‘Did it ever occur to you that those three things—the missing Pfc, the missing files, and the resemblance of the Major to the Pfc—were the things which discredited you?’
‘That goes without saying. I think if I could’ve straightened out any one or any two of those three things, I wouldn’t have wound up with that obsession.’
‘All right. Now think about this. You stumbled and grubbed through seven years, working your way closer and closer to regaining what you had lost. You traced the man who built it and you were just about to find him. But something happened.’
‘My fault. I bumped into Thompson and went crazy.’
She put her hand on his shoulder. ‘Suppose it wasn’t carelessness that made that Pfc pull the lever. Suppose it was done on purpose.’
He could not have been more shocked if she had fired a flashbulb in his face. The light was as sudden, as blinding, as that. When he could, he said, ‘Why didn’t I ever think of that?’
‘You weren’t allowed to think of it,’ she said bitterly.
‘What do you mean, I wasn’t—‘
‘Please. Not yet,’ she said. ‘Now, just suppose for a moment that someone did this to you. Can you reason out who it was—why he did it— how he did it?’
‘No,’ he said immediately. ‘Eliminating the world’s first and only anti-gravity generator makes no sense at all. Picking on me to persecute and doing it through such an elaborate method means even less. And as to method, why, he’d have to be able to reach into locked rooms, hypnotize witnesses and read minds!’