Joseph Green - Three-Tour Man [ss]

Some things no man can be held responsible for - but for some he must be held accountable.

"Here's why I called you in, Dale," said Jay Thompson, extending a printed form. The young personnel manager's smooth voice seemed less professionally pleasant than usual.

Dale Barber quickly scanned the filled-in parts of the paper. It was a standard application for a duty tour in Associated Unique Industries Plant 1. The sixty-six-hour work week and the fifty percent bonus at the end of a stint in the "Flying Factory" made assignments there highly desirable. Dale saw nothing unusual about this request of electronic technician Reubin Fox ... until he reached the small box with the "Previous Tours" heading. It had been answered with a "2." The dates following indicated this would be the third consecutive three-month stay aloft, with only the mandatory month on Earth between stays.

"So Mr. Fox wants to be a three-tour man; he's greedy. We've had a few before," said Dale, as he handed back the form and accepted another. "Did he pass the physical?"

"Yes, although it was close, of course. He did his exercises very conscientiously while up there. But look at that psych profile carefully, Dale. Then put the facts together, and you'll see a pattern you should recognize by now."

Dale followed instructions. As the lone company investigator he was semiautonomous, but on Unique's organization chart his office was a subunit under "Personnel." Theoretically he worked for this polished, baby-faced son of one of the six company presidents who had combined divisions to form Associated Unique.

Reubin Fox had a two-year technical school degree in electronics. He was thirty-one, single, and the support of his widowed mother. His intelligence scores were mediocre, but he had a dogged perseverance that had carried him through his schooling. According to ratings by fellow employees Reubin was a quiet, withdrawn man, with few friends. Under the important "congeniality" factor he barely qualified for the Flying Factory. He had come from a welfare family living in Appalachia, as had Dale himself. The detective's interest grew stronger as he scanned the many smaller bits of data that dispassionately laid bare the inner core and basic fiber of this man. The pattern was forming, and he didn't need a degree in psychiatry to see it. Dale reviewed the major items. A request for a third consecutive tour, which carried the human body to about the maximum calcium loss the bones could safely stand; a capability in electronics; the deprived background. It added up to an unpleasant story that was already becoming old but unaccepted at Associated Unique.

"You think Reubin's trying to `fox' his way into the usual shortcut to riches?" asked Dale. He wished he hadn't made the bad pun when Jay Thompson accorded it his middle-line professional smile.

"The head shrink brought the matter to my attention, Dale. I fully agree with his conclusion, but I don't have any justification to deny the man's request. What I can do is send you up on next week's shuttle, to try to `catch him in the act,' as I think you people put it. I sincerely hope we're wrong, of course."

"I'll get to work on it," said Dale, and rose. He could not repress a sour smile as he left for his own seldom-used office. It was easy for someone like Jay Thompson to hope a poor slob like Reubin Fox was not attempting to make himself an illicit $200,000. Jay had never gone hungry, and the only winter chills he had suffered were at the ski slopes.

Dale spent the rest of the week helping the Unique attorney prepare a case against the last man he had caught. Very early Monday morning he kissed his wife and two sleeping children good-by - it might be weeks before he saw them again - and headed for Kennedy Airport. The Unique groundside finishing factories were in New Jersey, the corporate offices out of which he worked in Manhattan, and he lived on Long Island. He arrived just in time to board before the service tower moved back from the shuttle. If he had been late he would have been left. In order to rendezvous with the orbiting factory the awkward-looking craft had to lift precisely on time.

NASA operated the Space Transportation System, of which the shuttle was the largest item of hardware. The Flying Factory was visited on a weekly flight schedule. The government-owned research wheel, which rolled around the Earth three hundred miles above the equator, served as the transfer point for travelers going on to the small lunar research base. And two years before, in 1992, the first manned Mars expedition had departed on two vessels assembled in space adjacent to the wheel. A shuttle ride was the first step into space for every traveler.

The delta-shaped upper stage, as big as one of the old jet passenger planes, was locked to the back of a booster larger than the giant cargo aircraft. Both operated on hydrogen-oxygen rockets, had auxiliary jet engines for conventional flight, and landed like any other plane. But the launch was vertical, and always over water. Special facilities had been constructed at Kennedy International, and several other airports around the world, to launch the massive combination vehicle.

