“We’ll let you guess,” said Fairchild.
Shock upon shock had been too much for the girl’s overstrained nerves. She fainted quietly and Ryder eased her down to the cold steel floor.
“Can’t you give her a better cell than this?” he protested then. “There’s no . . . it isn’t decent!”
“You’ll find food and water, and that’s enough.” Graves laughed coarsely. “You won’t live long, so don’t worry about conveniences. But keep still. If you want to know what’s going on, you can listen, but one more word out of you and I cut the circuit. Go ahead, Doc, with what you were going to say.”
“There was a fault in the rock. Very small, but a little of the finest smoke seeped through. Barney must have been a sniffer before to be able to smell the trace of the stuff that was drifting down the hill. I’m having the whole cave tested with a leak-detector and sealed bottle-tight. The record can stand it that Barney—he was a snake-tender, you know—died of snake-bite. That’s almost the truth, too, by the way.”
“Fair enough. Now, how about these two?”
“Um . . . m. We’ve got to hold the risk at absolute minimum.” Fairchild pondered briefly. “We can’t disintegrate them this month, that’s sure. They’ve got to be found dead, and our books are full. We’ll have to keep them alive—where they are now is as good a place as any—for a week.”
“Why alive? We’ve kept stiffs in cold storage before now.”
“Too chancey. Dead tissues change too much. You weren’t courting investigation then; now we are. We’ve got to keep our noses clean. How about this? They couldn’t wait any longer and got married today. You, big-hearted philanthropist that you are, told them they could take their two weeks vacation now for a honeymoon—you’d square it with their department heads. They come back in about ten days, to get settled; go up the valley to see the vortex; and out. Anything in that set-up we can’t fake a cover for?”
“It looks perfect to me. We’ll let ’em enjoy life for ten days, right where they are now. Hear that, Ryder?”