One of the first birds he had already sent into the ventilator so he could look through it into the room below. He got it there just in time to hear the Leader's gasp of dismay as he saw Hanlon's body slump still further in apparent lifelessness. "Is he dead, Boss, is he?" he heard Panek's anxious cry. His Highness felt the pulse in Hanlon's wrist and the one in his throat. "No, he's still alive." The man stood there in deep thought, his forehead creased with a frown of concentration. "There's something peculiarly wrong here," the Leader finally said aloud. "Something very wrong and very strange. This isn't an ordinary fainting spell. It's ... uh ... beyond my previous experience." He straightened and addressed Hanlon's body once more. "Can you still hear me, George Hanlon?" There was no answer, no slightest indication that his words were heard. He reached forward and lifted the body into a more upright position in the chair. "Answer me, George Hanlon. Do you hear me? I command you to tell me, are you a Corpsman?" Still no answer, no twitch of muscle, no movement of awareness. He shook the body a little, and raised his voice still more. "I demand an answer, George Hanlon! The truth drug must make you speak!" But only silence, and when he let go of the body it fell backward into the chair, and the head lolled forward as though the neck was broken. "Let me work on him, Boss," Panek pleaded. "Let me give him a going over, let me." Barely waiting to see that His Highness did not forbid it, the thug raised a short, ugly piece of rubber hose, and struck the unresisting body again and again--across the face, over the top and back of the head, vicious blows at the ribs and even in the groin. But he might as well have been pounding a sack of meal. The body sagged beneath the blows, and became bloody and discolored, but no movement--no conscious movement--did it make. "That will do, Panek," His Highness finally commanded. "That does no good. This I cannot understand, but I do know there is ... uh ... something most peculiar here. It is almost as though ...", he paused and frowned again. "But that is ridiculous!" "What's ridiculous, Boss, what is?" "It is almost as though there was ... uh ... no mind left in the body," His Highness said slowly. Then, abruptly, "Are you sure that was truth-serum in that hypodermic?" "You fixed it yourself, Boss." His Highness wheeled suddenly, rudely awakened from his thinking by the loud _shoo_-ing noise one of the guards was making. He was astonished to see the man making vain motions toward a pigeon whose head was sticking through, the ventilator vanes. But the bird didn't leave. "Stop it!" the Leader commanded impatiently. "We've more import ..." He checked himself, and turned back to stare wonderingly at the bird, which peered back at him with apparently unfrightened, beady eyes, turning its head to first one side and then the other, as though better to see all that was going on.