Dale surrendered his papers and boarded the upper stage, hoping the dark-brown contact lenses, brown hair and heavily tanned complexion were enough of a disguise. This would be his fourth topside investigation, and on the last one he had gone as his fair complexioned, sandy-red-haired self. Even the thick contacts, which were mandatory for him and the reason he was not in the space program, had been clear plastic over his own green eyes.

While still not routine, the ride into space did not have the thrill it had once possessed for Dale. The shuttle was windowless, and there was nothing to do but watch his fellow passengers. He quietly endured the six minutes of first-stage flight, felt the familiar sensation of lightness when the shuttle was released and the booster dropped away to fly back to Kennedy, and relaxed as best he could for the sixteen minutes of second-stage propulsion. At no time did acceleration exceed three gravities, and a healthy person could make the lift into a 280-mile orbit without undue strain.

Dale did enjoy listening to the excited talk of the first-timers among the fifteen passengers. They would learn soon enough that eleven hours a day, six days a week, was work ... whether on the ground or in space. Getting personnel and material into and back from orbit was Unique's largest continuing expense. It was not economical to man more than a two-shift operation. The extremely high pay drew many people back a second time, but few asked for a third consecutive tour. And those who did not follow the prescribed exercise routines vigorously enough disqualified themselves anyway. That sixty-six hours a week in Zero-G could weaken improperly exercised legs beyond the safety limit.

The pilot threw a view of Plant I on the large TV screen at the front of the passenger cabin. The talk died away as the travelers, including Dale, watched the approach. Six 60by-80-foot modules, launched separately and assembled in space, formed the great 480-foot-long central cylinder. Six more were attached at right angles, three to a side, by fifteen-foot-diameter connecting tunnels. The center two, which housed the crew's living and gravity-dependent recreational facilities, turned like a giant rotating dumbbell. The shuttle was moving toward one of the airlocks on each end of the main body. An incredibly bright sun glittered off the polished surfaces of heat reflectors, or was absorbed and vanished into the black metal skin covering internal heat sinks. Plant 1 was a strictly utilitarian facility, but it had a beauty of design and structure seldom matched in Earthbound architecture.

Reubin Fox had been sitting behind Dale in the cabin. The detective got his first good look at the suspect as they crawled through the docking tunnel into the loading area. The technician was a tall, lean-bodied man, well endowed with stringy but hard muscles. His dark-red, sharply planed face came equipped with a large jaw and a reserved, deliberately neutral expression.

The new arrivals had only an hour to get settled in their tiny but comfortable individual cubicles before they were due to start their first shift. The rush to work was deliberate. An average of ten of the fifteen were making their first trip into space. Unique had a full-scale mockup of Plant 1 on the ground, but no training simulator could match the actual experience of weightlessness. Nor could it accustom a person to moving routinely from the average thirty percent gravity of the rotating living quarters to the Zero-G production facilities. Most found comfort in operating the familiar but demanding machines. They were a refuge from strangeness. It also helped them absorb the physical sensations of Zero-G slowly and easily, while their minds were elsewhere.

Dale's identity and true purpose were known only to the current manager, Tohiyo Yakama, whom he had not met. He was processed with the rest and reported to the crystal growth facility in Wing 2, where he had worked before. Reubin Fox was in the same room. At the moment they were on a large carbon whisker run, a process with which Dale was familiar. Everyone had been thoroughly trained on Earth, and was expected to be productive immediately. Within ten minutes he was in full control of his machine, concentrating on the tedious business of starting the cycle by pulling crystals from the melt without inducing dislocations. In an hour he had forgotten he was not actually a production worker. The task before him demanded his complete attention.

