The only way Hake was certain he had been sleeping was that he woke up, with Leota tense in his arms. She had said something. He was no longer warm. The bag was wet and chill, soaked with cold water; and the silence was gone, replaced by a distant thumping sound of a pump and a slithering, creeping sound like a forest in a gentle wind. He blinked and beheld Leota’s face peering out toward the sea, lighted with a strange violet radiance. “It hurts,” she complained, squinting.
It was almost dawn. The moon and stars were gone, and the sky had turned blue, with a rosy aurora toward the east. The sullen red glow from the top of the tower was gone now; obviously it had cooled through the night, and was now only a black ellipsoid, no longer radiating. But something new was in the sky. A poorly defined, purplish splotch of light hung above the horizon. It was not bright, but as Hake looked at it his eyes began to ache. “Don’t look that way!” he ordered, clapping a hand to his eyes, then squinting between his fingers.
“What is it, Horny?”
“I don’t know! But I think it’s ultraviolet, and it’ll blind you if you let it. Look around you, Leota!”
The slithering noise came from the myriad tangled vines. Their furled flowers were opening and turning themselves toward the sea. Amid the glossy, green-black leaves, pearly white flower cups were swelling and moving, new ones smaller than his thumbnail and huge old ones the size of inverted beach umbrellas, and each pearl-white cup, tiny or immense, was pointing the same way.
Hake and Leota stared at each other, then quickly crawled out of the sodden sleeping bag and began to dress, careful not to look toward the spectral violet glow. The reason for the wetness revealed itself; under the vines there was a tracery of plastic tubing, squeezing out a trickle of water to irrigate the plants. None of this was accidental. A great deal of design and an immense effort of work had gone into it.
“Good God,” said Hake suddenly. “I know where I’ve smelled these flowers before! IPF had some of them in Eatontown.”
But Leota wasn’t listening. “Look,” she said, barreling her fingers to make a fist-telescope and peering out toward the sea. The sun had come up, as abruptly as it had set the night before, and it was blindingly bright. But it was not alone! It had two companions in the sky, the purplish glow, now comparatively fainter but no less painful to look at, and a tinier and fiercer sun atop the metal tower. Careful as he was, Hake could not avoid an occasional split-second glance at one or another of the three suns. Even with eyes closed the after-images were dazzling in green and purple.
“The flowers are the mirrors!” he cried. “Like morning glories! They ton toward the sun, and reflect it to the tower!”
“But what’s that purplish thing?” Leota demanded.
He shrugged. “Whatever it is, we’d better get away from it. But—but this is perfect! You hardly even need machines —just the tower, to generate electricity, or hydrogen, or whatever. Why is it secret?”
“Because we don’t have it ourselves,” Leota said bitterly. “Because your friends don’t want to give foreigners credit for it. Because they’re pathological liars. What difference does it make?” She squinted down toward the base of the tower. “Regardless,” she said, “there are people working down there now. I move we get out of here and see if we can catch the morning bus to the city.”
They made their way to the highway nearly blind, and even hours later, when they had succeeded in stopping a bus and were looking for the hotel called The Crash Pad in the city, Hake could still see the after-images, now blue and yellow, inside his eyes. They had come within measurable distance of blindness, he realized. If Reddi had known where the installation was, he had known enough to warn them of the danger, too. And he had not elected to do so. Which said something about their relationship with the Reddis.
The hotel was the only one available for transients in the city. It was set back from the roadway in a little park (now bare, because unwatered), and the entrance was behind a three-tiered fountain (now dry). The lobby was a ten-story-high atrium, with its space filled with dangling ropes of golden lights (now dark) and with a pillar of outside elevators at one side, only one of which seemed to be working. They used their faked passports to register for a room and were relieved to find that the desk clerk did not seem to care that they were in two different names. There was no bellboy to help them with their baggage, but as their baggage amounted only to the two knapsacks the problem was not severe.
Hake’s notions of luxury had been formed in Germany and on Capri, and they added up to a really large room with an auto-bar. This Was a suite. There was no soap in the bathroom, and the ring around the bidet suggested that someone, sometime, had mistaken its purpose. To offset that, it had its own kitchen (not working) and dressing room; and if the bed was bare, it was also oval and a good ten feet across. Its sheets and covers were stacked on top of it, along with half a dozen huge towels, and when Hake knelt on it to reach them he was surprised to find that it gave gently under his weight in a fashion quite unlike anything he had ever experienced before. “Silicone foam,” Leota explained. “Like Silly Putty. I’ve seen them, but I’ve never actually slept on one.”
It was clear that the hotel was willing to allow them whatever luxury they liked, as long as they didn’t expect any of the hotel staff to provide it. Hake carried towels to the bathroom and checked out the kitchen. A strange fermenting odor led him to the refrigerator which turned out to hold two half-gallon jugs of fresh orange juice, fresh no longer; he dumped them down the sink and discovered it was plugged up. The twin TV sets on either side of the immense bed didn’t work, either, until he crawled behind the head of the bed to plug them in. The room had been neither dusted nor swept in recent times, but there was a vacuum cleaner with attachments at the bottom of one of the immense closets. There Leota drew the line. When she had finished making up the bed she said, “That’s good enough. We’re not going to be living here forever, after all. I saw some shops in the lobby; are any of those credit cards good enough to get me some clothes of my own?”
“Let’s hope so,” Hake said grimly; and while Leota was re-outfitting herself he prowled the top three floors of the hotel, looking for the room with the bent Do Not Disturb sign on the door.
There wasn’t any. The Reddis either had not yet arrived or did not choose to be contacted.
When Leota returned Hake was sitting on the edge of the bed, watching an old American private-eye movie on the television. “Are you having a good time?” she asked.
He looked up and switched the set off. It was no loss; he had not seen any of the last twenty minutes of it. “I’ve been thinking,” he said. “I’m not sure I want to contact the Reddis. They’re pure poison.”
“And your friends on the Team are better?”
“No, they’re not. I should be applying for a job at Hydro Fuels right about now, and I’m not sure I want to do that either. Do you want to know what I am sure of?”
She sat down and waited for him to answer his own question. “I’m sure I like this. Being here. With you. And I’d like it to go on.”
He stood up and paced to the window. Over his shoulder, he said, “I’m willing to do what’s right, Leota—my God, I want to. But I don’t know where right is, any more, and I guess I understand how people give up. Take what they can get for themselves, and the hell with everybody. And we could do that, you know. We’ve got unlimited credit. Anywhere in the world. We can do anything we like, as long as the credit cards last. We could catch a plane to Paris tonight. Or Rio de Janeiro. Anywhere. We can milk the cards for a million dollars in cash and put it in a Swiss bank, so if they ever catch up with us we can go right on with real money.”