“Doctor,” Ivo said, stepping close. “I admired your planet, with its noodle plants and yellow trees.”

The serene gray eyes refocused. The firm jaw dropped; then, after a second or two, the lips parted. “Huh-huh-huh,” Johnson said. A trace of spittle overlapped one corner of his mouth.

“Hello,” Afra said distinctly. “Hel-lo.”

Johnson smiled, not closing his mouth. A waft of ordure touched them.

“That’s what he’s trying to say,” Afra explained. “Hello. He was always courteous.” She sniffed. “Oh-oh. Nurse!”

A young man in white appeared, a male nurse. “I’ll take care of it, Miss Summerfield,” he said. “Perhaps you’d better leave now.”

“Yes.” She led the way out of the infirmary. “They don’t have much control,” she said. “We’re trying to reeducate them, but there hasn’t been enough time yet to know how far they can recover. It’s a terrible thing that happened to them, and we still don’t—”

Brad was coming swiftly down the hall. “Crisis,” he said, joining them. “There’s an American senator coming, an ornery one. Someone leaked the mind-destroyer to him, and he means to investigate.”

“Is that bad?” Ivo asked.

“Considering that we haven’t released the information yet to anyone beyond the station, yes,” Brad said. “Don’t be fooled by our candor with you, Ivo. This is super-secret stuff. We’ve been fudging reports from all five victims, just to keep up appearances while we try to break this impasse. Until we crack it, no one leaves this station — no one who knows, I mean.”

“What about that man who brought me? Groton?”

“He can keep his mouth shut. But all he knew, then, was that I needed you, where to find you, and what to say to you once he got you alone.”

That explained the stalking. Groton hadn’t wanted to make contact in the crowd, though he had finally had to.

“But don’t misjudge him,” Afra said. “Harold and Beatryx are very warm people.”

Did that mean Groton was married? Ivo had not pictured that. It proved again how far off first impressions could be.

“Here’s the situation,” Brad said, bringing them to his room. “Senator Borland is on his way. He’s class-A trouble. Borland is a first-termer, but he’s on the make already for national publicity, and he’s ruthless. He isn’t stupid; in fact, there’s a distinct possibility he’s smart enough to get hooked by the destroyer sequence. It’s certain he’ll demand to see the show, and there will be merry hell if we try to fob off a substitute.”

“But you can’t show him the destroyer!” Afra exclaimed, alarmed.

“We can’t hold it from him, if he’s determined — and he is. He knows he’s on to something big, and he means to make worldwide headlines before he finishes with us. Kovonov put it to me straight: Borland is American, so he’s my baby. I have to neutralize him somehow until we can crack this thing open and get it under control, or the whole feculent mess will erupt.”

“When’s he due?” Ivo asked.

“Six hours from now. We only got the hint when he embarked, and it took until now to pin down his purpose. He’s a real old-fashioned loudmouth, but he can keep a secret when it pays him to and he’s no political amateur. He’s obviously had this in mind for some time, and now he’s coming to milk us for that vote-getting publicity.”

“Why not tell him the truth, then? If he’s that savvy, he should be willing to do something constructive for his votes, instead of—”

“The truth without the solution would wreck us — and put Borland on his party’s next Presidential ticket. He isn’t interested in our welfare, or in the future of space exploration. He’d be delighted to take credit for pulling America out of the macroscope.”

“But the other countries of the world would keep it going, wouldn’t they? Isn’t it under nominal UN control?”

“More than nominal. They might indeed — in which case we’d become a has-been power in a hurry, as other breakthroughs like my heat-shield are achieved. America can’t possibly match the alien science we know is there, once it becomes available. Or — the macroscope project might founder, frightened off by talk of a death-ray from space. The average populace has a profound distrust of advanced space science, perhaps because it doesn’t match the old, space-opera conception. People might accept the notion of astronauts plunging into space fearlessly in rockets, but the ramifications of relativistic cosmology and quantum physics—”

“How about just giving the senator what he wants — a gander at the sequence, if it comes to that?”

“What would it settle? Either it would pass him by, in which case he’d have ‘proof’ that we were killing off world-famous scientists by less exotic means than claimed — an international conspiracy, naturally — or it would bite him. Then we’d have five scientists and a U.S. senator to explain.”

Ivo shrugged. “I guess you’re stuck, then.”

“Our only chance is to crack the case before he gets here. For that we need Schön even more urgently.”

“There isn’t time to fetch him from Earth now,” Afra pointed out.

Brad did not reply.

“I’m not sure Schön would help, anyway,” Ivo said. “He might not care about America, or the macroscope.”

“What does he care about?” Afra demanded.

Brad cut off any reply. “Let’s take a break. We’re acting as though no one else in the station is concerned.”

Afra started to protest, but he put his ringer to her lips and forced her to subside. Ivo could see that she accepted from Brad what she would have taken from no other person. On the face of it, her objection was reasonable. Brad had dropped a bomb in their laps with a six-hour fuse, then called intermission as though the matter was of indifferent concern. How could this spirited creature know that Brad had already done his utmost to summon the cavalry, or that the break he recommended was hardly the nonchalance it appeared? Yet she trusted him.

Oh, to have a girl like that…

The “break” was in the form of a rather elegant dinner with the Grotons. Ivo had assumed that Harold Groton was an ad hoc emissary, and had to revise his impression of the man once again. Brad’s social taste was always good.

Beatryx, Harold’s wife, was a plumpish, smiling woman somewhere in her forties, light-haired and light-eyed but probably never lovely in the physical sense. Their apartment was quite neat in an unobtrusive manner, as though the housekeeper cared more for convenience than for appearance, in contrast to the tale told by Afra’s habitat. Ivo had the impression of stepping into an Earth-building, and thought he might glimpse a street or yard if he looked out a window. If he could find a window.

He found something better. The Grotons were situated at the edge of the torus, where the white-walls would be on a tire. The station was oriented broadside to the sun, so that one wall continuously faced the light and the other remained in shadow. This was the dark side. There was a large port looking directly out into the spatial night.

“It varies with the season,” Brad said, noting the direction of his attention. “The station is a planet, technically, and does have an annual cycle. It rotates to provide weight for the personnel, and that rotation gives it gyroscopic stability. It maintains its orientation in an absolute sense while revolving about the sun, so its day becomes sidereal. Three months from now that view will be twilight, and in six it will be full noon, and they’ll have to block it off with hefty filters.”

Ivo looked out at the uncannily steady stars of this arctic night. “They’re moving!” he exclaimed, then felt foolish. Of course they seemed to be moving; the torus was spinning, so that the heaven as viewed from this window rolled over in a complete circle every few minutes as though tacked to a cosmic hub. They were the same stars and constellations he had seen from the macroscope housing, but this porthole vantage changed his perspective entirely. It was, literally, a dizzying sight.