CHAPTER 2.

Hamilton’s first reaction was one of utter disbelief. He said, “You’ve what, Nancy? If by any chance this is a joke—”

“It’s not,” Miss Alderman assured him crisply. “How do you think I got these rings under my eyes? Sven Ryan is sleeping it off right here in my apartment. I didn’t dare turn on my communicator until he passed out.”

“But where, and how did you ever get hold of him?” asked Hamilton, still half-incredulous.

“Maybe you’d better come right over here, Chief,” she said. “I’ll explain when you get here. Do you know where I live?”

“I do—and I’m on my way.” When Miss Alderman switched off, he flipped Shirley’s switch, and informed her he was leaving the office. “Call Mr. Harris and tell him everything is under control,” he directed.

He left by the private door, thus avoiding the reception room and any potential holdups in the outer office. Emerging on the high-level ramp, he looked about warily for the rim repairmen and their ladder, and was relieved to discover that they had finished their work, and gone elsewhere.

Since Miss Alderman, like everyone on SPR except its few top echelon members, lived within a mile of the Zeckendorf Plaza offices, Hamilton hopped a ramp-conveyor that carried him with gratifying celerity and an equally gratifying smoothness across the bottomless canyons of the incredible city.

In less than fifteen minutes he had arrived at a high-level port in her own building, close to the lean green rectangle of Central Park. About him, unnoticed, passed the ever-changing kaleidoscopic vista of Manhattan with its familiar but fantastic metal and glass complexes of polychromatic spires, pyramids, ziggurats and domes.

Although the trip had been incredibly brief, Miss Alderman looked as crisply and as trimly brunette as she had on the day when she had first stepped into his office to take up her difficult assignment as his personal secretary. Evidently she had found time to do a quite miraculous repair job on the circles under her eyes.

He put an arm around her shoulders, and gave her a quick squeeze. He said, “If I forgot to say thanks over the communicator—thanks now, Nancy.” He stood back, looking at her with open admiration. “How?” he asked her.

“Have some coffee,” she suggested, flushing with pleasure.

She poured him a steaming black cupful from a glasspresso livingroom machine which was one of SPR’s most profitable patents. As they sat down, Hamilton could hear the faint sound of snoring from behind the closed bedroom door. He lifted an eyebrow, and nodded toward the sound. Miss Alderman nodded in return.

“I’m waiting,” said Hamilton.

“Well,” she began, marshalling her thoughts and words with care, “I was sound asleep in my beautypad when I got a call on the communicator. It must have been just about three a.m. It was one of the girls in compo-filing. She was watching a night club mike-jockey and she told me that Sven Ryan had just appeared on the screen, and wasn’t he supposed to be in Antarctica? It seems she filed your restraining message yesterday afternoon.”

“Good girls, both of you,” said Hamilton warmly.

To his surprise, Miss Alderman choked on her coffee. For some reason, her reaction reminded him of Ian Harris’ inexplicable embarrassment in his office earlier.

When she had recovered herself, Miss Alderman said, “I’m sorry, Chief. But I think you’ll understand when I tell you that by the time I got myself together and over to the club our crazy genius was sitting at a table swathed in three of Molly Sadler’s choicest items—one blonde, one redhead, and one brunette. You never saw such—er—figures.”

Hamilton could not help smiling. His use of the phrase good girls in even remote connotation with any of Molly Sadler’s justly renowned Cyprians was more than amusing. He said, “You underrate me, Nancy. How did Ryan react when he saw you?”

“It was odd.” She told him. “Mind you, he was very drunk, and by the time I managed to get him halfway reassembled he couldn’t remember any of it. But I’d be willing to swear he said, ‘Lord! Another vulture! And I fled Antarctica to get away from all of you. But where’s your black mustache?’”

She stroked her perfectly smooth upper lip, looking faintly troubled. Then she said, “I don’t have a mustache, do I, Chief?”

He replied, “No, of course not, but Ia—” He caught it barely in time. And, in spite of himself, he grimaced, envisioning what must have happened. Evidently Ryan, loaded and ready for “tiger hunting,” had headed for Molly Sadler’s famous non-home and discovered the impeccable, imperturbable, and immovable Ian Harris already there.

“What’s the matter, Chief?” Miss Alderman stared at him with curiosity snapping in her wide-set black eyes.

“Nothing,” said Alderman. “Tell you later. How did you manage to get him away from the bevy? From what I’ve heard about Molly’s girls—” He let it hang.

“Chief, all I can tell you after last night is that everything you hear isn’t half the truth,” she said solemnly. “If I had a quarter of the—well, I’ll just say that if I had a certain kind of glamor I’d never have wasted a fourth of my life becoming college-trained to spend the best years of my youth behind a desk—even a very nice desk.”

