Cussick passed over the material the information clerk had returned to him; the workers examined it, examined him, and were satisfied. "Good enough," one said. "Go ahead."
A triple, interlocked section rolled noisily back, and Cussick found himself facing more offices and corridors. There were fewer people, here; his footsteps echoed in the dismal silence. For a time he walked along a wide carpeted hallway; nobody was in sight; nobody met him. An almost religious quiet hung over the corridor... there were no ornaments, no pictures or statues or bric-a-brac, only the carpet, the sheer walls, the ceiling. At the far end of the hall was a half-closed door. He reached it and halted uncertainly.
"Who's out there?" a voice demanded, a thin, metallic voice, heavy with fatigue, aggravated and querulous. For a moment he didn't recognize it; then identification came.
"Come in," the voice ordered irritably. "Don't stand out there in the hall."
He entered, his hand around the lethe-mirror. Behind a vast littered desk sat Jones, his face wrinkled with weariness and despair. The piled-up work virtually hid him from sight; a tired, defeated puppet struggling with a mountain far too large to be lifted.
"Hello, Cussick," Jones muttered, glancing up briefly. He reached out his claw-like hands and shoved aside some of the heaps of tapes and papers that covered his desk. Squinting nearsightedly, he waved at a chair. "Sit down."
Stunned, Cussick advanced toward the desk. Jones had expected him. Of course... he had hidden the obvious from himself. Long before he had seen the application—long before Cussick had dictated it—Jones had known who the "expert from astronomical research" was.
Behind Jones stood two giant, dull-faced, uniformed toughs, gripping machine guns, eyes blank and impassive—as silent and unmoving as statues. Cussick hesitated, fingered the lethe-mirror, started to hold it out.
"Come on," Jones snapped testily, extending his hand. In a single second he had seized the lethe-mirror; without even glancing at it he dropped it to the carpet and ground it to splinters under his heel. Folding his hands together in the center of the desk, he peered up at Cussick. "Will you sit down?" he grated. "I hate to look up. Sit down so we can talk." He groped around among the litter on his desk. "You smoke, don't you? I don't have any cigarettes here; I gave up smoking. It's unhealthy."
"I have my own," Cussick said, reaching unsteadily into his coat.
Fingers drumming restlessly on the desk, Jones said: "I haven't seen you in years, not since that day in the police offices. Work, decrees and whatnot all the time. It's a big job, this type of work. A lot of responsibility."
"Yes," Cussick agreed thickly.
"Pearson is dead, you know. Died this morning." A grotesque leer touched the withered face. "I kept him alive for awhile. He planned my murder, but I was waiting—a whole year ahead of time. Waiting for that assassin to show up. You picked a good time to come; I was just about to send for you. Not just you, of course; everybody in your class, the whole lot of you. And that stupid blonde who used to be your wife; you knew she joined us, didn't you? Of course you knew... she filled out this application. I recognize her chicken-tracks."
"Yes," Cussick repeated.
"A lot of sex-starved society females have come to us," Jones rambled on, face twitching, thin body quivering with nervous spasms. His voice was monotonous; the words ran together in a mumbled blur of fatigue. "A sort of substitute for adequate copulation, I suppose... this is a lifelong orgasm for them. Sometimes with tricks like your wife around, I get the feeling I'm running a cat house instead of a—"
From his coat, Cussick's hand brought out the gun. He was conscious of no decision; his hand moved on its own volition. In an instinctive, reflexive blur, he aimed and fired.
It was at the larger of the two bodyguards that he had aimed; in some dim way he had the idea that it was necessary to kill them first. But Jones, seeing the glint of metal, had suddenly jumped to his feet. Like a skinny, animated doll, he bounced between Cussick and the two guards; the explosive shell caught him directly above the right eye.
The two guards, paralyzed with disbelief, stood rooted to the spot, without even lifting their guns.
Cussick, too, was unable to stir. He stood holding the pistol, not firing at the guards, not being fired as in return. The body of Jones lay strewn across the littered desk.
Jones was dead. He had killed him; it was over.
It was impossible.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
WHEN HE pushed open the apartment door, Nina gave a shriek and ran sobbing to him Cussick caught hold of her and held her tight, his mind still swirling aimlessly.
"I'm okay," he muttered. "He's dead. It's over."
She backed away, face streaked with tears, eyes red and swimming. "You killed him?" There was only disbelief there, without comprehension. He felt the same way; her expression mirrored his own. "But how?"
"I shot him." He was still holding the pistol. They had let him walk out of the building; nobody had tried to stop him. Nobody comprehended what had happened... he had met only dazed shock, comatose figures, stricken and lifeless.
"But you couldn't have killed him," Nina repeated. "Didn't he expect it?"
"I wasn't shooting at him. He was sitting down—I shot at one of the guards." Cussick rubbed his forehead uncertainly. "It was instinctive. He was talking about you... I yanked out the gun and fired. Maybe that was it; I didn't plan to. Maybe I changed time. Maybe I somehow altered the future by acting reflexively. Maybe subrational responses can't be predicted."
Clutching at straws, he almost believed it. Almost, he had constructed a convincing rationalization. Almost, he was prepared to accept it—until he saw the small brown package on the arm of the couch.
"What's that?" he demanded.
"This?" Nina picked it up. "I haven't any idea—it came before I got here. From the organization." She held it out. "It's addressed to you. It was lying in the hall, propped against the door."
Cussick took it. The shape of the box was familiar: it was a reel of audtape. With numb fingers he tore off the paper and carried the tape to the playback equipment mounted in the wall above the coffee table.
The voice didn't surprise him. By now the pieces were falling together.
"Cussick," the thin, harried snarl began, "you had better lay low for awhile. There'll probably be a lot of commotion. I don't know; I'm just guessing. You understand? I'm just guessing. As far as you're concerned, I've lost my ability. And you realize why."
Yes, he realized why. Jones had seen everything up until the moment of his death. But that was alclass="underline" nothing beyond that.
"You did a good clean job," Jones' voice continued, the harsh, metallic mutter that he had heard not half an hour ago. "Of course, you shouldn't get the credit. All you did was shoot off that gun; it was up to me to get in its way. But you did what you had to do. That was good; I knew you would. You didn't chicken out."
Cussick halted the tape. "Foxy dried-up little coot," he said savagely.
"Don't stop it!" Nina quavered; snatching his hand away, she clicked the tape-transport mechanism back into motion. "So now," Jones stated, "I'm dead. I can't tell exactly when this will reach you, but I suppose it will. What I do know is this: if and when you hear this, I'll be dead, because I've seen that much happen. And by now you've seen it happen, too. Do you grasp how I feel? For one year I've sat facing that moment, knowing it was coming. Knowing it couldn't be avoided. Suffering through that—and through what comes afterward. Now it's over. Now I can rest. You realize, of course, that what you did was what I wanted you to do. But probably you don't understand why.
"I made a mistake. I gambled, I took a chance, and I lost. I was wrong... but not in the way you think. I was more wrong than you think."