Part 3

"They won't come back," he whispered.

"Well, make sure," said Taranto shortly. "Get your ear to the wood!"

He felt his way to the window that faced away from the city. After the heat of the day, the air blowing in was almost cold; and he considered putting on his shirt. The realization that he would have to scrabble around the pile of straw for it gave him pause. His next thought was that he might come up with the wrong shirt, and that discouraged him completely.

His eyes had adjusted enough to the night to pick out the low hills of the desert where they broke the line of the horizon. Starlight glinted softly where there were stretches of sand. He settled down to wait, his arms folded upon the ledge of the window.

It was nearly half an hour later, when he suspected Meyers of dozing on the trap door, that Taranto heard something more than an insect zip past the window. He backed away and hissed to attract Meyers' attention.

"Did it come?" whispered the other.

"I think so," answered Taranto.

A tiny hum drifted through the window. Into the opening, timidly, edged a small, hovering shape.

"Okay," said Taranto in a low voice, even though he knew the room was being scanned by an infra-red detector.

The shape blossomed out with a midget light. Enough of the glow was reflected from the adobe walls to reveal that a miniature flying mechanism the size of a man's hand had landed on the window ledge. After a moment, its rotors ceased their whirring. Taranto jabbed backward with an elbow as he heard Meyers creep up behind him.

"Listen at the door, dammit!" he snarled. "All we need is to get caught at this, an' we'll be here till they turn out the sun!"

"Taranto!" piped a tiny voice from the machine. "Are you ready, Taranto?"

"Go ahead!"

"Two pills coming out of the hold." The voice was clear enough in the stillness of the Syssokan night.

A hatch in the belly of the little flyer slid back. Two capsules spilled out on the window ledge. Taranto scooped them up.

"You each take one, with water," instructed the voice. "Better wait till just before dawn. You told me they bring your food an hour later."

"That's right," whispered Taranto.

"That will give the stuff time to act. For all they can tell, you will both be deader than a burned-out meteorite."

"Then what?"

"So they will follow their normal custom with the dead--take you out to the desert to mummify. This thing will hover overhead to spot the location."

"Do they just ... leave us?"

"Yes, as far as anybody has ever been able to find out. I talked to the Capellan next door in the foreign quarter here, and he says they might not leave you in one of their own burial grounds. Otherwise, I would hate to take the chance of having this gadget seen in the daylight."

"All right, so we're out in the desert," said Taranto. "How does this ship you arranged for pick us up? We'll still be out for the count."

"I plan to tell them where to touch down. I can talk louder by radio, you know, than I can to you now. They will grab your 'bodies' and scramble for space. Against the sunset, they may not even be seen from the city. If they are, I never heard of them."

"Who are they?" asked Taranto.

"Some bunch hired for the job by the D.I.R.'s Department 99. Just as well not to ask where they come from or what their usual line is."

"I ain't got any questions at all, if they get us out of here," said Taranto.

He watched as the hatch closed itself and the tiny light blinked out. The rotors began to spin, and two minutes later they were alone.

"Come and get yours," said the spacer.

He reached out with his empty hand to guide Meyers to him, then very carefully delivered one of the capsules to the other.

"We're supposed to swallow that big lump?" whispered Meyers.

"Just don't lose it," admonished Taranto.

He relayed the instructions as precisely as he could.

"One thing more," he concluded. "You stay awake to make sure I stay awake until it's time to take the stuff."

"We could take watches," suggested Meyers.

"_I_ could," said Taranto bluntly, "but I'm not sure about you. In the second place, I ain't going to have you sleep while I don't. We're going to play this as safe as possible."

Meyers grumbled something inaudibly. In the darkness, a sardonic smile twisted Taranto's lips.

"If you know how," he advised, "pray! We're goin' to our funeral in the morning."

FOUR

Westervelt sat at his little desk in the corner, doodling out possible ways and means of breaking out of a cell thirty fathoms or so under water. From time to time Beryl or Simonetta offered a suggestion. He knew that everyone in the office was probably engaged in the same puzzle. Smith believed in general brain-storming in getting a project started, since no one could tell where a good idea might not originate.

