And yet it was dying!
“Almost empty,” Andy Persons’ quiet, garbled voice said into the tunnel.
Clenching his teeth, McDonough hitched himself into the air lock again and tried to tap the fading thoughts on a higher frequency. But there was simply nothing to hear or see, though with a brain so strong, there should have been, at as short a range as this. And it was peculiar, too, that the visual dream never changed. The flow of thoughts in a powerful human mind is bewilderingly rapid; it takes weeks of analysis by specialists before its essential pattern emerges.
This mind, on the other hand, had been holding tenaciously to this one thoughtcomplicated though it wasfor a minimum of two hours. A truly subidiot performancebeing broadcast with all the drive of a super genius.
Nothing in the cookbook provided McDonough with any precedent for it.
The suited figure was now slumped against the side of the empty tank, and the shades inside the toposcope goggles suddenly began to be distorted with regular, wrenching blurs: pain waves. A test at the level of the theta waves confirmed it; the unknown brain was responding to the pain with terrible. knots of rage, real blasts of it, so strong and un-controlled that McDonough could not endure them for more than a second. His hand was shaking so hard that he could hardly tune back to the gamma level again.
“We should have left the oil there,” he whispered. “We’ve moved him too much. The internal injuries are going to kill him in a few minutes.”
“We couldn’t let him drown, you said so yourself,” Persons said practically. “Look, there’s a seam on this tank that looks like a torsion seal. If we break it, it ought to open up like a tired clam. Then we can get him out of here.”