"He might die. Do you understand that?"
Arbin looked at him helplessly, and his fingers writhed furiously.
Shekt said, "I'd need his consent."
The farmer shook his head slowly, stubbornly. "He won't understand." Then, urgently, almost beneath his breath, "Why, look, sir, I'm sure you'll understand me. You don't look like a man who doesn't know what a hard life is. This man is getting old. It's not a question of the Sixty, you see, but what if, in the next Census, they think he's a half-wit and -and take him away? We don't like to lose him, and that's why we bring him here.
"The reason I'm trying to be secret-like is that maybe-maybe"-and Arbin's eyes swiveled involuntarily at the walls, as if to penetrate them by sheer will and detect the listeners that might be behind-"well, maybe the Ancients won't like what I'm doing. Maybe trying to save an afflicted man can be judged as against the Customs, but life is hard, sir…And it would be useful to you. You have asked for volunteers."
"I know. Where is your relative?"
Arbin took the chance. "Out in my biwheel, if no one's found him. He wouldn't be able to take care of himself if anyone has-"
"Well, we'll hope he's safe. You and I will go out right now and bring the car around to our basement garage. I'll see to it that no one knows of his presence but ourselves and my helpers. And I assure you that you won't be in trouble with the Brotherhood."
His arm dropped in friendly fashion to Arbin's shoulder, who grinned spasmodically. To the farmer it was like a rope loosening from about his neck.
Shekt looked down at the plump, balding figure upon the couch. The patient was unconscious, breathing deeply and regularly. He had spoken unintelligibly, had understood nothing. Yet there had been none of the physical stigmata of feeblemindedness. Reflexes had been in order, for an old man.
Old! Hmm.
He looked across at Arbin, who watched everything with a glance like a vise.
"Would you like us to take a bone analysis?"
"No," cried Arbin. Then, more softly, "I don't want anything that might be identification."
"It might help us-be safer, you know-if we knew his age," said Shekt.
"He's fifty," said Arbin shortly.
The physicist shrugged. It didn't matter. Again he looked at the sleeper. When brought in, the subject had been, or certainly seemed, dejected, withdrawn, uncaring. Even the Hypno-pills had apparently aroused no suspicion. They had been offered him; there had been a quick, spasmodic smile in response, and he had swallowed them.
The technician was already rolling in the last of the rather clumsy units which together made up the Synapsifier. At the touch of a push button the polarized glass in the windows of the operating room underwent molecular rearrangement and became opaque. The only light was the white one that blazed its cold brilliance upon the patient suspended, as he was, in the multihundred-kilowatt diamagnetic field some two inches above the operating table to which he was transferred.
Arbin still sat in the dark there, understanding nothing, but determined in deadly fashion to prevent, somehow, by his presence, the harmful tricks he knew he had not the knowledge to prevent.
The physicists paid no attention to him. The electrodes were adjusted to the patient's skull. It was a long job. First there was the careful study of the skull formation by the Ullster technique that revealed the winding, tight-knit fissures. Grimly, Shekt smiled to himself. Skull fissures weren't an unalterable quantitative measure of age, but they were good enough in this case. The man was older than the claimed fifty.
And then, after a while, he did not smile. He frowned. There was something wrong with the fissures. They seemed odd-not quite…
For a moment he was ready to swear that the skull formation was a primitive one, a throwback, but then…Well, the man was subnormal in mentality. Why not?
And suddenly he exclaimed in shock, "Why, I hadn't noticed! This man has hair on his face!" He turned to Arbin. "Has he always been bearded?"
"Bearded?"
"Hair on his face! Come here! Don't you see it?"
"Yes, sir." Arbin thought rapidly. He had noticed it that morning and then had forgotten. "He was born like that," he said, and then weakened it by adding, "I think."
"Well, let's remove it. You don't want him going around like a brute beast, do you?"
"No, sir."
The hair came off smoothly at the application of a depilatory salve by the carefully gloved technician.
The technician said, "He has hair on his chest too, Dr. Shekt."
"Great Galaxy," said Shekt, "let me see! Why, the man is a rug! Well, let it be. It won't show with a shirt, and I want to get on with the electrodes. Let's have wires here and here, and here." Tiny pricks and the insertion of the platinum hair-lets. "Here and here."
A dozen connections, probing through skin to the fissures, through the tightness of which could be felt the delicate shadow echoes of the microcurrents that surged from cell to cell in the brain.
Carefully they watched the delicate ammeters stir and leap, as the connections were made and broken. The tiny needlepoint recorders traced their delicate spider webs across the graphed paper in irregular peaks and troughs.
Then the graphs were removed and placed on the illuminated opal glass. They bent low over it, whispering.
Arbin caught disjointed flashes: remarkably regular…look at the height of the quinternary peak…think it ought to be analyzed…clear enough to the eye…"
And then, for what seemed a long time, there was a tedious adjustment of the Synapsifier. Knobs were turned, eyes on vernier adjustments, then clamped and their readings recorded. Over and over again the various electrometers were checked and new adjustments were made necessary.
Then Shekt smiled at Arbin and said, "It will all be over very soon."
The large machinery was advanced upon the sleeper like a slow-moving and hungry monster. Four long wires were dangled to the extremities of his limbs, and a dull black pad of something that looked like hard rubber was carefully adjusted at the back of his neck and held firmly in place by clamps that fitted over the shoulders. Finally, like two giant mandibles, the opposing electrodes were parted and brought downward over the pale, pudgy head, so that each pointed at a temple.
Shekt kept his eyes firmly on the chronometer; in his other hand was the switch. His thumb moved; nothing visible happened-not even to the fear-sharpened sense of the watching Arbin. After what might have been hours, but was actually less than three minutes, Shekt's thumb moved again.
His assistant bent over the still-sleeping Schwartz hurriedly, then looked up triumphantly. "He's alive."
There remained yet several hours, during which a library of recordings were taken, to an undertone of almost wild excitement. It was well past midnight when the hypodermic was pressed home and the sleeper's eyes fluttered.
Shekt stepped back, bloodless but happy. He dabbed at his forehead with the back of a hand. "It's all right."
He turned to Arbin firmly. "He must stay with us a few days, sir."
The look of alarm grew madly in Arbin's eyes. "But-but -"
"No, no, you must rely on me," urgently. "He will be safe; I will stake my life on it. I am staking my life on it. Leave him to us; no one will see him but ourselves. If you take him with you now, he may not survive. What good will that do you?…And if he does die, you may have to explain the corpse to the Ancients."
It was the last that did the trick. Arbin swallowed and said, "But look, how am I to know when to come and take him? I won't give you my name!"
But it was submission. Shekt said, "I'm not asking you for your name. Come a week from today at ten in the evening. I'll be waiting for you at the door of the garage, the one we took in your biwheel at. You must believe me, man; you have nothing to fear."
It was evening when Arbin arrowed out of Chica. Twenty-four hours had passed since the stranger had pounded at his door, and in that time he had doubled his crimes against the Customs. Would he ever be safe again?