Joe remained in the doorway, again silent. He looked a hundred years older than when Al had last seen him. "In my office." Joe turned away from the table; he blinked, hesitated. "I - don't think you should see. The man from the moratorium was with me when I found her. He said he couldn't do anything; it had been too long. Years."
"'Years'?" Al said, chilled.
Joe said, "We'll go down to my office." He led Al out of the conference room, into the hall, to the elevator. "On the trip back here the ship fed me tranquilizers. That's part of the bill. Actually, I feel a lot better. In a sense, I don't feel anything. It must be the tranquilizers. I guess when they wear off I'll feel it again."
The elevator came. Together they descended, neither of them saying anything until they reached the third floor, where Joe had his office.
"I don't advise you to look." Joe unlocked his office, led Al inside. "It's up to you. If I got over it, you probably will." He switched on the overhead lighting.
After a pause Al said, "Lord god."
"Don't open it," Joe said.
"I'm not going to open it. This morning or last night?"
"Evidently, it happened early, before she even reached my room. We - that moratorium owner and I - found bits of cloth in the corridor. Leading to my door. But she must have been all right, or nearly all right, when she crossed the lobby; anyhow, nobody noticed anything. And in a big hotel like that they keep somebody watching. And the fact that she managed to reach my room-"
"Yeah, that indicates she must have been at least able to walk. That seems probable, anyhow."
Joe said, "I'm thinking about the rest of us."
"In what way?"
"The same thing. Happening to us."
"How could it?"
"How could it happen to her? Because of the blast. We're going to die like that one after another. One by one. Until none of us are left. Until each of us is ten pounds of skin and hair in a plastic bag, with a few dried-up bones thrown in."
"All right," Al said. "There's some force at work producing rapid decay. It's been at work since - or started with - the blast there on Luna. We already knew that. We also know, or think we know, that another force, a contra-force, is at work, moving things in an opposite direction. Something connected with Runciter. Our money is beginning to have his picture on it. A matchfolder-"
"He was on my vidphone," Joe said. "At the hotel."
"On it? How?"
"I don't know; he just was. Not on the screen, not the video part. Only his voice."
"What'd he say?"
"Nothing in particular."
Al studied him. "Could he hear you?" he asked finally.
"No. I tried to get through. It was one-way entirely; I was listening in, and that was all."
"So that's why I couldn't get through to you."
"That's why." Joe nodded.
"We were trying the TV when you showed up. You realize there's nothing in the 'papes about his death. What a mess." He did not like the way Joe Chip looked. Old, small and tired, he reflected. Is this how it begins? We've got to establish contact with Runciter, he said to himself. Being able to hear him isn't enough; evidently, he's trying to reach us, but-
If we're going to live through this we'll have to reach him.
Joe said, "Picking him up on TV isn't going to do us any good. It'll just be like the phone all over again. Unless he can tell us how to communicate back. Maybe he can tell us; maybe he knows. Maybe he understands what's happened."
"He would have to understand what's happened to himself. Which is something we don't know." In some sense, Al thought, he must be alive, even though the moratorium failed to rouse him. Obviously, the moratorium owner did his best with a client of this much importance. "Did von Vogelsang hear him on the phone?" he asked Joe.
"He tried to hear him. But all he got was silence and then static, apparently from a long way off. I heard it too. Nothing. The sound of absolute nothing. A very strange sound."
"I don't like that," Al said. He was not sure why. "I'd feel better about it if von Vogelsang had heard it too. At least that way we could be sure it was there, that it wasn't an hallucination on your part." Or, for that matter, he thought, on all our parts. As in the case of the matchfolder.
But some of the happenings had definitely not been hallucinations; machines had rejected antiquated coins - objective machines geared to react only to physical properties. No psychological elements came into play there. Machines could not imagine.
"I'm leaving this building for a while," Al said. "Think of a city or a town at random, one that none of us have anything to do with, one where none of us ever go or have ever gone."
"Baltimore," Joe said.
"Okay, I'm going to Baltimore. I'm going to see if a store picked at random will accept Runciter currency."
"Buy me some new cigarettes," Joe said.
