Keeban strode into the glass room and pulled the cords. The ceiling closed and he came out. His normals stood about him, grinning. They took on an additional detachment of manner which I didn’t like at all; it was detachment from us—from Doris and me—that I mean.
She was keeping her nerve and she was standing steady. She was gazing into the glass room with a look which made me think that, though she’d known about this cabinet, she had never actually seen it before.
I haven’t mentioned its furnishings. The room had a bench with nothing on it; there was a table in the middle of the cabinet. Nothing was on that either, but from its position, and from the way that Doris and the normals looked at that, it had a much more menacing suggestion.
It was a narrow table, no wider than a couch; it was about the length of a couch. And somehow, though it was perfectly flat and hard, it suggested a couch. At least, I imagined myself spread out upon it. The reason I fancied this was simple. I was sure that they meant to put me into that cabinet; and the only place they could put me and tie me safely would be to bind me to that table.
Then they would pump in Stenewisc’s gas—his KX, which so competently had accounted for Costrelman and his butler and for the four guinea pigs which, but for me, might have been Lord Strathon and M. Géroud and Sencort and Teverson. But for Doris and me, I mean; for I knew—and Keeban and his normals knew—that if I had failed to warn Teverson, Doris was there to do it. Consequently, we were to get the gas now; and we were not to get it simply, but impressively as a part of a ceremony of punishment and discipline.
For Doris had done the double cross; she had “speiled” and “spouted”; and not only had she spoiled the biggest job this crowd ever had “on” but by her squeal or her willingness to squeal had made every man here a candidate for the electric chair. That was their judgment and their sentence against her.
It was not a fair judgment, nor a fair sentence, even from their own point of view, I thought. It was strange that, standing there and staring into the glass room, I angered at this more than anything else, that their sentence of her wasn’t fair. She never could have agreed to mix in murder; she had mixed with them only for counterfeiting, for her shoving of “the queer”; and through that contact, she had learned of the plot to kill which she could not stand for.
Other flashes of comprehension came to me there, too. Keeban was fast developing, I understood. He’d started, so far as I knew, only with robbery; then he’d run to shooting of old Win Scofield and, from that, to his attempt at the simultaneous gassing of the group appointed to gather in the Sencort directors’ room. Keeban had tried to carry Doris with him from counterfeiting into killing; he had failed. He must have been carrying some, or most, of these normals with him from smaller offenses into those which threatened “the chair.”
He could not simply have happened upon a group of normals going the exact gait he was going; he had to speed up some of them and keep them with him and impress them with the certainty of something worse than “the chair”, if any failed him. So he was giving “the glass room” to Doris and me, not merely for our punishment, but for an example to the others. And more of the others were arriving now. I heard footsteps and voices, a girl’s voice among them and her laugh. I turned about. Shirley, Win Scofield’s widow, had come with two young men beside her.
The sight of her brought me images of recollection. How I had seen her sing in her house that night before the shooting! How, like a cabaret Récamier, she had received me after her husband was dead! How I witnessed her dance at the Flamingo Feather that night she had stabbed at her partner, Keeban!