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Blue one: 10/5/52; 0900
A trooper was on guard at the corner. Jon Lukas hesitated, but that was guaranteed to attract attention. The trooper made a move of his hand to the vicinity of the pistol. Jon came ahead nervously, card in hand, offered it, and the trooper—heavyset, dark-skinned—took it and frowned while looking at it. “That’s a council clearance,” Jon said. “Top council clearance.” “Yes, sir,” the trooper said. Jon took the card back, started down the crosshall, with the feeling that the trooper was still watching his back. “Sir.” He turned.
“Mr. Konstantin’s at his office, sir.”
“His wife’s my sister.”
There was a moment of silence. “Yes, sir,” the trooper said mildly, and made himself a statue again. Jon turned and walked on.
Angelo did well for himself, he thought bitterly, no crowding here, no giving up of his living space. The whole end of crosshall four was Angelo’s. And Alicia’s.
He stopped at the door, hesitated, his stomach tightening. He had gotten this far. There was a trooper back there who would ask questions, make an issue of unusual behavior. There was no going back. He pressed com. Waited. “Who?” a reedy voice asked, startling him. “Who you?”
“Lukas,” he said. “Jon Lukas.”
The door opened. A thin, grayed Downer frowned up at him from eyes surrounded with wrinkles. “I Lily,” she said.
He brushed past her, stepped in and looked about the dim living room, the costly furniture, the luxury, the space of it. The Downer Lily hovered there, anxious, let the door close. He turned, his eyes drawn to light, saw a room beyond, a white floor, with the illusion of windows open on space. “You come see she?” Lily asked.
“Tell her I’m here.”
“I tell.” The old Downer bowed, walked away with a stooped, brittle step. The place was quiet, deathly hushed. He waited in the dark living room, found nothing to do with his hands, his stomach more and more upset. There were voices from the room. “Jon,” he heard in the midst of it. Alicia’s voice. At least it was the human one. He shivered, feeling physically ill. He had never come to these rooms. Never. Had seen Alicia by remote, tiny, withered, a shell the machines sustained. He came now. He did not know why he came—and did know. To find out what was truth—to know—if he could face dealing with Alicia; if it was life worth living. All these years—the pictures, the transmitted, cold pictures he could somehow deal with, but to be there in the same room, to look into her face and have to talk with her… Lily came back, hands folded, bowed. “You come. You come now.” He moved. Got as far as halfway to the white-tiled room, the sterile, hushed room, and his stomach knotted.
Suddenly he turned and started for the outside door. “You come?” The Downer’s puzzled voice pursued him. “You come, sir?”
He touched the switch and left, let the door close behind him, drew a breath of the cooler, freer air of the hall outside.
He walked away from it, the place, the Konstantins. “Mr. Lukas,” the trooper on guard said as he reached the corner, his eyes asking curious questions through the courtesy.
“She was asleep,” he said, swallowed, kept walking, trying with every step to put that apartment and that white room out of his mind. He remembered a child, a girl, someone else. He kept it that way.