Helda, coming up behind Ethan, stopped short. "By all the gods! Teki! I always thought you were an idiot, but this goes beyond all—"
"I'm off-shift," said Teki in a small dignified voice. "I don't hafta put up with you off-shift, Helda." He twitched against his bonds, starting a new trickle of blood across his feet.
Helda's voice stumbled to silence as she got a better view. But not for long. "What is this?"
"Is he drugged, Doctor?" asked the Security man as Ethan knelt beside Teki. "What with? Was this a, a private act that got out of hand, or something chargeable?" His thick fingers poised hopefully over his report panel.
"Drugged and tortured," said Ethan shortly, opening Quinn's medkit. "Kidnapped, too." There was a vibra-scalpel; a touch, and the ankle wires parted with a ping.
"Raped?"
"I doubt it."
Helda, closing in, turned her head at the sound of Ethan's voice and stared at him. "You're no doctor," she gasped. "You're that moron from Docks and Locks again. My department wants a word with you!"
Teki yelped with laughter, causing Ethan to drop the sterile sponge he'd been applying to his ankle. "Joke's on you, Helda! He really is a doctor." He leaned toward Ethan, nearly tipping the chair, and confided conspiratorially, "Don't let on you're an Athosian, or she'll pop an artery. She hates Athos." He nodded happily, then, exhausted, let his head loll sideways again.
Helda recoiled. "An Athosian? Is this some kind of joke?" She glared anew at Ethan.
Ethan, absorbed in his work, jerked his head at Teki. "Ask him, he's the one full of truth serum." Teki's pulse was racing, his extremities cold, but he was not quite shocky. Ethan released the wrists. Reassuringly, Teki did not fall over, but sat up on his own. "But for your information, madam, I am indeed Dr. Ethan Urquhart of Athos. Ambassador Doctor Urquhart, on a special mission for the Population Council."
He hadn't really expected to impress her, but to his surprise she drew back whitely. "Oh?" she said in a neutral tone.
"Don't tell her that, Doc," Teki urged anew. "Ever since her son sneaked off to Athos nobody dares to mention the place. She can't even nag him longdistance there—their censorship guys send back any vids from a woman. She can't get at him at all." Teki dissolved in giggles. "I bet he's happy as a clam."
Ethan cringed at the thought of getting drawn into some family squabble. The Security man looked equally dubious, but asked, "How old was the boy?"
"Thirty-two," Teki snickered.
"Oh." The Security man lost interest.
"Do you possess an antidote to that—so-called truth serum, Doctor?" Helda inquired frostily. "If so I suggest you administer it, and we'll sort the rest of this out down in Quarantine."
Ethan slowed. His words fell from him one by one, like drops of cold honey. "Where you possess dictatorial powers, and where you…" He looked up to catch her frigid, frightened eyes. Time stopped. "You…"
Time sprang forward. "Quinn!" Ethan bellowed.
At her prompt appearance, herding Millisor and Rau before her with jabs from her stunner, Ethan jumped to his feet. He felt like running around in tight circles, or tearing his hair out in great clumps, or grabbing her by her grey-and-white jacket and shaking her until her teeth rattled. His clenched hands beat the air. His words tumbled over one another in his excitement.
"I kept trying to tell you, but you never stopped to listen. Pretend you're the agent, or whatever, on Kline Station trying to grab Athos's shipment. You make an impromptu decision to replace the frozen tissues with substitute material. We know it's impromptu, because if it had been planned you could have brought real cultures with you and nobody would ever have known a switch had been made, right? Where, where, in God the Father's name even on Kline Station, are you going to come up with 450 human ovaries? Not even 450. Three hundred eighty-eight and six cows' ovaries. I don't think even you could pull 'em out of your jacket, Commander Quinn."
Quinn opened her mouth, closed it, and looked extremely thoughtful. "Go on, Doctor."
Millisor had dropped his Harmon Dal act and, oblivious now to Quinn's stunner, stood with his attention rapt on Ethan. Rau watched his leader anxiously for some signal to action. The other ecotech looked bewildered; the Security man, although his eyebrows were up in equal puzzlement, was absorbing every word.
Ethan gabbled on. "Forget the 426 suspect ships. Trace backwards from one ship, the census courier to Athos. Method, motive, and opportunity, by God! Who has ready access to every corner and cubbyhole on Kline Station, who could pass in and out of a guarded transfer warehouse with no question asked? Who has access to human cadavers every day? Cadavers from which a few grams of selected tissues will never be missed, because the bodies are biochemically destroyed immediately after the theft? But not quite enough cadavers, eh Helda, before it was time for the census courier to leave for Athos? Hence the cow ovaries, thrown in out of desperation to make up the numbers, and the short-changed boxes, and the empty box." Ethan paused, panting.
"You're insane," choked Helda. Her face had gone from white to red to white again. Millisor's stunned eyes devoured her. Quinn looked like a woman taken by a beatific vision. The Security's man's fingers were locked on his report panel in a sort of overloaded paralysis.
"Not as crazy as you are," said Ethan. "What did you hope to accomplish?"
"Redundant question," snapped Millisor. "We know what she accomplished. Forget the window-dressing, and find out where—" A sharp gesture from Quinn's stunner reminded him that his status had been reversed from interrogator to prisoner.
"You're all coming to Quarantine—"
"It's over, Helda," said Ethan. "I bet if I look around your Assimilation Station I'll even find a shrink-wrap sealer."
"Oh, yes," chorused Teki helpfully. "We use it to seal suspected contaminants, to store them for later analysis. It's under the wet bench. I sealed my shoes up once, on a slow day. I tried to seal water, to make balloons to drop down the lift tubes, but it didn't work—"
"Shut up, Teki!" snarled Helda desperately.
"It's not as bad as what Vernon did with the white mice—"
"Stop," growled Millisor in exasperation out of the corner of his mouth. Teki subsided and sat blinking.
Ethan spread his hands and asked Helda more gently and urgently, "Why? I have to understand."
The concentrated venom in her posture broke into speech almost despite her will. "Why? You even need to ask why? It was to cut you motherless unnatural bastards off, that's why. I meant to get the next shipment too, if there was one, and the next, and the next, until—" She was choking now. On her rage? No, Ethan realized, his buoyant intellectual triumph turning sickly-sour in his stomach; on tears. "Until I'd hooked Simmi out of there, and he came to his senses and came home and got a real woman, I swear I wouldn't criticize a hair on her head this time, I'll never be allowed to even see my own grandchildren on that dreadful dirty planet…" She turned her back and stood stiff-legged, defiant but for her hands over her red, smeared face, ugly and helpless and snorting.
Ethan thought he understood how a propaganda-stuffed young soldier must feel the first time in combat, stumbling by some sudden chance over his enemy's human face. He had gloried for a red moment in his power to break her. Now he stood foolishly with the pieces in his hands. Not at all heroic.