Brown was silent still, thinking hard. He said at last, “What do you want me to do?”
“It’s your department, but—”
“That’s no help. You come in here shouting ‘Fire!’ and then wash your hands of all knowledge. You—”
“If and when you climb down off your high horse,” Nat said, “maybe we can make some kind of sense, but not before.” He stood up. “I’ve tossed it in your lap.” He started for the door.
“Hold it,” Brown said. “Sit down.” His face was suddenly weary. He took a deep breath to regain control. He said slowly, “I’ve got a sick wife and an ulcer and an understaffed fire department in a city full of people who don’t give a shit about the kind of protection we try to give them, who think alarm boxes are for games—do you know that I lost two men this last week, two men killed answering false alarms?” He shook his head. “Never mind. My problems.” He opened a drawer, got out a pack of cigarettes, shook one loose, broke it in half and threw it angrily into the wastebasket. He tossed the package back into the drawer and slammed the drawer shut. “That’s fourteen today I haven’t smoked,” he said. He made himself sit quietly. “Now let’s talk sense.” He paused. “What exactly have you got?”
Better, Nat thought, and ticked items off on his fingers. “First,” he said, “a batch of copies of design-change authorizations with my name on them that I didn’t sign. We’ll have to assume somebody wanted the changes made. Joe Lewis, the electrical engineer, is checking the changes now to see how deep they go.”
“How do you know they were even made?”
“We have to assume they were. Isn’t that how you people think? You assume the worst can happen and you try to prevent it? Not all oily rags ignite spontaneously, but you call all oily rags fire hazards.”
True enough. Brown, calmer now, nodded affirmation. “It’s out of my field,” Nat said, “and I’m just guessing, but I can think of a dozen things your people might have overlooked, knowing that the building isn’t really occupied and knowing too that today’s doings were planned months ago and can’t be postponed.” He paused. “Pressure in the standpipes, floor hoses actually in place, fire doors operable and not blocked, sprinkler systems checked out, standby generators checked and ready—how much is your department’s job, and how much belongs to building inspectors, I don’t know; you’ve always seemed to work together.”
“We do.” Brown smiled wearily. “Or we try. We try to work with the cops too—”
“And that’s another thing,” Nat said. “The plaza’s crawling with cops. I assume that’s because somebody is worried about something.” And, face it, he told himself, that makes you a little more uptight too. “So am I,” he said, “even if I don’t know what.” He was thinking of the blinking elevator lights, the soft whirring of the highspeed cables as somebody moved around in the empty building at will.
“These days,” Brown said, “with nuts throwing bombs or shooting into crowds for no reason at all, everybody is always worried about everything.” He paused. “Or ought to be.” He sighed. “All right. I’ll see what I can find out. And I’ll see that the building is as well covered now as a building that size can be.”
The words started up again a train of thought already half-forgotten. “A building that size,” Nat said, and paused thoughtfully. “Despite every safety factor we design into it and every care we take with it and every possible threat we anticipate and plan for—it’s still vulnerable, isn’t it?”
Brown opened the desk drawer, glared down at the cigarette package, and then slammed the drawer shut again. “Yes,” he said, “your big building is vulnerable. The bigger they are, the more vulnerable they are. You just don’t think about it.”
“I’m thinking about it,” Nat said.
He walked again, back to the Caldwell offices. Ben Caldwell had already left for the ceremonies at the Tower building. Nat walked into his own office and sat down to stare at the drawings thumbtacked to the wall.
He told himself that he was being frightened of shadows as when, a time not easily forgotten, backpacking alone somewhere above the thirteen-thousand-foot contour, he had come across the largest bear tracks he had ever seen showing plainly the long front claws that spell grizzly.
Grizzly bears were extinct, some said; or near enough. Near enough was no consolation. One grizzly bear was more than ample: one grizzly bear was entirely too much.
Black bears were one thing: you left them alone and, unless it was a mother with cubs, they would not bother you. But the big fellow, Ursus horribilis, played by no rules except his own: what grizzly wanted, grizzly took, and his temper was short.
He could outrun a horse and he could kill a thousand-pound steer with a single blow of his forepaw. Searching for goodies like marmots or pikas, he could overturn with a flick of a paw rocks that two men together could not lift. When you hunted grizzly, or his cousin the big Alaska brown, you never, never, never fired unless you were above him; otherwise, those who knew assured you, no matter what weight weapon you were firing, he would get to you, and then it was Kitty-bar-the-door. And Nat wasn’t even carrying a gun.
All of this brought to mind by a few footprints on a windswept mountain slope high above timberline.
The balance of that afternoon Nat had had the feeling that he wanted to look in all directions at once; and that night after dark, in his sleeping bag, staring up at the stars and at occasional clouds that moved across their patterns, it had been worse: every night sound, every rustle of wind in rocks or stunted Alpine growth, sounded an alarm, and despite his fatigue from the days tramping, sleep was a long time coming.
When he awakened shortly after first light and reluctantly climbed out of the warm sleeping bag into the brisk mountain air, the grizzly was not immediately in his thoughts; until he saw the fresh tracks only feet from where he had slept. The great beast had obviously come to see what this strange animal was; for all his bulk quieter than the night itself, curious, fearless—and in the end, uninterested.
Nat never saw the bear, but he never forgot it. Now, sitting m his silent office, “I never saw the man in the building either,” he said aloud, “and probably I’ll never see him, and maybe he is harmless too, but I don’t for a moment believe it.”
He sat up and put through a call to Joe Lewis. “Anything yet?”
“We’re not magicians,” Lewis said. “Some of those changes we’re going to have to put into the computer and see what happens if: if we have a circuit failure here or an overload there; that kind of thing you don’t expect but you’ve got to consider.” He paused. “You aren’t usually jumpy.”
“I am now,” Nat said, “and if you ask me why, I can’t tell you. Call it a hunch.”
There was a short silence. Lewis said, “When did these changes turn up?”
“This morning. Giddings brought them in.”
“Where did he get them?”
“I don’t know.” Nat paused. “Maybe I’d better find out.”
There was no answer at Giddings’s telephone at the Tower building. Nat called Frazee’s office. Frazee had already gone to the festivities. “Can’t have a program without the MC,” Letitia Flores said. “My boss man is starting the talkfest right about now.” Letitia was plump, fluent in four languages, efficient as Joe Lewis’s computer. “Anything I can do?”