'Must seem just like home to him.' he replied. 'In there the atmosphere is thinned down to about one-thousandth Earth standard, with considerable ozone. Don't know whether he needs that, but a good deal of the oxygen on Mars must be in the form of ozone. Surface conditions there are suitable for its production. The temperature is 20 degrees below zero Centigrade. I had to guess at that, because I have no way of knowing from what part of Mars this animal of ours was taken. That would make a difference.'
He wrangled the cigar from one corner of his mouth to the other.
'A little private Mars all his own,' he stated.
'You found no records at all on the ship?' asked Woods. 'Nothing telling anything at all about him?'
Gilmer shook his head and clamped a vicious jaw on the cigar.
'We found the log book,' he said, 'but it had been deliberately destroyed. Someone soaked it in acid. No chance of getting anything out of it.'
The reporter perched on a desk top and drummed his fingers idly on the wood.
'Now just why in hell would they want to do that?' he asked.
'Why in hell did they do a lot of things they did?' Gilmer snarled. 'Why did somebody, probably Delvaney, kill Paine and Watson? Why did Delvaney, after he did that, kill himself? What happened to Smith? Why did Cooper die insane, screaming and shrieking as if something had him by the throat? Who scrawled that single word on the box and tried to write more, but couldn't? What stopped him writing more?'
Woods nodded his head toward the glass cage.