ten feet from the open veranda and peered around it cautiously.
A man with blond hair was sitting on the veranda steps making notations on a hand recorder. The woman stood in the doorway of the house. She was saying, “Well, I suppose I’ll be able to manage alone. No patients are due until the day after tomorrow.” She hesitated, then: “I don’t wish to seem critical, John, but you’re away so often that I hardly feel married any more. It’s less than a month since you returned from Earth, yet now you want to be off again.”
The man shrugged and, without looking up from his recorder, said, “I’m restless, Amelia. You know I have a high energy index. Until the mood passes, I’ve got to be on the move or build up silly frustrations.”
Gosseyn waited. The conversation seemed to be over. The woman turned back into the house. The man sat several minutes longer on the steps, then stood up and yawned. He looked at ease, apparently unworried by what the woman had said. He was about five feet, ten inches tall. He seemed husky, but the appearance of strength wouldn’t matter if he had never taken null-A muscular training. People who were not conditioned had difficulty understanding how strong human muscles could be when they were temporarily cut off from the fatigue center of the brain.
Gosseyn’s decision was made. The woman had called the man John. And no patients were due for several days.
That was identification enough. This was John Prescott, galactic agent, pretending to be a doctor.
The woman’s statement that nearly a month had passed since Prescott’s return from Earth staggered Gosseyn. Patricia Hardie had said to Crang, “Is Prescott going with you?” She must have meant
Not, he realized, that it made any difference. What mattered right now was his attack. It must be made now, while Prescott stood unsuspecting here in this garden of his Venusian home.
The mud hindered Gosseyn’s forward dash. Prescott had time to turn, time to see his assailant, time for his eyes to widen and for shock to register on his face. He even managed to launch the first blow. If Gosseyn had been a smaller man, less superbly muscled, it might have stopped him. But he wasn’t. And Prescott did not get in a second blow. Gosseyn hit him three times on the jaw, and caught his limp body as he fell.
Swiftly he carried the unconscious man up the veranda steps, and paused beside the door. There had been scuffling sounds. The woman might come out to investigate. But there was no movement from inside the house. Prescott stirred against his arm and moaned slightly. Gosseyn silenced him with another blow and stepped through the open door.
He found himself in a very large living room. The room did not have a rear wall. It opened, instead, onto a broad terrace. There was a garden beyond, and then what seemed to be another valley almost lost in mist.
To his right was a staircase leading to the upper floor, and to his left another stairway descended to the basement. On either side were doors that opened into rooms. Gosseyn heard pans rattling in one of the rooms, and there was the tantalizing odor of food cooking.
He headed upstairs. At the top he found himself in a corridor with many doors leading from it. He pushed open the nearest one. It was a spacious bedroom, with a great curving window facing toward a grove of Cyclopean trees. Gosseyn lowered Prescott to the floor beside the bed, quickly tore a sheet into strips, and bound and gagged the unconscious man.
Tiptoeing cautiously, Gosseyn went down the stairs and into the living room. The continuing rattle of kitchen utensils relaxed his tensed nerves. Apparently the woman had heard nothing. Gosseyn crossed the living room, paused briefly while he decided what to do with her, and then he stepped boldly across the threshold into the kitchen.
The woman was serving food out of a series of electronic cookers. Gosseyn had a glimpse of a daintily set table in a little alcove, and then the woman saw him out of the corner of her eye. She turned her head in mild surprise. Her gaze jumped from his face to his muddy feet. “Oh, my gosh!” she said.
She set down the plate and faced him. Gosseyn hit her once and caught her as she sagged toward him. He felt without compunction. She might be innocent. She might know nothing of her husband’s activities. But it was too dangerous to risk a struggle with her. If she was null-A and he gave her an opportunity, she would have enough physical stamina to break away from him and set off an alarm.
She began to writhe in his arms as he carried her up the stairs, but before she was fully awake, he had her bound and gagged and stretched out beside her husband. He left the two of them lying there and went out to explore the house. Before he could be sure that his victory was complete, he had to verify that no one else was around.
VII
To be acceptable as scientific knowledge, a truth must be a deduction from other truths.
It seemed to be a hospital. There were fifteen additional bedrooms, each complete with electronic and other standard hospital equipment. The laboratory and the surgery were in the basement. Gosseyn hurried from room to room. When he had finally convinced himself that no one else was around, he began a more careful search of the rooms.
He felt dissatisfied. Surely it wasn’t going to be as easy as this. As he peered into clothes closets and riffled hastily through unlocked drawers, he decided that his best plan was to get the facts he wanted, then leave. The sooner he departed the less chance there was of someone else appearing on the scene.
All his rummaging failed to locate a weapon. The disappointment of that sharpened his sense of danger from an outside source. Finally, hastily, he went out onto the veranda in the front of the building and then the terrace in the rear. A quick look, he thought, to see if anyone was coming, and then questions.
There were so many questions.
It was the view from the terrace that delayed him. For he realized why he had been unable to see the valley that was there beyond the garden. From the edge of the terrace, he looked down, down, into the gray-blue haze of distance. The hill on which the hospital was built was not really a hill at all, but a lower peak of a mountain. He could see where the slopes leveled off. There were trees down there, too. They stretched for scores of miles and faded into the mists of remoteness. There were no mountains in that direction, so far as he could make out.
But that didn’t matter. What seemed clear now was that this building could be approached only from the air. True, they could land a mile or more away, as he must have been landed, and then walk. But the air approach was an essential step in the process.
It was not particularly encouraging. One minute the sky could be empty except for the hazy atmosphere. The next a ship loaded with gang members could be settling down on the terrace itself.
Gosseyn drew a deep, slow, exhilarated breath. The air was still rain-fresh, and it braced him to acceptance of his danger. The very mildness of the day calmed his restless mind. He sighed and let the sweetness of the day tingle upon and through his body. It was impossible to tell what time of day it was. The sun was not visible. The vast height of the sky was cut off by clouds that were almost hidden in the haze of an atmosphere that was more than a thousand miles thick. A hush lay over the day, a silence so intense that it was startling—but not frightening. There was a grandeur here, a peace unequaled by anything in his experience. He felt himself in a
