"Sorry," the operator said. "I've used too much power already. Have to give the generators a chance to build it up again."
Nodding, I turned and motioned to Karn. We went back downstairs.
"That explains something at any rate," the old prospector said. "But how about that Red spot fever?"
On Jimmy Baker's desk was a large file marked: FEVER VICTIMS. I opened it and found it contained the case histories of those men who had been attacked by the strange malady.
Reading them over, I was struck by one detail. Each patient had received the first symptoms, not while working in the mines, but while sleeping or lounging in the barracks.
Five minutes later Karn and I were striding down a white ramp that led to the nearest barracks. The building came into sight, a low rectangular structure, dome-roofed to withstand the violent winds.
Inside double tiers of bunks stretched along either wall. In those bunks some thirty men lay sleeping.
The far wall was taken up by a huge window of denvo-quartz. As I stood there, something suddenly caught Ezra Karn's eye. He began to walk toward that window.
"Look here," he said.
Six feet up on that window a small almost imperceptible button of dull metal had been wedged into an aperture cut in the quartz. The central part of the button appeared to be a powerful lens of some kind, and as I seized it and pulled it loose, I felt the hum of tiny clock work.