Not that he could have gone anywhere much. He was in a bare little metal room, lying on the grating that supplanted decks in most modern spacers. Not much point in getting up, he realized, and merely hitched himself into a more comfortable position in a corner, moving as well as he could under the unaccustomed drag of full Earth gravity.
He was in the lock-room, the chamber before an airlock. He felt vaguely unhappy. Whatever was coming, he was sure he wouldn't like it.
Behind him a heavy door eased open. Boots thumped hollowly on the grids and a familiar voice sounded, echoing from the bare metal walls. "Hello, MacCauley. How's the head?"
"Go to hell," Mac suggested. He craned his neck and stared full into Kittrell's face. There was a curious mixture of emotions there; faint sorrow, an unpleasant sort of crooked leer, and an air of boredom—each was visible. Kittrell shrugged.
"I guess you know what you're up against?"
"Sure." MacCauley tried to shrug, too, but succeeded only in tearing a patch of skin from his wrists where the wire bonds were tightest. "You're going to shove me out."
"I'm afraid so. Believe me, I'd rather not. I think you're a good chap; once I wanted to be like you—loyal to the service. They stuck me out here and made a desk clerk of me, when I would have given my arm to do some real work. I got a good salary; there was prestige enough whenever I could get back to Boston and show off. It was a good job, in a way. But there was nothing to do. Then I intercepted a load of narcophene. Like everybody else, I thought I could beat it. I didn't. I tried it and couldn't stop."
He stopped abruptly and scanned MacCauley's face through narrowed eyes. "You see how it is?" he questioned.
MacCauley tried to stall for time. Tensing his chest muscles against the bruises, he said, "Give me a cigarette, Kittrell? That's the usual privilege of the condemned man." The lunatic obligingly popped a brown-paper cylinder between his lips, squeezed the tip to light it. Mac suddenly heard more footsteps, lighter ones but many of them. "What's that?"
"Just my Kiddies," the dope peddler explained, as a dozen of them trotted into the room and ranged themselves, immobile, along the walls. "They've never seen an air-breather—that's you—in empty space, and they don't believe it will be fatal. You don't mind if they watch, do you?"