"Sure, Laney."
She decided not to question the illogic of this. "All right, let's start at the beginning, How are you going to reach the Hospital?"
"Yah. Too far to walk. Mmm ... Parlette's car. It's on the roof."
"But if Castro gets it, it'll lead him straight here."
"I'd have to wait till midnight to get the other car."
"That may be the only way." Laney wasn't tired; she'd had twice as much sleep as she needed in the vivarium. But she felt used, ready for the laundry. A hot bath would help. She put it out of her mind. "Maybe we can raid a crew house for another car. Then we set the autopilot to take Parlette's car back here."
"That'll take time."
"We'll have to take it. We'll also have to wait till after sunset before we start."
"Will we need darkness that early?"
"It would help. And suppose the fog cleared while we were over the void?"
"Oh." Colonist and crew alike, the people of the Plateau loved to watch the sun setting over the void mist. The colors were never the same twice. Land along the void edge always cost three times as much as land anywhere else.
"Suddenly we'd have a thousand crew looking down at us. It might be a mistake to use the void at all. Castro may have thought of that. We'll be safe if the fog holds. But whatever we do, we'll have to wait till dark."
Matt stood up and stretched muscles that felt knotted. "Okay. So we get to the Hospital. How do we get in?-Laney, what's an electric eye?"
She told him.
"Oh. I didn't see any light... Ultraviolet, of course, or infrared. I should be able to get over that."
"We."
"You're not invisible, Laney."
"I am if I stick close to you."
"Phut. "
"I'll have to come that far with you anyway. You can't program an autopilot."
Matt got up to pace. "Leave that a moment. How do we get over the wall?"
"I don't," said Laney, and stopped. "There may be a way," she said. "Leave it to me."
"Tell me."
"I can't."
The cold breeze outside had become a wind, audible through the walls. Laney shivered, though the electric fire was hot enough. The fog beyond the south windows was growing dark.
"We'll need guns," she said.
"I don't want to take one of yours. You've only got the two we picked up on the way to the car."
"Matt, I know more than you do about crew. They all go in for sports of one kind or another."
"So?"
"Some of them hunt. A long time ago Earth sent us some frozen fertilized deer and caribou ova in a cargo ramrobot. The Hospital hatched them out, grew 'em to adulthood and scattered them around the bottom edge of the glacier, north of here. There's enough grass there to keep them happy."
"Then we might find guns here."
"It's a good bet. The richer a crew is, the more sports equipment he buys. Even if he never uses it."
The gun rack was in a room in the upper story, a room lined with paintings of more-or-less wild-animals and with heads and hooves of deer and caribou. The rack held half-a-dozen air-powered rifles. They searched the room, and eventually Laney found a drawer containing several boxes of crystal slivers, each sliver two inches long.
"They look like they'd stop a bandersnatch," said Matt. He'd never seen a bandersnatch, except in filmed maser messages from Jinx, but he knew they were big.
"They'll stop an elk cold. But the guns only fire one at a time. You have to be accurate."
"Makes it more sporting?"
"I guess so."
Implementation mercy-guns fired a steady stream of tiny slivers. One would make the victim woozy; it took half a dozen to drop him in his tracks.
Matt closed and pocketed the box of oversized mercy-slivers. "Getting hit with one of these would be like being stabbed with an ice pick, even without the knockout effect. Will they kill a man?"
"I don't know," said Laney. She chose two guns from the rack. "We'll take these."
"Jay!" Hood stopped halfway to the living room, turned, and made for the entrance hall.
Lydia Hancock was bending over Millard Parlette. She had folded his flaccid hands neatly in his lap. "Come here and have a look at this."
Hood looked down at the stunned crew. Millard Parlette was coming around. His eyes didn't track and wouldn't focus, but they were open. Hood saw something else, and he bent for a closer look.
The crew's hands didn't match. The skin of one was mottled with age. It couldn't be as old as Parlette must be, but he hadn't replaced the skin in a good long time. From fingertips to elbow the arm showed a curious lack of personality, of what Hood decided was artistic continuity. Part of that might have been imagination. Hood knew in advance that Parlette must have used the organ banks continuously during his lifetime. But no imagination was needed to see that the left hand was dry and mottled and faintly callused, with cracked fingernails and receding quick.
Whereas the skin of the right hand was like a baby's, smooth and pink, untanned, almost translucent. The quick of the fingernails ran all the way to the tips of the fingers. Many high school students could not have said the same.
"The old love-child just got a transplant job," said Hood.
"No. Look here." Lydia pointed to the wrist. There was a ragged band of color, something less than an inch wide, running round Parlette's wrist. It was a dead milky-white such as Hood had never seen in human skin.
"Here too." A similar ring circled the first joint of Parlette's thumb. The thumbnail was cracked and dry, with a badly receding quick.
"Right, Lydia. But what is it? An artificial hand?"
"With a gun inside, maybe. Or a radio."
"Not a radio. They'd be all over us by now." Hood took Parlette's right hand and rolled the joints in his fingers. He felt old bone and muscle under the baby skin, and joints that would be arthritic someday soon. "This is a real human hand. But why didn't he get the whole thing replaced?"
"We'll have to let him tell us."
Hood stood up. He felt clean and rested and well fed. If they had to wait for Parlette to talk, they'd picked a nice place to wait.
Lydia asked, "How's Laney doing with Keller?"
"I don't know. I'm not going to try to find out."
"That must be tough, Jay." Lydia laughed a barking laugh. "You've spent half your life trying to find psychic powers on Plateau. Now one finally shows up, and he doesn't want to play with us."
"I'll tell you what really bothers me about Matt Keller. I grew up with him. In school I never noticed him, except one time when he got me mad at him." Absently he rubbed a point on his chest with two fingertips. "He was right under my nose all the time. But I was right, wasn't I? Psi powers exist, and we can use them against the Hospital."
"Can we?"
"Laney's persuasive. If she can't talk him around, I sure, can't."
"You're not pretty enough."
"I'm prettier than you."
The barking laugh rang again. "Touche!"
"I knew it," said Laney. "It had to be the basement."
Two walls were covered with various kinds of small tools. Tables held an electric drill and a bandsaw. There were drawers of nails, screws, nuts ...
Matt said, "Parlette the Younger must have done a lot of building."
"Not necessarily. It may be just a hobby. Come on, Matt, get your wrists down here. I think I see the saw we want."