’re here, is owned or controlled by us.”

  “Yes,” Bleys said.

  “Fine,” said Harley. “We’ll be counting on you, then, not to try anything that will do the CEO Clubs any harm.” He raised his gaze from the wineglass, let go of its stem, and smiled a smile that in spite of his obvious efforts, was rusty and unconvincing.

  “I’ve already told you,” Bleys said. “My concern is with something greater. Philosophies make history; machinations by CEO Clubs hardly would.”

  Harley did not look particularly pleased with the association of the word “machinations” with CEO Clubs. But he made an effort to hang onto his smile.

  “Good,” he said. “Then that subject’s taken care of. There’s one other matter to talk about.”

  “Is there?” said Bleys; and this time, so delicate was the irony in his voice that it was questionable how many of those there besides Toni and perhaps Jay Aman even heard it.

  “Yes,” said Harley. “You know of course that we’re not the only power on this world—though we’re the main one. The other is the jobholders’ Guilds”—his face reddened—“unions are what the damn outfits are! Never mind that fancy medieval name they call themselves—”

  Harley swallowed the wine that was left in his glass; and the sudden surge of blood that had come with his last words faded again. Bleys thought of the obvious effort that had been given to produce an impression of great age in the outer portion of the Club building.

  But Harley was going on.

  “Don’t ever think the Guilds won’t be approaching you,” he said. “They’ll want you to use your talks to advertise them, to give them credit. We can’t have that. If they ever got control here, everything’d fall apart—everyone his own job-giver. Anarchy! So we don’t want you encouraging them. We’ve got trouble enough keeping them in line now. All right, then, you’ve told us how you’re not concerned with doing anything about changing our world, here. Have you got it clear that we’re in a position to outbid the Guilds in anything—including interstellar credit, which is the only thing that really matters?”

  “Is it the only thing that really matters?” said Bleys, a little wistfully.

  “What else could?” demanded Harley. “Credit’s everything. All right, so the Guilds have strength in numbers. Also, they’ve got financial resources; but, talking about amounts that count, only in local currency. They can’t begin to touch us in interstellar credit. We’re the ones who buy from Cassida and Newton, who sell to all the other Younger Worlds. If you plan to visit here, you also plan to visit other worlds—am I right?”

  “You’re right,” said Bleys.

  “Of course I am,” said Harley. “So, since these other-world trips of yours have to be expensive, a large chunk of interstellar credit banked with us is always going to be useful to you. Particularly if all that you had to do to get it was to make sure that you helped people to look always to us for guidance, not the Guilds.”

  “A bribe?” asked Bleys.

  “Call it anything you want,” said Harley.

  “I’m afraid,” answered Bleys, rising to his feet, “you’re one of the people for whom my little anecdote of what to do if chased by a grizzly bear doesn’t yet have a personal application. I think Antonia Lu and I will leave you all, now—”

  “I don’t think you will,” said Harley. “Not until we’ve got the kind of assurances from you we invited you up here to get.”

  As he spoke, he was very visibly pressing a stud on his wrist control pad.

  Bleys nodded, but he also stayed on his feet. Toni had risen to stand beside him. He did not move toward the lift; neither did she.

  “Looks like you didn’t think of all that could happen,” said Harley. “Anyway, just for your further education, we’ll let the answer to that signal I just sent out carry on through—for your education. Stand, or sit if you want—but it’ll only be a couple of minutes.”

  “Then of course we’ll wait,” said Bleys.

  There was utter silence in the room, a silence which continued while the seconds ticked off. Both Bleys and Toni knew how to stand still, but relaxed. Less than two minutes after Harley had spoken, the lift arrived. He and Toni turned to face it, with the others in the room who could not see the lift doors without turning their chairfloats around.

  The doors opened. Through them stepped Henry MacLean.

  He stood aside to leave the entrance clear, and Bleys and Toni walked to and into the lift. Henry stepped back in beside them; and they all turned back to face the startled expressions of those in the room they had just left.

  It was only then that Harley came out of whatever shock had held silent not only him, but all those with him. He shouted at Bleys as if the words within him had a life of their own and were now finally exploding into speech from the emotional pressure.

  “Where’s Mathias?” he shouted. “What have you done with him? You”—he stared at Henry—“how did you get in here?”

  Henry did not answer. He had already touched the row of studs in the elevator wall beside him. The doors closed and the lift began to descend.

