diluted liquor. But it burned like
fury once it hit my stomach and my mind began to wobble. He'd given me a
slug of the pure quill, one hundred proof.

As some sort of counter-irritant, it worked. Very gradually the awful
pain in my hand began to subside.

"You can take that manipulator off in an hour or so," he told me. "And
in the meantime we'll get along with our testing."

I gathered that they could stop this treatment anywhere along the
process if I did not measure up.

XVIII

Midnight. The manipulator had been off my hand for several hours, and it
was obvious that my Mekstrom's was past the first joint and creeping up
towards the next. I eyed it with some distaste; as much as I wanted to
have a fine hard body, I was not too pleased at having agony for a
companion every time the infection crossed a joint. I began to wonder
about the wrist; this is a nice complicated joint and should, if
possible, exceed the pain of the first joint in the ring finger. I'd
heard tell, of course, that once you've reached the top, additional
torture does not hurt any greater. I'd accepted this statement as it was
printed. But now I was not too sure that what I'd just been through was
not one of those exceptions that take place every now and then to the
best of rules.

I was still in a dark and disconsolate mood. But I'd managed to eat, and
I'd shaved and showered, and I'd hit the hay because it was as good a
place to be as anywhere else. I could lie there and dig the premises
with my esper.

There were very few patients in this building, and none were done up
like the character in the Macklin place. They moved the patients to some
other part of the grounds when the cure started. There weren't very many
nurses, doctors, scholars, or other personnel around, either.

Outside along one side of a road was a small lighted house that was
obviously a sort of guard, but it was casual instead of being formal and
military in appearance. The ground, instead of being patrolled by human
guards (which might have caused some comment) was carefully laid off
into checkerboard squares by a complicated system of photobeams and
induction bridges.

You've probably read about how the job of casing a joint should be done.
I did it the same way. I dug back and forth, collecting the layout from
the back door of my building towards the nearest puff of dead area. This
coign of safety billowed outward from the pattern towards the building
like