He was within a hundred and fifty feet of the point when he discovered just how healthy the notion of a preliminary check had been. A man was lying in the cover of the evergreens Dowland had been thinking about, head up, studying the ranch grounds. He wore an antiradiation suit of the type Dowland had found in the storeroom; a heavy rifle lay beside him. His face was in profile. It was smeared now with the sweat and dirt the AR field had held in, but Dowland recognized the bold, bony features instantly.
He had finally found Doctor Paul Trelawney.
* * *
It took Dowland over eight minutes to cover the remaining distance between them. But the stalk had eminently satisfactory results. He was within a yard of Trelawney before the Freeholder became aware of his presence. The IPA gun prodded the man’s spine an instant later.
“No noise, please,” Dowland said softly. “I’d sooner not kill you. I might have to.”
Paul Trelawney was silent for a moment. When he spoke, his voice was raw with shock. “Who the devil are you?”
“Solar Police Authority,” Dowland said. “You know why I’m here.”
Trelawney grunted. Dowland went on, “Why are you hiding out?”
“Why do you think?” Trelawney asked irritably. “Before showing myself, I was trying to determine the whereabouts of the man who fired a rifle within half a mile of me during the night.”
So they had been stalking each other. Dowland said, “Why couldn’t that person have been your brother or niece?”
“Because I know the sound of our rifles.”
“My mistake . . . Do you have a gun or other weapon on you?”
“A knife.”
“Let’s have it.”
Trelawney reached under his chest, brought out a sheathed knife and handed it back to Dowland. Dowland lobbed it into the bushes a few yards away, moved back a little.
“Get up on your hands and knees now,” he said, “and we’ll make sure that’s all.”
He was careful about the search. Trelawney appeared passive enough at the moment, but he was not a man too take chances with. The AR suit turned out to be concealing a tailored-in two-way communicator along with as many testing and checking devices as an asteroid miner’s outfit, but no weapons. In a sealed pocket, obviously designed for it, was a five-inch atomic key. Dowland skid the heavy disk out with fingers that suddenly were shaking a little.
“Does this open your laboratory here?”
“Yes.”
Dowland detached the communicator’s transmission unit, and dropped it with the laboratory key into his pocket. “All right,” he said, “turn around and sit down.” He waited until Trelawney was facing him, then went on. “How long have you been watching the ranch?”
“About an hour.”
“Seen anyone—or anything?”
Trelawney regarded him quizzically, shook his head. “Not a thing.”
“I won’t waste time with too many questions just now,” Dowland said. “The laboratory is locked, and the machine you started in there apparently is still in operation. Your brother was found outside the laboratory yesterday morning, and may be dead or dying of internal radiation burns. He was alive and didn’t seem to be doing too badly when I left him and Miss Trelawney in the house last night to go looking for you. I had to drug Miss Trelawney—she isn’t a very cooperative person. She should still be asleep.
“Now, if I hadn’t showed up here just now, what did you intend to do?”
“I intended to stop the machine, of course,” Trelawney said. His expression hadn’t changed while Dowland was talking. “Preferably without involving the Solar Police Authority in our activities. But since you’ve now involved yourself, I urgently suggest that we go to the laboratory immediately and take care of the matter together.”
Dowland nodded. “That’s what I had in mind, Trelawney. Technically you’re under arrest, of course, and you’ll do whatever has to be done in there at gun point. Are we likely to run into any difficulties in the operation?”
“We very probably will,” Trelawney said thoughtfully, “and it’s just as probable that we won’t know what they are before we encounter them.”
Dowland stood up. “All right,” he said, “let’s go. We’ll stop off at the house on the way. I want to be sure that Miss Trelawney isn’t in a position to do something thoughtless.”
He emptied the magazine of Trelawney’s rifle before giving it to him. They started down to the house, Trelawney in the lead, the IPA gun in Dowland’s hand.
The house door was closed. Trelawney glanced back questioningly. Dowland said in a low voice, “It isn’t locked. Open it, go on in, and stop two steps inside the hallway. I’ll be behind you. They’re both in the living room.”
