shower. By sternly repressing the craving, weaker in me than in most because it had had less time to become established, I managed to have the showers almost alone. When the mob arrived, I hit the vending machines. It was a simple application of intelligence, and if that doesn’t bear out the essential difference between consumer and copy smith mentality, what does? Of course, as I say, the habits weren’t as strong in me. There was one other man in the shower, but, with only two of us, we hardly touched. He handed me the soap as I came in; I lathered and let the water roar down over me under the full pressure of the recirculators. I was hardly aware he was there. But, as I passed the soap back to him, I felt his third finger touch my wrist, the index finger circle around the base of my thumb. “Oh,” I said stupidly, and returned the handclasp. “Are you my con-” “Ssh!” he hissed. He gestured irritatedly to the Muzak spymike dangling from the ceiling. He turned his back on me and meticulously soaped himself again. When he returned the soap a scrap of paper clung to it. In the locker room I squeezed it dry and spread it out. It read: “Tonight is pass night. Go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Classics Room. Be in front of the Maidenform exhibit at exactly five minutes before closing time.” I joined the queue at the supervisor’s desk as soon as I was dressed. In less than half an hour I had a stamped pass authorizing me to skip bedcheck for the night. I returned to my bunk to pick up my belongings, warned the new occupant of the bed about the sleep-talking of the man in the tier above, turned in my bag to the supply room, and caught the shuttle down to Bronxville. I transferred to a north-bound local, rode one station, switched to the south-bound side, and got out at Schocken Tower. No one appeared to be following me. I hadn’t expected anyone to, but it never pays to take chances. My Consie rendezvous at the Met was almost four hours off. I stood around in the lobby until a cop, contemptuously eyeing my cheap clothing, moved toward me. I had hoped Hester or perhaps even Fowler Schocken himself might come through; no such luck. I saw a good many faces I recognized, of course, but none I was sure I could trust. And, until I found out what lay behind the double cross
on Starrzelius Glacier, I had no intention of telling just anybody that I was still alive. The Pinkerton boomed, “You want to give the Schocken people your business, crumb? You got a big account for them, maybe?” “Sorry,” I said, and headed for the street door. It didn’t figure that he would bother to follow me through the crowd in the lobby; he didn’t. I dodged around the recreation room, where a group of consumers were watching a PregNot light love story on the screen and getting their samples of Coffiest, and ducked into the service elevators. “Eightieth,” I said to the operator, and at once realized I had blundered. The operator’s voice said sharply through the speaker grille: “Service elevators go only to the seventieth floor, you in Car Five. What do you want?” “Messenger,” I lied miserably. “I got to make a pickup from Mr. Schocken’s office. I told them I wouldn’t be let in to Mr. Schocken’s office, a fellow like me. I told them, ‘Look, he’s probably got twenty-five seckataries I got to go through before they let me see him,’ I said-” “The mail room is on forty-five,” the operator said, a shade less sharply. “Stand in front of the door so I can see you.” I moved into range of the ike. I didn’t want to, but I couldn’t see any way out. I thought I heard a sound from the grille, but there was no way of being sure. I had never been in the elevator operators’ room, a thousand feet below me, where they pushed the buttons that sent the cars up and down the toothed shafts; I would have given a year’s pay to have been able to look into it then. I stood there for half a minute. Then the operator’s voice said noncommittally. “All right, you. Back in the car. Forty-fifth floor, first slide to the left.” The others in the car stared at me through an incurious haze of Coffiest’s alkaloids until I got out. I stepped on the leftbound slidewalk and went past the door marked “Mail Room,” to the corridor juncture where my slidewalk dipped down around its roller. It took me a little while to find the stairway, but that was all right. I needed the time to catch up on my swearing. I didn’t dare use the elevators again. Have you ever climbed thirty-five flights of stairs?