"Yes, I daresay you have, Zan Matl Blekeke."
* * * * *
Maxwell and I were alone in the small, bare, brightly lighted but
windowless room.
Blekeke had spent a half-hour after my arrival trying to find out how
much I knew. But after my initial shocker--letting him know that I
recognized him--I had kept my mind closed tightly; and I was keeping it
closed now. Blekeke was still listening in--I had no doubt of that.
Maxwell knew it too, for he made no attempt at conversation.
He sat with his back to the walls in one corner, and I crouched in
another corner, and we sat there, staring at the walls and at each
other, not daring to speak or to think.
After about ten or fifteen minutes the door opened, and Blekeke stepped
in. He was wearing earphones, and a wire trailed behind him. In one hand
he carried a blaster.
He smiled broadly and nodded, once at each of us. "Something show you,"
he said. "Watching."
He pushed a button on the wall beside the door and the lights died. For
an instant everything was black, and I braved myself. Then the wall
beside Blekeke glowed, flickered--and a scene in black and white came
into focus.
"This observer room," Blekeke said. "Show what camera top meeting hall
see."
The scene was dim; a half-moon bobbed and splashed in ocean waves in the
background. In the right foreground, close and large, dark and dull, was
the spaceship.
It was Martian, but not military. An old cargo carrier. Its rear jets
were extinguished, but the ship was vibrating.
_Leaving?_ I wondered--and Blekeke caught my thought over the telenizer
earphones.
_No--just arriving_, was his answer in my mind. _But it leave again very
soon. You with. Soon no matter what you know. What did. Soon gone._
_How soon?_ I demanded.
Blekeke spoke aloud: "Very soon. Fifteen, twenty, half-hour minutes.
Looking more. All way right."
I looked at the extreme right edge of the picture, where a rough,
shadowy hillock arose. While I watched, an opening appeared in the
hillock and a dim human figure emerged. It stood erect and walked across
the stretch of gravel beach toward the spaceship. Another figure came
from the hillock aperture and followed the first.