p still
further in apparent lifelessness.

"Is he dead, Boss, is he?" he heard Panek's anxious cry.

His Highness felt the pulse in Hanlon's wrist and the one in his throat.
"No, he's still alive."

The man stood there in deep thought, his forehead creased with a frown
of concentration. "There's something peculiarly wrong here," the Leader
finally said aloud. "Something very wrong and very strange. This isn't
an ordinary fainting spell. It's ... uh ... beyond my previous
experience."

He straightened and addressed Hanlon's body once more. "Can you still
hear me, George Hanlon?"

There was no answer, no slightest indication that his words were heard.
He reached forward and lifted the body into a more upright position in
the chair. "Answer me, George Hanlon. Do you hear me? I command you to
tell me, are you a Corpsman?"

Still no answer, no twitch of muscle, no movement of awareness. He shook
the body a little, and raised his voice still more.

"I demand an answer, George Hanlon! The truth drug must make you speak!"

But only silence, and when he let go of the body it fell backward into
the chair, and the head lolled forward as though the neck was broken.

"Let me work on him, Boss," Panek pleaded. "Let me give him a going
over, let me."

Barely waiting to see that His Highness did not forbid it, the thug
raised a short, ugly piece of rubber hose, and struck the unresisting
body again and again--across the face, over the top and back of the
head, vicious blows at the ribs and even in the groin.

But he might as well have been pounding a sack of meal. The body sagged
beneath the blows, and became bloody and discolored, but no movement--no
conscious movement--did it make.

"That will do, Panek," His Highness finally commanded. "That
does no good. This I cannot understand, but I do know there
is ... uh ... something most peculiar here. It is almost as
though ...", he paused and frowned again. "But that is ridiculous!"

"What's ridiculous, Boss, what is?"

"It is almost as though there was ... uh ... no mind left in the body,"
His Highness said slowly. Then, abruptly, "Are you sure that was
truth-serum in that hypodermic?"

"You fixed it yourself, Boss."

His Highness wheeled suddenly, rudely awakened from his thinking by the
loud _shoo_-ing noise one of the guards was making. He was astonished to
see the man making vain motions toward a pigeon whose head was sticking
through, the ventilator vanes.

But