The Dark Design

"I could never torture anybody, and I wouldn't permit anyone else to do it for me."

"Perhaps Thorn will volunteer information when he realizes that he ca

Boynton's voice came in again. "With your permission. Ms. Gulbirra, I'll fly the chopper out. Everything looks okay. My men can bring Thorn back in the raft."

"Permission granted," Jill said. "If it's operable, take it up to the top of the tower. We'll be along later."

Within ten minutes, the radar operator reported that the helicop­ter was lifting. Boynton added that everything was ru

Leaving Coppename in charge, Jill went down to the hangar bay. She arrived in time to see Thorn's cloth-wrapped body being lifted out of the raft. He was still unconscious. She followed the stretcher bearers to the sick bay, where Graves immediately took charge.

"He's in shock, but I think I can pull him through. You can't question him now, of course."

Jill posted two armed guards at the door and returned to the control room. By then the ship was lifting, headed for the tower. A half-hour later, the Parseval was again poised above the landing field. This time, it stayed 200 meters .from the dome. Its nose was pointed against the slight wind, and its propellers spun lazily.

After a while, the little wagon made by the machinists was lowered onto the surface. After being pulled to the entrance, it was pushed as far as two men could get. Then long poles made by the machinists were used to push the wagon deeper. Extensions were added to the poles as needed. In a short time, the forward end of the wagon was against the far wall.

After six photographs were taken, the wagon was pulled back by a long rope. Jill eagerly removed the large plates, which had been developed electronically at the moment of exposure.

She looked at the first one.

"He's not there."

She handed it to Cyrano. He said, "What is this? A short hall and a doorway at its end. It looks like an elevator shaft beyond, yes? But... there is no cage and there are no cables."

"I don't think They would have to depend upon such primitive devices as cables," she said. "But it's evident that Piscator got through the field and that he took the elevator."

"But why does he not come back? He must know that we are concerned."

He paused, and then he said, "He must also know that we ca

There was only one thing to do.

60

She gave the order to tie the ship up again. After this was done, she summoned the entire crew to the hangar bay. The photo­graphs were passed around while she told them in detail everything that had happened.

"We'll wait here a week if we have to. After that, we must leave. Piscator would not willingly stay down there so long. If he doesn't come back within twelve hours we can presume that he's being detained by ... Them. Or perhaps he has had an accident and has been killed or hurt. There's no way of knowing. We can do nothing except wait for a reasonable period of time."

No one would think of deserting Piscator at this time. But it was evident that they did not like the idea of staying seven days in this cold, dark, wet, ominously silent place. It was too much like camping outside the gates of hell.

By then, helicopter No. 1 had quit burning. A work party went out to recover the bodies and to investigate the cause of the explo­sion. Mechanics began checking the other copter for pontoon dam­age and replacing the bullet-torn windshield and port door.

A three-man guard was posted just inside the dome. Just before Jill went to the messroom, she got a call from Doctor Graves.

"Thorn's still unconscious, but he's rallying. I've also looked at what's left of Firebrass' brain. I can't do much since I don't have a microscope. But I'd swear that that little black sphere was attached to the neural system of the forebrain. I considered the possibility that it was extraneous and had been injected by the force of explo­sion into his brain. But the mechanics tell me there wasn't any such thing in the copter's equipment."'

"You mean that you think that sphere had been surgically im­planted in his brain?"

Graves said, "There isn't enough frontal skull left to say for certain. But I'm going to cut the others open, too. In fact, I'm going to do a complete dissection on all the victims. That'll take time, especially since I have to keep an eye on Thorn."

Trying to keep her voice from trembling, she said, "You realize the implications of that sphere?"

"I've been doing some thinking about it. I don't know what the hell it means except that it's important. Now, Jill, I've been doing dissections for years, not because I had to but just to keep my hand in. And I've never found anything out of the ordinary in a thousand corpses.

"But I'll tell you this. I think I know why Firebrass insisted on X-raying the skulls of his crew. He was looking for people with black spheres on, or in, their forebrains.

"I'll tell you something else. I think he rushed Stern's corpse off to The River because he knew that Stern had a ball in his brain.

"It's like Alice said, 'Mysteriouser and mysteriouser,' isn't it?"

Her heart pounding hard and her hand shaking, Jill switched off the intercom.

Firebrass was one of Them.

A moment later she called Graves back.

"Firebrass said he'd tell us why he wanted us X-rayed. But he never did, not to me, anyway. Did he tell you?"

"No. I asked him to tell me, and he just put me off."

"Then you don't know whether or not Thorn has a sphere in his head. If he should die, open him up, Doc."

"I'll do that. Of course, I could expose the brain, anyway. But not now. He has to get well first."

"Wouldn't that kill him? I know that the top of the skull is removed in operations, but can you expose Thorn's forebrain?"

"It won't hurt me a bit."

Twenty-four hours passed. Jill tried to keep the crew busy, but there was very little to do except u

Meanwhile, the dark and the cold seemed to seep into their bones. And the thought that below them there might be those mysterious beings who had made this world for them was nerve stretching. What were They doing? Why had They not come out?

Above all, what had happened to Piscator?

Cyrano de Bergerac seemed to be especially affected. His long silences and obvious brooding could be caused by the death of Firebrass. It seemed to her, howdver, that something else was bothering him.

Doctor Graves asked her to come to his office. On entering it, she found him sitting on the edge of his desk. Silently, he held out his palm. In it was a tiny black sphere.

"They were all so badly burned that I couldn't even determine the sex by exterior observation. Obrenova was the smallest, though, so I dissected the smallest corpse first. I found this at once. I didn't say anything to you because I wanted to examine all of them first.

"She was the only one to have this."

"Two of them!"

"Yeah. And it makes me wonder about Thorn."

Jill sat down and lit a cigarette with trembling hands. Graves said, "Listen. The only liquor aboard is in my locker. It's for medical purposes, but I think you need some medicine. I know I do."

While he got a bottle out, she told him about overhearing the quarrel between Thorn and Obrenova.