Steel's arm froze in mid-swing. He stared at the face above the collar he was holding as if he'd caught a ghost.
He had.
He was staring into the bespectacled eyes of a man who was supposed to have been dead fifteen long years—Hampton Stahl's dead partner, Lois Harmon's dead father—Dr. Albert Harmon....
Steel stood there holding Dr. Harmon's collar, fist poised, for a long crazy moment. The skull cap had fallen off, revealing the scientist's shaggy white hair. From his lined face, his gray eyes looked up at Steel, troubled but without fear.
"Well?" he said, as if the next move were entirely up to Steel. His voice was remarkably clear for a man of his age.
"Dr. Harmon...." Steel turned him loose and lowered his hand. "Maybe you'd better explain a few things, Doctor," he said shakily.
Instead of explaining, however, the old man shot a hand toward the video table—toward an alarm button.
Steel saw it just in time. He caught the hand and shoved the old man back into his chair. Then he scooped the volt gun from the other man's holster. "Dr. Harmon," he said, "finding you here when you're supposed to have been dead fifteen years explains a lot about this place. The police are going to be mighty interested." Moving around where he could keep his eye on the door as well as on the old man, he reached out and switched the video into the Earth frequency band. Dirk's face had already disappeared. "The police'll be here in about one hour," Steel said.
He twirled a dial to the frequency he'd arranged with Stahl's listener at the Vita-Heat Building. It was hard to believe that a man who had been so well loved as Dr. Harmon could have traded his reputation for a criminal career—but here he was. Obviously, he'd faked his own death and hidden here ever since—another brilliant mind that had followed pure science too far.