"Damn! Good Lord, Mr. Cavendish, why didn't you suggest it to me?"
"Sir?" The old man drew himself up and his nostrils dilated. "It would not have been ethical. I am a Fair Witness, not a participant. My professional association would suspend me for much less. Surely you know that."
"Sorry. I forgot myself." Caxton frowned. "Let's wheel this buggy around and go back. We'll take a look at his feet - or I'll bust the place down with Berquist's fat head!"
"I'm afraid you will have to find another Witness� in view of my indiscretion in discussing it, even after the fact."
"Uh, yes, there's that." Caxton frowned.
"Better just calm down, Ben," advised Frisby. "You're in deep enough now. Personally, I'm convinced it was the Man from Mars. Occam's razor, least hypothesis, just plain horse sense."
Caxton dropped them, then set the cab to cruise while he thought. Presently he punched the combination to take him back to Bethesda Medical Center.
He was less than half way back to the Center when he realized that his trip was useless. What would happen? He would get as far as Berquist, no farther. He had been allowed in once - with a lawyer, with a Fair Witness. To demand to be allowed to see the Man from Mars a second time, all in one morning, was unreasonable and would be refused. Nor, since it was unreasonable, could he make anything effective out of it in his column.
But he had not acquired a widely syndicated column through being balked. He intended to get in.
How? Well, at least he now knew where the putative "Man from Mars" was being kept. Get in as an electrician? Or as a janitor? Too obvious; he would never get past the guard, not even as far as "Dr. Tanner."
Was "Tanner" actually a doctor? It seemed unlikely. Medical men, even the worst of them, tended to shy away from hanky-panky contrary to their professional code. Take that ship's surgeon, Nelson - he had quit, washed his hands of the case simply because - wait a minute! Dr. Nelson was one man who could tell offhand whether that young fellow was the Man from Mars, without checking calluses, using trick questions, or anything. Caxton reached for buttons, ordered his cab to ascend to parking level and hover, and immediately tried to phone Dr. Nelson, relaying through his office for the purpose since he neither knew where Dr. Nelson was, nor had with him the means to find out. Nor did his assistant Osbert Kilgallen know where he was, either, but he did have at hand resources to find out; it was not even necessary to draw on Caxton's large account of uncollected favors in the Enclave, as the Post syndicate's file on Important Persons placed him at once in the New Mayflower. A few minutes later Caxton was talking with him.
To no purpose - Dr. Nelson had not seen the broadcast. Yes, he had heard about it; no, he had no reason to think the broadcast had been faked. Did Dr. Nelson know that an attempt had been made to coerce Valentine Smith into surrendering his rights to Mars under the Larkin Decision? No, he did not know it, had no reason to believe so� and would not be interested if it were true; it was preposterous to talk about anyone "owning" Mars; Mars belonged to the Martians. So? Let's propose a hypothetical question, Doctor; if someone were trying to - but Dr. Nelson had switched off. When Caxton tried to reconnect, a recorded voice stated sweetly: "The subscriber has voluntarily suspended service temporarily. If you care to record-" Caxton switched off.
Caxton made a foolish statement concerning Dr. Nelson's parentage. But what he did next was much more foolish; he phoned the Executive Palace, demanded to speak to the Secretary General.
His action was more a reflex than a plan. In his years as a snooper, first as a reporter, then as a lippmann, he had learned that close-held secrets could often be cracked by going all the way to the top and there making himself unbearably unpleasant. He knew that such twisting of the tiger's tail was dangerous, for he understood the psychopathology of great power as thoroughly as Jill Boardman lacked knowledge of it - but he had habitually relied on his relative safety as a dealer in still another sort of power almost universally feared and appeased by the powerful.
What he forgot was, that in phoning the Palace from a taxicab, he was not doing so publicly.
Caxton was not put through to the Secretary General, nor had he expected to be. Instead he spoke with half a dozen underlings and became more aggressive with each one. He was so busy that he did not notice it when his cab ceased to hover and left the parking level.
When he did notice it, it was too late; the cab refused to obey the orders he at once punched into it. Caxton realized bitterly that he had let himself be trapped by a means no professional hoodlum would fall for: his call had been traced, his cab identified, its idiot robot pilot placed under orders of an over-riding police frequency - and the cab itself was being used to arrest him and fetch him in, all most privately and with no fuss,
He wished keenly that he had kept Fair Witness Cavendish with him. But he wasted no time on this futility but cleared the useless call from the radio and tried at once to call his lawyer, Mark Frisby.
He was still trying when the taxicab landed inside a courtyard landing fiat and his signal was cut off by its walls. He then tried to leave the cab, found that the door would not open - and was hardly surprised to discover that he was becoming very light-headed and was fast losing consciousness-
VIII
JILL TRIED TO TELL HERSELF that Ben had gone charging off on another Scent and simply had forgotten (or had not taken time) to let her know. But she did not believe it. Ben, incredibly busy as he was, owed much of his success, both professional and social, to meticulous attention to human details. He remembered birthdays and would rather have welched on a poker debt than have forgotten to write a bread-and-butter note. No matter where he had gone, nor how urgent the errand, he could have - and would have! - at least taken two minutes while in the air to record a reassuring message to her at her home or at the Center. It was an unvarying characteristic of Ben, she reminded herself, the thing that made him a lovable beast in spite of his many faults.
He must have left word for her! She called his office again at her lunch break and spoke with Ben's researcher and office chief, Osbert Kilgallen. He assured her solemnly that Ben had left no message for her, nor had any come in since she had called earlier.
She could see past his head in the screen that there were other people in the office; she decided it was a poor time to mention the Man from Mars. "Did he say where he was going? Or when he would be back?"
"No. But that is not unusual. We always have a few spare columns on the hook to fill in when one of these things comes up."
"Well� where did he call you from? Or am I being too snoopy?"
"Not at all, Miss Boardman. He did not call; it was a statprint message, filed from Paoli Flat in Philadelphia as I recall."
Jill had to be satisfied with that. She lunched in the nurses' dining room and tried to interest herself in food. It wasn't, she told herself, as if anything were really wrong� or as if she were in love with the lunk or anything silly like that.
"Hey! Boardman! Snap out of the fog - I asked you a question."
Jill looked up to find Molly Wheelwright, the wing's dietician, looking at her. "Sorry. I was thinking about something else."
"I said, 'Since when does your floor put charity patients in luxury suites?'
"Isn't K-12 on your floor? Or have they moved you?"
"K-12? Certainly. But that's not a charity case; it's a rich old woman, wealthy that she can pay to have a doctor watch every breath she draws."
"Humph! If she's wealthy, she must have come into money awfully suddenly. She's been in the N.P. ward of the geriatrics sanctuary for the past seventeen months."