The UV sterilizers overhead made everything look ghastly violet, but in any light, the waxy face under the plastic would have looked dead as death itself. I couldn't blame Rena for weeping. I took out the little radiation counter and looked at it awkwardly. There was nothing complicated about the device--fortunately, because I had had little experience with them. It was a cylinder with a flaring snout at one end, a calibrated gauge at the side, marked in micro-roentgens. The little needle flickered in the green area of the dial. I held it to myself and the reading didn't change. I pointed it up and pointed it down; it didn't change. I held it to the radiation-seared body of Benedetto dell'Angela. And it didn't change. Radiation-seared? Not unless the instrument lied! If dell'Angela had ever in his life been within the disaster radius of an atomic explosion, it had been so long before that every trace of radioactive byproduct was gone! Rena was right! * * * * * I worked like a machine, hardly thinking. I stood up and hurriedly touched the ion-tasting snout of the counter to the body on the shelf above Benedetto, the one above that, a dozen chosen at random up and down the aisle. Two of them sent the needle surging clear off the scale; three were as untainted by radioactivity as Benedetto himself. A few others gave readings from "mild" to "lethal"--but all in the danger area. _Most were as untainted by radiation as Benedetto himself._ It was possible, I told myself frantically, that there were mysteries here I did not understand. Perhaps after a few months or a year, the radiation level would drop, so that the victim was still in deadly danger while the emitted radiation of his body was too slight to affect the counter. I didn't see how, but it was worth a thought. Anything was worth a thought that promised another explanation to this than the one Rena had given! There had been, I remembered, a score or more of new suspendees in the main receiving vault at the juncture of the corridors. I hurried back to it. Here were fresh cases, bound to show on the gauge. I leaned over the nearest one, first checking to make sure its identification tag was the cross-hatched red one that marked "radiation." I brought the counter close to the shriveled face-- But I didn't read the dial, not at first. I didn't have to. For I recognized that face. I had seen it, contorted in terror, mumbling frantic pleas for mercy, weeping and howling, on the old Class E uninsurable the expediters had found hiding in the vaults. _He_ had no radiation poisoning ... unless a bomb had exploded in these very vaults in the past twelve hours. It wasn't pleasant to stand there and stare around the vaults that were designed for the single purpose of saving human life--and to wonder how many of the eighty thousand souls it held were also prisoners.