He shifted his glance upward and met the eyes of a tall, gaunt man who held a hypodermic whose needle was still dripping with a dark purple fluid. The tall man tossed the hypodermic to a male nurse who caught it deftly, and sat down on the bed beside Bevin.
"Well? What did you find?"
Bevin's eyes clouded with pain. He tried to turn them away but the others were insistent, commanding. He clenched his fists and held them tightly against his side.
"Nothing," he said flatly.
The three in attendance stared. The tall man laid a hand on his wrist. "Bevin. Wake up. What did you find?"
The inert figure groaned.
"Can't you stop that damn pounding?"
The other grunted and looked up at the two men standing beside the bed. "He'll be all right in a minute. What's that about pounding?"
The man addressed as Weyman smoothed out the front of his tunic the flat of his hand.
"It's the machinery. He feels it more than we do."
"Well, what do we do now?"
"Payton, we've got to wait. Wait until he can talk rationally." Weyman stared directly into the other's eyes, "We've got to know what's out there now. It took three this morning, two men and a woman, and among the best specimens we have," he raised a hand to his face, pale and tinged with a faint green. "Damn this air. It's getting foul." One of the men was an atmosphere expert. "The machine's broken down—"
Payton put out a warning hand.
"Wait," he's coming to again. Bevin! Tell us what you found."
The man on the bed woke to full consciousness. He made a faint gesture of hopelessness,
"I told you. Nothing. Hayward's dead. It got him. I left him outside at the shaft entrance," a fit of coughing shook him, "you might send somebody up after the suit. We haven't many left."
Payton arose and folded his arms disgustedly.
"Come on. Let's get over to the atmosphere plant. We've got to see about that machine," he put a hand to his mouth and masked a hacking cough, "before we all die of suffcaion."
They went out, leaving Bevin attended by the male nurse.
Payton and Weyman walked along the big corridor slowly. Their gait was irregular and shifty. Neither of them seemed able to balance perfectly. Nor could anyone else in the fortress. A hundred years of confinement in the machinery-crammed City had resulted in the degeneration of the inhabitants' synapses. Most of them acted like people with locomotor ataxia. The atmosphere had been overloaded with exhaust gases and the by-products of the liberation of energy for so long that it had finally taken effect on their organisms.
The skins of the fortress people were a ghastly shade of green, except for
93
