Of course she could get the key. She went away, and came back almost immediately, and led me to Suite 87 herself.
No windows. Not in the balls, not in my room, not in the diner, not in Jenna’s office, and not here in Suite 87. Only die Colonel, at the top of the tower, had a window, which told him kindly lies. Windowless, Suite 87 had three rooms, each as small as the one in which I had slept last night. The first was a sitting room done in green and brown, with an entertainment center along one wall, I almost went over to look at the books and tapes, but then I remembered they wouldn’t be Gar’s, they’d be the new tenant’s, and I turned away.
The second room was a dinette, in silver and yellow, the kitchen appliances grouped on one side and the meal area across the way. It was necessary to go through the dinette to get to the third room, a bedroom in yellow and green, continuing the two primary colors from the earlier part of the suite. (Just as there were no windows, there was no red anywhere. The only man-made red I’d seen since arrival was the Colonel’s robe.) Finally, off the bedroom was a small silver and while bath.
There was nothing here, I could stand in any of the rooms and look around and know I was looking at the walls and floors and furnishings that Gar had looked at, but artifacts of the new tenant kept intruding, breaking into my communication. Suite 87 was barren.
At last I shook my head and said, “All right. I’ve had enough.”
She looked at me with sympathy, and put her hand on ray arm. I don’t know why, but that look and that touch made me dislike her for the moment.
Out in the corridor again, I waited while Jenna relocked the door and then I said, “It’s time for me to see L.L. Goss.”
“Special Projects Supervisor. He’ll help you, if anybody will.”
We had to take the elevator, and came to the first really busy level I’d so far seen. Men and women in work jumpers sat at tables, carried papers from room to room, spoke into tape machines or discussed things together in low intense voices. Jenna led me to a door which took me away from all this activity into a brown room where a girl sat primly in a brown juniper at a brown desk. She was plain of face and very thin, and I saw a quick expression of something like bitter envy flash by her eyes when she looked up and saw Jenna. But her voice was bright and impersonal as she asked what we wanted.
Jenna answered: “Gar Malone’s brother, to see Mr. Goss. He’s expected.”
“One moment.”
When she left the room, going through another door into an inner office, Jenna turned to me and said, “Well, good luck, Rolf.”
“You’re going?”
“I have work to do. Goodbye.”
“Will I see you later on?”
She smiled slightly and shook her head. “I doubt you’ll ever see me again, Rolf,” she said.
“Why?”
“Because we both have work to do. And it takes us in different directions.” Her smile twisted a little, and she said, “Besides, I don’t think I like who you think I am.”
“I don’t even know you.”
“What difference does that make?” Then she smiled more freely and said, “In some ways, you remind me of Gar. But in most ways you’re very different.”
I suddenly had to know. I said, “Did he ask you?”
“Of course not.” Smiling, putting sex into it for just a second, she said, “I had to ask him.”
It was an exit line, and she’d planned it that way, and she went out on it. Suddenly disliking her more than ever, I took a step toward the door, to follow her and spoil the exit, force her to give Gar and me and herself back our individuality no matter what the pain, but the voice of the plain girl in brown stopped me, saying, “Mr. Goss will see you now.”
XI
L.L. Goss was a short, stocky, rumpled man standing in the middle of a stuffed, square, rumpled room and trying to decide what expression he should have on his face while greeting the brother of a dead man he used to know. He seemed to be the compulsively friendly type, and a cheerful hail fellow sort of grin struggled on his face with a solemn and mournful funeral parlor wince. Since he’d been Gar’s supervisor, a remote official detachment also strove for command of his features, but with little success.
“Mr. Malone,” he said, and pumped my hand. “Your brother talked about you a lot. Talked about you a lot.”
“Did he?”
“I was looking forward to meeting you,” he assured me, talking all in a rush, continuing to hold my hand as though he’d forgotten it was there. “Expected big things from the Malone brothers, big things. Could hardly wait to see you walk in, but not under these conditions. No, not under these conditions.”
“I feel the same way,” I said.
“Of course you do. Of course you do.” Still holding my hand, he led me deeper into the room and told me twice to sit down in one of two facing plastic chairs. When I had done so, and he had released my hand at last and sat facing me, he said, with solemnity now in charge of his face, “It was a really tragic thing, I assure you. Tragic. Gar had a brilliant mind. Yes, and a great future ahead of him. It’s hard to believe a man so vibrant is gone, hard to believe.”
“But he is gone,” I said. I didn’t want eulogies, with or without a second copy. I could supply myself all the eulogies I wanted concerning Gar.
The solemn face gave way for a while to the remote official face as he said, “Colonel Whistler tells me you understand there’s no job opening for you at the moment, now that your brother is no longer with the corporation.”
No longer with the corporation. What a phrase. I said, “I realize that.”
“Certainly. Certainly.”
“I’m not here for a job. I’m here to find out what happened.”
Goss got to his feet, looking away from me, saying, “Yes, yes, perfectly natural. Under the circumstances, perfectly natural.” He was roaming around the room, peering here and there on littered tables, not looking at me, saying, “I can understand how you feel, the shock of it— Ah, there it is!” He picked up a pipe and showed it to me, the hail fellow grin finally flashing out at me unrestrained. “Never find this thing,” he said. “Never find it.”
I said, “I want to know the details.”
“Only to be expected,” he muttered, busy now filling his pipe. “Only to be expected. Anything I can do to help, anything at all—”
“You can tell me about it.”
He stopped fussing with the pipe, looked sharply at me with a wary look I hadn’t seen in his face before, then went back to the pipe. “I’ll be glad to, glad to. Whatever I know.”
“Maybe it would be best,” I said, “if I asked you questions about the parts that interest me.”
“Excellent. Just the thing.” He came back with his pipe, trailing a thread of smoke, and sat in front of me again. “Ask away,” he invited me. “Ask away.”
I could hardly think which question came first, and finally selected one at random: “Where was he killed?”
“Where? Yoroch Pass.” He popped to his feet again, motioning at me with the pipe. “Come along, I’ll show you the exact spot. Come along.”
I followed him to one of the littered tables, and watched him clear it; stacks of papers went on another table, small lumpy specimen sacks went on the floor, pencils and rulers and compasses went anywhere they could fit. When the table top was at last clean, I could see inlaid in it a map of Anarchaos done in black and white.
“You see what this is,” Goss said unnecessarily. “It’s dayside of the planet. Here we are here, at Ulik. There’s Ni, where you landed, the center of dayside. Here’s Moro-Geth way over here to the west. And north of Ni, here’s Prudence, here, the mining town.”