"Not more than twenty-seven vistch, I should say. Cardiac."
"Under a good—master, would you call it?—who can pace him, more."
"Perhaps. At any rate, he will not be difficult. See his record."
"Stimulate him again."
Again there was the split-second of hell on earth. The woman was studying a small sphere in which colors played prettily. "A good surge,"
she said, "but not a good recovery. What is the order?"
One of the men ran his finger over a sheet of paper—but he was looking at the woman. "Three military."
"What kind of military, sobr'?"
The man hastily rechecked the sheet with his index finger. "All for igr' i khom. I do not know what you would call it. A smallship? A kill-ship?"
The other man said scornfully: "Either a light cruiser or a heavy destroyer."
"According to functional analogy I would call it a heavy destroyer," the woman said decisively. "A good surge is important to igr' i khom. We shall call down the destroyer to take on this Oliver and the two Stosses.
Have it done."
"Get up," one of the men said to Oliver.
He got up. Under the impression that he could be punished only in the chair he said: "What—?"
"Silence!" the woman snarled, and rapped the button. He was doubled up with the wave of pain. When he recovered, the man took his arm and led him from the laboratory. He did not speak as he was half-dragged through endless corridors and shoved at last through a door into a large, sunlit room. Perhaps a dozen people were sitting about and turned to look.
He cringed as a tall, black-haired man said to him: "Did you just get out of the chair?"
"It's all right," somebody else said. "You can talk. We aren't—them.
We're in the same boat as you. What's the story—heart disease?
Cancer?"
"Cancer," he said, swallowing. "They promised me—"
"They come through on it," the tall man said. "They do come through on the cures. Me, I have nothing to show for it. I was supposed to survey for minerals here—my name's Brockhaus. And this is Johnny White from Los Angeles. He was epileptic—bad seizures every day. But not any more. And this—but never mind. You can meet the rest later. You better sit down. How many times did they give it to you?"
"Four times," Dr. Oliver said. "What's all this about? Am I going crazy?"
The tall man forced him gently into a chair. "Take it easy," he said. "We don't know what it's all about."
"Goddamn it," somebody said, "the hell we don't. It's the commies, as plain as the nose on your face. Why else should they kidnap an experienced paper salesman like me?"
Brockhaus drowned him out: "Well, maybe it's the reds, though I doubt it. All we know is that they get us here, stick us in the chair and then—
take us away. And the ones they take away don't come back."
"They said something about cruisers and destroyers," Oliver mumbled.
"And surges."
"You mean," Brockhaus said, "you stayed conscious all the way through?"
"Yes. Didn't you?"
"No, my friend. Neither did any of us. What are you, a United States Marine?"
"I'm an English professor. Oliver, of Columbia University."
Johnny White from Los Angeles threw up his hands. "He's an English professor!" he yelled to the room. There was a cackle of laughter.
Oliver flushed, and White said hastily: "No offense, prof. But naturally we've been trying to figure out what—they—are after. Here we've got a poetess, a preacher, two lawyers, a salesman, a pitchman, a mining engineer, a dentist—and now an English professor."
"I don't know," Oliver mumbled. "But they did say something about cruisers and destroyers and surges."
Brockhaus was looking skeptical. "I didn't imagine it," Oliver said stubbornly. "And they said something about 'two Stosses.' "
"I guess you didn't imagine it," the tall man said slowly. "Two Stosses we've got.
Ginny! This man heard something about you and your old man."
A WHITE-HAIRED MAN, stocky in build and with the big, mobile face of an actor, thrust himself past Brockhaus to confront Oliver. "What did they say?" he demanded.
A tired-looking blonde girl said to him: "Take it easy, Mike. The man's beat."
"It's all right," Oliver said to her. "They talked about an order. One of the men seemed to be reading something in Braille—but he didn't seem to have anything wrong with his eyes. And the woman said they'd call down the destroyer to take on me and the two Stosses. But don't ask me what it means."
"We've been here a week," the girl said. "They tell me that's as long as anybody stays."
"Young man," Stoss said confidentially, "since we're thrown together in this informal fashion I wonder if I could ask whether you're a sporting man? The deadly, dullness of this place—" He was rattling a pair of dice casually.
"Please, Mike!" the girl said in a voice near hysteria. "Leave the man alone. What god's money here?"
"I'm a sporting man, Ginny," he said mildly. "A friendly game of chance to break the monotony—"
"You're a crook on wheels," the girl said bitterly, "and the lousiest monte operator that ever hit the road."
"My own daughter," the man said miserably. "My own daughter that got me into this lousy can—"
"How was I supposed to know it was a fake?" she flared. "And if you do die you won't die a junkie, by God!"
Oliver shook his head dazedly at their bickering.
"What will this young man think?" asked Stoss, with a try at laughing it off. "I can see he's a person of indomitable will behind his mild exterior, a person who won't let the chance word of a malicious girl keep him from indulging in a friendly—"
"Yeah! I might believe that if I hadn't been hearing you give that line to farmhands and truck-drivers since I was seven. Now you're a cold-reader. My aching torso."
"Well," Stoss said with dignity, "this time I happened to have meant it."
Oliver's head was throbbing. An indomitable will behind a mild exterior. It rang a bell somewhere deep inside him—a bell that clanged louder and louder until he felt his very body dissolve under its impact.
He dismissed the bizarre fantasy. He was Dr. Oliver of Columbia. He was Dr. Oliver of Columbia. He had always been.
The Stosses had drifted to a window, still quarreling. Brockhaus said after a pause: "It's a funny thing. He was on heroin. You should see his arms. When he first got here he went around begging and yelling for a fix of dope because he expected that he'd want it. But after a few hours he realized that he didn't want it at all. For the first time in twelve years, he says. Maybe it was the shocks in the chair. Maybe they did it intentionally. I don't know. The girl—there's nothing wrong with her.
She just came along to keep the old man company while he took the marvelous free cure."
A slight brunette woman with bangs was saying to him shyly:
"Professor, I'm Mitty Worth. You may have heard of me—or not. I've had some pieces in the New New Review."
"Delighted," Dr. Oliver said. "How did they get you?"
Her mouth twisted. "I was doing the Michoacan ruins. There was a man—a very handsome man―who persuaded me that he had made an archaeological find, that it would take the pen of a poet to do it justice—" She shrugged. "What's your field, professor?"
"Jacobean prose writers."
Her face lit up. "Thank God for somebody to talk to. I'm specially interested in Tom Fuller myself. I have a theory, you know, about the Worthies of England. Everybody automatically says it's a grab-bag, you know, of everybody who happened to interest Fuller. But I think I can detect a definite structure in the book—"
Dr. Oliver of Columbia groped wildly in his memory. What was the woman running on about?
"I'm afraid I'm not familiar with the work," he said.
Mitty Worth was stunned. "Or perhaps," Oliver said hastily, "I'm still groggy from the—the laboratory. Yes, I think that must be it."
"Oh," Mitty Worth said, and retreated.
Oliver sat and puzzled. Of course his specialty was the Jacobean prose writers. The foolish woman had made a mistake. Tom Fuller must be in another period. The real writers of Jacobean prose were Were—?