It was locked, but there was a tantalizing hum of voices beyond it. He put his ear to the cold steel. The fruits of his eavesdropping were scanty but alarming.
“——cut ’em down mumble found someplace mumble.”
“——mumble never killed yet mumble prosthesis racket.”
“——Jones’s sake, it’s their lives or mumble mumble time to get scared mumble Peepeece are you?”
And then apparently the speakers moved out of range. Ross was cold with sweat, and there was an abnormal hollow in the pit of his stomach that breakfast would never fill.
He spun around as a Jones voice croaked painfully: “Hear anything good, stranger?”
The surgeon, looking very dilapidated, was sitting up and regarding him through bloodshot eyes. “They’re talking about killing us,” he said shortly.
“They are not really intelligent,” Sam Jones said wearily. “They were just bright enough to entangle me to the point where I had to work for them—and to keep me copiously supplied with that green stuff I haven’t the intelligence to use in moderation.”
Ross said, “How’d you like to break away from this?”
Sam Jones mutely extended his hand. It trembled like a leaf. He said, “For his own inscrutable reason, Jones grants me steadiness of hand during an operation designed to frustrate his grand design. He then overwhelms me with a titanic thirst for oblivion to my shame.”