There was a clamor above us now, and I thought I heard Littlefield's voice raised in a shout, followed by a scream of terror. Possibly someone had seen me slump and jumped to the conclusion that the spiral was collapsing.
There was no chance of that, so I couldn't have cared less how close to panic the people up above were. Right at the moment it didn't concern me. I was only concerned with what Joan might find when her fingers started probing. If a bullet had ploughed into me and her fingers came away wetly red I'd know for sure whether it was as bad as I feared. It helps to know, when there's a tormenting uncertainty in your mind along with the physical pain.
I could feel her hand fumbling with my shirt, getting it loosened. Then they were moving up, down and across my back. Cautiously, gently, with the nurselike competence which women usually manage to summon to their aid in an emergency, no matter how shaken they are.
After a moment her fingers stopped moving and she drew in her breath sharply.
Being in agony and on the verge of blacking out carries with it a penalty. You can't always hear what someone close to you may be saying, even when it's of life-and-death importance.
I caught a few words, however, just enough to know it was a dart before I lost consciousness. And her look told me what kind of dart it was.
Or maybe it wasn't her look, just what I knew about darts in general. The kind of dart that's in common use today as a weapon is quite unlike the primitive blowgun darts of South American Indians a century ago. Science, like everything else, progresses, especially in the field of weapons. The modern dart is just as simple, in a way, but you take it out of a wafer-thin metal case as you would a hypodermic needle and you fit the three parts very carefully together and you use a liquid propellant to blow it out of a very slender tube of gleaming metal. And there's space in it for poison.
It's handier, tidier than the small robot killers with their intricate internal gadgetry, even though it requires precision aiming and you're much more likely to be observed while you're taking aim, and be compelled to pay the customary penalty for murder.
I'd managed to roll back on my side, and lying then in agony, trying to catch what Joan was saying, sort of telescoped all that for me, so that it registered in my mind in a more rapid way than it does when you're trying to explain it academically. Everything I knew about darts came sweeping into my mind, and I remembered something else that helped to explain the agony.
The modern dart changes shape the instant it enters a man's body, opening up like a pair of six-bladed scissors, cutting, slashing, severing veins and muscles and nerve ganglions. And if it strikes an artery—