Down Went McGinty By FOX HOLDEN _McGinty's first love was Moon-shaped; gutted and inhumanly beautiful. And it served him well all the days of his short life._ [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] I guess you could say I hated Kolomar. Not with the same hatred I had for the Comrades, but I hated him. There were the obvious reasons--he'd beat me out of my general's star, and got the top job with Security that I'd been promised for the last five years. It was because of him that I was still stuck with the command of a second-rate satellite. But there was an even more obvious reason, and it was the same one everybody else had. Kolomar had the authority, both above and below the 120-mile limit, that went with being Director-General of the FBSI. He took that to mean head cop, and judge and jury as well. There are a lot of ways of handling authority. You could be human. Or you could be like Kolomar. And if you were like him, you never made any mistakes: you'd go to the end of the Universe if you had to, and when you wound up a case, the front office would always have a gold star waiting for your report card. The only thing good anybody else would have to say for you was that at least, you were on the right side and not pitching on the Comrades' team. He was towering over me now as I knelt in front of the wrecked safe; he couldn't have missed the look in my eyes, but it was like shooting a pistol at an atomic screen. I might as well have kept looking at the thing in my hand that I'd just picked up off the deck. He towered over me, that sour face of his hard as rock, and only the cold blue eyes showing that he was two jumps ahead of me; that he understood all about the thing in my hand, and that I wasn't as innocent about it as I was trying to make him think. "Mark it Exhibit 1," he rattled, "and add the name of the man to whom it belongs." I straightened up. I tossed the good luck piece to my desk; it was like any ordinary good luck charm--a century-old 1900 50-cent piece--and under the satellite's one-third G it just floated down to the desk top like a leaf falling off a tree. "How do I know whose it is?" I bluffed. "I'm boss of sixty men here, Kolomar. Besides the twenty that come up every week on the supply shuttle. And they're a different twenty each time at that--" He stared me straight down. "How long have you been here, Colonel Kenton? Ten years, isn't it?" I didn't answer him. He knew. He'd been a shuttle-lieutenant when I'd first arrived on the satellite. He had a brother who was floor leader of the Senate. It was ten years later, and now he was Director-General of the Federal Bureau of Space Investigation. I was still a colonel. My brother was a schoolteacher.