"If I ever get into space," Willie muttered, "it will never be to a planet as wet as Trident. What ever made this Harris think he was a pearl diver?"

"Is that what he was after?" asked Beryl.

"No, I just made that up."

He glanced over at Simonetta, who winked and continued with the letter she was transcribing. An earphone reproduced Smith's dictation from his tape. As she listened, she edited mentally and spoke into the microphone of her typing machine, which transcribed her words as type. Westervelt realized that it was more difficult than it seemed to do the job so smoothly. He had noticed Beryl rewriting letters two or three times, and Parrish was more likely than the boss to set down his thoughts in a logical order.

"I've heard so many wild ideas in this office," said Beryl, "that I simply don't know where to start. How do they decide on a good way?"

"They guess, just the way we've been doing. They're better guessers than we are, from experience."

"It's just a matter of judgment, I suppose," Beryl admitted.

"They make their share of mistakes," Simonetta put in.

"Yeah, I read an old report on a great one," said Westervelt. "Ever hear of the time they were shipping oxygen tanks to three spacers jailed out around Mizar?"

Simonetta stopped talking her letter, and the girls gave Willie their attention.

"It seems," he continued, "that an exploring ship landed on a planet of that star and found a kind of civilization they hadn't bargained for. The natives breathed air with a high chlorine content; so when they grabbed three of the crew for hostages, the ship had to keep supplying fresh tanks of oxygen."

"How long could they keep that up?" asked Beryl.

"Not indefinitely, anyway. They weren't recovering any carbon dioxide for processing, the way they would in the ship. The captain figured he'd better lift and orbit while he tried to negotiate. Meanwhile, he sent to the Department for help, and they came up with a poor guess."

"What?"

"They got the captain to disguise some spacesuit rockets as oxygen tanks and send them down by the auxiliary rocket they were using to make deliveries and keep contact. The idea was that the prisoners would fly themselves over the walls like angels, the rocket would snatch them up, and they'd all filter the green-white light of Mizar from their lenses forever."

"And why didn't it work?"

"Oh, it worked," said Westervelt. "It worked beautifully. The only trouble was that when they got these three guys aboard and were picking up stellar speed, they found that the Mizarians had pulled a little sleight of hand. They'd stuck three of their own into the Terran spacesuits--pretty cramped, but able to move--and sent them to spy out the ship. Well, the captain took one look and realized it was all over. He couldn't supply the Mizarians with enough chlorine to keep them alive until they could be sent back. He just kept going."

"But the men they left behind!" exclaimed Beryl. "What happened to them?"

Westervelt shrugged.

"They never exactly found out."

Beryl, horrified, turned to Simonetta, who stared reflectively at the wall.

"For all we know," said the dark girl, "they were dead already."

"It was about even," said Westervelt. "The Mizarians never heard exactly what happened to theirs either."

There was a period of silence while they considered that angle. Simonetta finally said, "Why don't you tell her about the time they gave that spacer the hormone treatment for a disguise?"

"Oh ... you tell it," said Westervelt, trapped. "You know it better than I do."

"That one," began Simonetta, "happened on a world where there's a colony from Terra that isn't much talked about. It's a sort of Amazon culture, and they don't allow men. They were set to execute this fellow who smuggled himself in for a lark, when the Department started shipping him drugs that changed his appearance."

Westervelt admired Beryl's wide-eyed intentness.

"Finally," Simonetta continued, "his appearance changed so much that he could dress up and pass for a woman anywhere. He just walked out when the next scheduled spaceship landed, and was halfway back to Terra before they finished searching the woods for him. It made trouble, though."

"What happened?" breathed Beryl.

"They never quite succeeded in changing him back. His wife wound up divorcing him for infidelity when he gave birth to twins."

Beryl straightened up abruptly.

"Oh...! You--come on, now!"

Westervelt reminded himself that the blush must have resulted less from the joke than from having been taken in. They were still laughing when a buzzer sounded at Beryl's desk phone. She flipped the switch, listened for a moment, then rose with a toss of her blonde head at Westervelt.

