And it didn't change.
Radiation-seared? Not unless the instrument lied! If dell'Angela
had ever in his life been within the disaster radius of an atomic
explosion, it had been so long before that every trace of radioactive
byproduct was gone!
Rena was right!
* * * * *
I worked like a machine, hardly thinking. I stood up and hurriedly
touched the ion-tasting snout of the counter to the body on the shelf
above Benedetto, the one above that, a dozen chosen at random up and
down the aisle.
Two of them sent the needle surging clear off the scale; three were
as untainted by radioactivity as Benedetto himself. A few others gave
readings from "mild" to "lethal"--but all in the danger area.
_Most were as untainted by radiation as Benedetto himself._
It was possible, I told myself frantically, that there were mysteries
here I did not understand. Perhaps after a few months or a year, the
radiation level would drop, so that the victim was still in deadly
danger while the emitted radiation of his body was too slight to
affect the counter. I didn't see how, but it was worth a thought.
Anything was worth a thought that promised another explanation to this
than the one Rena had given!
There had been, I remembered, a score or more of new suspendees in the
main receiving vault at the juncture of the corridors. I hurried back
to it. Here were fresh cases, bound to show on the gauge.
I leaned over the nearest one, first checking to make sure its
identification tag was the cross-hatched red one that marked
"radiation." I brought the counter close to the shriveled face--
But I didn't read the dial, not at first. I didn't have to. For I
recognized that face. I had seen it, contorted in terror, mumbling
frantic pleas for mercy, weeping and howling, on the old Class E
uninsurable the expediters had found hiding in the vaults.
_He_ had no radiation poisoning ... unless a bomb had exploded in these
very vaults in the past twelve hours.
It wasn't pleasant to stand there and stare around the vaults that were
designed for the single purpose of saving human life--and to wonder how
many of the eighty thousand souls it held were also prisoners.
And it wasn't even tolerable to think the thought that followed. If
the Company was corrupt, and I had worked to do the Company's business,
how much of this guilt was mine?
The Company, I had said and thought and tried to force others to agree,
was the hope of humanity--the force that had permanently ended war
(almost), driven out disease (nearly), destroyed the threat to any
human of hunger or homelessness (in spite of the starving old man who
slept in the shadow of the crypt, and others like him).
* * * * *
But I had to face the facts that controverted the Big Lie. If war was
ended, what about Naples and Sicily, and Prague and Vienna, and all the
squabbles in the Far East? _If there was no danger from disease, why
had Marianna died?_
Rena had said that if there was no danger of disaster, no one would
have paid their premiums. Obviously the Company could not have
wanted that, but why had I never seen it before? Sample wars, sample
deaths--the Company needed them. And no one, least of all me, fretted
about how the samples felt about it.
Well, that was behind me. I'd made a bet with Rena, and I'd lost, and I
had to pay off.
I opened the cased hypodermic kit Rena had given me and examined
it uncomfortably. I had never used the old-fashioned sort of needle
hypodermic; I knew a little something about the high-pressure spray
type that forced its contents into the skin without leaving a mark, but
I was very far from sure that I could manage this one without doing
something wrong. Besides, there wasn't much of the fluid left, only the
few drops left in the bottom of the bottle after Rena had loaded the
needle that had been smashed.
I hurried back along the corridor toward Benedetto dell'Angela. I
neared again the red-labeled door marked Bay 100, glanced at it in
passing--and stopped.
This was the door that only a handful of people could open. It was
labeled in five languages: "Entrance Strictly Prohibited. Experimental
Section."
Why was it standing ajar?