Free Baby Is Three by Theodore Sturgeon Page B

insulting.
    I went in. It was completely up to her whether she moved aside or was walked down. She moved aside. The door swung shut.
    “Where’s Jud?”
    “I don’t know.”
    I looked into those long secret eyes and raised my hand. I think I was going to hit her. Instead I put my hand on her chest and shoved.She fell, unhurt but terrified, across a relaxer. “What do you th—”
    “You won’t see him again,” I said, and my voice bounced harshly off the acoust-absorbing walls. “He’s gone.
They’re
gone.”
    “They?” Her face went pasty under the deep tan.
    “You ought to be killed,” I said. “But I think it’s better if you live with it. You couldn’t hold either of them, or anyone else.”
    I went out.
    My head was buzzing and my knitting arm throbbed. I moved with utter certainty; never once did it occur to me to ask myself: “Why did I say that?” All the ugly pieces made sense.
    I found Wold in the Recreation Sector. He was tanked. I decided against speaking to him, went straight to the launching court and tried the row of ship ports. There was no one there, no one in any of them. My eye must have photographed something in the third ship, because I felt compelled to go back there and look again.
    I stared hard at the deep-flocked floor. The soft pile of it looked right and yet not-right. I went to the control panel and untracked an emergency torch, turned it to needle-focus and put it, lit, on the floor. A horizontal beam will tell you things no other light knows about.
    I turned the light on the door and slowly swung the sharp streak across the carpet. The monotone, amorphous surface took on streaks and ridges, shadows and shadings. A curved scuff inside. Two parallel ones, long, where something had been dragged. A blurred sector where something heavy had lain long enough to press the springy fibers down for a while, over by the left-hand bunk.
    I looked at the bunk. It was unruffled, which meant nothing; the resilient surface was meant to leave no impressions. But at the edge was a single rubbed spot, as if something had spilled there and been wiped hard.
    I went to the service cubicle. Everything seemed in order, except one of the cabinet doors, which wouldn’t quite close. I looked inside.
    It was a food locker. The food was there all right, each container socketed in place in the prepared shelves. But on, between, and among them were micro-reels for the book projector.
    I frowned and looked further. Reels were packed into the disposal lock, the towel dispenser, the spare-parts chest for the air exchanger.
    Something was where the book-reels belonged, and the reels had been hidden by someone who could not leave them in sight or carry them off.
    And where did the reels belong?
    I went back to the central chamber and the left-hand bunk. I touched the stud that should have rolled the bunk outward, opening the top, so that the storage space under it could be reached. The bunk didn’t move.
    I examined the stud. It was coated over with quick-setting leak-sealer. The stuff was tough but resilient. I got a steel rod and a hammer from the tool-rack and, placing the rod against the stud, hit it once. The leak-sealer cracked off. The bed rolled forward and opened.
    It was useless to move him or touch him, or, for that matter, to say anything. Judson was dead, his head twisted almost all the way around. His face was bluish and his eyes stared. He was pushed, jammed, wedged into the small space.
    I hit the stud again and the bunk rolled back. Moving without any volition that I could analyze, feeling nothing but a great angry numbness, I cleaned up. I put the rod and the hammer away and fluffed up the piling of the carpeting by the bunk. Then I went and stood in the service cubicle and began to wait.
    Wait. Not just stay—wait. I knew he’d be back, just as I suddenly and belatedly understood what it was that every factor in five people had made inevitable. I was coldly hating myself for not having