"Coffee an' roll?" asked a pleasant voice. Startled, Dale looked up from his viewplate, to find one of the kitchen helpers floating by his elbow. She was a short, sturdy girl with a round face and very black hair, dressed in the usual work outfit of a form-fitting pants suit. The reusable cup she was offering him was designed for Zero-G drinking, and the roll had to be extruded from a thin paper container, one bite at a time. Dale had forgotten the snack-breaks in the middle of each long work session. But it was real coffee, tasty food, and a nice-looking coffee girl. Sore things never changed.

"New man? My name's Sheila Samberg; not Sandberg, Samberg. I'll be by twice a day, and please save the cup for me. I see the foxy rube is back. Hi, old hick; how are you?"

Despite the words the tone was friendly. Reubin Fox looked up and smiled. "Hi, Sheila; I'm fine. This your last month?"

Dale hastily gave her his assumed name, and Sheila pulled herself along the guide rail to Reubin's station, dragging her bulky dispenser behind her. It was attached to the rail by a sliding clamp. "Yep, just one more month," she said cheerfully as she handed the technician his coffee. "I'll be back, though. Heck, I like it here!"

Dale had not realized how hungry he was until he smelled the roll. He ate quickly and returned to his work. Lunch was served hot in the cafeteria in one of the rotating wings, and then the workers faced the long second session. Only people who were willing to work hard were accepted for the Flying Factory. With the exception of hollow ball bearings and a few special metal or glass castings, everything produced in this factory had a low mass as individual units. Most items required extreme care during the production processes. The semi-conductor divisions produced crystals so pure their operating characteristics were radically different from similar items made on Earth. The optics section could handle castings up to forty inches, and the lenses and mirrors they produced were of far higher quality than those cast in gravity. Last year, the third operational one for Unique, the Flying Factory had exceeded a billion dollars in gross sales.

The six companies which had had the daring to invest three hundred million dollars each in space manufacturing, by pooling their space systems divisions to form Associated Unique, were proving to the stockholders that their managers had not been wild-eyed visionaries after all. Although they would be years paying off that huge capital investment, their profits ran close to twenty percent a year. And the money the U.S. government was making from its shuttle service was helping to pay the cost of developing the vehicles.

After dinner that evening most of the first shift met in the rec-room in the living quarters for "get acquainted" night. With an average turnover of fifteen people each week, the entire complement of one hundred ninety changed every three months, making most friendships or romances transitory. Reubin Fox, Dale noted, was perfunctorily greeted by several people, obviously acquaintances still here from his last tour. Sheila Samberg was there, dressed now in a wide-mesh knit jumpsuit that revealed a lot of skin-colored underwear. Among others Dale met "Yohiyu Yakama, and at the first opportunity the small Japanese executive pulled the detective aside. He informed Dale that Reubin Fox was not very popular, but he had always been a good worker. The plant manager doubted the technician was trying to cheat on his employment agreement.

"I hope you're right, but we've had less than a dozen consecutive three-tour people to date," Dale answered. "In every case, when the shrink's staff said the man was probably stealing, they were proved correct. It looks so easy, and the temptation to make a big killing is so strong ..." Dale shook his head. After a moment he added, "There have probably been small ones successfully smuggled out by two-tour people who were willing to settle for fifty thousand dollars or less. The ones like Reubin Fox, who are quiet but like to think they're very clever, don't realize that third consecutive tour is like waving a red flag in front of the psychiatrists."

While they were talking Reubin Fox quietly drifted out the door. It seemed unlikely he would be replacing his carbon electrode the very first night, but Dale decided he would take no chances. Hastily excusing himself, he followed the wiry Southerner.

Dale's sudden hope for a quick end to the case was doomed to disappointment. Reubin Fox entered the connecting tunnel to the main cylinder and started up the winding stairs, holding the center guide rail and smoothly transferring himself from walking to pulling as the artificial gravity of rotation faded. In the central open area he pulled himself along the handrails to the Zero-G rec-room. At the moment it was probably deserted, and Dale decided not to enter behind Reubin. The device, of whatever type the technician had made, was unlikely to be hidden there. Instead Dale turned around and went to his cubicle. It had been a long day, and he was very tired.

