Apparently it was on the way in that I had been spotted, for Lawton said thoughtfully, "Let's take a look."
We took a couple of battered expediters with us—I didn't regard them as exactly necessary, but I couldn't see how I could tell Lawton that. The elevators were working again, so we came out in a slightly different part of the vaults than I had seen before; it was not entirely acting on my part when I peered around.
Lawton accepted my statement that I wasn't quite sure where I had heard the noises, without argument. He accepted it all too easily; he sent the expediters scouring the corridors at random.
And, of course, one of them found the pool of spilled fluorescence from the hypodermic needle I had knocked out of Rena's hand.
We stood there peering at the smear of purplish color, the shattered hypodermic, Rena's gas gun.
Lawton mused, "Looks like someone's trying to wake up some of our sleepers. That's our standard antilytic, if I'm not mistaken." He scanned the shelves. "Nobody missing around here. Take a look in the next few sections of the tiers."
The expediters saluted and left.
"They won't find anyone missing," Lawton predicted. "And that means we have to take a physical inventory of the whole damn clinic. Over eighty thousand suspendees to check." He made a disgusted noise.
I said, "Maybe they were scared off before they finished."