The doors were all unlocked, and he moved down the line without alarm, like a mechanical giant preceded by a sweeping, nervous flow of light. Such he might from the outside have appeared to be, but the man within himself was more like a cat scenting for danger, all muscles and senses delicately tuned to alertness. Door by door, a cautious and thorough inspection; but he found nothing of danger. All the rooms of that wing were used merely for stores and equipment, and they were quite silent and deserted. When he came at last to its end, Carse knew that the wing was safe.
He paused a minute before the laboratory door. He had expected to find it locked, and that he would have to seek other means of entrance; but it was not. By pushing softly against it, it easily gave inward on silent well-oiled hinges. He entered.
arse found himself in a place of memories, and they were sharp and painful in his brain as he stood there. Here so much had happened: here death, and even more than death, had been, and was, so near!
The high-walled circular room was dimly lit by daylight tubes from above. The damage he, Carse, had wrought when besieged in it, a week before, had all been repaired. The place was deserted—it seemed even desolate—but in Carse's moment of memory it was peopled. There had been the tall, graceful shape in black silk; there the operating table and the frail old man bound on it; there the four other men, white men and gowned in the smocks of surgeons, but whose faces were lifeless and expressionless. Dr. Ku Sui and his four assistant surgeons and his intended victim, Master Scientist Eliot Leithgow....
They were all gone from the room now, but there was in it one thing of life that had been there before. It lay behind the inlaid screen which, standing on roller-legs, lay along the wall at one place. The Hawk did not look behind the screen. He could see under it, to know that no one lurked there. He knew what it was meant to conceal. There his promise lay.
But his promise could not be fulfilled immediately. There were four wings to the building, four doors leading into the laboratory, and he had inspected but one.
An open door to his right revealed a corridor similar to the one he had reconnoitered. He repeated down it his methodical search and found no one. Then he returned to the laboratory.
Surely there were men somewhere! Surely someone was behind one of the two closed doors remaining! Gun and flashlight still at the ready, Carse listened a moment at the nearest one.