He took the hypodermic needle out of its case, squeezed out a pale drop of liquid and slid the point into the exposed vein of Boyle's forearm.
Boyle, watching the slow depression of the plunger, asked: "How long a period will this guarantee, in Earth time?"
"Seven hundred years," Fermiirig said. He withdrew the instrument and replaced it in its case, his liquid glance following Boyle's rising gesture with the freeze-gun. "At the end of that time, the treatment may be renewed if facilities are available."
Immortality!
"Then I won't need you any more," Boyle said, and rayed him down. "Nor these other two."
Locke, characteristically, sprang up and tried to shield Moira with his own body. "Boyle, what are you thinking of? You can't murder us without—"
"There's a very effective rapids a hundred yards down river," Boyle said. "You'll both be quite satisfactorily dead after going through it, I think. Possibly unrecognizable, too, though that doesn't matter particularly."
He was pressing the firing stud, slowly because something in the tension of the moment appealed to the sadism in his nature, when an Orderman's freeze-beam caught him from behind and dropped him stiffly beside Fermiirig.