"Yes, I see. Weldon, will you kindly cut yourself out of this circuit.
I'll call you back in a moment."
Colonel Weldon's room vanished from the phone field. Mr. Green went
over to a wall safe, opened it with his back to Dr. Lowry, closed it
again and turned holding up a small, brightly polished metal disk.
"I should appreciate it incidentally," he remarked, "if you would find
it convenient to supply me with several more of these devices."
"I'll be very glad to do it, sir," Dr. Lowry told him, "after I've been
released from my present assignment."
"Yes ... you take no more chances than we do." Mr. Green raised his
right hand, held the disk facing the phone field. After a moment,
the light in Dr. Lowry's living room darkened, turned to a rich, deep
purple, gradually lightened again.
Mr. Green took his hand down. "Are you convinced I'm the person I
appear to be?"
Lowry nodded. "Yes, sir, I am. To the best of my knowledge, there is no
way of duplicating that particular diex effect--as yet."
* * * * *
Arlene Rolf walked rapidly along the passage between the thick inner
and outer walls enclosing Cleaver Spaceport. There was no one in sight,
and the staccato clicking of her high heels on the light-green marblite
paving was the only sound. The area had the overall appearance of a
sun-baked, deserted fortress. She reached a double flight of shallow
stairs, went up and came out on a wide, bare platform level with the
top of the inner wall.
Cleaver Spaceport lay on her left, a twenty-mile rectangle of softly
gleaming marblite absolutely empty except for the narrow white spire
of a control tower near the far side. The spaceport's construction had
been begun the year Arlene was born, as part of the interplanetary
colonization program which a rash of disasters and chronically
insufficient funds meanwhile had brought to an almost complete
standstill. Cleaver port remained unfinished; no space-ship had yet
lifted from its surface or settled down to it.
Ahead and to Arlene's right, a mile and a half of green lawn stretched
away below the platform. Automatic tenders moved slowly across it,
about half of them haloed by the rhythmically circling rainbow sprays
of their sprinklers. In the two years since Arlene had first seen the
lawn, no human being had set foot there. At its far end was a cluster
of low, functional buildings. There were people in those buildings ...
but not very many people. It was the security island where Dr. Lowry
had built the diex projector.
Arlene crossed the platform, passed through the doorless entry of the
building beyond it, feeling the tingle of another somatic barrier as
she stepped into its shadow. At the end of the short hallway was a
narrow door with the words NONSPACE CONDUIT above it. Behind the door
was a small, dimly lit cube of a room. Miss Rolf went inside and sat
down on one of the six chairs spaced along the walls. After a moment,
the door slid quietly shut and the room went dark.
For a period of perhaps a dozen seconds, in complete blackness, Arlene
Rolf appeared to herself to have become an awareness so entirely
detached from her body that it could experience no physical sensation.
Then light reappeared in the room and sensation returned. She stood
up, smoothing down her skirt, and discovered smiling that she had been
holding her breath again. It happened each time she went through the
conduit, and no previous degree of determination to breathe normally
had any effect at all on that automatic reaction. The door opened and
she picked up her purse and went out into a hall which was large,
well-lit and quite different in every respect from the one by which she
had entered.
* * * * *
In the wall screen across the hall, the image of a uniformed man smiled
at her and said, "Dr. Lowry has asked that you go directly to the
laboratory on your return, Miss Rolf."
"Thank you, Max," she said. She had never seen Max or one of the
other project guards in person, though they must be somewhere in
the building. The screen went blank, and she went on down the long,
windowless hall, the sound of her steps on the thick carpeting again
the only break in the quiet. Now, she thought, it was a little like
being in an immaculately clean, well-tended but utterly vacant hotel.
* * * * *
Arlene pressed the buzzer beside the door to Dr. Lowry's quarters and
stood waiting. When the door opened, she started forwards then stopped
in surprise.
"Why, hello, Colonel Weldon," she said. "I didn't realize you would
be on the project today." Her gaze went questioningly past him to Dr.
Lowry who stood in the center of the room, hands shoved deep into his
trousers pockets.
Lowry said wryly, "Come in, Arlene. This has been a surprise to me,
too, and not a pleasant one. On the basis of orders coming directly
from the top--which I have just confirmed, by the way--our schedule
here is to be subjected to drastic rearrangements. They include among
other matters our suspension as the actual operators of the projector."
"But why that?" she asked startled.
Dr. Lowry shrugged. "Ask Ferris. He just arrived by his personal
conduit. He's supposed to explain the matter to us."
Ferris Weldon, locking the door behind Arlene, said smilingly, "And
please do give me a chance to do just that now, both of you! Let's sit
down as a start. Naturally you're angry ... no one can blame you for
it. But I promise to show you the absolute necessity behind this move."
He waited until they were seated, then added, "One reason--though not
the only reason--for interrupting your work at this point is to avoid
exposing both of you to serious personal danger."