Page:Keeban (IA keeban00balm).pdf/261

 without window; its light came through the door by which I entered; and it was so dark that, when I was thrust in and the door slammed and bolted, I supposed myself alone.

I stood still, with my hand on the door panel, while the after-images of light faded from my retinas and became replaced by the blackness of pitch dark. I indulged myself—or attempted to—in some of that logic said by Jerry, a little time ago, to be the present prerogative of gervers, guns and gorillas, and in which I felt certain that pumpers of poison gas would not be found lacking.

The last step on their ladder of reason was not difficult for my mind to ascend. I had spoiled their great scheme at the Sencort Trust; therefore now I was to be punished. Perhaps, in contemplation of the certainty of this, should have been satisfied; but I had to go about the gathering up of earlier starts and sequences.

I felt myself caught in a continuity, frequently suggested but not finally convincing, until suddenly that gat at my stomach summed up everything for me. "Here you are!" it spoke. "You've gone this way and that; but now you've come to it!"

I got to thinking what Jerry told me of "his