Five minutes later his car vidphone light flashed on; he lifted the receiver. "I got the janitor," Sebastian said miserably.
"And he said what."
"That he was alone in the building; everyone else, the staff, everybody, had gone home."
Tinbane said, "There are seven living people below me. Okay, I'll go down and take a look. I'll call you back as soon as I have anything definite."
"Should I call the police?" Sebastian asked.
"I am the police," Tinbane said, and rang off.
He set the warning circuit of the cephalic-wave detector to activate itself when someone was within five feet of himself, and then, lugging the detector in one hand, his service revolver in the other, he hurried awkwardly to the unlocked entrance door of the Library.
A moment later, by the stairs, he had reached the top floor.
Closed doors. Darkness and silence; he fumbled with his infrared flashlight, switched it on. A study of the screen of the cephalic-wave detector showed the seven dots arranged on a horizontal plane vertically distant from him by over five feet; the warning circuit had not triggered. The next floor down, he decided. He tried, as he again descended the stairs, to recall on which floor Mavis McGuire maintained her private suite of offices. On floor three, as I recall, he said to himself.
The warning circuit lit up, blinked on and off at the vertical side of the two-filament bulb. He was on the right floor, distant now only horizontally. Floor six, he noted. The level which the Erad Council is said to occupy. And the overhead lights, on this floor, had not been shut off; bathed in yellow, the corridor of closed doors lay ahead of him.
He walked slowly, glancing intermittently up and then back at the cephalic-wave detector's screen. The seven dots advanced toward him on the horizontal axis. All in one spot, more or less; grouped together in one suite of offices.
I wonder what I'll get out of this, Tinbane asked himself. Probably Library pressure will cost me my job; they reach pretty far up in city government. So the hell with it, he said to himself; it wasn't much of a job anyhow. And, if he could prove that the Erads had forcibly detained Lotta Hermes--anyhow a semblance of a case could be made, if she was willing to back him up. But, he reflected, that might mean Lotta would have to appear in court, or at least sign a complaint, and she would shrink from that; to her it might appear as terrible as the Library. Well, too late to worry about that; he could only hope that, if it came to it, Lotta would vindicate what he--out of uniform but with police equipment--was doing.
The horizontal side of the bulb lit, now, and stayed lit. He was less than five feet from someone. Ahead, a closed office door; he sensed the persons on the far side, the seven of them, but, listening, he could hear nothing. Rats, he said to himself.
Muttering, he hurried all the way back up to the roof, to his prowl car, and, from the trunk, got a monitoring tool, which he laboriously lugged along with the other equipment: his gun, flashlight, cephalic-wave detector, back to floor six and the inhabited, closed office door.
There, working with speed and deft precision, he set the monitoring tool into motion; programmed, it stretched its plastic self thin enough to pass under the door, and then, on the far side, it--presumably--reformed in some neutral shape, and set its aud and vid receptors going.
In his hand he held the vid receiver of the monitoring tool; in his ear he had, squeezed tightly in, the aud outlet.
The aud outlet squeaked into his ear a man's voice. An Erad, he decided. And the vid portion; he peered at the postage stamp sized tube surface, gray and vaguely illuminated. The monitoring machinery had not focused; it was still sweeping out a random scan.
"--also," the Erad was saying in his gloomy, sententious Erad voice, "we are concerned as to the matter of public safety. It is an axiom of this Library that public safety ranks foremost in value; our eradication of dangerous, disturbing written material--" It pontificated on. Tinbane inspected the tube surface. Three figures grouped together, a man and two women; he screwed the pan-lens knob clockwise, and the face of one woman grew until it filled the meager screen. It appeared to be Lotta Hermes, but the image was distorted and indistinct, and he could not be sure. He operated the sweep-scanner until it came to rest on the other woman's features. This, he decided, was certainly Mavis McGuire. His identification of her was certain.
And now, in his ear plug, he heard her voice.
"Can't you see how harmful this man is?" Mavis was ranting. "How pandering to the proles, as he'll try to do, will bring about more riots, more civil disobedience; not only in the Free Negro Municipality, but here among Negroes and white pro-Negroes on the West Coast. Don't forget Watts and Oakland and Detroit; don't forget what you learned in school."
A harsh, penetrating Erad voice said, "We might as well all become part of the Free Negro Municipality, when that happens."
"We've virtually done a complete erad job on _God In a Box_," Mavis McGuire said. "His major tract, or whatever you want to call it, is almost gone. Forever. It was _God In a Box_ which, thirty years ago, before you were born, helped inflame mass sentiment which brought about the creation of the F.N.M. The Anarch was personally responsible; if he hadn't made speeches and sermons and written tracts, the F.N.M. would never have been formed, and a whole United States, undivided, would still exist; our country wouldn't have been chopped into three pieces. Four, if you count Hawaii and Alaska; they wouldn't have become separate nations."
The other woman, presumably Lotta Hermes, cried quietly, her hand over her face, a huddled shape overshadowed by Mavis McGuire and the Erad. And, Tinbane reflected, four more Erads loitered somewhere in the vicinity, probably in the next chamber of the office. Waiting to take turns at her, he thought; he knew the procedure of interrogation, the shifts which spelled each other at regular intervals; the police department worked in this fashion also.
"Now, as to Ray Roberts," the Erad said. "He probably knows more about the Anarch than does anyone else alive. What do you suppose his sentiments toward the Anarch's rebirth are? Would you say Roberts is probably profoundly disturbed? Or would you say that he's overjoyed?"
"Do the Council member the courtesy of answering," Mrs. McGuire said to the huddled girl. "He asked you a reasonable question. You know that Roberts is out here, making his pilg here to the West Coast, because he's distressed. He doesn't want to see this happen. And Roberts is a Negro. And from the F.N.M. And head of Udi."
The Erad said, "Don't you think that tells us what to expect from the old-born Anarch? If Roberts, a fellow Negro and head of Udi and--"
Tinbane removed the aud plug from his ear, set down the visual portion of the gear, freed himself from all his equipment except for his service revolver. I wonder if Erads go about armed, he asked himself. In the light of the overhead hallway fixtures he carefully set the instruction-complex of his service revolver. He calculated distance, how many of them there were to take out, how best to protect Lotta Hermes. And how finally, after the havoc cleared, to make sure that he and Lotta got out of the Library and up to the roof and in his prowl car.
I have about one chance in ten, he decided, of making this work. What will probably happen will be that both Lotta and I will have disappeared into the Library and never re-emerged. Never seen again.
But just maybe, he thought, I owe this to her.
Once more he adjusted the controls of his weapon. Not kill any of them, he realized; I can't conceivably get away with that--even if Lotta and I did get out, they'd hunt us, hound us, for the rest of our lives. Until we were back in the womb. And, he thought, I don't think they'll go for killing either of us... at least not now, not without some Council discussion; a formal decision, if what I know about the Erads is accurate, will have to be arrived at.