o sound
came from there.

Had he been left alone? And what had happened? He wasn't in McAllen's
home or in that fishing shack at the lake. The Tube might have picked
him up--somehow--in front of McAllen's house, transported him to the
Mallorca place. Or he might be in a locked hideaway McAllen had built
beneath the Sweetwater Beach house.

Two things were unpleasantly obvious. His investigations hadn't
revealed all of McAllen's secrets. And the old man hadn't really been
fooled by Barney Chard's smooth approach. Not, at any rate, to the
extent of deciding to trust him.

Hot chagrin at the manner in which McAllen had handed the role of dupe
back to him flooded Barney for a moment. He swung his legs over the
side of the bed and stood up. His coat had been hung neatly over the
back of a chair a few feet away; his shoes stood next to the bed.
Otherwise he was fully clothed. Nothing in the pockets of the coat
appeared to have been touched; billfold, cigarette case, lighter, even
the gun, were in place; the gun, almost startingly, was still loaded.
Barney thrust the revolver thoughtfully into his trousers pocket. His
wrist watch seemed to be the only item missing.

He glanced about the room again, then at the half-open door and the
stretch of narrow hallway beyond. McAllen must have noticed the gun.
The fact that he hadn't bothered to take it away, of at least to
unload it, might have been reassuring under different circumstances.
Here, it could have a very disagreeable meaning. Barney went quietly
to the door, stood listening a few seconds, became convinced there was
no one within hearing range, and moved on down the hall.

In less than two minutes he returned to the room, with the first slow
welling of panic inside him. He had found a bathroom, a small kitchen
and pantry, a storage room twice as wide and long as the rest of the
place combined, crammed with packaged and crated articles, and with an
attached freezer. If it was mainly stored food, as Barney thought, and
if there was adequate ventilation and independent power, as seemed to
be the case, then McAllen had constructed a superbly self-sufficient
hideout. A man might live comfortably enough for years without
emerging from it.

There was only one thing wrong with the setup from Barney's point of
view. The thing he'd been afraid of. Nowhere was there an indication
of a window or of an exit door.

The McAllen Tube, of course, might make such ordinary convenienc