Page:Astounding Science Fiction (1950-01).djvu/58

 He regained consciousness swiftly, almost as though there had been no lapse of time. Things had become different, so there must have been an interval. Still, he had no memory. He had been smoking a cigarette—

He was sitting upright in a chair, and caution told him to make no sudden move. He was in—it seemed more of an office than anything else. Two walls were almost unseen because of the scores of filing cabinets backed against them. One wall was covered with panels on which were dozens of small screens, reminding him of the faces of cathode-ray tubes used for television.

Tredel realized there was a picture on each tube, some of them vaguely familiar. There was the warehouse, and there the first big room the belt had brought him to. There what looked like the hallway—

"It wasn't too much trouble keeping up with you, Mr. Tredel."

He twisted in the chair, so that he could see the desk, and the man sitting behind it.

He was a small man, with a long, lean face, graying hair, and eyes that seemed almost lidless, beady and staring. On the desk Tredel saw his pistol, and, close to it, the man's small hand.

Tredel didn't answer for a moment. Then: "No, I guess not." "My name is Del," the man behind the desk said. His voice was flat and even, the words unaccented. "Del has no meaning to you so far as nationality goes. My face, my body, are essentially North American."

Tredel nodded, feeling stupid, yet with nothing to say.

"I owe you some sort of an explanation," Del continued. "After all, you have expended an amazing amount of time and energy and money to reach me. It is only just that you know what you have come to learn."

"You'll kill me, though." Tredel was just a little pleased with himself about the way he put it into words. Not dispose, or get rid of—Kill.

Del shook his head and seemed to smile, yet without moving his lips. "No, I can't do that. If it were anyone else—almost anyone else, that is, I'm afraid I would have to kill." At the use of the word he seemed, again, to smile without smiling, as though daring Tredel to take the word back, strip it to its basic meaning, and then apply it personally.

"However, with you, that's not possible. You, along with some twenty or thirty other men I could name, I must consider as unkillable."

Tredel listened, trying to make sense of what Del was saying, telling himself that Del must be making sense, it was just that he wasn't following.

"That doesn't matter for the moment," Del went on. "The important thing is that you are here. I've been fairly certain that eventually you would get here. That's why you made the first part of the 58