ired of this place, and if you don't let me out I will blow the whole
place to Kingdom Come. Good bye-eye-eye."

He hung up without waiting for an answer.

Then he looked around the hotel suite he had rented. It was an
expensive one--very expensive. It consisted of an outer room--a
"sitting room" as it might have been called two centuries before--and
a bedroom. Plus a bathroom.

Harry Morgan, a piratical smile on his face, opened the bathroom door
and left it that way. Then he went into the bedroom. His luggage had
already been delivered by the lift tube, and was sitting on the floor.
He put both suitcases on the bed, where they would be in plain sight
from the sitting room. Then he made certain preparations for invaders.

He left the door between the sitting room and the bedroom open and
left the suite.

Fifteen minutes later, he was walking down 42nd Street toward Sixth
Avenue. On his left was the ancient Public Library Building. In the
middle of the block, somebody shoved something hard into his left
kidney and said. "Keep walking, commodore. But do what you're told."

Harry Morgan obeyed, with an utterly happy smile on his lips.

IV

In the Grand Central Hotel, a man moved down the hallway toward Suite
7426. He stopped at the door and inserted the key he held in his hand,
twisting it as it entered the keyhole. The electronic locks chuckled,
and the door swung open.

The man closed it behind him.

He was not a big man, but neither was he undersized. He was five-ten
and weighed perhaps a hundred and sixty-five pounds. His face was dark
of skin and had a hard, determined expression on it. He looked as
though he had spent the last thirty of his thirty-five years of life
stealing from his family and cheating his friends.

He looked around the sitting room. Nothing. He tossed the key in his
hand and then shoved it into his pocket. He walked over to the nearest
couch and prodded at it. He took an instrument out of his inside
jacket pocket and looked at it.

"Nothin'," he said to himself. "Nothin'." His detector showed that
there were no electronic devices hidden in the room--at least, none
that he did not already know about.

He prowled around the sitting room for several minutes, looking at
everything--chairs, desk, windows, floor--everything. He found
nothing. He had not expected to, since the occupant, a Belt man named
Harry Morgan, had only been in the suite a few minutes.

Then he walked over to th