Irritated at his inability to relax, he opened his briefcase, took out the security cloak and put it on. Sitting on a chair at the centre of the black beehive he began to go over his files by the’glow of the lamp attached to his forehead. The paper work was perversely unmanageable in the cramped confines —some of it being minutes of a previous meeting taken down in SpeedBraille but which he had omitted to have transcribed into normal text. The subject was the provision of a series of Retardite discs of varying delay periods for a prolonged system of strategic survey satellites, and there was much technical argument about delay increments and the eventual desirability of building numerous short-term discs into a long-delay composite which might be recalled to Earth for splitting at any desired point.
Garrod sat for perhaps an hour, running his fingers over the embossed SpeedBraille characters, hoping his meeting in the morning would be in one of the Pentagon’s up-to-date “approved environment” rooms. The last two had been in the older zero-light rooms and had seemed like black eternities of unseen voices, rustling papers and the urgent clicking of Braille shorthand machines. One of Garrod’s private nightmares was that somebody would invent a sound recording device as efficient and ubiquitous as Retardite was for light, in which case confidential meetings might have to be held not only in darkness but in utter silence.
He had begun to consider putting his notes away again when the wall viewphone chimed. Glad to escape from underneath the cloak, he closed his case, went to the screen and pressed the answer button. The image of a black-haired girl appeared before him. She was grey-eyed, with a pale oval face and lips that were painted silver. Her face was one that Garrod might have seen in a dream, just once, a long time ago. He stared at her for a still moment trying to analyse the emotion he was experiencing, but could identify only one component—he felt privileged just to be looking at her. It came to him that a man could accept a woman as being beautiful, perhaps for years, a lifetime, because he had never met his personal ideal and therefore was adopting the standards of others. But if he ever did encounter his own ultimate, then everything had to change and no other woman could any longer be considered as perfect. This girl had the wide-mouthed sensuality of a comic strip heroine, modified by a hint of Oriental subtlety and perhaps cruelty, and…
“Mr. Garrod?” Her voice was pleasant but unremarkable. “I’m sorry to disturb you at this late hour.”
“You aren’t disturbing me,” Garrod said. At least, he thought, not in the way you mean.
“My name is Jane Wason. I work for the Department of Defence.”
“I’ve never seen you there.”
She smiled, showing very regular, very white teeth. “I work in the background, on the secretarial staff.”
“Oh? Well, what brought you into the foreground?”
“I called your Portston office and they told me I’d reach you at this number. Colonel Mannheim sends his apologies, but he will not be able to meet you in the morning.”
“That’s too bad.” Garrod tried to sound disappointed. “Would you consider having dinner with me this evening?”
Apart from a slight widening of her eyes, the girl ignored his question. “The Colonel had to fly to New York this evening, but he’ll be back in the morning. Could you postpone your meeting with him until 15.00 hours?”
“I could—but it means spending the morning alone in Washington. Will you have lunch with me?”
A tingle of colour appeared in Jane Wason’s cheeks. “At 15.00 hours, then.”
“Wouldn’t that be too late for lunch? That’s when I’m meeting the Colonel.”
“I was simply confirming your new appointment with Colonel Mannheim,” she said firmly. A second later the screen went blank.
“You fouled that one up beautifully,” Garrod said aloud, puzzled about what had happened to him. Even as a teenager he had known he was not the type to bring off an instant pick-up with success, yet the girl had upset his judgement. He had been convinced she would respond to him as he had to her, and now—he had to admit it—he was bitterly disappointed. Disappointed because a strange girl with silver lips had not looked at him and developed a “Some Enchanted Evening” syndrome. Across a crowded viewphone channel. Shaking his head in wonderment, he went into the bathroom to take a shower before dinner. He was unbuttoning his pants when his gaze fell on a notice beside the shower.
The management have taken every possible precaution to ensure that no objects made of Retardite, Spyglass, or any similar substance have been left in the rooms, but patrons who wish to have zero-light conditions will find green masterswitches in convenient locations.
Garrod had heard about this trend developing in larger cities but this was the first occasion on which he had ever encountered evidence of a public reaction against slow glass. He shrugged, found a green pullswitch beside the shower and jerked the tasselled string. The room was plunged into a darkness which was complete except for a faint luminosity from the tassel. Taking a shower in these conditions, he decided, would be like drowning. Putting on the light again, he finished undressing, stepped into the shower cubicle and at once noticed a small black shiny object lying in one corner. He picked it up and examined it closely. It looked like a bead or part of a button which had fallen from a woman’s dress, but something prompted him to drop it carefully into the cubicle’s outlet pipe.
Chapter Four
The meeting, much to Garrod’s relief, was short and took place in one of the newer “approved environment” rooms which the Pentagon regarded as having been sufficiently proofed against glass eyes as to be suitable for important conferences. In practice, this meant that the walls, floor and ceiling had been sprayed with quick-setting plastic under official supervision minutes before the meeting. The treatment was also applied to the table and chairs, giving them an appearance reminiscent of nursery furniture. A thick, buttery smell of fresh plastic had pervaded the entire meeting. When it was over Garrod lingered at the door and intercepted Colonel Mannheim as casually as possible, but with an unwarranted pounding in his chest.
“Nice idea that,” he said, glancing around the gleaming walls, “but there’s one drawback, John. The room’s bound to be getting smaller and smaller. Someday it’ll disappear altogether.”
“So what’s wrong with that?” Mannheim, a well-preserved man in his fifties had clear eyes and a ruddy skin which suggested he liked open-air activities. “Aren’t there too many rooms in this damned place?”
“That’s the impression I get. Give me a small efficient setup every…” Garrod put on what he hoped was a convincing look of astonishment. “Say! Do you know something? I’ve never visited your Retardite Applications Group in…in…”
“Macon. Georgia.”
“That’s it.”
Mannheim looked doubtful. “I’ve just come from there, Al. and I’m not scheduled to go back for a week or more.”