"You have found a way to kill him?" She backed away, eyes wide.
"Yes! And it is all perfect. Perfect. One would think Albert had prepared everything for my benefit, so that I might kill him. Everything is perfect. His experiment is finished. It is a great success. And he deserves to die. You know that, don't you, Joha? Don't you?"
"Yes. I know it," she said.
Owen glared into the mist. "Fifteen years of study. My record was undeniably the highest in my study section. I might have graduated from World Tech this year, Joha! I might be in those Labs right now—instead of rotting here in the slime-pit! I took the final psychotic tests, weeks of mental probing with those damnable scanners digging into my brain. And Albert—my own twin brother—with his hypocritical love for me—he was the one who turned in the negative report! As Chief of the Psychometric Council he could have passed me. It was because he was my zygotic twin—because he knew me more intimately than even the scanners—that he was able to deny me entrance into the Labs! Now, Joha, doesn't he deserve to die?"
And Joha, who had heard this countless times before, made the customary reply. "Yes, Owen." And then added. "You have been waiting five years for him to perfect his Time-Encystment principle. This—suspended animation. You have said you would murder him, and take his place in the encystment chamber. But, Owen, are you sure you can escape detection long enough to get to him in order to kill him?"
"Yes, yes! It is all arranged. I can't fail. I must get to him. All these years of hell in this cesspool—they mustn't be wasted, Joha. They can't be wasted, can they?"
"No," she said softly. "They can't be. But—but I love you so much, Owen. When you leave, I shall be so lonely. I will probably die of loneliness."
He laughed. It was a broken, bitter laugh. It was the laughter of a mad man. The paranoiac who is guided by a strange genius for planned destruction.
The laughter died, and he seemed to have forgotten her. He paced back and forth across the tiny damp hut. "Now. Now it is time. Five years in hell—then paradise. Albert has perfected his time-encystment chamber. He has insisted, bless him, on undergoing the experiment himself. He insists against the will of the Tellurian Government, the Council, everyone. He is noble. 'It would not be fair,' he says, 'to allow another to take the chance. It is my experiment; and it is only right that I must be the guinea pig.' Ah, my brother is so noble, so fair, as are all hypocrites! How simple it is, Joha! I kill him. I become Professor Albert Baarslag. I enter the time-encystment chamber as my illustrious brother. I am put into a state of suspended animation. And I awake in five hundred years—a free man!"