It did. He flowed into a chair and stared out the window, the cup warming his hand. Outside, there were trees and grass and what looked like brick walks. Menninger's was a labyrinth of buildings, none more than four stories tall. A mile-high skyscraper would have saved millions in land, even surrounded by the vitally necessary landscaping; but many woman patients would have run screaming from the sexual problems represented by such a single, reaching tower.
Dale shook himself and gulped at the brew. For ten minutes he could forget the patients.
The patients. The "alien shock" patients. They had fooled him at first, him and others, with their similar behavior. Only now was it becoming obvious that their problems were as different as their fingerprints. Each had gone into some kind of shock when the alien cut loose.
Dale and his colleagues had tried to treat them as a group. But that was utterly wrong.
Each had borrowed exactly what he needed from the ET's tantrum of rage and shock and grief and fear. Each had found what he had needed or feared. Loneliness, castration syndrome, fear of violation, xenophobia, claustrophobia- there was no point even in cataloguing the list.
There weren't enough doctors. There wasn't room for the number of doctors they would need. Dale was exhausted and so was everyone else. And they couldn't show it.
The cup was empty.
"On your feet, soldier," Dale said aloud. At the door he stood aside for Harriet Something, a cheerfully overweight woman who looked like everybody's mother. His mind held the afterimage of her smile, and he wondered, how does she do it? He didn't see the smile drain away behind his back.
"It's the details," said Lit. "The double damned details. How could they have covered so many details?"
"I think he told you the truth," Marda said decisively.
Lit looked at his wife in surprise. Marda was notoriously slow to reach decisions. "Don't get me wrong," he said. "The Arms could have attended to all these little things. What bothers me is the work it must have taken. Hiding Greenberg. Coaching his wife. Tearing things up in the starship's life system. They can put everything back later, of course, but imagine going to all that trouble! And the disturbance at Menninger's. My God, how could they have worked that? Training all those patients! And they flatly couldn't have borrowed the Golden Circle. Ninety millionaires at the Titan Hotel are all screaming murder because they can't go home on time. Thirty more on Earth are going to miss their honeymoon trips. Titan would never have let that happen! The Arms must have out-and-out stolen that ship."
"Occam's Razor," said Marda.
"Occam's-? Oh. No. Either way, I have to make just too many assumptions."
"Lit, how can you take the chance? If Garner isn't lying, the whole solar system's in danger. If he is, what's his motive?"
"You're really convinced, aren't you?"
Marda bobbed her head vigorously.
"Well, you're right. We can't take the chance."
When he came out of the phone booth he said, "I just sent the fleet the record of my interview with Garner. The whole bloody hour. I'd like to do more, but Garner'll hear everything I say. At this distance he's bound to be in the maser beam."
"They'll be ready this way."
"I wonder. I wish I could have warned them about the helmet. The very worst thing I can think of is that Garner might get his hands on the damn thing. Well, Lew's bright, he'll think of that himself."
Later he called Ceres again, to find out how the other side of the check was going. For more than two weeks now, Belt ships had been stopping and searching Earth ships at random. If Garner's snark hunt was an attempt to cover something, it wasn't going to work! But Ceres reported no results to date.
Ceres was wrong. The search-and-seizure tactics had had at least one result. Tension had never been so high between Earth and Belt.
The copilot sat motionless listening to Kzanol/Greenberg's side of the conversation. He couldn't understand overspeak, but Kzanol/Greenberg could; and Kzanol listened to the shielded slave through the mind of the copilot.
"I ought to get rid of you right away," Kzanol mused. "A slave that can't be controlled can't be trusted."
"That's truer than you know." A hint of bitterness showed in Kzanol/Greenberg's voice. "But you can't kill me yet. I have some information that you need very badly."
"So? What information?"
"I know where the second suit is. I also know why we weren't picked up, and I've figured out where the rrgh- where our race is now."
Kzanol said, "I think I also know where the second suit is. But for whatever else you may know, I won't kill you."
"Big of you." Kzanol/Greenberg waved the disintegrator negligently. "I'll tell you something you can't use first, to prove I know my stuff. Did you know whitefoods were intelligent?"
"Whitefood droppings."
"Humans have found them on Sirius A-III-1. They're definitely whitefoods. They're also definitely sentient. Can you think of any way they could have developed intelligence?"
"No."
"Of course not. If any form of life has ever been mutation-proof, it's the whitefoods. Besides, what does a herbivore with no manipulatory appendages, and no natural defenses except sentient herders to kill off natural enemies, want with intelligence? No, the tnuctipun must have made them sentient in the first place. Making the brains a delicacy was just an excuse for making them large."
Kzanol sat down. His mouth tendrils stood straight out, as if he were smelling with them. "Why should they do that?"
He was hooked.
"Let me give it to you all in one bundle," said Kzanol/Greenberg. He took off his helmet and sat, found and lighted a cigarette, taking his time, while Kzanol grew silently but visibly enraged. There was no reason why the thrint shouldn't get angry, Kzanol/Greenberg thought, as long as he didn't get too angry.
"All right," he began. "First point is that the whitefoods are sentient. Second point, you remember that there was a depression when Plorn's tnuctipun came up with antigravity."
"Powerloss, yes," Kzanol said fervently and untactfully. "He should have been assassinated right away."
"Not him. His tnuctipun. Don't you see? They were fighting an undeclared war even then. The free tnuctipun must have been behind it all the time: the tnuctip fleet that escaped into space when Thrintun found the tnuctip system. They didn't try to reach Andromeda. They must have stayed between the stars, where nobody ever goes… went. A few civilized tnuctip must have taken their orders. The whitefoods were their spies; every noble in the galaxy, everyone who could afford to, used to keep whitefoods on his land."
"You're a ptavv fool. You're basing all these suppositions on the idiotic idea that whitefoods are intelligent. That's nonsense. We'd have sensed it."
"No. Check with Masney if you don't believe me. Somehow the tnuctipun must have developed a whitefood brain that was immune to the Power. And that one fact makes it certain that the whole ploy was deliberate. The whitefood spies. The antigravity, released to cause a depression. There may have been other ideas, too. Mutated racing viprin were introduced a few years before antigravity. Thea put all the legitimate viprin ranches out of business. That started the depression, and antigravity sped it along. The sunflowers were usually the only defense for a plantation; and everyone who had land had a sunflower border. It got the landowners used to isolation and independence, so that they might not cooperate in wartime. I'd give odds the tnuctipun had a spray to kill sunflowers. When the depression was in full swing they struck."