He followed Trelawney in, reaching back to draw the door shut again. There was a whisper of sound. Dowland half turned, incredulously felt something hard jab painfully against his backbone. He stood still.
“Drop your gun, Dowland.”
Jill Trelawney stood behind him. Her voice was as clear and un-slurred as if she had been awake for hours. Dowland cursed himself silently. She must have come around the corner of the house the instant they went in.
“My gun’s pointing at your uncle’s back,” he said. “Don’t do anything that might make me nervous, Miss Trelawney.”
“Don’t try to bluff Jill, friend,” Paul Trelawney advised him without turning his head. There was dry amusement in the man’s voice. “No one’s ever been able to do it. And she’s quite capable of concluding that trading an uncle for an SPA spy would still leave Terra ahead at this stage. But that shouldn’t be necessary. Jill?”
“Yes, Paul?”
“Give our policeman a moment to collect his wits. . . . This does put him in a very embarrassing position, after all. And I can use his help in the lab.”
“I’ll give you exactly three seconds, Dowland,” Jill said. “And you’d better believe that is not a bluff. One . . .”
Dowland dropped his gun.
* * *
The two Trelawneys held a brief, whispered conversation in the living room. Dowland, across the room from them, and under cover of two guns now, couldn’t catch much of it. Jill was in one of the radiation suits he’d brought in from the storeroom. Miguel was dead. He had still been unconscious when she woke up, and had stopped breathing minutes afterwards. Medic had done what it could; in this case it simply hadn’t been enough. Jill, however, had found another use for it. Dowland thought the possibility mightn’t have occurred to anyone else in similar circumstances; but he still should have thought of it when he left the house. As she began to struggle up from sleep, she remembered what Dowland had told her about medic, and somehow she had managed to inject a full ampule of it into her arm. It had brought her completely awake within minutes.
The murmured talk ended. The girl looked rather white and frightened now. Paul Trelawney’s face was expressionless as he came over to Dowland. Jill shoved the gun she had put on Dowland into her belt, picked up Paul’s hunting rifle, held it in her hands, and stood waiting.
“Here’s the procedure, Dowland,” Trelawney said. “Jill will go over to the lab with us, but stay outside on guard. She’ll watch . . .”
“Did you tell her,” Dowland interrupted; “to keep an eye out for something that stands twice as high as this house?”
Trelawney looked at him a moment. “So you ran into it,” he said. “I was wondering. It’s very curious that . . . well, one thing at a time. I cautioned her about it, as it happens. Now come over to the table.”
Dowland remained standing beside the table, while across from him Trelawney rapidly sketched out two diagrams on a piece of paper. The IPA gun lay on the table near Trelawney’s right hand. There might have been an outside chance of reaching it if one could have discounted Jill’s watchfulness. Which, Dowland decided, one couldn’t. And he’d seen her reload the rifle she was holding. He stayed where he was.
Trelawney shoved the paper across to him.
“Both diagrams represent our machine,” he said, “and they should give you a general idea of what you’ll see. This wheel here is at the far side of the console when we come in the door. The wheel is the flow regulator—the thing you have to keep in mind. There are scale markings on it. The major markings have the numbers one to five. Yesterday morning the regulator was set at five—full flow. Spin the wheel back to one, and the YM-400 that’s been producing the flow goes inert. Is that clear?”
Dowland nodded. “Clear enough.”
“After that,” Trelawney remarked, “we may be able to take things a little easier.”
“What’s the quantity you’re using in there?”
“No real reason I should tell you that, is there? But I will. The sixty-eight kilograms the Overgovernment’s been grieving about are under the machine platform. We’re using all of it.” He grinned briefly, perhaps at Dowland’s expression. “The type of job we had in mind required quantities in that class. Now, about yourself. We’re not murderers. Jill tells me you can’t be bribed—all right. What will happen, when this thing’s settled, is that you’ll have an attack of amnesia. Several months of your life will be permanently lost from your memory, including, of course, everything connected with this operation. Otherwise you won’t be harmed. Understand?”