Then Ritchy-loo opened a door that revealed two men standing on opposite sides of a desk, spouting angry German at each other. The tall one noticed us after a second, said, “ ’St, ’st,” to the other, and then to us, coldly, “You might, at least, knock.”
“Sorry, gentlemen,” said Ritchy-loo brightly. He closed the door and went on to the next on the same side. This opened onto a small, bare room with nobody in it but a stocky man with corporal’s stripes on his sleeve. He was sitting hunched over, elbows on knees, hands over his face. He didn’t move or look up.
I have a good ear, and I had managed to catch one sentence of what the fat man next door had been saying to the tall one. It went like this: “Nein, nein, das ist bestimmt nicht die Klaustrophobie; lch sage dir, es ist das dreifiissige Tier, das sie storrt.”
My college German came back to me when I prodded it, but it creaked a little. While I was still working at it, I asked Ritchy-loo, “What was that?”
“Psychiatric section,” he said
“You get many psycho cases here?”
“Oh, no,” he said. “Just the normal percentage, Mr. Dahl. Less, in fact.”
The captain was a poor liar.
“Klaustrophobie” was easy, of course. “Dreifilssige Tier” stopped me until I remembered that the German for *‘zoo” is “Tiergarten.” Dreifilssige Tier: the three-footed beast. The triped.
The fat one had been saying to the tall one, “No, no, it is absolutely not claustrophobia; I tell you, it’s the triped that’s disturbing them.”
Three-quarters of an hour later we had peered into the last room in B building: a long office full of IBM machines. We had now been over every square yard of Chillicothe, and I had seen for myself that no skulduggery was going forward anywhere in it. That was the idea behind the guided tour, as Ritchy-loo was evidently aware.
He said, “Well, that just about wraps it up, Mr. Dahl. By the way, the General’s office asked me to tell you that if it’s all right with you, they’ll set,up that phone call for you for four o’clock this afternoon.”
I looked down at the rough map of the building I’d been drawing as we went along. “There’s one place we haven’t been, Captain,” I said. “Section One.”
“Oh, well that’s right, that’s right. You saw that yesterday, though, didn’t you, Mr. Dahl?”
“For about two minutes. I wasn’t able to take much of it in. I’d like to see it again, if it isn’t too much trouble. Or even if it is.”
Ritchy-loo laughed heartily. “Good enough. Just wait a second, I’ll see if I can get you a clearance on it.” He walked down the corridor to the nearest wall phone.
After a few moments he beckoned me over, palming the receiver. “The General says there are two research groups in there now and it would be a little crowded. He says he’d like you to postpone it if you think you can.”
“Tell him that’s perfectly all right, but in that case I think we’d better put off the phone call, too.”
He repeated the message, and waited. Finally, “Yes. Yes, uh-huh. Yes, I’ve got that. All right.”
He turned to me. “The General says it’s all right for you to go in for half an hour and watch, but he’d appreciate it if you’ll be careful not to distract the people who’re working in there.”
I had been hoping the General would say no. I wanted to see the alien again, all right, but what I wanted the most was time.
This was the second day I had been at Chillicothe. By tomorrow at the latest I would have to talk to Eli Freeman; and I still hadn't figured out any sure, safe way to tell him that Chillicothe was a legitimate research project, not to be sniped at by the Herald-Star—and make him understand that I didn’t mean a word of it.
I could simply refuse to make the call, or I could tell him as much of the truth as I could before I was cut off—two words, probably—but it was a cinch that call would be monitored at the other end, too; that was part of what Ritchy-loo meant by “setting up the call.” Somebody from the FBI would be sitting at Freeman’s elbow... and I wasn’t telling myself fairy tales about Peter Zenger any more.
They would shut the paper down, which was not only the thing I wanted least in the world but a thing that would do nobody any good.
I wanted Eli to spread the story by underground channels—spread it so far, and time the release so well, that no amount of censorship could kill it.
Treason is a word every man has to define for himself.
Ritchy-loo did the honors for me at the gun-room door, and then left me, looking a little envious. I don’t think he had ever been inside Section One.
There was somebody ahead of me in the tiny antechamber, I found: a short, wide-shouldered man with a sheepdog tangle of black hair.
He turned as the door closed behind me. “Hi. Oh—you’re Dahl, aren’t you?” He had a young, pleasant, meaningless face behind dark-rimmed glasses. I said yes.
He put a half-inch of cigarette between his lips and shook hands with me. “Somebody pointed you out. Glad to know you; my name’s Donnelly. Physical psych section—very junior.” He pointed through the spy-window. “What do you think of him?”
Aza-Kra was sitting directly in front of the window; his lunch-counter stool had been moved into the center of the room. Around him were four men: two on the left, sitting on folding chairs, talking to him and occasionally making notes; two on the right, standing beside a waist-high enclosed mechanism from which wires led to the upper lobe of the alien’s body. The ends of the wires were taped against his skin.
“That isn’t an easy question,” I said.
Donnelly nodded without interest. “That’s my boss there,” he said, “the skinny, gray-haired guy on the right. We get on each other’s nerves. If he gets that setup operating this session, I’m supposed to go in and take notes. He won’t, though.”
“What is it?”
“Electroencephalograph. See, his brain isn’t in his head, it’s in his upper thorax there. Too much insulation in the way. We can’t get close enough for a good reading without surgery. I say we ought to drop it till we get permission, but Hendricks thinks he can lick it. Those two on the other side are interviewers. Like to hear what they’re saying?”
He punched one of two buttons set into the door beside the speaker grill, under the spy-window. “If you’re ever in here alone, remember you can’t get out while this is on. You turn on the speaker here, it turns off the one in the gun room. They wouldn’t be able to hear you ask to get out.”
Inside, a monotonous voice was saying, . have that here, but what exactly do you mean by..
“I ought to be in physiology,” Donnelly said, lowering his voice. “They have all the fun. You see his eyes?”
I looked. The center one was staring directly toward us; the other two were tilted, almost out of sight around the curve of that bulb of blue-gray flesh.
“... in other words, just what is the nature of this energy, is it—uh—transmitted by waves, or..
“He can look three ways at once,” I said.
“Three, with binocular,” Donnelly agreed. “Each eye can function independently or couple with the one on either side. So he can have a series of overlapping monocular images, all the way around, or he can have up to three binocular images. They focus independently, too. He could read a newspaper and watch for his wife to come out of the movie across the street.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “He has six eyes, not three?”
“Sure. Has to, to keep the symmetry and still get binocular vision.”