After a week of observation, Dale decided that catching Reubin Fox "in the act" was going to be difficult. The unsociable technician spent most of his free time in his cubicle, or on the exercise machines in both rec-rooms. But if Dale could detect a pattern in the suspect's movements, it might be possible to at least pinpoint the room in which the device was hidden. After that a thorough search. would probably uncover it.

Dale used his master key one night when Reubin started his regular exercise routine, and carefully searched the man's tiny room. He did not expect to find the box, since it required the vacuum of space for operation, but he wanted to know more about Reubin Fox. All he learned was that the technician's taste in reading ran to science journals and pornography, a seemingly odd combination. Dale carefully replaced all items just as he had found them, and returned to his own quarters.

On the second morning after the search Dale reported for work, pulled himself into the operator's chair, and reached for the seatbelt. With his free hand he grasped the control to adjust the focus of the viewfinder ... and was snapped rigid with electric shock.

The knob had been wired to kill. That single thought flashed through Dale's mind before the current almost paralyzed brain as well as body. Some lingering fragment of self-possession, the safety training that had been drummed into him during his years in industry, remained. He knew not to attempt to lift the hand; the muscles involved would not obey him. He could not even cry out, since his trunk was the main path for the current. But he did still have some control over his legs, because the flow was from hand through chest to the metal seatback. He kicked convulsively against the bottom of his machine.

On Earth Dale would have died. In Zero-G the momentum imparted by the kick threw him back and upward, bouncing him off the seat, bending his trunk as he rose in the air. His hand was pulled away from the knob.

The low ceiling swung wildly before Dale's eyes as he flew toward it, still cartwheeling in the air, and then he hit on his back. He had a final glimpse of the innocent-appearing knob that had almost killed him, and then blackness blotted out the alarmed faces of his co-workers.

When Dale recovered his senses he was in the small clinic. With the return of consciousness came fear, and he cried aloud and tried to sit up. The Plant 1 doctor was by his side immediately, a soothing hand on his shoulder. "Easy there, fellow. Just relax. That was a close one, but you're all right now. You did get a touch of ventricular fibrillation, but I knocked it out in a hurry. Tomorrow you'll be as good as new."

Dale lay back, realizing that he was strapped in. The clinic was in the central cylinder, since Zero-G had therapeutic affects on a great many illnesses. The doctor was so young he seemed almost a juvenile; probably his first paid job after internship.

"One of the maintenance men and your buddy Fox checked the control that almost got you," the doctor went on. "Seems that a 220-volt wire worked loose on the inside and was lying against the shaft. Just a few seconds of that is all a man can take. Lucky for you your legs went into muscle spasm and kicked the machine, pushing you away."

Dale started to explain that he had retained enough sense to kick on purpose, but refrained. Instead he concentrated on a new thought. Unless that really had been an accident, which he gravely doubted. Reubin Fox was on to him. And the man from the Appalachian hills was willing to murder. Dale was saddened by the thought. He would not have expected Reubin to be a killer.

It was two days later before Dale felt like returning to work. In the meantime he checked with the maintenance man who, with Reubin's help, had repaired the machine. Apparently a power supply wire had slipped out of an improperly tightened terminal and floated about until it made contact with a potential conductor. Dale's body had completed the circuit to ground. No one could explain how it had happened in the hour between shifts, but there was no possible way to prove it had not been an accident.

To Dale's pleased surprise, Sheila Samberg had visited him twice while he was in the clinic. She was one of the lowest-paid people in the Flying Factory, but her job took her everywhere and she knew everyone. She was also one of the few who liked Reubin Fox, and with whom he would spend any appreciable time.

There was a double-dance on the evening of every seventh day, which the production workers had off. Newcomers always met in the rec-room in the living quarters, where rotation held them to the floor for normal if extremely light-footed dancing. Many veterans preferred the more difficult but interesting free-form effects possible in the larger Zero-G rec-room in the main cylinder. The dances were popular, and had to be staged in shifts to accommodate everyone. Since males outnumbered females, girls could attend two shifts if they wished. Dale went to the dance held two days after he returned to work, in the second group of men. Sheila was in the free-form room, dancing with Reubin Fox. She was wearing a bell-bottomed pants suit of semitransparent material, and looked very attractive.

