Something was going to happen to me here, I knew; and I was going to have nothing to say about it. The occurrence would be of that sort which precedes the finding of a body in a deserted building.
You’ve read in the papers, as I had, how the vice-president of the John Doe Company, making an inspection of a disused building prior to reopening it, was shocked to come upon the body of a man, evidently dead for some time. His clothing and so on; marks of identification and so on. The police state that the man undoubtedly met a violent end and prior to his death and so on. It is evident that the man was brought there by several others who used the building for—well, here I was to find out for what these normals used this building.
The elevator, which had descended after depositing us, reappeared with another group of normals and with a girl. Doris! Yes; there she was! If they had tied and gagged her while bringing her here, they had loosed her again; she stepped off the elevator and moved a little away from the normals. Not even her hands were tied; but she was in the same fix I was; that was clear.
They were letting her go to see what she would try to do, as they had let me. I got up from my seat on the desk; she came toward me. “Hello,” I said; and she said the same and sat in a chair near me. I slumped down again on the edge of the desk.
There was an average of eight of the normals about us in that big office; some kept sifting in and out, from and to a farther room, where there appeared to be somebody or something particularly important.
Doris glanced that way several times and they watched her; I watched her, too. She appeared alert and on edge with eyes bright and with lips thin and tight; but she didn’t show fright.
I’m not sure what I showed but I know what I felt. I was dull, not alert like her. One sort of nature seems to dull itself when in for what it can’t prevent; that was mine. I guessed that the “glass room” was over in that farther end of this floor.
During those three hours alone in that closet, I had spent a good deal of thought on the “glass room”; and, knowing that the scheme at the Sencort Trust had employed gas, naturally I set to fitting gas in the arrangements of the “glass room.” So now that I had seen this was a chemical factory, I was sure I was right. They had some ritual with gas for Doris and me. A rather elaborate ritual, if one were to judge by the time it took them to make ready. Or perhaps they were waiting for somebody.
A telephone instrument stood on the desk beside me. The last time I’d sat down, I had placed myself next it. Now I didn’t take it up; I merely moved my hand and lifted the receiver from the hook.
One of the normals saw me and made no move. He had no reason for worry; there was no response in the wire; the circuit was dead.