"Good God!" I said. "So that's why—No ... no. It doesn't quite explain why just the sight of Helen Barclay emerging from the robot enraged him the way it did. Just the fact that there was a woman stowaway on Board shouldn't have angered him at all. It wasn't his headache, because he was merely masquerading as a crewman. Even a man who felt some responsibility in the matter would have only been a little angered."
Littlefield nodded. "Don't think that hasn't occurred to me. If he'd never set eyes on her before, or had no idea who she was ... it's hard to see why he should have become enraged, as you say. That's why I've gone to such lengths to make sure she was telling us the full truth when she explained why getting to Mars was so important to her."
He didn't have to read from the paper he was still holding to help me recall in detail everything she'd said during that part of the question-and-answer session. It had made too deep an impression on me. It had also struck a vital nerve, because it was tied in with my assignment. Not directly, because I could have completed my big job without so much as talking to her again. But she was going to Mars because of something that Wendel Atomics had done.
Wendel Atomics was the exposed nerve, because anything that had to do with the Martian power combines was of vital interest to me, if only on the general information level.
In her case it was a personal matter, just between Wendel and herself. A very small matter to Wendel but overwhelmingly important to her.
Her brother, an electronic engineer, was dying by inches in a Wendel laboratory. Slow, radio-active poisoning meant very little to Wendel Atomics apparently, when just one small human cog was afflicted with it and they still needed his services.
So she had used her own knowledge of electronics and a very great resourcefulness and a high I.Q. to stow away in a cybernetic robot and was on her way to Mars to see what a woman of courage, entirely alone, could do to save the life of the only brother she had.
She had tried to get a clearance from the Board and failed and that explained how she happened to be in the New Chicago spaceport bar when my own life had been in even more immediate danger ... because slow, radio-active poisoning takes a long time to kill and if you can stop it in time there's always a chance that the victim will recover.
"I've been checking up ever since you left," Littlefield was saying. "I managed to get through to Earth on the needle frequencies and Trilling knows now that you showed me the silver bird. The code I used to tell him that was too complicated to be broken by the big-brained inhabitants of Alpha Centauri's third planet, if—as seems unlikely—such a planet exists."
"And you didn't even tell me," I said. "I suppose I should be burned up about it."