"Good God!" I looked at her, wondering. "If I was that close to death how could my strength have come back so fast? I don't feel too good right now. But I had enough strength when I crashed into him to drag him from the chair, lift him up and slam him back against the wall." She nodded. "Even a dying man can do that sometimes, if he's threatened in a violent enough way and desperately wants to stay alive. But you weren't that weak, and you're not going to die. You've got more strength right now than you realize. And you'll get stronger--not weaker. After minor surgery the post-operative shock is usually minor too, and the fever didn't last long enough to seriously weaken you. The last blood test was good. No poison--not even a millionth of a c.c. You perspired freely, and that helped to save your life." "All right," I said. "That's good news. Just the fact that you're the only one who knows what would happen if I don't get out of here fast would be better news--the best there is. Except that--" I shook my head and looked past her toward the door. "What good would a walk up the corridor do me if there's a Wendel agent stationed at the end of it? A doctor might be taken in, but a Wendel agent would wonder why a nurse was helping me to keep my strength up when I could answer questions better flat on my back. He'd come right back into this room with us, to find out what happened." "There are no Wendel agents anywhere in the hospital," she said. "The hospital would have put up a fight if a Wendel police officer had insisted on questioning you as _he_ did--in private. It would have been a losing battle, and we couldn't have held out for very long. By tomorrow an armed guard would have demanded that you be released in Wendel custody and you can't run a hospital in the Colony if you defy the Wendel police to that extent." I stared at her, amazed. "Then how did he get in here to see me?" It was then that she exploded the bombshell. "If the Wendel Combine, with all of its socio-political power, came here in the person of just one man and threatened to make full use of that power if he was not allowed to talk to you in strict privacy ... and that man was Henry Wendel himself--" She shrugged, glancing steadily for a moment at the slumped form of Glacial Stare, with just an uncanny silence hovering over him. No trace now of the power-aura that must have made hundreds of his yes-men turn pale and snap to attention at various times in the past, if the look he'd trained on me was ingrained and habitual with him. And I rather thought it was.