Mess was on when I reached the group. I wasn't hungry. The wine had cut the edge from my appetite, and the slow increase of poison in the air was getting me, as it was the others. Sure, carbon dioxide isn't a real poison--but no organism can live in its own waste, all the same. I had a rotten headache. I sat there playing a little game I'd invented--trying to figure which ones I'd eliminate if some had to die. Jenny laughed up at Muller, and I added him to the list. Then I changed it, and put her in his place. I was getting sick of the little witch, though I knew it would be different if she'd been laughing up at me. And then, because of the sick-calf look on Bill Sanderson's face as he stared at Eve, I added him, though I'd always liked the guy. Eve, surprisingly, had as many guys after her as Jenny; but she didn't seem interested. Or maybe she did--she'd pulled her hair back and put on a dress that made her figure look good. Either flattery was working, or she was entering into the last-days feeling most of us had. Napier came in and touched my shoulder. "Lomax is conscious, and he's asking for you," he said, too low for the others to hear. I found the chemist conscious, all right, but sick--and scared. His face winced, under all the bandages, as I opened the door. Then he saw who it was, and relaxed. "Paul--what happened to me? The last I remember is going up to see that second batch of plants poisoned. But--well, this is something I must have got later...." I told him, as best I could. "But don't you remember anything?" "Not a thing about that. It's the same as Napier told me, and I've been trying to remember. Paul, you don't think--?" I put a hand on his shoulder and pushed him back gently. "Don't be a damned fool, Hal. I know you're no killer." "But somebody is, Paul. Somebody tried to kill me while I was unconscious!" He must have seen my reaction. "They did, Paul. I don't know how I know--maybe I almost came to--but somebody tried to poke a stick through the door with a knife on it. They want to kill me." [Illustration] I tried to calm him down until Napier came and gave him a sedative. The doctor seemed as sick about Hal's inability to remember as I was, though he indicated it was normal enough in concussion cases. "So is the hallucination," he added. "He'll be all right tomorrow." In that, Napier was wrong. When the doctor looked in on him the next time, the big chemist lay behind a door that had been pried open, with a long galley knife through his heart. On the bloody sheet, his finger had traced something in his own blood. "_It was_...." But the last "s" was blurred, and there was nothing more. IV I don't know how many were shocked at Hal's death, or how many looked around and counted one less pair of lungs. He'd never been one of the men I'd envied the air he used, though, and I think most felt the same. For awhile, we didn't even notice that the air was even thicker.