The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Victor, by Bryce Walton

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net

Title: The Victor

Author: Bryce Walton

Illustrator: Kelly Freas

Release Date: June 19, 2010 [EBook #32903]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE VICTOR ***

Produced by Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

The Victor

By Bryce Walton

Illustrated by Kelly Freas

[Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from IF Worlds of Science
Fiction March 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

[Sidenote: _Under the new system of the Managerials, the fight was not
for life but for death! And great was the ingenuity of--The Victor._]

Charles Marquis had a fraction of a minute in which to die. He dropped
through the tubular beams of alloydem steel and hung there, five
thousand feet above the tiers and walkways below. At either end of the
walkway crossing between the two power-hung buildings, he saw the
plainclothes security officers running in toward him.

He grinned and started to release his grip. He would think about them on
the way down. His fingers wouldn't work. He kicked and strained and tore
at himself with his own weight, but his hands weren't his own any more.
He might have anticipated that. Some paralysis beam freezing his hands
into the metal.

He sagged to limpness. His chin dropped. For an instant, then, the fire
in his heart almost went out, but not quite. It survived that one
terrible moment of defeat, then burned higher. And perhaps something in
that desperate resistance was the factor that kept it burning where it
was thought no flame could burn. He felt the rigidity of paralysis
leaving his arms as he was lifted, helped along the walkway to a
security car.

The car looked like any other car. The officers appeared like all the
other people in the clockwork culture of the mechanized New System.
Marquis sought the protection of personal darkness behind closed eyelids
as the monorail car moved faster