“You’ll do—anywhere,” he told her. Then, frowning, “Among the interesting things I’ve heard about Molly’s girls is that some of them have college degrees too. Was Ryan talking?”

“He certainly was,” said Miss Alderman promptly. “He was beguiling his harem with promises to ship each of them an Antarctic rock-diamond every week, by instant teleportation.”

“Oh, God!” said Hamilton. “Let’s hope these particular girls have extremely low IQ’s. They could be the exact opposite of the intellectual type.”

“I wouldn’t bet on it, Chief,” was Miss Alderman’s reply. “Though it doesn’t seem quite fair, when you come right down to it.”

“How did you get him away from them?” he asked.

She shook her close-cut darkhaired head. “If I hadn’t been full of outraged righteousness, if I’d stopped to think twice, I’d never have made it,” she admitted. “I just marched in and led poor Sven out by the ear. It was a high-handed, somewhat unworthy trick—at least he seemed to think so once I had him under wraps. I’m beginning to think so myself.”

“Get hold of yourself, Nancy,” said Hamilton, rising. “You’ve done SPR a very great service. How’d you keep him here?”

“Not the way you think,” she said promptly. “By the time I got him here he was running out of steam. He wanted to talk—and go on drinking. He’s a pretty nice guy, you know. It took me all the rest of the night to get him folded up.” She paused, then added, “Chief, is this new item of his as hot as he claims?”

“Ian Harris was in my office just now, having catfits over it,” said Hamilton. “Potentially, it’s the hottest potato SPR has ever come up with. And we’ve had to handle some pretty sizzling ones, remember?”

“I remember,” said Miss Alderman.

Hamilton rose. He said, “I think we’d better wake Ryan up. We can’t let him sleep here indefinitely.”

“Why, Chief!” asked Miss Alderman, standing to reveal a trim if not opulent figure.

“I’m not, at the moment, concerned about your reputation,” he told her, inwardly damning all women for their tendency to coyness at the wrong moments. “What I am concerned with is Ryan and his—”

The doorbell chimed sharply. After a swift, silent interchange, Miss Alderman answered it. Rather expecting Ian Harris to have run them to earth, Hamilton was not wholly surprised at the appearance of a huge, burly man with bushy black eyebrows and a ruggedly handsome face.

Face and body belonged to Charles Forsythe, Undersecretary of Science and Industry in the Cabinet of the President of the United States and one of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful individuals. It is perhaps needless to add that he was, incidentally, SPR’s deadliest foe in the name of private enterprise.

Miss Alderman turned to stare at Hamilton, her expression bewildered and uncertain.

Hamilton said, quietly, “Come in, Charlie. Come in. I’m glad to see you.”

“Glad to see you, too, Park,” said Forsythe. The two men eyed each other with the restrained wariness of polite jungle cats. Then Forsythe’s mouth twitched and Hamilton found himself laughing with the intruder. Confound the man! he thought. It was a hell of a note when you couldn’t stay mad at your enemies.

Actually, Forsythe’s sudden emergence in the already complex problem of Sven Ryan and his matter-transmitter was an element Hamilton had been hoping they could avoid ever since Ian Harris had told him Ryan was at liberty in New York and talking his head off. But, since Forsythe was already here....

Hamilton said, “Let Miss Alderman pour you a cup of coffee. It’s excellent, I can assure you.”

“Thank you, I could use one,” said the industrialist, flinging himself in a rollachair that creaked ominously under his by no means inconsiderable weight. “I didn’t get much sleep last night.”

“I don’t imagine you did,” said Hamilton, shaking his head faintly at Nancy, who was giving him a shall-I-put-something-in-it? look. “You must have been pretty busy.”

“All in the night’s work,” said Forsythe, yawning and extending his legs. His voice, like the rest of him, was big and deep. Charlie Forsythe looked like a gigantic, old-fashioned steel puddler who had come up in the world and was not quite adjusted to its social niceties—a bull in a china shop instead of the expensively-reared son of vast inherited wealth that he actually was. He was a throwback to the industrial-pirate era of the late nineteenth century—human, tough, limited, determined, likeable, and always dangerous.

He was, in fact, that most dangerous variety of anarchist—the sort that believes in absolute freedom for himself and stringent regulation for others. He was a dinosaur, a three-decker man of war. He was obsolete but he didn’t know it. All of which, with his strength of personality and immense resources, made him doubly dangerous.

The cup of coffee Miss Alderman handed him looked like a child’s piece of doll-house china in his immense hairy hand. Нe drained it at a draught, nodded his thanks, and said, “Well, where’s the boy?”

“In there,” said Hamilton, nodding toward the bedroom door. “He’s sleeping it off.”

