Yet he could understand her emotion. It had been a long time since he had lived in Castletown. But he wished his last look at the old town had not been like this.
He turned toward Pudgy. "Now you can talk. Let's have it."
Pudgy said sullenly, "I've already talked too much. You didn't believe me, anyway."
Wales' face hardened. He said, "All right. The flames will reach this residential section in an hour. We'll leave you here."
It was enough. Their prisoner's doughy face seemed to fall apart a little.
"All right!" he cried. "But what's the use telling you when you just say I'm lying?"
"Nevertheless, give it to me from the first," Wales ordered.
Pudgy said, "Look, this whole scheme to keep the crummy no-goods here on Earth—that wasn't my idea. Five years ago, when they were first organizing Operation Doomsday, I got a job in the Evacuation Police. I did all right. Pretty soon I was a sergeant. Then—I began to hear things about the Evacuation from one of the other sergeants."
The man paused, then went on. "Eugene—that was my friend in the Police—told me that Fairlie and some other Evacuation officials needed some men for special secret police work. Said the work was so important and so secret nobody must know about it. I said okay, I'd like to be one of these special secret Evacuation Police. So they took me in. And Fairlie himself talked to me and a couple of others."