“I walked through the Park,” he admitted. He had stopped eating; his “eggs” were cooling on his plate.
“But the paint,” Janet said. In her voice was the vague, troubled fear with which she met every crisis, the helpless sense of foreboding that always seemed to paralyze her ability to act. “You didn’t do anything wrong, did you?” She was, obviously, thinking of the lease.
Rubbing his forehead, Allen got to his feet. “It’s seven-thirty. I’ll have to start to work.”
Janet also rose. “But you didn’t finish eating.” He always finished eating. “You’re not sick, are you?”
“Me,” he said. “Sick?” He laughed, kissed her on the mouth, and then found his coat. “When was I last sick?”
“Never,” she murmured, troubled and watching him. “There’s never anything the matter with you.”
At the base of the housing unit, businessmen were clustered at the block warden’s table. The routine check was in progress, and Allen joined the group. The morning smelled of ozone, and its clean scent helped clear his head. And it restored his fundamental optimism.
The Parent Citizens Committee maintained a female functionary for each housing unit, and Mrs. Birmingham was typical: plump, florid, in her middle fifties, she wore a flowered and ornate dress and wrote out her reports with a powerfully authoritative fountain pen. It was a respected position, and Mrs. Birmingham had held the post for years.
“Good morning, Mr. Purcell.” She beamed as his turn arrived.
“Hello, Mrs. Birmingham.” He tipped his hat, since block wardens set great store by the little civilities. “Looks like a nice day, assuming it doesn’t cloud up.”
“Rain for the crops,” Mrs. Birmingham said, which was a joke. Virtually all foods and manufactured items were brought in by autofac rocket; the limited domestic supply served only as a standard of judgment, a kind of recalled ideal. The woman made a note on her long yellow pad. “I . . . haven’t seen your lovely wife yet, today.”
Allen always alibied for his wife’s tardiness. “Janet’s getting ready for the Book Club meeting. Special day: she’s been promoted to treasurer.”
“I’m so glad,” Mrs. Birmingham said. “She’s such a sweet girl. A bit shy, though. She should mix more with people.”
“That’s certainly true,” he agreed. “She was brought up in the wide open spaces. Betelgeuse 4. Rocks and goats.”
He had expected that to end the interview—his own conduct was rarely in question—but suddenly Mrs. Birmingham became rigid and business-like. “You were out late last night, Mr. Purcell. Did you have a good time?”
Lord, he cursed. A juvenile must have spotted him. “Not very.” He wondered how much it had seen. If it tagged him early in the trip it might have followed the whole way.
“You visited Hokkaido,” Mrs. Birmingham stated.
“Research,” he said, assuming the posture of defense. “For the Agency.” This was the great dialectic of the moral society, and, in a perverse way, he enjoyed it. He was facing a bureaucrat who operated by rote, whereas he struck through the layers of habit and hit directly. This was the success of his Agency, and it was the success of his personal life. “Telemedia’s needs take precedence over personal feeling, Mrs. Birmingham. You certainly understand that.”
His confidence did the trick, and Mrs. Birmingham’s saccharine smile returned. Making a scratch with her pen she asked: “Will we see you at the block meeting next Wednesday? That’s just the day after tomorrow.”
“Certainly,” Allen said. Over the decades he had learned to endure the interminable interchange, the stuffy presence of his neighbors packed together in one room. And the whirr of the juveniles as they surrendered their tapes to the Committee representatives. “But I’m afraid I won’t have much to contribute.” He was too busy with his ideas and plans to care who lapsed and in what way. “I’ve been up to my neck in work.”
“Perhaps,” Mrs. Birmingham said, in a partly bantering, partly haughty thought-for-this-week voice, “there might be a few criticisms of you.”
“Of me?” He winced with shock, and felt ill.
“It seems to me that when I was glancing over the reports, I noticed your name. Perhaps not. I could be mistaken. Goodness.” She laughed lightly. “If so it’s certainly the first time in years. But none of us is perfect; we’re all mortal.”
“Hokkaido?” he demanded. Or afterward. The paint, the grass. There it was in a rush: the wet grass sparkling and slithering under him as he coasted dizzily downhill. The swaying staffs of trees. Above, as he lay gaping on his back, the dark-swept sky; clouds were figments of matter against the blackness. And he, lying stretched out, arms out, swallowing stars.
