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can keep them a long time. They are competent, loyal, diligent and quite happy to have somebody else take the career risks and the money risks. Sam Harrison was of the third variety. At first you think they belong in number-two class. But then you slowly learn that they are doing just a little bit more than you asked for, and doing it a little better than you thought possible. Then, feet on solid ground, they start coming to you with innovative ways of doing things more easily and quickly, and some you approve and some you don’t. Then you know what you have on yourhands. So you make an extra effort to keep them on the team as long as you can, knowing you are going to lose them. The Sam Harrisons always get restive. They have to run their own store. It is the only way for them. So, when the highway and the bridges were finished in the Peruvian mountains, Sam went his own way.
    Sam had gone to follow his own most intense area of interest, man’s efforts to tame the sea. In lonely places when work is done there is time for talk. Sam had said that you can’t tame it, you can’t overwhelm it by force. You have to comprehend the way the sea uses its power, and use its own strength to make it defeat itself. Gus had heard later how Sam Harrison, in his first job, had devised a new kind of dog-bone groin which, laid in rail-fence fashion and laced with cable, had rebuilt a Spanish beach without causing the usual deep erosion down-current from the groin.
    This was the sort of problem Sam Harrison would like to tackle. Relate the remaining safety factor in the construction of Golden Sands to the possible and probable impact of hurricane tides this far from the actual beach front of Fiddler Key, and recommend measures to be taken. It would be no great feat finding him. But paying his fee would be. There are too few Sam Harrisons in the world at any one time, and they are in demand.
    And so, thinking again about his list of defects, he drifted into sleep, where he stood on the lip of a deep river gorge in Peru watching his survey crew work out the precise dimensions of the span he had calculated from the aerials.…

3
    MARTIN LISS STOOD on the blue pile carpeting by the big corner windows of his office on the mainland, in downtown Athens, and looked out across the roofs of smaller buildings toward the bay and toward the caramel and vanilla buildings along the beach front of Fiddler Key. It was a clear hot windy day, a breeze off the Gulf blowing the usual smutch inland. The big windows were tinted blue-gray. The north bridge over to Fiddler Key was open to let a small sailboat through, the stacked traffic glittering in the mid-morning sunlight. He could see the red markers of the Intracoastal Waterway spaced down the middle of broad Palm Bay, and he wondered how long it would be before he could get the
LissLess III
out of freshwater storage and go cruising.
    He was a short plump man in his forty-third year. The lifts in his shoes brought him up to five foot six and a fraction. He was deeply, permanently tan. The entire front half of his head was bald. From that midpoint the hair was combed straight back,falling in dark ringlets over his collar. He wore a small goatee, black salted with gray, squared off. He had a third wife he mistrusted and two grown children he despised.
    For a week he had experienced that familiar hollow breathless feeling which meant it was decision time. It was the high-roller feeling. After a series of straight passes, do you drag down, or do you try to make just one more pass?
    From his windows on the twelfth floor of the Athens Bank and Trust Company, he could see the jungle-green fourteen acres of the Silverthorn tract on the bay side of Fiddler Key, with the familiar shape of Golden Sands just beyond it. Beyond Golden Sands, across Beach Drive, rose the higher towers of Azure Breeze and the Surf Club. Martin Liss did not see only the fourteen raw uncleared acres. His mind superimposed upon it the