"Your demand is just," Fradin faltered. "I fear in the heat of argument I made statements I do not care to support. I do not choose to produce the experimental evidence that I have."
He didn't say another word. Instead, he turned and walked off the platform, going out through a door at the back. Nor did he enter the lecture hall where the meeting was being held. He walked out of the room.
And he didn't come back.
Why had he refused to produce the evidence that he had? What had scared him?
Questions were buzzing like gadflies in my mind. There was one particularly persistent gadfly. Fradin had said something of which I had almost caught the significance. Almost, but not quite. The significant thing he had said kept buzzing in the back of my mind, but I couldn't quite put a mental finger on it....
Then I remembered it.
I went out of that room at a dead run. I went up over the speaker's platform and through the door Fradin had taken. How I did want to talk to that tortured man!
What he had said, letting it slip accidentally, added up to one of the biggest stories that ever splashed across the front page of a newspaper. I had come down here looking for a human interest yarn. Instead I had run straight into a story that could easily set the world on fire, if I could find Fradin and make him talk.
I didn't doubt that I would find him. He couldn't have gotten far away. He hadn't had time. Not five minutes had passed after he had walked off the platform until I was following him.
The door opened into a long hall, and in that hall I found Fradin. He was down at the far end, getting into an elevator. A tall, thin individual was with him.