Stan watched it with intense curiosity, then moved over to the bed. The bed clothes were rumpled but they weren't lying flat. They were bunched in spots—as if somebody might still be underneath them.
He held his heat gun in one hand and flicked the blankets aside with the other. Like the curtains, they ripped and powdered.
Beneath the blankets was a skeleton—a few tattered pieces of cloth lying inside the gaunt bones. "I see you've found Clark," Tanner said.
"Clark?"
Stan could feel the sweat pop out on his forehead. Nobody on Thusca had ever told him that a man could die and the flesh on his bones shrivel to dust all in one evening. He bent over the bed. The skeleton was that of a man, a very old man, whose bones had started to calcify at the joints. There was nothing about it to link it with William Clark.
The little man with the walrus moustache had been middle-aged. He hadn't been old, he certainly hadn't been senile to the point where his joints were hardening.
Then he saw the ring on one of the finger bones. He touched it gingerly and rubbed away the green verdigris. The same ring he had seen Clark toy with at the tavern.
But the age! The incredible age!
He turned to Tanner, questioning. The narrow-eyed, dapperly dressed man was standing at one side of the window, his heat gun cocked. He was staring steadily through the glass and didn't bother to turn around. His voice was hard.
"You want to know what it's all about, don't you, Martin? Well, come on over and take a look for yourself."