Carter came into the chart-room. “Gregg, you get to bed––you look like a ghost!”
“But––”
“She’s not dead––she may live. Dr. Frank and her brother are with her. They’re doing all they can.” He told us what had happened. Anita and George Prince had both been asleep, each in their respective rooms. Someone unknown had opened Anita’s corridor door.
“Wasn’t it sealed?” I demanded.
“Yes. But the intruder opened it.”
“Burst it? I didn’t think it was broken.”
“It wasn’t broken. The assailant opened it somehow, and assaulted Miss Prince––shot her in the chest with a heat-ray. Her left lung.”
“She is conscious?” Balch demanded.
“Yes. But she did not see who did it. Nor did Prince. Her scream awakened him, but the intruder evidently fled out the corridor door of A 22, the way he entered.”
I stood weak and shaken at the chart-room entrance. “A little son, cast in the gentle image of his mother. But with the strength of his father....” But Anita––dying, perhaps; and all my dreams were fading into a memory of what might have been.