It would be worthwhile staying as long as
Bancroft did, in the hope of learning some more. "I may be here a
couple of days yet," he said.

"Good," said Tyler. He looked up at the sky. It was beginning to fill
with stars. The deck was still empty. It ran around the dim
upthrusting bulk of a weather-observation tower which was turned over
to its automatics for the night and there was no one else to be seen.
A few fluoros cast wan puddles of luminance on the plastic flooring.

Glancing at his watch, Tyler said casually, "It's about
nineteen-thirty hours now. If you don't mind waiting till twenty
hundred I can show you something interesting."

"What's that?"

"Ah, you'll be surprised." Tyler chuckled. "Not many people know about
it. Now, getting back to that point you raised earlier...."

The half hour passed swiftly. Dalgetty did most of the talking.

"--and mass action. Look, to a rather crude first approximation a
state of semantic equilibrium on a world-wide scale, which of course
has never existed, would be represented by an equation of the form--"

"Excuse me." Tyler consulted the shining dial again. "If you don't
mind stopping for a few minutes I'll show you that odd sight I was
talking about."

"Eh? Oh-oh, sure."

Tyler threw away his cigarette. It was a tiny meteor in the gloom. He
took Dalgetty's arm. They walked slowly around the weather tower.

The men came from the opposite side and met them halfway. Dalgetty had
hardly seen them before he felt the sting in his chest.

_A needle gun!_

The world roared about him. He took a step forward, trying to scream,
but his throat locked. The deck lifted up and hit him and his mind
whirled toward darkness.

From somewhere will rose within him, trained reflexes worked, he
summoned all that was left of his draining strength and fought the
anesthetic. His wrestling with it was a groping in fog. Again and
again he spiraled into unconsciousness and rose strangling. Dimly,
through nightmare, he was aware of being carried. Once someone stopped
the group in a corridor and asked what was wrong. The answer seemed to
come from immensely far away. "I dunno. He passed out--just like that.
We're taking him to a doctor."

There was a century spent going down some elevator. The boat-house
walls trembled liquidly around him. He was carried aboard a large
vessel, it was not visible through the gray mist. Some dulled portion
of himself thought that this was obviously a pri