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Minutes passed as she slowly and carefully scanned the outer walls of John Hammond's offices and
living quarters. Here was something new ... something that seemed very dangerous. Within the walls and
doors, above the ceiling, below the flooring of this section, strange energies curled and crawled like
twisting smoke.
She could not pass through that barrier.
But though she could not enter, her perceptions might, to some extent.
She must avoid, she decided, both the front entry door and the secret elevator which led directly to
Hammond's living quarters in the rear of the section. As the most obvious points for an intruder to
consider, they were also the most formidably shielded.
She shifted back along the hall to a point some twenty feet away from the massive black door, well back
from the wall between her and the front office. She waited. Gradually a picture began to form...
This was an unfamiliar room, the inner office of the section. There was no one in it, nothing of interest
except a closed door across from the one which opened on the corridor.
The inner office disappeared ... and what came next was no picture, but a surge of savage, demanding
hunger.
Startled, shocked, already feeling the pull that in a moment would hurl her into the murderous barriers
about the section, the searching awareness instantly broke the thread of visual perception, went inactive
to allow herself to stabilize.
Nevertheless, she now knew where the serum was in a strongroom of Hammond's quarters, heavily
screened, seemingly inaccessible.
Perception cautiously opened again. Another section of the living quarters appeared, hazy with hostile
energies. The other the male counterpart was here. Alive.
Here, but helpless. Here, but unconscious, in a cage of dark force which permitted no more than barest
identification by the searcher. She was very glad he had been rescued.
Minutes later, she knew there was no one else in Hammond's locked quarters. She withdrew visual
perception from there, and let the picture of the main office develop. The blurred image of a woman
Helen Wendell now seemed to be speaking into an instrument connected with the apparatus before
her.
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A second band of perception opened, and voices, became indistinctly audible.
Ganin Arnold, the New Brasilia courier, was making his final call from the city jetport, nine miles south of
the Research Alpha complex.
'The doors are being secured,' he said. He was speaking into a disguised microphone clamped over his
mouth and nose, which had the appearance of the tranquilizing respirators many of the other jet
passengers were using now in the last moments before lift-off. Even to anyone within inches of him, his
voice would have remained completely inaudible. In John Hammond's office, it emerged clearly from the
device on Helen Wendell's desk.
'Lift-off for the nonstop jet to Paris,' Arnold went on, 'will follow' he glanced at the watch on his wrist
'in two minutes and thirty seconds. All passengers and every member of the 'crew have passed at
least once through the measurement radius. Nothing which may have preceded or followed myself and
our biologist aboard registers life-energy levels significantly above the standard Earther range that is,
of course, below six.
'To sum it up, we definitely arenot being accompanied to Paris by any abnormally high human
evolutionary form. Dr Gloge's behavior has been excellent. His tranquilizer has begun to take effect, and
he is showing signs of drowsiness. Undoubtedly, he will sleep soundly throughout the trip.'
Arnold paused, apparently waiting for comment. When there was none, he resumed, 'As soon as the
lift-field goes on, communication by this means, of course, will be impossible. Since nothing is likely to go
wrong from this moment on, I suggest, if it's satisfactory to Mr. Hammond, that I end my report now.'
Helen Wendell's voice, seeming to speak from a point just within the left side of the courier's skull, told
him pleasantly, 'Mr. Hammond prefers you to remain alert and available for final instructions until the lift
has begun.'
XII
In the locked room on the top floor of the empty warehouse a few miles east of Research Alpha, the
womanshape standing at the window stirred suddenly out of the tranced immobility it had maintained for
the past minutes. The head lifted, gaze sweeping the softly glowing night sky above the city. A hand
moved, touching the thick windowpane probingly. The glass fell away like a big drop of melting ice.
Dust swirled as cool air rushed in.
Barbara waited, then moved closer to the opening.
Her gaze swung to the west again, remained there. She listened. The myriad noises of the city were clear
and distinct now. Overlying them was a thin fountain of skysound as, every thirty seconds at this hour
a jet lifted vertically from the city port, cut in its engines, and vanished up into the night with a whistling
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