Hughes laughed and his voice was hearty, "I kept telling Mr. Farradyne that he was too heavy with the medicine." Hughes poked Farradyne humorously on the shoulder. "Coryosis, Mr. Farradyne, is nowhere near as violent an illness as you have been led to believe. Our ancestors called it the common cold and most of them spent a few weeks each year fighting one form or another, frequently several forms at the same time. Sleep and isolation cured me. I'm quite all right now."
"You're certain?" Farradyne managed.
"I'll let any doctor on Pluto look down my throat," promised Hughes. "And I'll go back with you if he doesn't say I'm fit. I'm a bit pale, I admit, and I won't regain my color until we get back sunward, but I'm telling you that I am quite cured of my brief encounter with coryosis."
The spaceport bus came to a stop at that moment and Hughes, pausing to scratch his name on the plaque, thanked Farradyne for the thorough medication that had kept him quiet, got on the bus, waved and was whisked away.
Farradyne, stunned, could only wave like a reluctant schoolboy.
So Hughes-Brenner disappeared again, wandering away under the protection of a group of honest, unsuspecting human beings who would have been aghast at the first cry of villain against one of their number.
Farradyne felt like a seven-year-old who had just been trapped into admitting that he has been a naughty boy. But out of the maze of items one thing was obvious.
Hughes or Brenner or whatever he called himself was a very extraordinary man. He had been able to walk off the ship with his eyes bright and his system hale, when he should have been flat on his spine with a brainful of marcoleptine. And marcoleptine was one of the most completely paralyzing drugs that had ever been synthesized. Hughes had feigned his doped slumber and his helplessness because he had known that Farradyne would not attempt to ask questions until he had Hughes alone. He had also lulled Farradyne into thinking him drugged so that he could come out nice and easy to join his fellow-travelers in such a way as to turn Farradyne's own explanation against him. Then he had walked away without a murmur of dissent from Farradyne who had no legal right to raise a cry against him.
Hughes-Brenner was a very remarkable fellow.
Farradyne watched the truck bringing out his shipment of refined thorium ore. Outpointed, outsmarted, outnumbered, the evidence he had was so very meager. He sneered at himself. Evidence? It was more a mere belief.