Brenner laughed and his voice was hearty. "I kept telling Mr. Farradyne that he was going a bit heavy on the rest-cure. I'm really quite all right." He slapped Farradyne on the shoulder. "Coryosis is not as dangerous as the books say it is," he said. "Certainly it is nothing to keep a good man flat on his back!"
"But—"
"Sleep and isolation did the job," chuckled Brenner. "And now I'll be happy to let any doctor on Pluto look down my throat. I'm a bit pale, I suppose, but I assure you I'm quite well again."
He climbed into the spaceport bus, still thanking Farradyne for the medication that had kept him quiet, and waved back gayly as the bus sped off across the Pluto Spaceport.
Brenner had become 'Hughes' again to his friends, and had disappeared under the protection of a group of people above reproach.
He was a very extraordinary gentleman, Farradyne thought glumly; 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 brain full of marcoleptine—one of the most completely paralyzing drugs that had ever been synthesized. He had feigned doped slumber and helplessness, then had walked away, knowing that Farradyne had not the legal right to raise a cry against him.
Hughes was a very remarkable fellow.
Farradyne watched the truck bringing out his shipment of refined thorium ore, with a sneer directed at himself. Outpointed and outsmarted—the evidence he had was very meager. Evidence? It was more of a belief than evidence.
What did he have to fit together? A common pattern of love-lotus background. A man who died with a discordant moan. A man who grunted in a polytonal when surprised by a woman, and who could take a paralyzing dose of marcoleptine and then walk out jauntily. An apparent well-to-do family with a proud place in the community, and a girl who worked hand-in-glove with love-lotus operators but who had never had her nose in one of the hellish things.