A particularly juicy and entertaining bit, Nadreck thought, was the case of Narkor Base Hospital, in which four of the planet's most eminent surgeons decapitated every other person in the place—patients, nurses, orderlies, and all, with a fine disregard of age, sex, or condition—arranged the several heads, each upright and each facing due north, upon the tiled floor to spell the word "Revenge," and then hacked each other to death with scalpels.
These, and a thousand or more other events of similar technique, Nadreck tabulated and subjected to statistical analysis. Scattered so widely throughout such a vast volume of space, they had created little or no general disturbance; indeed, they had scarcely been noticed by Civilization as a whole. Collected, they made a truly staggering, a revolting and appalling total. Nadreck, however, was inherently incapable of being staggered, revolted, or appalled. That repulsive summation, a thing which in its massed horror would have shaken to the core—shocked almost into paralysis—any being possessing any shred of sympathy or tenderness, was to Nadreck simply an interesting and not too difficult problem in psychology and mathematics.
He placed each episode in space and in time, correlating each with all of its fellows in a space-time matrix. He determined the locus of centers and derived the equations of its most probable motion. He extended it by extrapolation in accordance with that equation. Then, assuring himself that his margin of error was as small as he could make it, he set out for a planet which Kandron would most probably visit at a time far enough in the future to enable him to receive the Onlonian.