“You’ve thought a great deal about this,” Wald said slowly. “I dislike to think of what might have happened had some less conscientious person stumbled on the beep.”
“That wasn’t in the cards,” Dana said.
In the ensuing quiet, Weinbaum felt a faint, irrational sense of let-down, of something which had promised more than had been deliveredrather like the taste of fresh bread as compared to its smell, or the discovery that Thor Wald’s Swedish “folk song” Nat-og-Dag was only Cole Porter’s Night and Day in another language. He recognized the feeling: it was the usual emotion of the hunter when the hunt is over, the born detective’s professional version of the past coitum tristre. After looking at the smiling, supple Dana Lje a moment more, however, he was almost content.
“There’s one more thing,” he said. “I don’t want to be insufferably skeptical about thisbut I want to see it work.
Thor, can we set up a sampling and smearing device such as Dana describes and run a test?”
“In fifteen minutes,” Dr. Wald said. “We have most of the unit in already assembled form on our big ultrawave receiver, and it shouldn’t take any effort to add a high-speed tape unit to it. I’ll do it right now.”
He went out. Weinbaum and Dana looked at each other for a moment, rather like strange cats. Then the security officer got up, with what he knew to be an air of somewhat grim determination, and seized his fiancee’s hands, anticipating a struggle.
That first kiss was, by intention at least, mostly pro forma. But by the time Wald padded back into the office, the letter had been pretty thoroughly superseded by the spirit.