"Mr. Parrish wants me to help him research in the dead files," she said. "I bet _he_ won't try that kind of gag on me!"

"No," muttered Westervelt as she strode out, "he has some all his own."

He looked up to find Simonetta watching him with a grin. She shook her head ruefully as Westervelt grew a flush to match Beryl's.

"Willie, Willie!" she said sadly. "You aren't letting that bottle blonde bother you? I didn't think you were that kind of boy!"

Westervelt grinned back, at some cost.

"Is there another kind?" he asked. "After, all, Si, she's only been around a few weeks. It's the novelty. I'll get used to her."

"_Sure_ you will," said Simonetta.

She returned to her letters, and Westervelt hunched over his desk to brood. He wondered what Parrish and Beryl were up to in the file room. He could think of no innocent reason to wander in on business of his own. Perhaps, he reflected, he did not really want to; he might overhear something he would regret.

He passed some time without directing a single thought to the problems of the Department. Then the door beyond Simonetta opened and Smith strolled out. He carried a pad as if he, too, had been doodling.

"Well, Willie," he said cheerfully, "what are we going to do about this Harris fellow?"

"All I can think of, Mr. Smith, is to offer to trade them a few people we could do without," said Westervelt.

Smith grinned. He seemed to be willing to make up a little list.

"Some who never would be missed, eh? And let's head the page with people who take messages from thinking fish!"

He pottered about for a few moments before winding up seated on a corner of the unoccupied secretarial desk.

"I was actually thinking of skin divers," he confided. "Then I realized that if it takes a twenty foot monster to wander the undersea wilds of Trident without being intimidated, maybe those waters wouldn't be too safe for Terran swimmers."

"Unless they could get one of the monsters for a guide," suggested Westervelt.

The three of them pondered that possibility.

"I can see it now," said Simonetta. "My name Swishy. Me good guide. You want find pearl? Not allowed here; we no steal from other fish!"

They laughed, and Smith demanded to know how one _thought_ in pidgin talk. They discussed the probability of fraud in the reports that Smith had received, and concluded reluctantly that, whether or not some trick might be involved, there was bound to be some truth in the story.

"I suppose we'll have to use this fishy network to locate him," sighed Smith at last. "It would take too long to ship out parts of a small sub to be assembled on Trident. The whole thing makes me wonder if I'll ever eat another seafood dinner!"

"Maybe somebody else will think of something," said Westervelt, partly to conceal the fact that he himself had come up with nothing.

"Tell you what," said Smith, nodding. "Suppose you go along and see how Bob Lydman is making out, while I sign these letters. You might check at the com room sometime, too, in case anything else on the case comes in."

Westervelt agreed, made sure he had something in his pocket to write upon should the need arise, and left.

A few minutes later, he reached the end of the corridor, having cocked an ear at the door of the old file office as he passed and heard Beryl giggling at some remark by Parrish. He unclenched his teeth and knocked on Lydman's door.

He waited a minute and tried again, but there was still no answer.

He hesitated, wondering what would happen should he walk in and find that Lydman was physically present but not in a mood to recognize any one else's existence. Slowly, he walked back to the washroom on the opposite side of the hall.

Washing his hands with deliberation, Westervelt decided that it might be best to get Lydman on the phone. He could not, in fact, understand why inside phone calls were not more popular in the office. He supposed that the face-to-face habit had grown up among the staff, probably reflecting Smith's preference for getting everyone personally involved in everything. There might even be a deeper cause--they were so often in contact with distant places by the tenuous beaming of interstellar signals that there must be a certain reassurance and sense of security in having within physical reach the person to whom one was speaking.

"I'll have to watch for that if I stay here long enough," Westervelt told himself. "You don't have to be a prizefighter to get punchy, I guess."

He examined himself critically in the mirror over the sink, thinking that he could do with a neater appearance. A coin in the slot of a dispenser on the wall bought him a disposable paper comb with which he smoothed down his dark hair.

