Hands folded sedately on his ample belly, Mycroft Greysel ducked his head and stepped into the cell where the Kirbari alien had last been seen. He glanced around once, twice. Lowering his bulk cautiously, he sat himself down on the left bunk, making it creak and groan. He produced an inconclusive ‘hm’, nodded to himself, and finally uttered a thickly accented,
“I see.”
“You do?” Morton asked, as he stuck his head through the door with eager urgency. But nothing had changed since the last seventeen times he had looked. Thirty square feet of grubby plasteel floor; three walls of the same depressing material; a ceiling that had once upon a time, probably at the time of the ancient starcruiser’s first launch, been white, and which shone with a dismal blue-white light through no apparent fixture of any kind. Two backbreaker bunks, thick slabs of plasteel, protruded from opposite walls, leaving only a narrow strip of floor free. A basin barely large enough for the hands of a small child hung over the left bunk’s far end, its faucet dripping like Chinese torture.
And no trace of the Kirbari prisoner.
His career was doomed.
