“Two samples,” the implant reported.
“Run the latest,” said Lacey.
The scene in the scanner was visual proof of the story Ashby had told. Silvers was arriving in his blue and smoke livery, a stim stick between his gum and cheek to diffuse its alkaloids into his bloodstream. His walk missed being a swagger only by its fluidity. Wilhoit was aware of him as of nothing else in the room, but he kept his head bent down and only the tension of his hand on the desk edge was a communication.
The chauffeur sidled between desks, watching with bored superiority as clerks tapped figures into the displays across their desktops. Some stumbled under his gaze. Once Silvers spoke to an employee, a blond boy whose bones must have been translucent to give him so ethereal an air. Lacey switched to another camera for a view of Silvers’ lips, but the words were a bland question about how long the other had worked for Coeltrans. The embarrassed clerk only muttered, “Sir, a week is all,” but his eyes followed Silvers until the driver left, alone, as suddenly and inexplicably as he had come.
Lacey sent his left ring finger the message to curl. The rerouted nerve triggered his implant. “What’s Silvers’ home address?” he asked.
“Suite 12, Level 3, 184 West Mangum Street.”
“Suite” sounded plush, “Level 3” sounded plush—a low walk-up but high enough to be clear of the noise and odors of the inevitable stores on the ground floor—and the street address was in the middle of a very good neighborhood indeed. “Same template, same scan frame, Level 3, 184 West Mangum Street,” Lacey directed.
“Five samples.”
“Run the latest.”
By law and in practice, every room in the State of over five cubic meters was covered by the interlocked fields of three scanning cameras. The law did not regulate minimum size or occupancy for rooms, but the staggering use-tax linked to every required camera guaranteed that space—and the scanners covering it—would be efficiently used. Silvers’ rent was indicated by the fact that his apartment level was planned into fifty suites when many middle-class levels would have held five times as many units in the same area. Lacey’s helmet showed him a late-evening scene: Silvers entering from the lower staircase and sauntering along a serpentine corridor to his own suite. He was out of livery, wearing instead a cape and jumpsuit cut conservatively but from lustrous material that flowed through a range of colors. Because the scanners worked on infra-red in the darkness, the precise shades were doubtful; the cost of the garment was not.
The corridors and suites were divided by double floor-to-ceiling sheets of vitril, sound-deadening but kept visually transparent by an expensive static cleaning system. Silvers palmed his lock plate, entered, and began fixing a meal in the kitchen.
“Who’s paying for this?” Lacey asked.
The CS Net cleared its throat with a click, then said, “All charges are paid through Personnel Accounting, Coeltrans.”
“On whose request?”
“That information is not available.”
A written or verbal order, than, not one punched directly into the corporation’s accounts from a high level. Available to Lacey when he began running scanner images and questioning clerks. He didn’t need the knowledge yet, and it would still be waiting for him when he did.
Lacey swung away his helmet and rubbed his eyes. The level was almost empty and the sky beyond the windows was black. “Late,” he thought, then glanced at the clock hands illuminated over the doorway and realized that instead it was early—and not all that early. He did not feel tired, only light and insubstantial and happy in a way that drugs could never leave him. There was one more matter he could clear up through the helmet while it was still dark outside.
“Same template, same scan frame—Level 9, 304 Corcoran Street,” Lacey ordered, shrouding himself with his helmet again.
“One sample.”
“Run it.”
On the screen flashed a moving image of the anteroom of Hell. In a nation without privacy there can be few statutory crimes. This is neither altruism nor liberality, simply economics. Since every human activity was scanned and the inputs monitored by computers which would ring alerts on every instance of activity they were programmed to find unlawful, there had to be sharp limits to make actual enforcement possible by a police force of acceptable size. In earlier decades, patrolmen could be writing parking tickets within twenty feet of a mugging or rape in progress. Now no crime was ignored and, without the lubricant of ignorance which made the old system work, the statute book itself had to be streamlined into the realm of possibility by a ruthless paring of minor offenses and victimless crimes.