  “It was almost too easy,” said Henry to Bleys as they started down. “They made a common mistake. Once we were inside, we were past their main security elements. We’d been scanned, just as you were, for weapons and were found unarmed. Anyway, we didn’t look like enough force to make trouble for them. We waited until we were alone with only a few of them, disarmed and tied them up, then took care of just those that could give us access to this lift, including the Manager in his office. Nobody else saw anything happen. Then we waited for a call to him from upstairs. When it came, I c
ame.”

  “Anyone hurt?” asked Bleys.

  “None of us,” said Henry. “A few of the club employees may have sore heads, but I doubt if any of them were really hurt. I took a void pistol from the Manager. We didn’t have to touch him, at all. When he saw how easily we’d taken control, he simply handed the pistol over.”

  “That’s interesting,” said Bleys. “I’d guess they thought something like this might happen; and the Manager had been given orders not to risk any of the people with us getting hurt, unless he was sure he could win. But I don’t think they ever expected you to turn on them like that.”

  “No,” said Henry. “I don’t think so. In any case, we left the Manager with his thumbs tied behind him in his office. I think he’ll stay there—at least until we’re out of here.”

  The lift stopped abruptly and unexpectedly.

  “They may have planned a little more sensibly than we thought, Uncle,” murmured Bleys.

  “It’s possible,” said Henry.

  The elevator started again. Moments later it stopped a second time, and the door opened. Mathias stood just outside, his hands unbound and Henry’s men with their own hands tied behind their backs looking embarrassed.

  Henry glanced at Bleys.

  “I don’t think there’ll be a problem,” Bleys said to him. He looked at Mathias. “Will there?”

  “No, Bleys Ahren,” said Mathias. “We have certain standard emergency measures,” he went on, once Bleys, Toni and Henry were out of the lift. “The one we’d designed for your visit didn’t work too well. But we’ve managed, anyway. However, since you’re so well known and a governing Member on your own world, it’s been decided you need some time to think things over.”

  “Of course,” said Bleys. “But you might tell Harley Nickolaus for me that their bluff didn’t work. You see, I knew they weren’t ready yet to get rough.”

  Mathias did not seem to have heard Bleys at all.

  “So,” he went on, “I’ve just been told the Club considers any questions between you and it deferred for the moment. I’ll show you out.”

  He turned and led off. Bleys, Toni, Henry and the rest followed. The men who had their hands tied behind their backs had their bindings cut by Henry as they left.

  They retraced the route they had followed coming in, according to Bleys’ memory. But as they passed through the door that let them into the outer section of the Club, they found themselves in halls swarming with people.

  They halted.

  “Forgive this, please,” said Mathias, turning back to Bleys, “I forgot there’s a special meeting going on. Let me show you another way out.”

  They turned aside, into a room that held a long, empty dining table set with silverware and glasses; and through a farther door into a large kitchen area, through which they threaded their way amidst various pieces of equipment and people working with food, to a double door of gray metal, with a lift bar locking it.

  Mathias picked up the lift bar and pushed on the right hand section of the door. It opened on the side alley Bleys had noticed on entering. Nighttime had made the darkness without into an opaque wall surrounding a small circle of alley pavement lit by the glaringly bright light above the door.

  The air outside felt cool now, and slightly damp. It was all black to their left. To their right, it was a tunnel of gloom, giving way gradually to the light from the alley’s farther opening to the trafficway on which they had driven to the club.

  “Take Intertrafficway Forty-one,” said Mathias, pointing to their right. “Your chances of picking up autocabs for your hotel are best there.”

  Henry led his men out first into the alley. Bleys and Toni followed. Mathias stood for a moment in the doorway behind them, watching as they started toward the lit passageway to their right.

  Suddenly the outside light went out; and the total length of the alley was plunged in darkness, except for the light coming past Mathias through the service door. At the same moment, figures with thick rods like policemen’s nightsticks, erupted from the dark at their left in an attack at Bleys’s group from behind. Mathias stared for a second; then hastily stepped back inside, closed, and locked the door behind him, leaving them blinded in the sudden lightlessness.

  Chapter 8

  But the darkness did not completely blind them. There was still the light from the alley mouth; and that, as their eyes adjusted, began to let them see almost as well as their attackers.

  Henry and the Soldiers, who had gone out first, had immediately dropped to the floor of the alley, spinning around as they lay on their backs, so that their feet were toward their attackers. Taking one long stride over the three steps to the alley floor, Bleys had shut his eyes to let his sight adjust as quickly as possible to the dimness of the alley, and was going completely with the momentary glimpse of the attackers rushing toward them, which was like a picture imprinted on his mind—a picture which acquired movement as his ears picked up the sounds of the people rushing at them, and turned it from a still image to a moving, developing one.

