He looked up at me for a moment with a killing rage in his eyes, but I didn't give him a chance to get his breath back. For the barest instant, though, if he had been quick enough, he might have succeeded in getting to his feet and lashing out at me, for I saw something on the opposite side of the room that seemed almost too good to be true, and I took three full seconds out to stare at it.
It was a big tele-communicator screen—just the kind of screen I had been sure I'd find somewhere in the plant, but hardly in Wendel's private office. The fact that Sherwood had one in his office was not quite so surprising, for Sherwood's custodianship of thermonuclear weapons had made him more communication-conscious.
I'd counted on being able to persuade Wendel to accompany me to wherever the plant's screen happened to be located, after I'd had a serious talk with him. But since he hadn't wanted me to have a talk with him until he'd done his best to get me killed or crippled for life, and I would now have to keep him boxed up in his office by force while we conducted the talk, having the screen so accessible was one hell of a lucky break.
"Shut the door," I told Lynton. "And lock it."
I waited until Lynton had complied, my hands on Wendel's shoulders with so fierce a clamp-hold that he gave up trying to rise.
"You'll never get out of here alive!" he choked. "If you think—"
"Don't press your luck, Wendel," I said, warningly. "I might be tempted to break your neck."
"That insignia you're wearing doesn't mean a thing now, Graham. Don't you understand? You couldn't command a fly to crawl over a bread crumb. The Wendel Combine is taking over the Colony."
"Not a fly, Wendel," I said. "The Wendel Combine. A big boa constrictor has nothing in common with a fly and I'm not interested in bread crumbs. And this will surprise you. You're going to do the commanding. You're going to command the boa constrictor to start disgorging—every kill it's ever swallowed. It's going to flatten itself out until it's just a mass of cold mottled skin, which the Board will know how to deal with."
"Who's going to make me?"