I paused on the pedestrian street level to look up at the General Anomaly building. I felt very remote from it and the pride I had once felt seemed foreign and distant. It was not my building; I had only paid for it. Steelworkers and cement handlers and welders were the ones who built it. Electricians and decorators and airlift operators were the ones who owned it. They had made it, not I.
Huo had put guards out on the street, too. They looked like casual gawkers, but their eyes were too restless, too alert. I walked past the outer perimeter, but they didn’t appear to notice me.
The guards at the door recognized me, but I looked at them and they seemed to freeze, uncertain and confused. I went to the executive elevator and there the single burly guard was more certain. But slow. The elevator door opened on the sealed floor according to the punch code, and there were four of them, ready but unwilling to act. Bowie saved them.
“Easy, boys,” he said from the right, his laser steady. “Hi, boss,”
he said with a grin, standing separate from the other outer guards.
“Thank you, Bowie,” I said and walked through the empty floor to my office.
It was as if I had done all this a thousand times before and this was one more dreary performance. Huo was so predictable, so ordinary, that it was almost startling. The surprised look, the frantic reach for the laser in the security drawer, the expression when he knew he would be too late.
I stood looking down at his body and thought my sad thoughts.
I went to see Sandler, who became very confused. He showed me tapes of conversations with “Brian Thorne” and I had to admit the double was excellent. Then Lowell gave me the bad news.
“You’re broke, Mr. Thorne. It will take you years to get the mess straightened out. His signature was perfect. Even the thumbprint slip-on was made by an expert forger. I’m sorry . . . but you saw him yourself. His mannerisms, his way of speaking, his voice, the nicknames, the special information and—”
I waved him silent. “I understand. It’s not really—important. Is there anything at all left? I must repay the Sunstrums for the passage money and I have some . . . research to do.”
“I was in the process of liquidating the Itacoatiara Dam stock with the Amazonia Corporation. There’s some of that left, and, uh, I haven’t sold off the Cortez stock on the deep-drilling wells on Mars, and
. . .”
“I’ll need about ten million Swiss francs. Do I have it or not?”
“I
“London. Control will know.”
“Uh, you don’t have Control, sir. It was sold, along with—”
“All right. I’ll call you. Bank of Luna is the Sunstrum bank. Pay them first, then I’ll want to know how much is left.”
But there would be enough.
I had Cilento’s original papers brought to me in his London studio, and with them the reports of the research teams I had set working two years before. I read everything through once, then again. At first I was confident that my new insights, or what I thought were my new insights, would help me solve the problem quickly.
But I was wrong. For days I stared at the sensatron, reading the notes, the reports, the Probability Analysis papers, the conjectures and wild guesses. Time and again I walked around Michael Cilento’s strange, final sensatron, looking at the red-violet sea, at the footsteps that went off through the grass to the distant rocks at seaside.
Then I had to admit my failure to comprehend. No mere strange metaphysical experience on the fourth planet had prepared me to be a scientist. But I knew that one way to unravel problems was to get people who
I attacked the problem as if I were assembling an exhibit or putting on an art festival. I got Coleman from Harvard by buying one of England’s best wine cellars and opening it to him. Gilman Gottlieb came from his hobbit-hole in the Sierras when he was told Coleman was going to beat him to the solution. I poured resources into backup teams from Intertech and Physics International. I gave grants to M. I. T. and Caltech and established the Mark Rhandra Chair of Physics at the University of Mexico, just to free a certain scientist.