_I need a haircut almost as bad as Castor P._ he thought. _I wonder if that really stands for Pollux? What a thing for parents to do! On the other hand, from people that came up with one like him, you'd expect almost anything!_

No one came in while he was in the washroom, much as he would have welcomed an excuse for conversation. He dawdled his way through the door into the corridor, not liking the thought of inflicting his presence upon Beryl and Parrish. That meant he would have to walk back as far as the spare conference room to find a phone.

"Of course, there's the lab," he muttered.

That was only a few steps away, and he could hardly do much damage between the door and the phone.

Reaching the end of the corridor once more, he decided to make one last try at Lydman's door. Again, there was no reply to his knock, so he turned away to the laboratory door and entered.

He was faced by a vista of tables, workbenches with power tools, and diverse assemblies of testing apparatus, most of the latter dusty and presenting the appearance of gold-bergs knocked together for temporary use and then shoved aside until someone might need a part from one of them. By far the greater space, however, was occupied by shelves and crates and stacks of small cartons or loosely wrapped packages in which various gadgets seemed to be stored after plans of them had been transmitted to the field. Half a dozen large files for drawings and blueprints reached nearly to the ceiling. Racks of instruments in relatively recent use or consideration stood here and there among the tables and workbenches.

To Westervelt's right, near the far wall behind which lay the communications room, he caught sight of a prowling figure. He recognized Lydman's broad shoulders and hesitated.

The ex-spacer had paused to examine a gadget lying on one of the tables. From Westervelt's position, it appeared to be a wristwatch or something similar. Lydman picked it up and turned toward a part of the wall where a thick steel plate had been fastened to an insulated partition of brick. He raised the "watch" to eye level, as if aiming.

A thin pencil of white flame leaped from the instrument to spatter sparks against the already scarred and stained steel. Sucked up by the air-conditioning, the small puff of smoke disappeared so quickly that Westervelt realized that the scorched odor was entirely in his imagination.

Lydman replaced the instrument casually before strolling over to another table. He inspected an open pack of cigarettes with a grim smile, but let them lie there in plain sight. Westervelt reminded himself never to grub one of those, just on general principles. Lydman went on to a small cylinder somewhat larger than an old-fashioned battery flashlight. Something clicked under his finger, and from one end of the cylinder emerged the folding blades of a portable fan. The ex-spacer pressed a second switch position to start them spinning. He turned the fan to blow across his face, as if to check its cooling power, then held the thing at arm's length as he thumbed the switch to a third position.

A low, humming sound reached Westervelt. It rose rapidly in pitch until it passed beyond his hearing range. He shook his head slightly. For some reason, he found it difficult to concentrate. Perhaps Lydman's presence, unexpected as it was, had upset him, he thought. He decided that he must be getting a dizzy spell of some sort. Then he became concerned lest he turn nauseous.

The final stage, hardly a minute after Lydman had last moved the switch, found Westervelt tensing as a wave of sheer panic swept over him.

He stepped back toward the door, noticing dizzily that Lydman wore a strange expression too. Part of the youth's mind wondered if some of the ultra-sonic effect were reflected from the walls to the ex-spacer; another part insisted upon leaving the scene as hastily as possible.

He got himself into the corridor again, actually panting as he eased the door closed behind him. He started to walk, finding his knees a trifle loose. Passing the washroom, he hesitated; but he decided that he could make it to the conference room. Once there, however, he slipped inside and sat down to recover.

"What does it take to have a mind like that?" he whispered to, himself. "It's like a hobby to him. I think some day I ought to look for a job with reasonably normal people!"

A few minutes of peace and quiet refreshed him. He returned to the main office, just as Smith was surrendering a stack of signed letters to Simonetta Diorio. They looked around as he entered.

"Well, Willie, did he have anything going?" asked Smith.

"I ... uh ... he was kind of busy," said Westervelt.

"What did he seem to have in mind?" Smith started to reach for Simonetta's phone switch.

"He ... that is ... I didn't ask him. He was ... busy, in the lab."

"Oh," said Smith.

He peered at Westervelt's expression, and added, "Then ... perhaps we'd better not disturb him. It might spoil any ideas he's putting together."

Westervelt managed a grunt of assent as he turned to walk back to his desk.