“I’ve got an order here,” said Forsythe patting his breast pocket. “I’ve also got operatives outside. We’re picking up Ryan under the Security Act of nineteen fifty-six.”

“You have been busy,” said Hamilton, really worried. “But that Act has been superseded by a whole flock of subsequent legislation.”

Forsythe grinned lazily, like a satisfied sabre-tooth tiger. He said, “Maybe—but it’s still on the books. And by the time the courts get through arguing out the pros and cons of it we’ll have all the juice out of the boy.” He glanced at Hamilton, and added significantly, “All of this is on the level, isn’t it? I’d hate to think I’d wasted the entire night for nothing.”

Hamilton longed to lie, but knew it would gain him nothing. They’d simply pull Ryan in anyway and find out about his invention for themselves. He said, “It’s on the level, Charley. But the whole thing is so new—so untried. It may take years, even decades.”

Forsythe lit a cigar—a cigarette would have looked like a ladycracker stuck in that enormous face. He said, “That may be so. But we can’t afford to risk it. The Wrights invented the airplane at the turn of the century, and ten years later they were using it to bomb targets in the Second Balkan War.”

That, thought Hamilton unhappily, was one of the things that made Forsythe dangerous. Underneath the bullyboy exterior lurked a first-class brain and a vast storehouse of knowledge in unexpected fields. It was, he decided, time to take steps.

“Charley,” he said, “I think you know what I am empowered to do if you try this with Ryan. It is clearly stated in the SPR charter that infringement by a national government, or any subject or citizen of such a government, upon the rights of either SPR, or any member thereof, permits us to apply sanctions, either limited or total, according to our judgment. That’s a UN General Assembly provision.”

Forsythe looked sleepily amused. “Quite the lawyer, aren’t you, Park? Too bad you aren’t as good an American.”

With difficulty Hamilton restrained the sudden surge of anger within him. He said, “Not today, Charley. But if you pull this kidnapping merely to save your own bank account SPR will take action—and we’ll have no trouble getting UN backing.”

“Of course you won’t,” said Forsythe, smiling. “But we can’t afford the risk of matter-transmission at this point. We’re willing to fly by the seat of our pants. The UN can’t afford to have you people withdraw your patents from us and put America out of business.” He blew a perfect smoke ring.

Miss Alderman emerged from the bedroom. “He’s still out like a light,” she said.

“We have an ambulance downstairs,” said Forsythe quietly. “We were going to use it anyway.”

Hamilton said, “Naturally, we wouldn’t put America out of business. But we could withdraw your rights to all SPR patents employed in your international carriers. That would hurt you. It would force American exporters to use foreign carriers. But it wouldn’t put America or the world out of business.”

It was the old, hateful tug of war, the civilized man against the jungle barbarian in thought and deed. Not for the first time, Hamilton felt a sense of shame at his country’s forbearance. As, he supposed, other internationalists must occasionally feel toward their own.

Forsythe said, “I hardly have to remind you, Park, that there is strong and growing resentment in certain influential circles against your SPR as a world monopoly that gobbles up all of our finest scientific brains and forces us to pay for their use.”

“If you’d paid them well enough to begin with, SPR would never have been formed,” said Hamilton.

“Perhaps.” Forsythe shrugged. “But that’s water under the bridge. We shan’t repeat the mistake, I promise you.”

“You won’t get the chance,” warned Hamilton.

They were eyeing each other warily when the doorbell chimed again. Miss Alderman hastened to answer it. Ian Harris stood framed in the entranceway, backed by four white-and-blue-uniformed UN police officers. A pair of plainclothesmen, obviously Forsythe’s operatives, hovered at a discreet distance behind them.

Harris, looking every inch the Britisher, waited until Miss Alderman had closed the door. Then he said, “Mr. Forsythe, am I right in my interpretation of what Miss Alderman recently informed me via UN communicator? Did you enter this apartment, accompanied by an armed escort, for the sole purpose of removing without his consent an SPR employee to an unknown destination?”

Forsythe shrugged his mammoth shoulders. “Interpret it as you choose. I came here empowered by the President of the United States, operating under law—the Security Act of nineteen fifty-six—to ensure that a citizen of my country does not employ his specialized knowledge to its jeopardy.”

Harris said, drily, “For your information, Forsythe, and that of your government, all SPR property and persons fall under UN jurisdiction according to General Assembly agreement—an agreement ratified by all member nations. That naturally includes their living quarters. Since Miss Alderman is an SPR official her apartment is therefore inviolable by any national police force—except in case of a felony.” Hamilton stepped in. He said, “Gentlemen, we seem to have reached an impasse. May I therefore suggest a way out?”