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view.
Only Paul would come early.
He reached into the pattern and to the invincible knowledge that had become a
part of him with his own individual ability. He cut certain lines of causal
relationship, and established new ones. The pattern altered, in the immediate
identity area of the body. And the body itself floated upright out of its
container.
It floated toward the door. The door opened. Skimming just above the steps,
it mounted a flight of stairs and passed through a farther door into a small
hallway. Beyond, was a third door, a transparent door to the traffic level, on
a street Paul recognized as being less than a dozen blocks from theKoh-i-Nor .
It was night beyond this last door, and for some reason the Complex without
seemed darker than it should be.
Paul's body floated to the last door. It opened and he floated out into the
hot July night. The Complex Internal
Weather Control seemed to have failed in its functioning, for the temperature
outside here was in the high nineties at the very least and humidity must be
close to a hundred per cent. The still air of the Complex seemed to hang
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heavily in the unusual shadows between structures, and its heat wrapped itself
steamily around Paul's icy body.
No vehicles were in motion. And here, at least, the streets seemed deserted.
Paul swung about and skimmed off along the concrete walk in the direction
which he knew would take him to theKoh-i-Nor .
The streets were as empty as if the people in the Complex had locked and
barred their doors against some plague or roaming madness. In the first half
block the only sound Paul heard was the insane, insect-like buzzing of a
defective street light. He looked up at its pulsating, uncertain glow, and saw
at least part of the reason it did not do well. Its pole had become a
monstrous cane of red-and-white striped candy.
Paul floated on. At the next corner he passed a closed door. From the crack
beneath it, however, a flood of red fluid remarkably like blood in its color
and viscosity was flowing. One block farther on, Paul turned down into a new
street and saw his first living person of the night
This was a man with his shirt half torn off, who was sitting in a doorway and
turning a kitchen knife over and over in his hands. He looked up as Paul came
toward him.
"Are you a psychiatrist?" he said. "I need   " His lifted eyes caught sight
of Paul's feet and the space between them and the pavement. "Oh," he said. He
looked down at his hands and went back to playing with his knife again.
Paul paused. And then he realized that his body could not speak. He went on,
and as he did so he reached once more into the pattern. It was possible, as he
had suspected Blunt had intended,to hurry things up. Living cells could not be
thawed quite as crudely as dead meat, but borrowing heat uniformly from the
general surroundings was even more efficient than the deep-heating mechanism
of the storage container had been. Slowly, but at the same time much more
rapidly than might have been expected, a living warmth came to Paul's body as
he proceeded on toward theKoh-i-Nor .
He passed other things of the night which bore little relation to normality.
A monument in the center of one street crossing was slowly melting down as he
passed, like wax in a warm oven. The stone head of a lion, at the corner of a
heavy balcony running around one large building, dipped its heavy muzzle and
roared down at him as he passed below. In the center of one street he passed a
circle of blackness a hole of nothingness that showed, not the level below,
but a spatial distortion on which the human eye was not equipped to focus. No
cars were running Complex Transportation must have been as inactive or
powerless as Internal Weather but occasionally Paul saw other people, alone,
on foot, and at some distance. None of them stayed to talk when they saw him
coming, but hurried off rapidly.
Life was rapidly taking over Paul's body. He had started the heart early. By
the time he reached the concourse his temperature was at ninety-six and a
fraction of a degree, pulse and respiration almost normal. He could have
walked it, but he waited until he actually reached the entrance to
theNorthTower of the hotel before he put his feet to the ground.
He walked into a dim-lit lobby illuminated only by emergency lighting, and
empty of guests. A white face stared at him from well back of the desk
counter. It was the clerk with the elegant longhand. Paul paid him no [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]