"Yes, yes. Oh yes. You have seen him, then?"
"Not five minutes ago he was in there eating with two men...Here they are...Say, you two." He beckoned them over.
Granz reached them first. "Cab, sir?"
"No, but if you tell the young lady what happened to the man you were eating with, you'll stand to make the fare, anyway."
Granz paused and looked chagrined. "Well, I'd like to help you, but I never saw him before in my life."
Arvardan turned to the girl. "Now look, miss, he can't have gone in the direction you came from or you'd have seen him. And he can't be far away. Suppose we move north a bit. I'll recognize him if I see him."
His offer of help was an impulse, yet Arvardan was not, ordinarily, an impulsive man. He found himself smiling at her.
Granz interrupted suddenly. "What's he done, lady? He hasn't broken any of the Customs, has he?"
"No, no," she replied hastily. "He's only a little sick, that's all."
Messter looked after them as they left. " A little sick?" He shoved his visored cap back upon his head, then pinched balefully at his chin. "How d'ya like that, Granz? A little sick."
His eyes looked askance at the other for a moment.
"What's got into you?" asked Granz uneasily.
"Something that's making me a little sick. That guy must've been straight out of the hospital. That was a nurse looking for him, and a plenty worried nurse, too. Why should she be worried if he was just a little sick? He couldn't hardly talk, and he didn't hardly understand. You noticed that, didn't you?"
There was a sudden panicky light in Granz's eyes. "You don't think it's Fever?"
"I sure do think it's Radiation Fever-and he's far gone. He was within a foot of us, too. It's never any good-"
There was a little thin man next to them. A little thin man with bright, sharp eyes and a twittering voice, who had stepped out of nowhere. "What's that, gents? Who's got Radiation Fever?"
He was regarded with disfavor. "Who are you?"
"Ho," said the sharp little man, "you want to know, do you? It so happens that I'm a messenger of the Brotherhood, to be sure." He flashed a little glowing badge on the inner lapel of his jacket. "Now, in the name of the Society of Ancients, what's all this about Radiation Fever?"
Messter spoke in cowed and sullen tones. "I don't know nothing. There's a nurse looking for somebody who's sick, and I was wondering if it was Radiation Fever. That's not against the Customs, is it?"
"Ho! You're telling me about the Customs, are you? You better go about your business and let me worry about the Customs."
The little man rubbed his hands together, gazed quickly about him, and hurried northward.
"There he is!" and Pola clutched feverishly at her companion's elbow. It had happened quickly, easily, and accidentally. Through the despairing blankness he had suddenly materialized just within the main entrance of the self-service department store, not three blocks from the Foodomat.
"I see him," whispered Arvardan. "Now stay back and let me follow him. If he sees you and dashes into the mob, we'll never locate him."
Casually they followed in a sort of nightmare chase. The human contents of the store was a quicksand which could absorb its prey slowly-or quickly-keep it hidden impenetrably, spew it forth unexpectedly; set up barriers that somehow would not yield. The mob might almost have had a malevolent conscious mind of its own.
And then Arvardan circled a counter watchfully, playing Schwartz as though he were at the end of a fishing line. His huge hand reached out and closed on the other's shoulder.
Schwartz burst into incomprehensible prose and jerked away in panic. Arvardan's grip, however, was unbreakable to men far stronger than Schwartz, and he contented himself with smiling and saying, in normal tones, for the benefit of the curious spectator, "Hello, old chap, haven't seen you in months. How are you?"
A palpable fraud, he supposed, in the face of the other's gibberish, but Pola had joined them.
"Schwartz," she whispered, "come back with us."
For a moment Schwartz stiffened in rebellion, then he drooped.
He said wearily, "I-go-along-you," but the statement was drowned in the sudden blare of the store's loud-speaker system.
"Attention! Attention! Attention! The management requests that all patrons of the store leave by the Fifth Street exit in orderly fashion. You will present your registration cards to the guards at the door. It is essential that this be done rapidly. Attention! Attention! Attention!"
The message was repeated three times, the last time over the sound of scuffling feet as crowds were beginning to line up at the exits. A many-tongued cry was making itself heard, asking in various fashions the forever-unanswerable question of "What's happened? What's going on?"
Arvardan shrugged and said, "Let's get on line, miss. We're leaving anyway."
But Pola shook her head. "We can't. We can't-"
"Why not?" The archaeologist frowned.
The girl merely shrank away from him. How could she tell him that Schwartz had no registration card? Who was he? Why had he been helping her? She was in a whirl of suspicion and despair.
She said huskily, "You'd better go, or you'll get into trouble."
They were pouring out the elevators as the upper floors emptied. Arvardan, Pola, and Schwartz were a little island of solidity in the human river.
Looking back on it later, Arvardan realized that at this point he could have left the girl. Left her! Never seen her again! Have nothing to reproach himself with!...And all would have been different. The great Galactic Empire would have dissolved in chaos and destruction.