  Within seconds Bleys had his eyes open again and could see enough better to make out that the attackers had run into the Soldiers, and unexpectedly found themselves being flipped off their feet as the Soldiers’ heavy work boots caught them with one toe behind one of their ankles and another kicking out at the front of the lower leg above it. The floor of the alley was concrete, and some of those who went down that way stayed down.

  Bleys’s first concern was for Toni. But she had been behind him going down the stairs, and as long as she stayed in that position relative to him, the two of them could handle just about anything that was likely to come at them, clubs or no clubs. Four of the attackers had peeled off from the general rush to concentrate on him, but those four now had the light from the alley mouth in their eyes while he had it at his back, and his own vision was about as good as it could be in this dimness. That advantage, at least, was clearly with him.

  At the same moment, the first of his club-wielding attackers reached him, and he lashed out with his right foot, feeling it connect solidly. The leader of the four had made the same mistake so many people made, which was to underestimate the unusual reach of Bleys’s long arms and legs.

  Bleys’s sight was good enough now that he could see that the man he had kicked was sliding limply down the opposite wall of the alley. But his attention was on his other three opponents.

  His action had brought a sudden check to the other three fronting him. Out of the corner of his eye he could also see that Toni had slipped past the blow aimed at her with the nightstick of one attacker, at the same time as she accelerated the momentum of the man’s rush to propel him on past her—so that he slammed face foremost against the wall of the building—and dropped. Now she was turning to help Bleys.

  Meanwhile, the other three had decided to spread out and move in on Bleys, but by this time, between vision and hearing, he knew their movements well; and, from the corner of his right eye, he saw Henry’s group rising from the alley pavement and taking down their remaining attackers, one-on-one or two-on-one.

  Toni had already moved past Bleys, and in behind the next closest of Bleys’s opponents. She twisted his stick from his grasp, over his shoulder. At the same time, she drove the point of her toe into the hollow of his left knee from behind and pulled him to the pavement backward, where he lay still. Now warned, one of the two coming toward Bleys turned to face her.

  He lifted his stick in good baton fashion—a foolish move against someone like Toni, who had grown up with the art of kendo. She spun in underneath the blow and hardly more than tapped him on the side of the head with the stick she now carried. At the same time, Bleys, dropping to a crouch on his left knee, used his long right leg to sweep his one remaining opponent’s legs from under him with such force that his head also hit the pavement and he lay still.

  Around them the battle was ending.

  “Henry?” Bleys peered through the gloom for his uncle, who emerged from
the mass of dark bodies.

  “They’re all taken care of,” Henry said to Bleys. He seemed only slightly breathless.

  “Are you hurt?” Bleys asked. Henry shook his head. “Anyone else hurt?”

  “A couple of our men might be concussed,” Henry’s matter-of-fact voice came out of the obscurity. “They’re still out, and we’ll have to carry them. Nothing to speak of, otherwise.”

  “Good,” said Bleys.

  “But I think we’d better be moving,” Henry added.

  “Yes,” said Bleys, “I can carry one of the men who’s hurt, if you’d like.”

  “No need,” said Henry. “The Soldiers are used to this. They’re already on the way. It’s only a short distance to the road—passageway, I mean—that the Manager pointed out.”

  They did not have to hunt autocabs, as Mathias had suggested. When they reached the street, the limousines which had brought them to the dinner were still waiting for them, a small distance down the curb from the doorway of the club. They backed down to the alley-mouth as soon as Bleys and the rest emerged.

  Bleys took Toni and Henry with him in the leading car; he turned to Toni the minute they were out in traffic.

  “Toni,” he said, “this is your department, since Dahno’s not with us to deal with the political aspect. Call the local police and report an attack on us as we were leaving the CEO Club. Tell them Dahno’s the one they should go through for any further questions. He can arrange to have our Soldiers available for them. Then get Dahno on voice only. He’s having a private dinner with the New Earth City Governor, I understand. Brief him and say we’re headed back to the hotel. But contact the police first.”

  “Is there any real point in that?” asked Toni. “The CEO Club must have the local police in their pocket.”

  “Probably. But I want it on the police record,” said Bleys.

  Toni started to lift her wristpad to her lips, then hesitated.

  “You’re looking unusually pleased,” she said. “Did you like our being attacked in that alley?”