“Thanks a lot.”
“Not at all. Front!” As he let himself be led away, Don suddenly realized that he was groggy. The big foyer clock told him that it was already tomorrow, had been for hours in fact—he was paying seven-fifty an hour, about, for the privilege of a bed, but the way he felt he would have paid more than that simply to crawl into a hole.
He did not go immediately to bed. The Caravansary was a luxury hotel; even its “cheap” rooms had the minimums of civilized living. He adjusted the bath for a cycling hot sitz, threw off his clothes, and let the foaming water soothe him. After a bit he changed the pattern and floated in tepid stillness.
He came to with a start and got out. Ten minutes later, dried, powdered, and tingling with massage, he stepped back into the bedroom feeling almost restored. The ranch school had been intentionally monastic, old-style beds and mere showers; that bath was worth the price of the room.
The delivery chute’s annunciator shone green; he opened it and found three items. The first was a largish package sealed in plastic and marked “CARAVANSARY COURTESY KIT”; it contained a comb and toothbrush, a sleeping pill, a headache powder, a story film for the bed’s ceiling projector, a New Chicago News, and a breakfast menu. The second item was a card from his roommate; the third item was a small package, a common mailing tube. The card read: Dear Don, A package came for you on the P.M.—I got the Head to let me run it into Alb-Q-Q. Squinty is taking over Lazy. Must sign off; I’ve got to land this heap. All the best, Jack.
Good old Jack, he said to himself, and picked up the mailing tube. He looked at the return address and realized with something of a shock that this must be the package over which Dr. Jefferson had been so much concerned, the package which apparently had led to his death. He stared at it and wondered if it could be true that a citizen could he dragged out of his own home, then so maltreated that he died.
Was the man he had had dinner with only hours ago really dead? Or had the security cop lied to him for some reason of his own?
Part of it was certainly true; he had seen them waiting to arrest the doctor—why, he himself had been arrested and threatened and questioned, and had had his baggage virtually stolen from him, for nothing! He hadn’t been doing a thing, not a confounded thing, just going about his lawful business.
Suddenly he was shaking with anger. He had let himself be pushed around; he made a solemn vow never to let it happen again. He could see now that there were half a dozen places where he should have been stubborn. If he had fought right at the outset, Dr. Jefferson might be alive—if he actually were dead, he amended.
But he had let himself be bulldozed by the odds against him. He promised himself never again to pay any attention to the odds, but only to the issues.
He controlled his trembling and opened the package.
A moment later he was looking baffled. The tube contained nothing but a man’s ring, a cheap plastic affair such as one might find on any souvenir counter. An old English capital “H” framed with a circle had been pressed into the face of it and the grooves filled with white enamel. It was flashy but commonplace and of no value at all to any but the childish and vulgar in taste.
Don turned it over and over, then put it aside and sorted through its wrappings. There was nothing else, not even a message, just plain white paper used to pack the ring. Don thought it over.
The ring obviously was not the cause of the excitement; it seemed to him that there were just two possibilities: first, that the security police had switched packages—if they had, there was probably nothing he could do about it—and second, if the ring were unimportant but it was the right package, then the rest of the contents of the package must be important even though it looked like nothing but blank paper.