"Don't bother. A more inventive title than Ledman Atomics, but not
quite as much heart, wouldn't you say?" He grinned. "I saved for years;
then I came to Mars, lost myself, built this Dome, and swore to get
even. There's not a great deal of uranium on this planet, but enough to
keep me in a style to which, unfortunately, I'm no longer accustomed."
* * * * *
He consulted his wrist watch. "Time for my injection." He pulled out the
tanglegun and sprayed us again, just to make doubly certain. "That's
another little souvenir of Sadlerville. I'm short on red blood
corpuscles."
He rolled over to a wall table and fumbled in a container among a pile
of hypodermics. "There are other injections, too. Adrenalin, insulin.
Others. The Blast turned me into a walking pin-cushion. But I'll pay it
all back," he said. He plunged the needle into his arm.
My eyes widened. It was too nightmarish to be real. I wasn't seriously
worried about his threat to wipe out the entire Geig Corps, since it was
unlikely that one man in a wheelchair could pick us all off. No, it
wasn't the threat that disturbed me, so much as the whole concept, so
strange to me, that the human mind could be as warped and twisted as
Ledman's.