“But it hasn’t worked perfectly,” Sales was saying from far away. “Unless the lake goes a step further, we can destroy it. Perhaps it has. Perhaps it realizes that static antibodies which can’t exist outside its own bloodstreams won’t help much.
“Do you think, chief, that it might have captured still other humans and worked its basic change in their minds? Could it have implanted in men like yourself a shift in instinct so that you know only one basic drive—the Organism must be preserved?”
The idea had struck him suddenly. I could see that in his face as he leaned forward across the desk, half rising, his features congesting with the newness and the terrible danger of the thought.
I didn’t even get up from my chair. I’d had my revolver out on my knee for the past several minutes, though he couldn’t see it from where he sat.
I shot him at close range, through the chest.
For a moment he hung there above the desk, his hands gripping the blotter convulsively. He had one thing more to say but it was hard for him to get it out. He tried twice before he made it.
“You—it’s no good,” he said very thinly. “Can’t—stop me now. I’ve sent—full report—Mobile Staff—reading it now.”
Blood cut off whatever else he wanted to say. I watched impersonally as it bubbled from his lips and he collapsed forward into the scarlet puddle forming so fast on the desk top. I saw how the blotter took it up at first but the fountain ran too fast and finally a trickle began to spill over the desk edge and patter on the floor with a sound like the dripping of lake water from that girl’s garments as she crossed the rocks toward us.
The lake was blue and wonderful in the sunlight. It was the most important thing in the world. If anything happened to destroy it I knew the world would end in that terrible, crashing moment. All my mind and all my effort must be dedicated to protecting it from the danger threatening it now.
A knock at the door banished that vision. I sprang to my feet and blocked off the desk from sight.
Davidson lunged into the room, slammed the door, put his back to it. He was breathing hard.
“They’re after you, Jim,” he said. “They know about Williams.”
I nodded. I knew too, now. I knew why my mind had gone blank when the need to silence Williams was paramount. At that time it wasn’t safe for me to remember too much. It wasn’t safe for me to know too much about my own actions, my own motives. Oh yes, I had killed him, all right.
“You knew all along?” I asked him. He nodded.
“You’ve got to do something quick, Jim,” he said. “I tell you, they’re coming! They know we were there together and they’re almost certain you did it. Fingerprints, bullet type—think of something, Jim! I—”
There was a heavy blow on the door behind him. He wasn’t expecting it. He jolted forward into the room and the door slammed back against the wall. What looked like a tide of black uniforms poured through, Lewis at the front, his granite face set, his eyes like steel on mine.
“Want to ask you some questions, Owen,” he began. “We have reason to think you know more than—”
Then he saw what lay across the desk behind me. There was an instant of absolute silence in the room. Davidson had been hurled past me by the slamming open of the door and the first sound I heard was his gasp of intaken breath as he leaned over the chair from which I’d risen.
My mind was perfectly blank. I knew it was desperately imperative that I clear myself but I’d had too many shocks, one on another, all that day. My brain just wasn’t working any more.
I had to say something. I took a deep breath and opened my mouth, praying for the right words.
Davidson’s hand closed on my arm. It was a hard, violent grasp, but very quickly, before his next move, he pressed my biceps three times, rapid, warning squeezes. Then he completed his motion and hurled me aside so hard I staggered three paces across the rug and came up facing him, stupid with surprise.
He had scooped up the revolver which I had dropped in my chair. I saw his fingers move over the butt as if for a firmer grip. But I knew what he was doing. His prints would have effaced mine when the time came to test it.
“All right, Lewis,” he said quietly. “I did it. I shot them both.” His glance shifted from face to face. When it crossed mine I recognized the desperate appeal in his eyes. It was up to me. I couldn’t refuse this last offer of aid from him, in the service of a cause greater than any cause men ever fought for.
I knew the truth of that as I knew my own name. There could be no greater cause than the protection of the lake.
A look of wildness which I knew was deliberate suddenly convulsed his face. He lifted the revolver and fired straight at me.
Except—it wasn’t straight. Davidson was a good shot. He couldn’t miss at this range unless he meant to. The bullet sang past my ear and shattered something noisy behind me. And I saw the look of deep satisfaction relax his face an instant before Lewis’ bullet smashed into it, erasing his features in a crimson blur.
(He had to fire the gun at someone—I think he remembered that wax-tests would otherwise prove he hadn’t fired one recently. And it might as well be at me, to clear me of suspicion. Perhaps too he knew he couldn’t make his story stand under close questioning. So it was suicide, in a way, but suicide in a cause of tremendous, unquestionable rightness. That I knew
