hat's one change. And
instead of going home nights he roisters around in bars and
restaurants, talking to everybody, listening to everybody, liking them
all and enthusiastically making friends in carload lots. That's
another change. He doesn't look into mirrors because they make him
feel cross-eyed. That's because he unconsciously expects to see me in
the mirror. And he will organize the Belt and be president as he
planned. I won't stop him in that. The difference will be that he
won't want the power he'll get." Pierce said grimly, "A power-lusting
man can never be trusted with power: he goes megalomaniacal. Carter
was already halfway there. But he's safe from that now. He's going to
be given plenty of power, and see it only as responsibility, and not
want it. That's the only safe kind of man to have in a powerful
position."

"That--" said Donahue with great earnestness, "--is like sending a
poor damned soul to Kismetic paradise as a eunuch. You psychologists
are all complete sadists," he said lifting his drink. "I suppose
you've put something in my drink?"

"Absolutely nothing," Roy Pierce assured him, grinning. "Funny thing
was, when I got back to Earth that time, _I_ kept feeling cross-eyed
when I looked into a mirror. And my friends said I was not myself. If
I was not myself, I knew I must still be Bryce Carter. Things had
seemed different, and they had warned me that the technique sometimes
backfired when I was learning. So I called my uncle Mordand on the
televiewer--he's the head of the family, and he lives in an estate in
the jungle--and he--"

Donahue was fascinated again.

There was a different approach for each case, Pierce had found. It was
not ordinarily ethical to discuss any case history, but he knew with
great surety that Donahue could be trusted not to repeat what he was
being told. The only reason there wasn't something extra in his
current drink was because there had been something in the last drink.

This was case five.

* * * * *

End of Project Gutenberg's The Man Who Staked the Stars, by Charles Dye

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