Reubin was an inexperienced Zero-G dancer despite his two tours aloft, but Sheila was excellent. Dale watched, amused, as they kicked off the padded walls and met in the center, to lock arms and convert forward momentum to spin. They broke apart, twisted, placed the bottoms of their feet together, and pushed each other toward the walls. Since there were about fourteen other couples doing the same things, mid-air collisions were frequent. The music was lively, the crowd congenial, and the bruises accepted in good humor. Alcohol and drugs were not allowed aloft, and many people were amazed to discover they could have an enjoyable evening without them.

Dale danced with two other women he knew, and eventually with Sheila. He had a relaxing, laughing good time for the two hours he was allowed, and noticed as he started to leave with Sheila that Reubin had vanished.

"Where did the old Fox go?" Dale asked as they headed for the cafeteria and a late snack.

"Oh, Reubin always leaves before he has to," said Sheila, sounding slightly miffed. "Sometimes I think he just comes to keep his congeniality rating up. He said something about relieving his friend Sam Johnson for a while. Sam has duty in the vaccine room this evening, and Reubin used to work there. To heck with him. Tell me all about how you have a wife and six kids back on Earth, but we can have a beautiful two-week romance before I leave. You're almost as quiet as Reubin."

Dale grinned, and said, "Just two kids. And I wouldn't romance you because I like you too much."

Their food was slow in coming. Sheila left him at the table and went behind the counter to get it herself. Someone asked her to make a sundae while there, and she good-naturedly agreed. More people drifted in, more orders came, and there was only one girl actually on duty to fill them. Sheila found that she had involuntarily put herself to work. She threw Dale an apologetic glance, and shrugged. He waved, in acceptance of the situation, and left. But instead of going to his cubicle Dale headed for the biological labs in Wing 4, and the vaccine room.

The speed with which a bacterial culture grew was in direct proportion to the amount of oxygen each tiny living form received. On Earth it was difficult to distribute oxygen evenly throughout the fluid medium. The rising bubbles combined and became too large for good dispersion. In Zero-G it was possible to keep a constant flow of micron-sized bubbles moving from wall to wall in each fermenter. Another constant always present was noise. The vaccine room walls were sound absorbent, as were most of those in the Flying Factory, but the continual bubbling of liquids and hissing of air made it one of the less desirable places to work. At the moment Dale appreciated the sound. It enabled him to enter the room without being noticed, and slip between one of the larger fermenters and the wall when he saw Reubin and Sam Johnson talking at the central monitoring board.

Dale could not hear the words, but after a moment Sam pointed to one of the dials and the control below it, and Reubin nodded. Then the older man, whose voice indicated he came from the same part of America as Reubin, turned and started pulling himself along the guide rail. Dale moved back behind the fermenter. He would have been visible if the technician had turned his head after passing, but Sam went straight out the door, obviously headed for the dance.

His friend had hardly disappeared when Reubin pulled himself into the work area. He moved purposefully toward a large tank, one mounted to the curved wall. It contained the supply of liquid nutrient for most of the fermenters. Locking himself to the guide rail by his knees, the lean technician hung upside down and inserted a screwdriver between the tank and room wall, near the bottom. A foot-square section of plate came off in his hands.

Reubin Fox did not score highly on intelligence tests designed by men with superior educations, but he had a native shrewdness and inventiveness the tests would never show. Dale saw that a rubber bladder had been inserted and braced to form a dry cavity within the liquid. A six-inch square metal box took up most of the space. It was anchored by a quarter-inch pipe that led to the wall. There was a hand valve in the line. In Dale's mind there was no doubt that the pipe penetrated on to the outer wall, and that a tiny hole to space had been added to those known and authorized.

Reubin turned off the valve. With the hand tool he opened a sealing screw set in the wall of the box, and Dale heard a new hiss as air entered. What the technician was doing violated every safety rule on access to vacuum - even from where Dale was hidden he could see the valve was not of the approved type - and that alone was justification for dismissal. But this quiet man had done far more. He quickly removed four screws holding the front plate on the metal box, and Dale saw what he had spent two weeks in space to find.

