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short time when he felt someone shaking his shoulder, pulling him back from sleep. “Wake up, Jazine! Wake up!” It was Dr. Armstrong’s voice.
    “Wake up, Jazine! There’s been another one! Freddy O’Connor’s dead!”

SIX
    T HE OTHERS WERE ALREADY downstairs, clustered around with varying degrees of shock written on their faces. Tony Cooper had his arm protectively around Vera’s shoulders, as if to ward off any blow that might be aimed in her direction, and Lawrence Hobbes simply stood, unbelieving, staring down at Freddy’s, body.
    “Skull crushed,” Armstrong reported bleakly from Earl’s side. “Hit from behind with the screw top from one of the freezing cylinders. Damn thing weighs about ten pounds.”
    “An impulse weapon,” Whalen observed.
    “Or else the killer wanted us to think so,” Tony Cooper said. “Now there’ll certainly be no dispute about calling in the authorities. If we wait any longer we’ll all be slaughtered in our beds.”
    “But what about him?” Hobbes asked, gesturing toward the operating table. “Are we to ruin all our work?”
    “Our work is ruined already if Frank’s the one who’s been killing all these people,” Cooper said. “I didn’t sign on to your team to create a monster.”
    “It couldn’t be Frank!” Hobbes insisted, calling him that for the first time.
    “No? Look at the position of the body. He was hit while his back was to the operating table.”
    “But what will we do?” Vera asked. “If it’s not even safe to stand guard over him, what—”
    Hobbes reached beneath the operating table to pull out the heavy straps they used to secure the patient during certain types of surgery with local anesthetic. “We’ll start by strapping him down. I should have done that sooner.”
    “Freddy was working on something,” Earl said. “He didn’t want to be relieved until he finished a new series of brain scans.”
    Hobbes finished buckling the straps around the patient’s arms and legs. “That should hold him. I hate to do it, but if there’s any suspicion that he’s having conscious periods of murderous activity we can’t take the risk. Now what were you saying about Freddy?”
    “I think he found something new in Frank’s brain patterns.”
    “Can any of you read those tracings?”
    Whalen and Cooper both shook their heads, but Vera stepped forward, avoiding Freddy’s sprawled and bloody corpse. “He showed me once, when I worked with him. But I don’t know. … This might indicate an irregularity—either a lack of oxygen or protein that could cause cell collapse.”
    “Could you take it and study it further?” Hobbes urged.
    “I suppose I could try. But I really don’t know much about it.” She ripped the long sheet of tracings out of the machine and folded it under her arm.
    “What about his body?” Whalen asked.
    “I have some spare freezing capsules,” Hobbes replied. “We can store him in one of those.”
    “Do you have enough spares for all of us? We may need them.”
    “Look,” Tony Cooper said, “the one thing this proves is that we need the authorities in here right away. We can’t delay any longer.”
    Vera took out a cigarette, glanced in Earl’s direction, and said, “The authorities are already here.”
    “What?”
    “Earl Jazine is some sort of government agent.”
    After that there was no point in denying it. Earl asked them all to go back upstairs, after they’d placed Freddy’s body in one of the metal capsules. Even with Hilda hovering in the doorway the room seemed oddly empty, and he had to count noses to be certain that all seven of them were present. Vera and Cooper, Hobbes, Hilda, Armstrong, Whalen, himself. Seven, instead of the original ten.
    Earl poured himself a generous shot of scotch and passed the decanter to the others. Then he started talking. “I’m sorry to have deceived you all—especially you, Dr. Hobbes. I am an agent of the Computer Investigation. Bureau with headquarters at