Grace watched the perspiring face of the man on the bed and dug her fingers into her palms, suffering in unison with him as he twitched and contorted the muscles of his face. Their Goon escort had departed, many minutes before, and Bodger had not awakened. Grace had looked in vain for something resembling medicine. None was to be seen in his bathroom, in his bureau drawers, in his closet—she'd checked the contents of the leather case there hopefully, then had dropped the puzzling device she'd found inside it back with disappointment and dismay—nor was there anything but the usual apportionment of foodstuffs in the kitchen. "Wake up, Mr. Bodger...." she said, more as a frantic prayer than actual address. "Please wake up!"
Bodger just lay there, however, moaning softly in his inexplicable coma, the salt sweat pouring from his face and neck and staining the coverlet beneath him. Grace bent forward and loosened his collar, then went back into the bathroom for a towel to wipe some of the moisture from his skin. On her way out again, towel in hand, she saw a glitter of something in the sink, and went closer. The broken remains of a water tumbler lay there, glinting sharply. Something gummy had dried and clung to the jagged shards there, something that certainly wasn't water. Grace frowned, and looked about her at the tiled walls of the room.
If that was Bodger's medicine on the broken glass—then he had taken it here, in the bathroom, she reasoned. If this were his accustomed spot to take it—The medicine should be near at hand, shouldn't it? She could see no point in his carrying it all the way in here from some other part of the Unit. She looked more closely at the surfaces of the individual tiles, noting with discouragement that the binding compound between the squares was solidly unbroken; no hope for a secret panel there.... But the mirror—!
Inset in a polished metal rectangle, its edges were out of sight. It might not be as securely in place as it seemed. Grace placed her fingers firmly against its surface and tried to slide it up or down or sidewards. It shifted a minute fraction of an inch, and held. But that merely meant a lock of some kind; even a slight shifting showed that it was not inset into the binding compound as the tiles were. The secret of unlocking the mirror lay with Bodger, however, and—she mused ruefully—if he were awake, she wouldn't need to know the secret.
She looked through the open doorway at the tortured form of the man on the bed, and made her decision. Wrapping the towel she held tightly about one fist, she hammered and punched at the surface of the mirror. The fifth blow sent an erratic craze through the glass, and the sixth burst it into a shower of gleaming fragments, leaving a raggedly round hole when she withdrew her hand from the towel, then tugged the towel itself free from where it had snagged on the broken ends. Behind the gaping hole, the side of a glass jar showed, and Grace reached gingerly through the sharp teeth of the opening and withdrew it.
There was no label on the bottle, hence no information regarding proper dosage. Grace would have to guess at that.
