The arm was bare for the needle that fed sodium pentothal into a vein, slowly, under the watchful eye of Sales, one of our best Base medics. We knew that presently, when the drug began to cloud her mind, Sale’s skillful questions would start drawing out the memories of what had happened to her, reconstructing the basic scenes which had led to—this.
Or—we hoped they would.
“It looks like aphasia,” Sales murmured. “No brain injury so far as we know yet, but—”
“Chief!” It was Davidson, touching my arm. We all turned in the half-darkness that was part of this narcosynthesis treatment. “Chief, the Mobile Staff’s on its way down here. They vised after you left.”
“What for?” I asked sharply, a nervous dread knotting my stomach.
“I don’t know. They wouldn’t say. You’re the boss, after all.”
But I wasn’t the boss of Mobile Staff. They were bigger than I, the bureau of specialists that controlled the administration of all the Rings. They were the bosses. And if they came here now …
I caught Davidson’s eye in the gloom. Very slightly he shook his head. The secret of Williams’ death was still safe, then. But not for long. And if the Staff talked to Fitzgerald about the lake …
I made an enormous effort and fought down the rising panic. Information first. Then action. I had to keep that order.
Sales grunted and I looked back, forcing my attention to the business at hand.
“She must have the tolerance of an elephant,” Sales said, eyeing the tube through which sodium pentothol still fed into the girl’s arm. “Or else there’s some chemical metamorphosis—I don’t know. I’ve given her enough to put a dozen men to sleep. But look at her.”
I didn’t like to look at her. It was obvious to me that she was dying. Yet when Sales pushed the wet sheets back from her face the impersonal, disinterested attention still dwelt upon the ceiling, fully awake, uncaring, hearing nothing we said, feeling nothing we did.
Fitzgerald said, “How could she have breathed under water?”
“She couldn’t.” Sales scowled at him. “There’s no physiological change at all. Her respiratory system’s normal.”
“She must have,” Fitzgerald said stubbornly. “I know what we saw.”
“Anything’s possible in a Ring,” Sales admitted, voicing an aphorism. “But I don’t see how it could have worked.” He looked up at me. “How important is this, chief?”
I told him.
“Give me an hour,” Sales said briefly when I had finished. “I’m going to try something else. Several other things. Maybe one of ’em will work.”
“One of ’em’s got to,” I told him, getting up.
In that hour a lot happened. Sales found what he wanted, for one thing. For another, the Mobile Staff arrived. Williams’ body was found. And as for me—it was the hour that marked the turning point in my life.
Williams’ death was reported on my private visor as soon as I got back to my office. I could feel Davidson’s silence like a tangible thing as he listened to the exclamations and incredulity of the others.
All I could do was order the usual investigations got under way immediately. At that moment I decided not to speak of my own presence when he died. I couldn’t let myself be diverted by useless questions on a subject only distantly related to my own terrible problem.
Worse than ever that deathly fear was stirring restlessly behind the closed doors of my unconscious. I knew the doors would swing open soon. Little by little they had let facts escape the barrier, and the barrier itself would be ready to fall. … Soon, I thought, soon.
Looking back now I lose my time-sense about that eventful hour. I think we were still lost in dismayed wonder over Williams when the visor flickered and then framed the grim, creased face of Mobile Staff’s chief, Lewis.
There was a hunted, nightmare quality about this piling of crisis upon crisis, I thought, as I went down to the reception hall to welcome my superiors. If only I could find five minutes of peace to try again those slowly opening doors!
Mobile Staff wears black uniforms. If all Bio employees are carefully tested then Mobile men are screened with such stringent care that there is reason to marvel how anyone ever passes their tests. All of these men in their severe black looked taut, nervous, keen with an edge almost ruthless in its steely temper.
“What about this lake development in Ring Seventy-Twelve?” was the first thing Lewis said to me as we walked back toward my office. It couldn’t have been worse, I told myself. If they had timed themselves deliberately they couldn’t have chosen a worse time.
“Three of us have seen it closely,” was all I answered. “You’ll want to discuss it with us in detail, I suppose.”
Lewis nodded crisply. We didn’t speak again until we were settled in my office, Davidson and Fitzgerald ready for questions beside me. We told what—overtly—we knew. It was Lewis, of course, who spoke with decision.
“I think we’d better destroy the thing pronto.”
“Frankly, sir—” this was Davidson “—frankly, I’d think that over first. The thing’s isolated, whatever it is. We’d run the risk of scattering it abroad.”
“I incline that way myself,” I said quickly. “Isolation. Ring it off, reroute air traffic. Leave it alone and study it … study it?” I suspected that was wrong. A warning bell had clanged in my brain.
Lewis sat there silently, shifting his keen glance from face to face. Just as he drew his breath to speak my desk visor buzzed.
“Report ready on Williams’ death, sir,” an impersonal voice said.
“All right. Hold it awhile,” I began. But Lewis bent forward and gave the face in the visor a narrowed glance.
“No, let’s have it right now,” he said. Despairingly I wondered how much he knew and how much that abnormally keen brain had guessed already of the undercurrents running swiftly beneath the surface of events here.
The face in the visor glanced at me. I shrugged. Lewis was boss as