“Or afterward?” he demanded, but Mrs. Birmingham had turned to the next man in line.
CHAPTER 2
The lobby of the Mogentlock Building was active and stirring with noise, a constant coming-and-going of busy people as Allen approached the elevator. Because of Mrs. Birmingham he was late. The elevator politely waited.
“Good morning, Mr. Purcell.” The elevator’s taped voice greeted him, and then the doors shut. “Second floor Bevis and Company Import-Export. Third floor American Music Federation. Fourth floor Allen Purcell, Inc. Research Agency.” The elevator halted and opened its door.
In the outer reception lounge, Fred Luddy, his assistant, wandered about in a tantrum of discomfort.
“Morning,” Allen murmured vaguely, taking off his coat.
“Allen, she’s here.” Luddy’s face flushed scarlet. “She got here before I did; I came up and there she was, sitting.”
“Who? Janet?” He had a mental image of a Committee representative driving her from the apartment and canceling the lease. Mrs. Birmingham, with smiles, closing in on Janet as she sat absently combing her hair.
“Not Mrs. Purcell,” Luddy said. He lowered his voice to a rasp. “It’s Sue Frost.”
Allen involuntarily craned his neck, but the inner door was closed. If Sue Frost was really sitting in there, it marked the first time a Committee Secretary had paid a call on him.
“I’ll be darned,” he said.
Luddy yelped. “She wants to see you!”
The Committee functioned through a series of departmental secretaries directly responsible to Ida Pease Hoyt, the linear descendant of Major Streiter. Sue Frost was the administrator of Telemedia, which was the official government trust controlling mass communications. He had never dealt with Mrs. Frost, or even met her; he worked with the acting Director of T-M, a weary-voiced, bald-headed individual named Myron Mavis. It was Mavis who bought packets.
“What’s she want?” Allen asked. Presumably, she had learned that Mavis was taking the Agency’s output, and that the Agency was relatively new. With a sinking dread he anticipated one of the Committee’s gloomy, protracted investigations. “Better have Doris block my incoming calls.” Doris was one of his secretaries. “You take over until Mrs. Frost and I are through talking.”
Luddy followed after him in a dance of prayer. “Good luck, Allen. I’ll hold the fort for you. If you want the books—”
“Yes, I’ll call you.” He opened the office door, and there was Sue Frost.
She was tall, and she was rather large-boned and muscular. Her suit was a simple hard weave, dark gray in color. She wore a flower in her hair, and she was altogether a strikingly handsome woman. At a guess, she was in her middle fifties. There was little or no softness to her, nothing of the fleshy and over-dressed motherliness that he saw in so many Committee women. Her legs were long, and, as she rose to her feet, her right hand lifted to welcome him in a forthright—almost masculine—handshake.
“Hello, Mr. Purcell,” she said. Her voice was not overly expressive. “I hope you don’t mind my showing up this way, unannounced.”
“Not at all,” he murmured. “Please sit down.”
She reseated herself, crossed her legs, contemplated him. Her eyes, he noticed, were an almost colorless straw. A strong kind of substance, and highly polished.
“Cigarette?” He extended his case, and she accepted a cigarette with a nod of thanks. He took one also, feeling like a gauche young man in the company of an older and more experienced woman.
He couldn’t help thinking that Sue Frost was the type of urbane career woman ultimately not proposed to by the hero of Blake-Moffet’s packets. There was an unsympathetic firmness about her. She was decidedly not the girl from next door.
“Undoubtedly,” Sue Frost began, “you recognize this.” She unraveled the winding of a manila folder and displayed a sheaf of script. On the cover of the sheaf was his Agency’s stamp; she had one of his packets, and she evidently had been reading it.
“Yes,” he admitted. “That’s one of ours.”
Sue Frost leafed through the packet, then laid it down on Allen’s desk. “Myron accepted this last month. Then he had qualms and he sent it along the line to me. I had a chance to go over it this weekend.”
Now the packet was turned so that Allen could catch the title. It was a high-quality piece he had personally participated in; as it stood it could have gone over any of T-M’s media.