A flushed little girl straightened up, holding something in both hands. Her dark pigtails, standing out stiffly on either side of her head, were tied with huge pink bows of ribbon. The thing in her hands was a doll—a painted, staring doll… A boy in a mussed white tunic was working his way out of the crowd, clutching a red wagon…
The things on the floor were all toys, and glittering plastic bags of candy. Langtree could not take it in. His brain was numbed by the suddenness, the noise, the shouting. The thing that spun and circled under the claws of the gray bird, slowing now, was the brown, broken top half of what might have been a gigantic earthenware jar. It was gaily painted with stars and lightning-strokes of primary red, blue, yellow, glittering with scraps of silver paper.
Dazed, Langtree saw that hollow fragments of the jar were lying among the dwindling heaps of toys. That was the thing he had broken; there on the floor was the wooden club he had done it with.
He was aware that men and women in bright costumes were closing in around him. Someone laid a hand on his arm, said something unintelligible. With a convulsive movement he backed away, brought up with a crash against the cold metal of the refuse chute. His hand found the gun at his waist, swung it up. "Keep off!" he shouted hoarsely. "You're all under arrest!"
He was crouched, every muscle tense, ready to fire at the first movement toward him. Yet at the same time, with a sense of doom, he realized that something was terribly wrong.
The huge room was hung with streamers and pendants of twisted, colored paper. The noise around him was dying away a little, faces turning toward him. There were hundreds of Outworlders in the room, all in bright, stiff tunics and flowered dresses; and the children, hundreds of children, all painfully clean, hair combed and shining…
As if in a nightmare, he saw the great gray bird fold one wing toward its head, saw the cruel beak tilt up and a human face appear under it. It was a broad, brown face, staring down at him with an expression of surprise and concern—a face he recognized.
"Pay!" someone was shouting. "Pay! Pay!" The din of voices lessened still more.
"I know you," Langtree gasped, staring. "Pembun, from Manhaven. Don't make a move, any of you—I'm Sergeant Langtree, from Security. I want to know—I demand to know."
The gray bird said something sharply in Outworld language. The men around Langtree darted forward, began herding the children away. After a moment the bird swayed, dropped half a meter, then another. The broken top of the brown jar struck the floor, bounced, rolled. Then the bird with Pembun's face was standing before Langtree, peeling open its gray breast, pulling the beaked headpiece back over a perspiring forehead.
"There's been some mistake, Sergeant," Pembun's voice said. "I'm afraid you've come all this way for nothing."
Langtree's mouth was dry; his tongue would not work properly. "But all this—this—"
Pembun's heavy face turned mournful. "Sergeant," he said gently, "there's no law on Earth against celebrating Christmas, is there?"
III
The flow chart of Administration Hill was enormously complex. Processions of speedsters, coptercars and limousines merged, mingled and separated again; scooters, for intramural transport, moved in erratic lines among the larger vehicles and darted along the interoffice channels reserved for them alone. Traffic circles and cloverleaves directed and distributed the flow. At every instant, vehicles slipped out of the mainstream, discharged or loaded passengers, and were gone again. The cars, individually, were silent. In the aggregate, they produced a sound that just crossed the threshold of audibility—a single sustained tone that blended itself with the hum of a million conversations. The resulting sound was that of an enormous, idling dynamo.
Pembun's movements traced a thin, wavering line across all this confusion. And wherever he passed, he left a spreading wave of laughter in his wake.
At the intersection of Corridors Baker and One Zero, he tried to dismount from a scooter before it had come to a complete stop. The scooter's safety field caught him, half on and half off, and held him, his limbs waving like an angry beetle's, until it was safe to put him down.
A ripple of laughter spread, and some of the recordists and codex operators, with nothing better to do in their morning break, followed him into the Section D commissary.
His experience with the scooter seemed to have dazed the little man. He boarded the moving strip inside the commissary and then simply stood there, watching the room swing past him. He made a complete circuit, passing a dozen empty tables, and began another. The recordists and codex girls nudged their friends and pointed him out.
On the third circuit, Pembun appeared to realize that he would eventually have to get off. He put out a foot gingerly, then drew it back. He faced in the other direction, decided that was worse, and turned around again. Finally, with desperate resolution, he stepped off the slowly-moving strip. His feet somehow got tangled. Pembun sat down with a thud that shook the floor.
The laughter spread again. A man at a strip-side table got something caught in his windpipe and had to have his back pounded. Diners at more distant locations stood up to see what was happening. Half a dozen people, trying to hide their smiles, helped Pembun to his feet.
Pembun wandered out again. A blue-capped official guide came forward, determinedly helpful, but Pembun, with vehement gestures, explained that he was all right and knew where he was going.
His bones ached, from his coccyx all the way up to his cranium. That had been his sixth pratt-fall of the morning, and there were others still to come.
He felt more than a little foolish—this place was so big!— but he plowed through the press at the commissary entrance, signaled for another scooter and rode it half a kilometer down the corridor.
On the walkway, just emerging from one of the offices, was a group which included two people he knew: the darkly mustachioed Colonel Cassina and his expressionless aide, Captain Wei. Pembun waved happily and once more tried to get off the scooter before it had stopped.
He writhed frantically in the tingling, unpleasant grip of the safety field. When it set him down at last, he charged forward, slipped, lost his balance, and—
The group wore a collective expression of joyful disbelief. There were suppressed gurglings, as of faulty plumbing; a nervous giggle or two from the feminine contingent; snickers from the rear. Colonel Cassina allowed himself a single snort of what passed with him for laughter. Even the impassive Captain Wei emitted a peculiar, high-pitched series of sounds which might be suggested by "Tchee! tchee! tchee!"
Helpful hands picked Pembun up and dusted him off. Cassina, his face stern again, said gruffly, "Don't get off before the thing stops, man. That way you won't get hurt." He turned away, then came back, evidently feeling the point needed more stress. "Don't get off before the thing stops. Understand?"
Pembun nodded, wordless. Mouth half open, he watched Cassina and Wei as they boarded a tandem scooter and swung off up Corridor Baker.
When he turned around, a disheveled Gordon was looming over him. "There you are!" cried the young man. "Really, Mr. Pembun, I've been looking for you upwards of an hour. Didn't you hear your annunciator buzzing?"
Pembun glanced at the instrument strapped to his right wrist. The movable cover was turned all the way to the left. "My!" he said. "I never thought about it, Mr. Gordon. Looks like I 'ad it turned off all the time."
Gordon smiled with his lips. "Well, I've found you, anyhow, sir. Can you come along to the Commissioner's office now? He's waiting to see you."