“I didn’t say I knew him!” Ashby blurted. “You don’t have any right—I don’t care who you are, you can’t put words in a person’s mouth!”
“Did he always use the elevator when he visited Level 15?” Lacey asked, his voice still smooth but his muscles hardening slightly.
“I don’t know.”
“Umm, well . . . do you know how a Psycomp works, Citizen Ashby?” Ashby’s face tilted up at the question, the mouth in a grimace or snarl, the eyes open. He said nothing. Lacey reached down, took a handful of fabric at the other man’s throat and guided rather than jerked Ashby erect. “Maybe I’d better tell you, then, because it could be you’ll be spending a long time in one yourself. You see, they give you a short-term anesthetic and slip you into a nutrient bath loaded with oxygen. Filling your lungs with it takes the anesthetic, but your body adapts to the system just fine.
“And you lose a little muscle tone, sure, but they won’t really atrophy. The techs, though, they’ve run leads into your brain and as you lie there fed and filtered and breathing without being able to blink, a computer starts playing games in your head. It feeds in signals and sees what your brain does with them. Pretty soon it knows your head better than god himself does. It gets the answers to any questions it’s been programmed to ask, and it goes around correcting any things that it’s been programmed to correct. So long as it’s in there anyway, you see.”
Lacey’s voice was the husky purring of a cat about to feed. His face was close to Ashby’s and he was speaking with great distinctness. The clerk’s eyes were bright with panic, and only the touch of Lacey’s hand on his garments kept him from bolting. “It’s not . . . comfortable,” Lacey said, “lying there while a machine turns over every rock in your mind. And sometimes something goes wrong. Sometimes the computer goofs and a fellow comes out normal enough to look at but ready to kill at the slightest provocation, the least little thing that doesn’t go his way . . .
“Oh—I forgot to tell you where they sink the leads into your skull, didn’t I?” Lacey added. He tossed his head so that his brown-blond hair flew back from his forehead. With his free hand he touched two fingers to the white dimples at the hairline. “They go here. At least they did on me.” He dropped Ashby and the softer man sagged into his chair like a scarecrow with half the stuffing gone.
“Now do you want to tell me about the driver?” Lacey asked; and through his sobs, Ashby told him.
Robert Wilhoit was afraid of heights. Not to an incapacitating degree, but enough that when he made it big he had begun to travel by ground vehicle despite the awkwardness of not being able to skim over the commercial traffic. For at least the past year, Silvers had been Wilhoit’s driver.
The first time Ashby had seen them together was a day that the clerk had arrived early. Wilhoit had left his car and purred up the elevator while Ashby trudged the fourteen flights of stairs to which his position made him subject: no one but Wilhoit ever used the elevator. Three weeks later, the chauffeur had shared the cage with his employer, his haughty smoke-blue livery pressed tight against Wilhoit in the narrow space; and soon after that, the young man had his own key to the device and frequently rode it alone.
“I’ve worked for Coeltrans for twenty-three years,” Ashby explained. Once started, the year of anger that had built up in the clerk spewed out like pus from a squeezed boil. “That’s from the day, the very day that Citizen Wilhoit incorporated. Did he ever let me ride his elevator? Did he even speak to me, say, ‘You’re doing good work, Ashby’? Ha! But this little, greasy child. . . .”
Ashby raised his face and cupped hands to Lacey, pleading for the agent to understand something that he could not articulate. “He would ride up the elevator, get off at one floor or another. He didn’t have any business in the building, he was just a driver. He talked to the younger clerks and the senior people, the floor managers—yes, me!—couldn’t stop him. We were . . . we were afraid.”