Melody echoed him, adding, "Philadelphia summer is bad, but this, "
walking left him covered with a sweaty film. He wiped his forehead with the back of his hand.
Through the station building's broad sweep of plate glass, he and Melody watched a human boss supervise the gang of sims that was loading baggage from the air waggon onto carts. He shook his head. "The seventeenth century, alive and well in the twentieth," he said scornfully.
"Wel ," someone with an amused voice said at his elbow, "you sound like the chap I'm looking for. Look like him too," the young man added.
He looked the way the Philadelphia committee said he would: a tal man with a good many blacks in his ancestry who wore a thick mustache.
"You're Patrick?" Dixon asked, as he had been told to do.
"Sorry, no. Stephen's the name," the fel ow said. They nodded at each other. Amateurs' games, Dixon thought, but good enough, he hoped, for the moment. Later, later was another matter. He put it aside.
"Here comes the luggage." Melody had been watching the sims tossing bags onto the conveyor belt.
They walked over to it. Stephen nudged Dixon. "Is she real y the one who's his great-granddaughter?" he whispered, not wanting her to hear.
"Great-great, yeah."
"Whoa." The respect in Stephen's voice and eyes was just this side of awe.
Dixon's lingering doubts cleared up. No infiltrator could be that impressed over her ancestry
He and Melody had boarded the air waggon early; their bags, naturally, were among the last ones out, having been put aboared beneath everyone else's. "So much for efficiency," Melody sighed when she had hers. Dixon's finally appeared couple of minutes after that.
"Come on," Stephen said. He led them to an omnibus with PEACHTREE
STREET on the destination placard. It roared off, a little more than half full, about ten minutes later. It was, Dixon discovered thankful y, cooled.
Stephen rose from his seat at a stop on Peachtree Street, in the midst of a neighborhood with many more apartment blocks than private houses. Dixon thought himself ready for the blast of heat that would greet him when he got off the omnibus, and was almost right.
"The collegium is over there," Stephen said, pointing west- Dixon could see a couple of tal buildings over the tops of the apartments. "In this neighborhood, no one will , pay any attention to you; everybody will figure you're just a couple of new students here for the start of fal term."
"Good," Melody said briskly. She turned around, trying to orient herself. "Where's the DRC from here? That way?"
Stephen gave her a respectful glance. "Yes, northwest of here, maybe three or four miles."
she said again. "We'll be staying with you, I gather, until we get down to business?"
"That's right. People float in and out of my cube all the time; the landlord's used to it. As long as he gets paid on the first of every month and nobody screams too loud, he doesn't care. Half the cubes in his block are like that."
Stephen started walking down the street. "Come on. It's this , way."
Following, Dixon asked, "How alert are they likely to be at the DRC?"
"Not very, I hope. Since the word came down from Philadelphia that this was going to happen, Terminus hasn't heard much from us about justice for sims. We've been quiet, just letting everybody relax and think we've forgotten what we're for."
"Outstanding," Dixon said. "If they were alert, either this wouldn't work at al or a lot of people might end up hurt on account of us, which wouldn't do the cause any good."
"Not Stephen agreed. "But we have made the two connections we'll need most: one in the calc department, the other in food services."
"The calc department I can see, but why food services." Stephen told him why. He grinned. Melody laughed out loud.
Stephen turned off the street, lead them into an apartrnent block and up three flights of stairs. By the time they got to the fourth floor, Dixon was sweating for reasons that had nothing to do with Terminus's climate. "My arms'll be as long as a shimpanse's if I have to carry these bags one more flight," he complained.
"You don't. We're here." Stephen had his key out and opened the door to his cube. "Here, this will help." He turned on the cooler.
Nodding gratefully, Dixon set down his bags and shut the door behind him and Melody.
The cube was not big; the luggage Dixon had dropped nd the two bedrolls on the floor effectively swallowed the living room. A table covered with what looked like floor Plans was shoved into one corner.
Melody made a beeline for that. Dixon was content just to stand and rest for a minute.
Stephen handed him a glass of iced coffee. He gulped it down fast enough to make his sinuses hurt. "Thanks," he said, squeezing his eyes shut to try to make the pain go away.
"No problem." Stephens eyes traveled to the bedrolls. He lowered his voice a little. "I don't know what kind of arangement the two of you have, but I'm not here all the time. " Dixon looked at Melody, who was engrossed in architectural drawings. "I don't quite know either,"
he said, also quietly. "I was sort of hoping this trip would let me find out.
"Like that, eh Al right. Like I said, I'll be gone a lot. I expect you'll have the chance to learn."
"Chance to learn what?" Melody looked up from the floor plans, beckoned.
"Come over here, the two of you. Stephen, just how much support can we count on from your people here? If we can put folks in a couple of places at the same time, we may actually bring this off. If I read this right, we can get in and out here pretty fast."
They bent over the plans together.
The night guard's footsteps echoed down the quiet hal way.
Except for him, it was empty. He was sleepy and bored. He turned a corner. Gray light from the bank of monitors lit the corridor ahead.
The night technician was leaning back in his swivel chair, reading a paperback. He looked bored he too.
"Hello, Edward," the guard said. "Slow here tonight."
"Isn't it, though, Lloyd?" The technician put the bookdown on his thigh, open, so he could keep his place. "Place is like a morgue when the computers go haywire everybody packs it in and goes home early."
Lloyd nodded, not quite happily. "Getting so no one can think anymore without the damn gadgets to help 'em." He glanced at the screens.
"That's something sims don't have to worry about."
"Just swive and sleep and eat," Edward agreed. "It could be worse."
Then, because he was a fair-minded man, he added, "A lot of times it is, especially when the new drugs go thumbs-down."
"AIDS." Like everyone else at the DRC, the guard made it a swear word.
"How's he doing?"
Having been-free of symptoms for eight months now on HIVI, Matt was a being to conjure with in these halls.
Everyone worried over him. The technician perfectly understood Lloyd's concern. "He's fine, just worn out from the females again."
"Good." Lloyd yawned til the hinge of his jaw cracked like a knuckle.
His eyes shifted from the monitors to a coffeepot on a hot plate. "I need another cup of that."
"I'l join you." Edward got up and poured for both of them.
"Thanks." The guard sipped. He made a face. "Give me some sugar, will you? It's bitter tonight tastes like it's been sitting in the pot for a week." "It is viler than usual, isn't it." The technician added cream and sugar to his own brew.
Lloyd finished, tossed his cup at a trash can under the coffeepot.
He missed, muttered to himself, and bent to pick up the cup. Then he ambled down the hal .
He yawned again, even wider than before. He glared back ward the technician's station. The coffee hadn't done him uch good, had its He put a hand on the wall of the corridor. For some reason, he did not feel very steady on his feet. Before he knew what was happening, he found himself sliding to the tile floor. He opened his mouth to call for help. Only a snore came out.