Beside him, Carol murmured, "It's going to be all right, Dave. Everything's going to be all right."
She placed a hand on his forehead, then looked worriedly at the director. Stewart, however, wasn't even interested in the fact that she had misinterpreted his numb silence.
For the thousandth time he searched his mind for all its hidden knowledge on the alien space ship, on how he had gained that information, how he could have forgotten it.
Carol tried to console him again, as though he were a child. "We'll get home all right. Then we'll get out of the Bureau. We'll go to Terra—you and I—and you'll see how happy we'll be."
On any other occasion, those words would have sent him into handsprings. But now they just bounced off his traumatic shield.
Then, suddenly, he had it. He knew what had happened. He rose, fully in command of himself finally, and struggled out of the heavily-shielded space suit. Then he faced the others.
"I've known all along," he said, "that we might be attacked out here by an alien ship."
Carol gasped. McAllister lunged erect. Mortimer, puzzled, started forward. But Randall stopped him.
"Wait," the director urged. "We may want to hear this."
"I said," Stewart continued, "that I knew it all along. But I didn't know I knew it."