“Frankly,” Norton told him, “it’s the first time I ever ran across a thing I couldn’t fix. Ask me anything else you want to, senator, and I’ll rig it up for you.”
The senator sat stricken. “You mean you couldn’t—But, Norton, there was Dr. Carson and Galloway and Henderson. Someone took care of them.”
Norton shook his head. “Not I. I never heard of them.”
“But someone did,” said the senator. “They disappeared—”
His voice trailed off and he slumped deeper in the chair and the truth suddenly was plain—the truth he had failed to see.
A blind spot, he told himself. A blind spot!
They had disappeared and that was all he knew. They had published their own deaths and had not died, but had disappeared.
He had assumed they had disappeared because they had got an illegal continuation. But that was sheer wishful thinking. There was no foundation for it, no fact that would support it.
There could be other reasons, he told himself, many other reasons why a man would disappear and seek to cover up his tracks with a death report.
But it had tied in so neatly!