You could follow these signs if you chose. They led to
another city altogether. They led to the city Danty lived in.
He left the hovercar at a halt on the roof of one of the city’s oldest surviving buildings, a good sixty years old. It had seemed like a logical idea, when they extended the line around the lake, to use existing roofs for halts, but they had had to straitjacket the building with concrete beams when the recurrent vibration threatened to shake it down. Now the beams served a double purpose, acting also as supporters for an exterior staircase and for landings on three sides of the building. The interior stairways and the elevator shaft had been turned into shower-rooms and kitchenettes. There had been two apartments on the top floor of this building; now there were eight, entered by doors that had been regular windows.
In the remaining window of the apartment nearest the stairs, dimly legible through the wire-reinforced glass, a card said simply CONSULTATIONS. It was into this one that Danty let himself, with a key that he wore on a steel chain around his neck. It was a precious key; there were only two like it. It was risky to use a stock type of lock in modern Cowville, because so many people had complete collections of the American Lock and Vault Corporation’s range. If you could afford it, you had one hand-made.
The apartment trembled a little as the hovercar he’d arrived on accelerated towards its next destination.
“Magdal” Danty called as he shut the door. There was no answer. He hadn’t really expected one, unless she was in the toilet.
The apartment consisted of one large room, along two walls of which couches that doubled as divans had been built in, plus an alcove cut off with a curtain, a shower cabinet, and a kitchen made of fire-proof board. As always, it was untidy, with a dozen books lying around open, a stack of sheets torn from a notepad in the middle of the one large low table. He glanced at the latter to make sure none bore a message for him, but they were covered in indecipherable technicalities.
He swore under his breath. Of course, she did have many other calls on her time, but you’d have thought that today . .
His resentment . died. Maybe it was better this way. Maybe he needed a chance to think over what he had done. Until he was in sight of Lakonia, he’d been able
to mute knowledge of his own actions in his mind, making them distant and dream-Me. Now they were throbbing and pounding in his memory.
More to distract himself than because he was hungry, he brought a soy burger and a carton of milk out of the freezer, switched on the TV, and sat down to eat in front of it. He caught the tail-end of the weather forecast, and then followed the day’s counts: pollen, RA-high beta, low gamma-KC’s, Known Carcinogens, SO, and the rest. But he wasn’t paying attention. He was thinking about the man from the sea.
Images came to his mind: He pictured the disturbance the stranger would cause, like a small, very hard pebble dropped into a loose-journal led complex of machinery. Slack would be taken up here and there in its bearings. Bit by bit it would become possible to deduce who he was, why he had come, what he hoped to achieve.
And then, perhaps, something would have to be done.
“Do thou therefore perform right and obligatory actions,” he quoted to himself under his breath, “for action is superior to inaction.”
With a sudden violent gesture he thrust away his plate. He linked his brown thin fingers together so tightly the knuckles paled. His teeth threatened to chatter, so that he had to knot his jaw-muscles to hold them still.
Magda! For pity’s sake hurry back!
I’m scared!
Lora Turpin had had all she could take, and said so to her mother. Her mother, with her usual infuriating white satin calmness-out of a bottle with “White Satin” on the label–called her a misbegotten moron and suggested that 5 radiation must have affected the ovum from which she was conceived. That finished the discussion. Theatrically Lora stormed out of the room, out of the apartment, out of the building, and into a hovercar going anywhere. ,