To the State, no form of consensual sexual activity was a crime. Society, however, had a separate opinion.
When poverty becomes the norm, everything is for sale somewhere; but ascetic religion becomes the only real anodyne for the masses. If present squalor is only God’s furnace to purify men for posthumous glory, what matter the lack of food and energy, the endemic diseases and the evidence that all over the world Man was staggering down a slope which he was unlikely to rescale. Purity is not a physical fact but a religious state of mind.
Level 9 was the entrance to the accommodation house, the time house, on the floor above. Clients paid for use of one of the hundreds of canvas-walled cribs, each with a single scanner unit mounted in the ceiling above it. You could not shut out the cameras, but the cameras did not care what—consensually—you did or to whom.
In the helmet screen, on the next to the top level of the sleazy residence building, Terry Silvers stood hipshot as his date, a wizened, balding man in a suit of natural silk, paid the attendant to be allowed to climb to the cribs.
“Cancel,” Lacey said. He did not need or want to follow Silvers into the accommodation house.
No law of the State had been broken there. If Society wished to stigmatize homosexuals as brutally as had Victorian England, if riot squads not infrequently were called to put down the spontaneous violence offered by mobs of the upright to uncovered paederasts, it was no business of Lacey’s.
No one in an accommodation house is upright.
“Death site minus 30 seconds,” Lacey ordered. Silvers’ doomed, smiling face appeared with Wilhoit and the rest of the room beyond it. “Tracer request.”
“Go ahead.”
“Robert Sawney Wilhoit, template as currently on helmet screen.”
“Ready.”
“Level 9, 304 Corcoran Street. All samples in the past six months.”
“Twenty-seven samples.”
“Run the latest.”
Another night on the screen but the same guard and Silvers with the same haughty expression as he waited. This time Citizen Robert Wilhoit, inventor and executive, was paying for the crib. He had the rigid look of a man whose legs were being amputated without anesthetic. There were other customers coming down the stairs, a middle-aged man and a woman too plainly garbed to be a prostitute. They avoided looking at Wilhoit just as he did them.
No one was upright in an accommodation house.
“Cancel,” Lacey repeated and swung the helmet away. Wilhoit had, perhaps, enough power to escape the Mob’s censure, but he could not have escaped his own upbringing. A self-made man rather than an aristocrat raised to believe in the propriety of whatever he chose to do, public exposure of his homosexuality would have horrified Wilhoit as surely as it would have the clerks in his office. And he had been willing to kill to keep it . . . not secret, but unproven. The scanner image was evidence of motive for the computer. Lacey had already known it, of course, because he had a sharp memory for faces. He had remembered Wilhoit and the victim from a night some months previous when he had seen them together, leaving the accommodation house as Lacey entered it for his own private needs.
Morning was bright in the windows and the room had begun to fill with returning agents. It remained to learn where Wilhoit was at the moment. Using the scanner helmet once more, Lacey checked the magnate’s office and found him seated at his desk speaking into a face-covering hush phone.
Lacey stood. “Ready me a car,” he ordered the computer. “I’m going to visit an apartment while its owner’s away.”
* * *
The palm lock set in the clear panel of the suite’s door was impossible to pick by conventional means. The flat pouch over Lacey’s left hip, balancing his needle stunner, held an electronic pick that was by no means conventional. Itself a terminal to the Crime Service Net, its face was a mesh of microscopic beads that raised, lowered, and changed their conductivity under the direction of the computer. If a pattern was on file, the pick duplicated it instantly, if not, the computer ran a random search certain to open any palm lock within a minute.