The security police had felt that the TV system was a fine idea. There was no way of predicting what a scientist might discover, or when he would find it out. Perhaps it would be a new weapon that would enable them to conquer the world. This was what scientists were for. This was the reason the whole vast institute existed here in secret.
"Nocher?" the loudspeaker inquired again.
"He went—that way." Holder said quickly, pointing toward an open door.
The loudspeaker went silent. Holder hastily turned his attention back to the lab table, where an experiment was in progress. His head was a whirl. It seemed to him that the whole center of his cranium was a ball of light. He knew beyond a doubt that this correlated with his ability to disintegrate Nocher. The next problem would be to test the process, in secret, and discover its limits, if any. Did it have any limits? A body, flesh, bone, blood, had gone—like that. He went from the table to his desk. With a knowledge that the TV camera was watching every move he made, he pretended to be busy studying a sheaf of reports on the experiment in progress. From the back of his desk, a photograph with three smiling faces looked at him—Marie and Johnny and Teresa. His wife and their two kids. They were here too, in his apartment, hostages for his good behavior and for his efficient performance.
The three faces in the photograph were the biggest reason why he hated Nocher, and all of Nocher's kind and all that Nocher had stood for.
They had been vacationing in the Swiss Alps two years before when all four had been kidnapped. It had been as simple as that. An American scientist and his family had vanished from Switzerland. Presumably they had been taken behind the Iron Curtain but no one in America knew this for certain. Nor would anyone in the western world have been able to do anything about it if they had known the facts. Holder assumed that a search had been made for him. Possibly a protest had been lodged with the Russian government. If so, like so many other protests, it had come to nothing. Power was all that was respected in this part of the world.
He grinned to himself. Since power was all they respected, he would show them some!
He looked up. An armed guard, one of the hated security police, had entered the room.
"The commandant orders your presence," the guard said.