Matt wanted to burrow like a rabbit. But even a rabbit wouldn't have made headway in the pitted, dusty stone. He stood up with his hands in the air.
There was no sound, no motion.
One of the lights swung away from him. Then the others. They moved in random arcs for a while, crossing the protective-rock field with swooping blobs of light. Then, one by one, they went out.
The amplified voice spoke again. It sounded faintly puzzled. "What set off the alarms?"
Another voice, barely audible in the quiet night. "Don't know, sir."
"Maybe a rabbit. All right, break it up."
The figures on the wall disappeared. Matt was standing all alone with his hands in the air. After a while he put them down and walked away.
The man was tall and thin, with a long face and a short mouth and no expression. His Implementation-police uniform could not have been cleaner nor better pressed if he'd donned it a moment ago for the first time. He sat beside the door, bored and used to it, a man who had spent half his life sitting and waiting.
Every fifteen minutes or so he would get up to look at the coffin.
Seemingly the coffin had been built for Gilgamesh or Paul Bunyan. It was oak, at least on the outside. The eight gauge dials along one edge appeared to have been pirated from somewhere else and attached to the coffin by a carpenter of only moderate skill. The, long-headed man would stand up, go to the coffin, stand over the dials for a minute. Something could go wrong, after all. Then he would have to act in a hurry. But nothing ever did, and he would return to his chair and wait some more.
Problem:
Polly Tournquist's mind holds information you need. How to get at it?
The mind is the body. The body is the mind.
Drugs would interfere with her metabolism. They might harm her. You'd risk it, but you're not allowed drugs anyway.
Torture? You could damage a few fingernails, bend a few bones. But it wouldn't stop there. Pain affects the adrenal glands, and the adrenal glands affect everything. Sustained pain can have a savage, even permanent, effect on a body needed for medical supplies. Besides, torture is unethical.
Friendly persuasion? You could offer her a deal. Her life, and resettlement in some other region of the Plateau, for anything you want to know. You'd like that, and the organ banks are full ... But she won't deal. You've seen them before. You can tell.
So you give her a nice rest.
Polly Tournquist was a soul alone in space. Less than that, for there was nothing around her that could have been identified as "space." No heat, no cold, no pressure, no light, no darkness, no hunger, no thirst, no sound.
She had tried to concentrate on the sound of her heartbeat, but even that had disappeared. It was too regular. Her mind had edited it out. Similarly with the darkness behind her closed, bandaged eyelids: the darkness was uniform, and she no longer sensed it. She could strain her muscles against the soft, swaddling bandages that bound her, but she sensed no result, for the slack was small fractions of an inch. Her mouth was partly open; she could neither open it further nor close it on the foam rubber mouthpiece. She could not bite her tongue, nor find it. In no way could she produce the sensation of pain.
The ineffable peace of the coffin cure wrapped her in its tender folds and carried her, screaming silently, into nothingness.
What happened?
He sat at the edge of the grass on the hill above the Hospital. His eyes were fixed on its blazing windows. His heart beat softly against his knee.
What happened? They had me. They had me!
He had walked away. Bewildered, helpless, beaten, he had waited for the magnified voice to shout its orders. And nothing had happened. It was as if they had forgotten him. He had walked away with the feel of death at his back, waiting for the numbness of a sonic stun-beam or the prick of a mercy-bullet or the roar of the officer's voice.
Gradually, against all reason, he had sensed that they were not going to come for him.
And then he ran.
His lungs had stopped their tortured laboring many minutes ago, but his brain still spun. Perhaps it would never stop. He had run until he collapsed, here at the top of the hill, but the fear that drove him was not the fear of the organ banks. He had fled from an impossible thing, from a universe without reason. How could he have walked away from that plain of death with no eye to watch him? It smacked of magic, and he was afraid.
Something had suspended the ordinary laws of the universe to save his life. He had never heard of anything that could do that ... except the Mist Demons. And the Mist Demons were a myth. They had told him so when he was old enough. The Mist Demons were a tale to frighten children, like the reverse of a Santa Claus. The old wives who found powerful beings in the mist beyond the edge of the world had followed a tradition older than history, perhaps as old as man. But nobody believed in the Mist Demons. They were like the Belt miners' Church of Finagle, whose prophet was Murphy. A half-bitter joke. Something to swear by.
They had me and they let me go. Why?
Could they have had a purpose? Was there some reason the Hospital should let a colonist sneak to its very walls, then let him go free?
Could the organ banks be full? But there must be someplace they could keep a prisoner until there was room.
But if they thought he was a crew! Yes, that was it! A human figure on Alpha plateau of course they'd assume he was crew. But so what? Surely someone would have come to question him.
Matt began pacing a tight circle at the top of the low hill. His head whirled. He'd walked to certain death and been turned loose. By whom? Why? And what did he do next? Go back and give them another chance? Walk to the Alpha-Beta Bridge and hope nobody would see him sneaking across? Fly down the cliff, vigorously flapping his arms?
The awful thing was that he didn't know it wouldn't work. Magic, magic. Hood had talked about magic.
No, he hadn't. He'd practically turned purple denying that magic was involved. He'd been talking about ... psychic powers. And Matt had been so involved in watching, Polly that he couldn't remember anything Hood had said.
It was very bad luck. Because this was his only out. He had to assume that he had a psychic power, though he had not the remotest idea what that implied. At least it put a name to what had happened.
"I've got a psychic power," Matt announced. His voice rang with queer precision in the quiet night.
Fine. So? If Hood had gone into detail on the nature of psychic powers, Matt couldn't remember. But he could fairly well drop the idea of flying down the Alpha-Beta cliff. Whatever else was true of man's unexplored mental powers, they must be consistent. Matt could remember the feeling that he wouldn't be noticed if he didn't want to be, he had never flown, nor even dreamed of flying.
He ought to talk to Hood.
But Hood was in the Hospital. He might be dead already.
Well ...
Matt had been eleven years old when Ghengis, or Dad, brought two charms home for gifts. They were model cars, just the right size for charm bracelets, and they glowed in the dark. Matt and Jeanne had loved them at sight and forever.
One night they had left the charms in a closet for several hours, thinking they would grow brighter when they "got used to the dark." When Jeanne opened the closet, they had lost all their glow.
Jeanne was near tears. Matt's reaction was different. If darkness robbed the charms of their powers ...
He hung them next to a light bulb for an hour. When he turned off the light, they glowed like little blue lamps.