"I'm scared," she confessed in a trembling voice. "Let me come with
you."
"I'm going to the engine room."
"But...." Her black eyes opened wide. Then she said defiantly, "I don't
care. I--I want to come, too."
The jets fell silent.
"There she goes over to the robot pilot. If you're coming with me
you'll have to stretch a leg." Without another word, he plunged off
down the corridor.
A peculiar whine began to make itself heard. It was so high it hurt his
ears. The atmosphere within the ship was growing foggy. A yellow-tinged
mist eddied sluggishly like ink discoloring a glass of water.
He reached the engine room. There he halted so abruptly that Nadia
pitched against him.
The engine room was deserted. But the strange door in the aft bulkhead
stood open.
"What is it?" Nadia whispered.
"Don't know." He blinked his eyes, trying to pierce the gathering
yellow fog. He caught a glimpse of a bank of switches, the base of a
spherical tube, big as man. Then Villanowski passed across the opening
from left to right.
Gavin began to creep toward the door. Halfway there a blinding flash
stabbed at the base of his skull. He swayed dizzily, thought, "Nadia!"
Half drawing his dart-gun, he turned laboriously around.
But the girl lay stretched on the deck, her long black lashes
fluttering.
Gavin paused, tried to turn back to the door. It was like moving
through syrup. A second flash burst in his brain. He pitched to the
deck.
* * * * *
"Nine years!" said a man's stifled voice. It reached Gavin, vaguely
distorted like an image through wavy glass. "My orbit, it's been nine
years!"
Through the open window came a wailing chant of imported black
laborers from Terra.
"But I didn't do it. You can't take me back now." The man's face
was sweating and yellow-white. His fingers twitched. He spread them
nervously on the desk top. "I'm proscribed. Jordon was a stockholder
in Amalgamated Plastic. They'll kill me! Even in the Lunar Corrective
Colony, they'll kill me."
"Sorry."
The cold unfeeling tone of his own voice shocked Gavin.
"But it's been nine years," the man persisted as if the time meant
anything. Gavin had been sent out by the T.I.S. to get him. Twenty
years wouldn't have made any difference.
"Even if I was guilty, I've proved I don't need corrective psychiatry.
I'm not an incorrigible."
"Look," Gavin interrupted. "I've got a job. I don't know whether you're
guilty or not and I don't care. I don't even blame you for killing
Jordon, if you did...."
Gavin's sense of strangeness increased. This had all happened once
before during his first year in the T.I.S. This man had been accused of
murdering a minor official of Amalgamated Plastic and had fled. After
nine years the T.I.S. had learned that he was at a remote trading post
on Ganymede. Gavin had been sent to fetch him back for trial.
Only Gavin wasn't dreaming all this now. He was _re-living_ it!
He was inside himself, yet outside, judging, appraising his own actions
with the detachment of an impersonal observer.
"I can make you rich. Millions of credits." The man's voice became low,
wheedling. "There's a deposit of pitchblende back in the hills. It's
fabulous...."
"It's no use," said Gavin harshly. "Hell, man, I'd always know that
six or seven years from now another T.I.S. agent might tap me on the
shoulder like I've done you. Besides, I'm satisfied. I'm a...."
"Manhunter!"
"If you like. I'm a manhunter. You might as well ask a cat to turn
loose a mouse. It's against his nature. Come along now."
"Murderer," said the man with disconcerting calmness. "I'm
innocent--and you're killing me just as surely as if you shot me with
that dart-gun. Do you think Amalgamated Plastic has forgotten? I'm
proscribed. Their agents will get me. Why don't you shoot me outright?"
His voice ran up the scale, half-hysterical with fright as he read his
sentence in Gavin's cold, unblinking eyes. "You're not human. Go ahead.
Kill me now. I'm not coming. Do you hear? I'm not coming."
Gavin saw himself reach suddenly across the desk and rap the fugitive
on the skull with the butt of his dart-gun.
From its peculiar vantage point, the detached half of Gavin's
personality knew the inexorable sequence of events to follow. He would
haul the fellow back to Terra, where he would be murdered by agents of
Amalgamated Plastic at his trial.
For the first time, Gavin realized, he was seeing himself as he must
appear to others. A gaunt, hollow-cheeked, sandy-haired man, with
implacable blue eyes, tight-lipped, hard-faced. Manhunter!
* * * * *
He felt the cold deck under his fingers. He opened his eyes. He was
still in the _Nova's_ engine room. The yellow mist had dissipated. He
saw Villanowski standing over him. The chief's homely features were
cold.
"What the hell are you doing here?"
Gavin pulled himself together with an effort and scrambled to his feet.
"Curious," he admitted frankly. From the corner of his eyes, he saw
Nadia sit up, holding her temples.