Murdoch felt as if the entire place was lined with eyes, all focused on his left hand. The act of theft clearly begun, his life in the balance, he felt now the icy nausea of fear; a feeling familiar enough, and which he knew how to control, but which he still didn't like. Fear. It's a strange thing, he thought. A peculiar thing. If you analyzed it, you could resolve it into the physical sick feeling and the wish in your mind, a very fervent wish, that you were somewhere else. Sometimes, if it caught you tightly enough, it was almost paralyzing so that your limbs and even your lungs seemed to be on strike. When fear gripped him he always remembered back to that turning point, that act that had made him an outlaw and an exile from Earth. He'd been a pilot in the Space Force, young, just out of the Academy, and the bribe had seemed very large and the treason very small. It seemed incredibly naive, now, that he should not have understood that a double-cross was necessarily a part of the arrangement. It was in escaping at all, against odds beyond calculating, that he had learned that he thought faster and deeper than other men, and that he had guts. Having guts turned out to be a different thing than he had imagined. It didn't mean that you stood grinning and calm while others went mad with fear. It meant you suffered all the panic, all the actual physical agony they did, but that you somehow stuck to the gun, took the buffeting and still had in a corner of your being enough wit to throw the counter-punch or think through to the way out. And that's what he had to do now. Endure the fear and keep his wits. The robot had responded to Waverill's loud demand. It barely glanced at Waverill's hand, said, "It will heal quickly" and left. So far as Murdoch could tell, it didn't look at him. As soon as he dared, he went and took a shower. In the process of lathering he inserted the syringe into the slit between thumb and forefinger of his left hand. In that hiding-place was a small plastic sphere holding a substance which ought to be nutrient to the virus. It was delicate work, but he'd practiced well and his fingers were under control now; and he got the point of the syringe into the sphere and squeezed. He relaxed the squeeze, felt the bulb return slowly to shape as it drew out some of the gummy stuff. He squeezed it back in, let the shower rinse the syringe and got that back into the pouch in his right hand.