And the first man of whom I would ask them was Colonel Holbed Whistler, the Wolmak Corporation’s manager at Anarchaos, the man who had been Gar’s final employer.
VII
“This way, Mr. Malone.”
I had stepped from the elevator into a wide, shallow, featureless, low-ceilinged tan room in which blank closed brown doors were spaced at regular intervals in every wall. The voice — feminine — had come from my right, where I saw a tall and slender blonde woman holding a door open and smiling an invitation to me to enter.
I had been frisked a second time by the inside guards before being put into the elevator, so I now spread my arms out and said, “Don’t you want to search me for weapons?”
She laughed gently, a musical political sound, and said, “No, I don’t think so. They’re very thorough downstairs.”
“So they are.”
I walked toward her, and she stepped aside to let me precede her through the doorway into a pale green corridor which curved away to the right. There were no windows here, nor in the tan room before it, so that nothing — the room, the corridor, the blonde woman — was tinged with that unhealthy red light. The indirect lighting here was colorless; I could have been back home on Earth.
The corridor was wide enough for us to walk abreast, so I waited for her to close the door and join me, noticing that she had a kind of beauty I hadn’t expected to find on Anarchaos, a smooth bland impersonal beauty that bespoke plastic surgery, social position or at least pretension, a background on Earth or on one of the oldest of civilized planets.
Her clothing encouraged the impression. The saying is that even the most advanced worlds are a year to three behind Earth fashions, and the outer worlds and more recent colonies are as much as a generation behind Earth styles of apparel, but the dress this woman wore would have been perfectly in style on the Earth I’d left five days ago. It was tailored to her body, emphasizing, as it was meant to, her best features, blending with her face, her hair style, her jewelry in a way that could be achieved nowhere other than Earth.
She turned, saw the attention I was giving her, and smiled companionably. “You like me?”
“Very much. I hadn’t expected anyone as beautiful as you.”
She was pleased, and honest enough to show it, saying, “Ah, you’re as gallant as your brother.”
“You knew Gar?”
“I thought of him as one of my dearest friends.” The plastic face expressed regret. “It was terrible, what happened.”
“What did happen?”
She became brisk. “Oh, the Colonel is the one to talk to. Come along, he’s waiting for you.”
We started together along the corridor, which continued to curve to the right and which appeared to be spiraling upward. I wasn’t entirely sure whether we were going up a slight slope or that was merely the four per cent additional gravity I was feeling. I asked, and she said, “Oh, yes, we’re going up. The elevator can’t go any higher; the tower’s too narrow for the housing up here. It’s only a little distance.”
I said, “What’s your job here?”
“My job?” She seemed amused, I suppose at the bluntness of the question. “I’m sorry, I should have introduced myself. Jenna Guild, the Colonel’s personal secretary.”
“Rolf Malone,” I said.
“Yes, I know.”
I said, “Did you know Gar while he was here? Or from before?”
“Here. This is where I met him. At the elevator, in fact, where I just met you.”
“How long have you been here?”
“Four years. Why?”
“I’m surprised at that dress.”
Surprise made her laugh with a sound like a tinkling of small bells, much more pleasant than the political music of that first laugh I’d heard from her. “There are ways,” she told me. “Ways to do anything. If you’re connected with someone like the Colonel.”
The spiraling corridor ended at last in closed double doors, against which Jenna Guild rapped just once. After the slightest of pauses, the doors slid apart into recesses in the walls, and we stepped through into a great luxurious room, all stuffed and carpeted, with furs everywhere and soft divans, different areas of the room at different levels; the whole was dominated by an incredibly broad curving window stretching around a full third of the wall space, through which could be seen a breathtaking view of the city, and of Hell at two o’clock in the sky.
But Hell, no longer Hell, had become the sun! This was no red globe suspended in the sky; no red tinge muddied the distant landscape or bloodied the other towers around us; there was no red anywhere. Except that the sun was too large, it was Earth, totally Earth, and I stood awestruck, staring at it.
A thin reedy voice said, “Are you impressed? It’s only a trick, a special glass to filter out the red. A trick to convince me I’m not really here in this filthy place.”
I turned toward the weary voice and, coming toward me, a drink in his bony hand, a twisted smile on his narrow face, figured crimson robe wrapped around his thin body, was the man who had to be Colonel Holbed Whistler.
VIII
We sat on facing divans near the long window, talking. Jenna Guild had brought me a drink at Colonel Whistler’s request, and now was seated, composed and beautiful, on a low hassock a little away from us, ready to be called upon again.
The Colonel directed the conversation into meaningless channels. He asked me about my trip, and then briefly discussed his experiences with space travel. When I grew restive, he asked me about Earth, putting specific questions about specific cities, most of which I had never seen, and detailing for me his feelings of homesickness. He had been on Anarchaos, he said, seven years and had never ceased to hate it.
This talk, under other circumstances, might have been pleasant, but now it merely agitated my impatience. Still, I thought it best to let the Colonel have his head, at least until I got to know him better. As yet I wasn’t even sure whether to consider him an enemy or a friend.
His manner and appearance I found not encouraging. There was a bony frailty to this man, an apparent weakness, everywhere but in his eyes, which, while his mouth produced pleasant banalities, studied me in cold calculation. Those eyes belied the brittleness of his body and the cordiality of his words. I felt emanating from him a great aura of coldness, of watchfulness, of secrecy and of caution.
He must have sensed my impatience, for at last he ended his monotonous pleasantries, studied me in silence a moment, and then said, “Frankly, Mr. Malone, I am surprised to see you here. You were informed of your brother’s death before you left Earth, were you not?”
“Yes, I was.”
“Jenna tells me” — he smiled briefly at her and she smiled in acknowledgement — “your brother had arranged for you to be taken on by the company.”
“That’s right.”
He smiled, and made a slight shrugging gesture. “Such details,” he said, “are handled by the Department involved. I was not aware of your having been employed, or even of your existence, until just now. Your arrival is something of a surprise.” He glanced at Jenna Guild again, and back at me, saying, “I’m told it was assumed you wouldn’t be coming, under the circumstances. If you’d sent us notification, we would have arranged to have you picked up at Ni. Travel here is somewhat dangerous for a man alone.”
“I was careful,” I said.
“Yes, of course. Caution is always best.” He offered me a blank, meaningless smile, sipped at his drink, and said, “But the point is, you are here. Jenna tells me you would have acted as your brother’s field assistant, and that you appear to have no formal specialized education, that you went no further than junior college.”