Suspended near the center of the box's interior was a carbon-coated filament, two wires leading from its end into the nutrient tank and some hidden power source. In front of the filament, glued to a small wooden pedestal, was a rough round pebble as large as a pigeon egg.

But that round stone was not a normal pebble. Though it had little of the fire and splendor it would possess after cutting and polishing, enough light penetrated into the cavity for something of its great potential beauty to shine through. Dale was looking at a large rough diamond.

The mechanics were simple. Evaporated carbon, in a vacuum, could condense out as either graphite or diamond. The diamond form took more energy, but if a seed crystal was available and the graphite pattern was not, the hot carbon would assume the higher energy form. It was a slow process at first, since the crystal could absorb only a few atoms at a time, but over a period of months a tiny stone could be enlarged into a magnificent diamond. The larger the surface area available for deposition, the faster the growth rate. There was no known way to tell the Zero-G-grown diamond from those formed by heat and pressure in the ground, except that the former were always nearly perfect stones. A diamond nurtured for six months might bring $50,000 from an unscrupulous dealer. One grown for three consecutive three-month tours would always top $200,000.

Reubin inserted a new filament and repositioned it. Weekly movement of the emitter was necessary to ensure a well-shaped stone. Working quickly, he replaced the cover on the box and tightened the air-sealing screw. With a turn of the valve the small amount of air in the box rushed into space, leaving a vacuum difficult and expensive to achieve on Earth. Reubin replaced the external cove; plate, and pulled himself back to the monitoring panel. During the next week his stone would grow in value by several thousand dollars, with no further effort on his part.

Diamond-growing was the oldest, most commonly tried way of cheating Associated Unique. The employee agreed when signing on not to use company facilities for private work. A separate, very strict legal agreement forbade making anything whatever of a personal nature in the Flying Factory. Employees were searched when arriving back on Earth, but there were many ingenious ways of hiding a small object like a diamond. They had been swallowed, hidden in the rectum, buried in carefully restored shoeheels ... and probably many other ways still undiscovered. Quite a few, Dale felt certain, had gotten through.

Unique had the capability to produce large diamonds in such quantities any middle-income family could afford one. But flooding the market would also lower the value of existing stones, causing aggregate losses in the billions to present owners. The political pressures had been too great to resist. Unique was forbidden to produce even commercial diamonds for cutting tools.

Dale pushed himself away from the wall and floated toward the guide rail. Reubin Fox was facing his way. The detective saw surprise on the red face, followed by dismay as the technician realized he had been caught. And then the craggy features settled back into their usual reserve, and Dale could almost read his thoughts. The watcher had no camera. It would only be one man's word against another as to what he had seen Reubin doing. It was true that the technician had worked in this room on his first tour, when the diamond-maker had been built, but that was no proof he had done it. His hopes of making a small fortune were shattered, but at least they couldn't put him in jail for attempted theft.

Reubin's face twisted into an attempt at a smile. He managed to say, "Hello! What are you doing here, Dale?"

"Spying on you," Dale answered calmly. "I'm very sorry, but under the authority granted me under the laws of the United States, as incorporated in the Charter of Associated Unique Industries, Incorporated, you are under arrest. You have the right to remain silent. You ..." he droned through the remainder of a suspect's safeguards, while Reubin waited with a smile that had gone twisted and sick.

"So you're a company dick. And maybe not a very good one, 'cause I saw you followin' me aroun'. Big deal. I don't think you got any proof, Mister. It'll be your word against mine in court."

"Not quite. You've forgotten one of the oldest proofs of all, Reubin, one that works as well in Zero-G as on Earth. That little vacuum box will be just covered with good fingerprints."

The technician's face reddened from a new surge of blood as he realized Dale was right. And then his right hand dipped into a pocket and emerged with the screwdriver. With his left one on the rail he flipped himself horizontal, braced both feet against the panel face, and shot toward the detective, the screwdriver held like a dagger. And it would make a very effective one.

