He turned and walked out of the room with Murgatroyd piously marching behind him.
Outside, Calhoun said:
"As one medical man to another, maybe I shouldn't have done that! I doubt these invaders have a competent physician among them. But even he would be apt to think that that man had collapsed suddenly and directly into the coma of the plague. That polysulfate's an assisting anaesthetic. It's not used alone, because when you knock a man out with it he stays out for days. It's used just below the quantity that would affect a man, and then the least whiff of another anaesthetic puts him under, and he can be brought out fast and he's better off all around. But I've got this man knocked out! He'll stay unconscious for a week."
Murgatroyd piped, "Chee!"
"He won't die," said Calhoun grimly, "but he won't come out fighting—unless somebody wakes him earlier. And of course, he is a murderer!"
"Chee!" agreed Murgatroyd.
He reached up a furry paw and took hold of Calhoun's hand. They walked out into the street together.
It is notorious that the streets of a city at night are ghostly and strange. That is true of a city whose inhabitants are only asleep. There is more and worse of eeriness in a deserted city, whose inhabitants are dead. But a city which has never lived, which lies lifeless under the stars because its people never came to live in it—that has the most ghastly feel of all.
Calhoun and Murgatroyd walked hand in paw through such a place. That the invaders felt the same eeriness was presently proved. Calhoun found a place where a light shone and voices came out into the tiny, remote night sounds of Maris III. Men were drinking in an unnecessarily small room, as if crowding together to make up for the loneliness outside. In the still night they made a pigmy tumult with their voices. They banged drunkenly on a table and on the floor.
Calhoun stood in the doorway and held the paint-gun trigger down. He traversed the room twice. Whirling rings of invisible vapor filled the place. Men gasped.