*

No one was inside. He looked around. There was another door in back. He
walked over to it. It didn't lead to a laboratory, as he expected.
Instead, there were living quarters. A peculiar way to conduct research.

The autobath was humming quietly. He sat down facing it and waited. She
came out in a few minutes, hair disarranged, damp around her forehead.
She didn't see him at first.

"Well," she said coolly, staring at him. There was no question that she
recognized him through the disguise. She slipped quickly into a robe
that, whatever it did for her modesty, subtracted nothing from the view.
He wished he was less tired and could appreciate it.

She found a cigarette and lighted it. "You're pretty good, you know."

"Yeah." But not good enough, he thought.

"Why are you here?" she asked. She was nervous.

"You know," he said. She had promised him help once before. Now let her
deliver. But she had to volunteer.

"I know." She looked down at her hands, long skilled hands. "I put in
the circuit. But I didn't choose you."

He began to understand part of it. The 'Medical Research' business was
just a cover. The real work was done at the police emergency hospital.
That was why she had no laboratory. And the raw material--

"Who did choose me?"

"The police. I have to take what they give me."

There were certain implications in that statement he didn't like. "Have
there been others?"

"Two before you."

"What happened to them?"

"They died."

He didn't like where this was taking him. His hand slid toward the
tangle gun in his pocket. "Maybe I should die, too."

She nodded. "That would be one solution." She added harshly: "They
shouldn't have taken you. Legally speaking, you're not a criminal. But
I couldn't investigate you personally before I put the circuit in."

Why not? Was she an automaton that reacted in response to a button? In a
way she was, but the button was psychological.

"That doesn't help me," he said tiredly. "The police wanted to catch
Burlingame through me. That's right, isn't it?"

She indicated that it was.

"I did, without knowing what I was doing," he went on. "Now I want out.
Even if I cooperated with the cops, which I'm not going to do, I'm of no
further value to them. Every criminal on Venus knows about me by now."

"That's part of it," she said. "But there's more. You've tied up the
machine and neither I nor the police can use it."

* * * * *