Webster's great hands were resting on the bar. His muscles tightened. He spun around and charged right through his tormentors. Since he happened to be carrying the top of the bar at the time, the fight ended right there. But the Board took a dim view of a man that destroyed property. So Webster was reduced to Seventh. There was no doubt about it. There was a jinx riding on the Third Officership as far as Webster was concerned. He couldn't overcome it. Every time he got there those two drag-buckets he used for hands would push him back. And there was no way to overcome it. He was living in the wrong kind of world. * * * * * Webster was a man built for violent action. If he could have joined Count Raymond IV on the First Crusade the other eight probably wouldn't have been necessary. Or if he could have stood with the Housecarles at Hastings that October day in 1066, Harold would have been king of England, not William. Webster should have lived in the days when a brilliant man with a powerful body could carve himself out an empire if he wanted to. But he didn't. Instead he lived in a world that hadn't seen a war in over a hundred years. Violence was dead. Even sports calling for physical contact had vanished. Weapons were unknown except in museums. The only competition to be found anywhere was in such sports as track or swimming or tumbling. Webster excelled in those but it wasn't enough. Something deep in his nature called for more. And unfortunately the call always seemed to come when Webster's superiors were considering moving him from a Third to a Second. But after surveying the wreckage they always changed their minds and moved him the other way. Webster was a man born a thousand years too late. And the only place he could even begin to use his talents was with the Space Fleet. He was almost happy there. The whole Fleet was rooting for him when he got his Third for the fourth time. The seventeen-hundred men that manned Earth's seventeen space ships were all behind Webster to help him over the fatal barrier. Even those that bore the scars of his violence were all for him. He was too good a man to dislike. But Webster's problem shrank to almost nothing after the disaster that destroyed over half the Space Fleet and killed nine hundred of the world's finest men. The Spacemen were in a murderous mood. All of them had lost good friends. They were a closely-knit body and there wasn't a man left among them that wasn't ready to blast Uranus right out of the system.