I get spotted, the men try to snatch me, and they all get vaporized by the sugarfoot, who runs off. I follow, and next thing, another mob is on my heels. Same bit with the sugarfoot. Zzzzzzurp! No more men! Only this time it doesn't run off. It dallies a bit, and tries to get me to go somewhere with it. Why it has suddenly decided to take me along, I don't know, because it had the opportunity much earlier, when it made its first massacre.
However, I decline the invitation, and, like a good boy, report all events to Security. Upshot: I am stashed in a solid rock cell, possibly never to emerge alive.
I lay there pondering these facts. One thing seemed clear: I didn't know the angles. What was Snow's angle? Or Baxter's? Or the sugarfoot's? Or the mob's?
Hell, what was mine?
I snorted and sat up, rubbing my neck. I had a headache coming on, and it felt like the start of a migraine, an occupational hazard with ad men. I tried rotating my head on my neck, a good relaxer for those tensed neck muscles. And then I noticed that I was perspiring like mad, and that my throat felt hot inside.
With a sick apprehension, I sprang up and thrust my nose near the grill on the wall. Nothing. I tried poking a finger between the latticework. It was stopped by a metal plate.
The air-supply grill was sealed off. In that tiny cell, I had maybe two hours more of breathing time. After that—Well, I wouldn't be feeling my oxygen-starvation headache any more.
I sat down on the cot once more and scowled at the floor. I was tired of puzzles, but even this didn't make sense! Why take the time and trouble to smother me?
A collapser could wipe me off the slate in seconds. No annoying corpus delicti cluttering up the premises. Not even a bit of fingernail left, nothing to incriminate the murderers. So they smother me.
But why kill me, for heaven's sake? It couldn't be to keep me from telling what I knew! I didn't know a damned thing. Except that Baxter, motive unknown, must have left Earth immediately after I spoke to him on that interplanetary hook-up. Or was it interplanetary? Come to think of it, he could've been in the next room when I talked to him. Damn. It was baffling.