_Whatever he's putting together_, he thought, _I'd rather stay out of the way._

He hunched over his desk, staring unseeingly at the notes he had scribbled earlier. He was vaguely conscious of the cessation of talk in the background, but he did not notice Simonetta's approach until the girl stood beside him.

"What happened, Willie?" she asked. "You look as if he threw you out."

"No. Not deliberately, anyhow," said Westervelt. "At least, I don't _think_ he knew I was even there--although how can you tell if he doesn't want to let on?"

He told her what had happened in the laboratory. She nodded thoughtfully.

"I suppose it has its uses," said Westervelt. "I hate to think of the way he plays around with things in there. Wasn't there a time when someone killed himself in that lab?"

"That was years ago," said Simonetta.

She hugged herself as if feeling a sudden chill, her large, soft eyes serious. Westervelt realized that she was actually a very beautiful girl, much more so than Beryl, and he wondered why he felt so differently about them. Simonetta seemed too nice to fit the ideas he got concerning Beryl. Something told him that his thinking was mixed up.

_I guess you just grow out of that_, he reflected silently. _Maybe they're the same under the skin._

FIVE

When Beryl walked in, Westervelt was at one of the tall windows with Simonetta, dialing filter combinations to make the most of the setting sun. They had the edge of it showing as a deep crimson ball beside another building in the vicinity.

"What are you two doping out?" asked the blonde. "Some disappearing trick?"

Simonetta laughed as Westervelt shoved the dial setting to afternoon normal.

"It's an idea," he said, scowling at Beryl.

"For underwater?" she demanded mockingly.

"Ever hear of a squid?" retorted Westervelt. "_They_ hide themselves underwater. Maybe a cloud of dye would be as good as a filter."

"Willie, that _is_ an idea!" said Simonetta. "You ought to tell Mr. Smith."

Westervelt looked at her sourly. Now Beryl knew that they really had been wasting time, and had a point to score against him in their next exchange.

_Oh, well. I can't hold a thing like that against Si_, he thought. _I can think of people who'd be on the way to Smitty already, calling it their own idea._

Beryl had done a ladylike collapse into her chair and crossed her legs. She dug into her purse for cigarettes and requested a light.

"Why don't you buy a brand with a lighter in the box?" asked Westervelt.

Nevertheless, he walked over to the switchboard cubicle for the office desk lighter that had been appropriated by Pauline. Returning with it after a moment, he lit Beryl's cigarette and inquired, "Well, what did you and Parrish dig up?"

"I don't know," she sighed, leaning back, "but, boy, did we dig!"

"Yeah, I thought I heard the shovel clink once," said Westervelt, thinking of the laughter he had heard through the door of the dead file office.

Beryl, concerned with her own complaints, ignored him.

"We must have looked up thirty or forty cases," she went on. "I never even heard of most of those places on the newscasts!"

"Did he find anything that gave him an idea?" asked Simonetta.

"Not a thing! There seemed to be some real crazy spots in the records, but nobody ever got in jail at the bottom of an ocean."

"You'd think it would have happened sometime," said Simonetta thoughtfully.

"I suppose," suggested Westervelt, "that on any planet where Terrans were taken underwater, they didn't live long enough to be one of our cases. On a place like Trident, they usually wouldn't have any trouble. They'd stay on land, and any local life would stay in the sea. It took a nut like Harris to go poking around where he wasn't wanted."

"That's what Mr. Parrish hinted," said Beryl. "All I know is that it sounds like a story out of a laughing academy. They shouldn't allow them to get into places like that."

"Then we'd all be looking for work," said Westervelt. "Don't complain, Beryl--maybe it will happen to you someday."

The blonde shivered and turned to face her desk.

"Not me," she declared. "I'm staying on Terra, even if they do offer me a field trip as a sort of vacation."

_Ah, he's already started that line on her, thought Westervelt. I wonder if there's anything in the files on how to spring a secretary from a penthouse?_

Lydman and Parrish walked in, the latter pausing to exchange remarks with Pauline, the switchboard operator. A moment later, Smith opened his door as if expecting someone. He must have phoned them for a change, Westervelt realized.