He looked so mournful that she walked over and kissed him.
"There's a good-by present, Diver. But we will meet regularly."
Finding him sitting with a pile of apple cores beside him, the doctor clicked his tongue reprovingly.
"Tell me, Doc, how could you stop me Diving?" asked Fred worriedly.
"Fill you full of vitamins and carbohydrates and alcohol and send you on a pleasure-cruise with a lot of accomplished women," said Dr. Howard Sprinnell promptly. "Or allow you to stuff yourself with apples, for a start. Now come along or I'll bar you from the exercise room."
Fred Williams followed him thoughtfully.
"By the way," the doctor said over his shoulder, "your wife thinks you're under arrest. You've been here four days so far and we can keep you another ten or so. After that you'll have to go back. You're on our payroll now, but you'd better keep your job. Or we can find you a heavier one, if you're not tired enough. We'll seal a miniature transmitter into your larynx under the skin before you leave, so that you can report audibly from wherever you are. Diving has the same effect on the body as sleep, you'll find, so you can do both at once. I'll grade off the injections before you leave here. Now this is the political field as we know it...."
They stood in a large lecture hall, filled with spaced models of the Solar System, set in the Milky Way and surrounded by the related galaxies.
"Here's the spiral in Andromeda," said the doctor, using a long pointer. "I understand you went there...."