Dale realized he had been somewhat foolhardy. He should have gotten help before confronting Reubin. The man had proven his willingness to kill when he wired two hundred twenty volts to that control knob. But it was too late for second thoughts. He also did an aerial flip and placed his feet to kick, using the only solid object available, the rail. The hurtling form was almost on him. Dale put all his strength into a desperate lunge away, and a stab by the narrow blade just missed as Reubin flew past below him. And then Dale realized he was heading for a fermenter, and tried to twist and impact on his hands. He was too late. The top of his head crashed into the hard steel wall, and white flashes flickered across a sudden blackness in front of his eyes.

Dale retained enough consciousness to feel himself bouncing away. He hit the ceiling, though with his rump and much more slowly, and then drifted horizontally, his muscles slack. Dimly he heard a loud voice crying "It was for my mother! She did without all her life, I could have given her ... I'll kill you!"

Dale's eyes came into focus just in time to see a hard brown hand grasp him by the ankle, yanking him down. He tried desperately to lift his arms, to fight, but his muscles refused to obey. He saw Reubin's snarling face, the screwdriver drawn back to strike, and thought hazily that he was going to be killed by an odd weapon. And then a piercing scream rang through the vaccine room, one so loud it overwhelmed even the steady hissing and bubbling. Reubin, jarred, withheld the killing blow. Dale was facing the room's entrance. Just inside, staring at them down the length of the guide rail, was Sheila Samberg, still in her semitransparent bell-bottomed pants suit.

Sheila threw her head back as if to scream again, and Reubin released Dale and started toward her. Then she did yell, but chopped it off and turned and pulled herself through the door. Reubin stopped, remembered he was holding the screwdriver like a weapon, glanced at it, and back at Dale. And then he tossed the tool toward the tank which held his diamond, in a gesture of disgust. Dale realized the technician had had no intention of harming Sheila.

Without another glance at the detective who had caught him, Reubin pulled himself out the door and vanished.

When his muscles were under control again, Dale reached for the telephone ion the monitoring panel and dialed the plant manager's cabin. It was unlikely Reubin Fox would attempt to hurt anyone, but his psych profile showed a disposition toward suicide. He would have to be protected against himself until he recovered his mental equilibrium.

An hour later Dale sat in his cubicle, having recovered enough to start his report to Jay Thompson. This was the part of his job he hated most. But the Monday morning shuttle would arrive in a few hours, and if this paperwork was ready he could go directly home from the airport instead of to his office.

The part of the form over which Dale always agonized was the "Charges" section. Reubin Fox could be tried and undoubtedly convicted of attempted murder. Or Dale could charge him with resisting arrest with violence, which carried a much lower penalty. Reubin would have stabbed him to death, if Sheila had not come to keep the technician company because of his supposed good deed. But Reubin would not have killed Sheila, one of the few people he regarded as a friend. Of that Dale felt certain. And once the lean man's rage had cooled, he had tossed the screwdriver away, rather than burying it in the still helpless detective.

Dale agonized a moment, thinking of Jay Thompson, the affluent executive who would read this report. To that scion of a wealthy family the motivations that had driven Reubin Fox to cheat and almost kill meant nothing. Jay would have the company attorney prosecute to the full extent of the charges.

Dale felt far more akin to the man he had caught than the one for whom he worked. Reubin Fox did not know it, but he too had an old mother living in Appalachia, and she also had done without all her life. And, unwittingly, she and Dale's now deceased father had deprived him of the one thing he wanted most. As a boy growing up in the Sixties, he had yearned with desperate earnestness to become an astronaut. But his poor and ignorant parents, when he was five, had let a severe case of trachoma go untreated for several months, irreparably damaging his eyes. He had gone into law enforcement instead, and again like Reubin, had had to settle for a two-year degree. This job with Unique was the closest he would ever come to fulfilling his boyhood dream.

Neither of them could help what had been done to them in childhood, but both men had been adults now for over a decade. And a grown man was responsible for his own actions. It was as an adult that the technician had become a thief, and had set an electrical trap that might well have killed a man.

Dale sighed, and charged Reubin Fox with attempted murder while resisting arrest. He and Reubin might both be children of Appalachia, but they had gone separate ways and become different men.