"I should have been so lucky," said Hood.
Laney wore the abstracted look of one tracing an idea.
"The eyes," said Harry Kane, and paused for thought. He had been listening without comment, in the attitude of The Thinker, jaw on fist, elbow on knee. "You said there was something strange about the guards' eyes."
"Yah, I don't know what. I've seen that look before, I think, but I can't remember--"
"What about the one who finally shot you? Anything odd about his eyes?"
"No."
Laney came out of her abstraction with a startled look. "Matt. Do you think Polly would have gone home with you?"
"What the Mist Demons does that have to do with anything?"
"Don't get mad, Matt. I've got a reason for asking."
"I can't imagine--"
"That's why you called in the experts."
"All right, yes. I thought she was going home with me."
Then she suddenly turned and walked away."
"Yah. The bitch just--" Matt swallowed the rest of it. Not until now, when he could feel his pain and rage and humiliation in bearable retrospect, did he realize how badly she'd stung him. "She walked away like she'd remembered something. Something more important than me, but not particularly important for all that. Laney, could it have been her hearing aid?"
"The radio? ... No, not that early. Harry, did you tell Polly anything by radio that you didn't tell the rest of us?'p
"I told her I'd call for her speech at midnight, after everyone had gone home. They could hear it through the radios. 'Otherwise, nothing."
"So she had no reason to drop me," said Matt. "I still don't see why we have to dig into this."
"It's strange," said Hood. "It can't hurt to look at anything strange in your young life."
Laney said, "Did you resent it?"
"Damn right I did. I hate being left flat like that, toyed with and then dropped."
"You didn't offend her?"
"I don't see how I could have. I didn't get drunk tell afterward."
"You told me its happened before like that."
"Every time. Every damn time, until you. I was virgin until Friday night." Matt looked belligerently around him. Nobody said anything. "That's why I can't see how it helps to talk about it. Dammit, it isn't unusual in my young life."
Hood said, "Its unusual in Polly's young life. Polly's not a tease. Am I wrong, Laney?"
"No. She takes her sex seriously. She wouldn't make a play for someone she didn't want. I wonder...
"I don't think I was kidding myself, Laney."
"Neither do I. You keep saying something was strange about the guards' eyes. Was there anything strange about Polly's eyes?"
"What are you getting at?"
"You claim every time you're getting ready to lose your virginity to a girl, she drops you. Why? You aren't ugly. You probably don't have the habit of being grossly impolite. You weren't with me. You bathe often enough. Was there something about Polly's eyes?"
"Dammit, Laney ... Eyes." Something changed in Polly's face. She seemed to be listening to something only she could hear. She certainly wasn't looking at anything; her eyes went past him and through, him, and they looked blind ...
"She looked abstracted. What do you want me to say? She looked like she was thinking of something then she walked away."
"Was it sudden, this loss of interest? Did she--"
"Laney, what do you think? I drove her away deliberately?" Matt jumped to his feet. He couldn't take any more; he was wires stretched on a bone frame, every wire about to break. Nobody had ever so assaulted his privacy! He had never imagined that a woman could share his bed, listen in sympathy to all the agony of the secrets that had shaped his soul, and then spill everything she knew into a detailed, clinical roundtable discussion! He felt like one who has been disassembled for the organ banks, who, still aware, watches a host of doctors probing and prodding his separated innards with none-too-clean hands, hears them making ribald comments about his probable medical and social history.
And he was about to say so, in no mild terms, when he saw that nobody was looking at him.
Nobody was looking at him.
Laney was staring into the artificial fire; Hood was looking at Laney; Harry Kane was in his Thinker position. None of them were really seeing anything, at least not anything there in the room. Each wore an abstracted look.
"One problem," Harry Kane said dreamily. "How the blazes are we going to free the rest of us, when only four of us escaped?" He glanced around at his inattentive audience, then went back to contemplating his navel from the inside.
Matt felt the hair stir on his head. Harry Kane had looked right at him, but he certainly hadn't seen Matt Keller. And there was something very peculiar about his eyes.
Like a man in a wax museum, Matt bent to look into Harry Kane's eyes.
Harry jumped as if he'd been shot. "Where the blazes did you come from?" He stared as if Matt had dropped from the ceiling Then he said, "Umm ... oh! You did it."
There wasn't a doubt of it. Matt nodded. "You all suddenly lost interest in me."
"What about our eyes?" Hood seemed about to spring at him, he was so intense.
"Something. I don't know. I was bending down to see, when"--Matt shrugged--"it wore off."
Harry Kane used a word your publisher will cut.
Hood said, "Suddenly? I don't remember its being sudden."
"What do you remember?" Matt asked.
"Well, nothing, really. We were talking about eyes was it about Polly? Sure, Polly. Matt, did it bother you to talk about it?"
Matt growled in his throat.
"Then that's why you did whatever you did. You didn't want to be noticed."
Probably.
Hood rubbed his hands briskly together. "So. We know you've got something, anyway, and it's under your control. Your subconscious control. Well!" Hood became a professor looking around at his not-too-bright class. "What questions are still unanswered?
"For one, what do the eyes have to do with anything? For another, why was a guard eventually able to shoot you and store you away? For a third, why would you use your ability to drive girls away?"
"Mist Demons, Hood! There's no conceivable reason--'
"Keller."
The voice was a quiet command. Harry Kane was back in Thinker position on the couch, staring off into space. "You said Polly looked abstracted. Did we look abstracted a moment ago?"
"When you forgot about me? Yah."
"Do I look abstracted now?"
"Yah. Wait a minute." Matt stood up and walked around Harry, examining him from different sides. He should have looked like a man deep in thought. Thinker position: chin on fist, elbow on knee; face lowered, almost scowling; motionless; eyes hooded ... Hooded? But clearly visible.
"No, you don't. There's something wrong."
"Your eyes."
"Round and round we go," Harry said disgustedly. "Well, get down and look at my eyes, for the Mist Demons' sake!"
Matt knelt on the indoor grass and looked up into Harry's eyes. No inspiration came. A wrongness there, but where? ... He thought of Polly on Friday night, when they stood immersed in noise and elbows, and talked nose-to-nose. They'd touched from time to time, half accidentally, hands and shoulders brushing ... He'd felt the warm blood beating in his neck ... and suddenly--