“You know, maybe I really am amused. The nerve. The fucking nerve of you. Now, once again—what do you want?”
For a moment, eyes pleasant, Rube stood looking at Danziger. Then, on apparent impulse, he put out his hand. “To make a new start.”
Danziger stood shaking his head incredulously. Then, continuing to shake his head, began to grin reluctantly. “The nerve,” he said, but took Rube’s hand. “Come on.” He turned away toward a metal-sheathed door in the wall opposite the street-side wall. “Let’s go up.” Rube moved ahead to pull the door open, holding it for Danziger, who stepped through to stand glancing curiously around the tiny, concrete-floored space before the closed elevator doors. Grinning now, Rube stepped in, and Danziger said, “You treacherous bastard: something I didn’t quite anticipate in all my ruminations, but it seems I still retain some sort of senile liking for you. Who’da thunk it.” He poked the elevator button, and the doors slipped open.
On the top floor, the sixth, they walked along a vinyl-tiled corridor, the tall older man glancing around, eyes sharp with interest. He carried his hat in his hand now, was bald, the top of his head freckled, his side hair dyed black. This looked like a floor of an office building, directional arrows stenciled on the walls indicating groups of office numbers; black-and-white plastic nameplates beside some of the closed doors. Danziger nodded at one that read: K. Veach. “Katherine Veach. Katie,” he said, “nice girl,” and stopped. “I’ll just step in for a moment, say hello.”
“ ’Fraid she’s not here today, Doctor.”
Just ahead Danziger stopped again, at an unmarked door. “This leads to the catwalks, I believe. I’d like to go in again, Rube, look down at the Big Floor.”
“Well—”
But Danziger stood stubbornly shaking his head with something of the old authority he had once held here. “Rube, I want to see it. It won’t take long.”
“What I was going to say, Dr. D, is that I didn’t bring my keys today.”
For a moment Danziger stood looking at Rube; then they walked on, turned a corner, and stopped at the conference room door. Danziger would not open it, and Rube Prien reached past him to turn the knob, and gestured him in. For a moment longer Danziger stood looking up and down the long corridor, then walked in saying, “Rube, where is everybody today?”
“Well”—Rube followed him, closing the door—“it’s the weekend, Doctor. So I expect they’re home. Sleeping late. Reading the paper. Whatever.” He stepped toward a chair at the long table, on which an attaché case lay, motioning Danziger to a place opposite.
Walking around the end of the table, taking off his coat, Danziger looked at the walls, overhead skylights, the carpeting. He said, “Weekends didn’t mean that much when I was here, Rube.” He placed hat and coat on a chair, and sat down on the chair beside them; he wore a blue suit, white shirt, and blue-and-white-striped tie. “I was here every day for at least a few hours even on Sundays, usually a lot longer. So were you. And Oscar. Most everyone on the staff. Here at the Project because it was where we wanted to be.” Facing Rube, he sat back comfortably, one long arm extended on the tabletop—a posture familiar to Rube.
“Well, it’s been several years since you left. And since Si left.” Rube shoved his attaché case aside and lay his forearms, hands folding, on the tabletop. “And things have settled down. Fallen into place. So that we’ve all gotten pretty much used to . . .” His voice trailed off because Danziger, arm still lying on the table, was writing in the dust with the forefinger of his speckled old hand.
Rube had to lean to one side, finding the angle; then the word Dr. Danziger had printed popped up for him, clearly defined against the dust: Bullshit. Their eyes met, and the big old man said, “You’re going to have to tell me eventually, Rube. Eventually, why not now? as the old ads used to say—remember? Maybe you don’t. Pillsbury flour, I think.”
“Okay.” Rube sat nodding. “Okay. I didn’t really hope to fool you, Dr. D. Or even intend to. I just put it off because I’m embarrassed. Humiliated. If you wanted vengeance, then maybe you’ve got it.” In sudden decision, he shoved back his chair to stand. “You want to see the Big Floor? All right: I’ll show you the Big Floor!”
Down on the main floor again, they walked along a narrow concrete-floored tunnel-like corridor lighted by ceiling bulbs in wire cages. At a metal door labeled, Keep Out. Absolutely Keep Out, they stopped; Rube brought out a key, unlocked the door, and stepped in, holding the door open with a foot while stooping to pick something up from the floor just inside. Following, Danziger had immediately stopped to wait because the interior stood dark—solid unrelieved blackness. Then Rube switched on the big five-cell flashlight which had been standing on its wide lens-end on the floor by the door. Swinging the hard solid beam, searching, Rube said, “This is how we have to look at the Big Floor these days. If at all.” His light found a small frame house, clapboard sides, wooden-shingled, an old house of the twenties, and Danziger said, “McNaughton’s hou—” He went silent because the trembling white circle had steadied on the low porch roof, caved in, broken-backed over the stump of the post that had once helped support it. Then the light swung on along the side of the house across the windows glinting black and mirrorlike, then held on a smashed pane, the window frame jagged with glass shards.
Neither spoke. Rube lowered his flash to make a rhythmically skipping oval of light on the floor ahead as they walked on. He stopped again, playing his light over an Indian tepee, painted with buffalo silhouettes and sticklike figures of men, and torn to long ragged tongues of hanging cloth. Inside it the chromed wire basket of a tipped-over shopping cart reflected dully. The flash swung away to play over another tepee, collapsed on its side. “Rube, I hate this,” Danziger said, his voice thinned and echoless in the great space they stood in. “Hate it. Turn that damn thing off.”
The light vanished, and in the utter blackness Danziger said, “All right. What happened?”
“We went broke. Our funding cut off. Every dime. And the Project canceled. We’re out of business, Doctor. There is no Project. I’m just kind of a squatter here now; I can’t keep away. I expect they know I come in sometimes. At least they haven’t changed the front-door lock. But they’ve cut off most of the electricity, all the big lines. And the whole place is on a government surplus list. They just haven’t found a buyer for a gutted warehouse with no interior floors.”
“Rube, this is worse; turn the thing back on.” Rube switched on the flash, and swung the beam upward. With it he searched for and found the catwalk five stories above, then slid the beam along till it reached a section with a gap of a dozen feet. “That came loose. A bolt rusted or worked loose, there’ve been no inspections, it dropped a little, and other bolts yanked out, I suppose. And the section fell, grazing our Denver storefront. Smashed it up good. There’s no maintenance at all, and now the catwalks are permanently locked.” He sent the beam along the floor before them, and they walked on. They passed without stopping what looked like a section of farmland with split-rail fencing, and a tree, but in places the soil was gone, exposing the concrete floor underneath. Two beer cans lay in the no-man’s-land before a World War I trench. “Okay, Rube, enough. Let’s get out.”
In the conference room Dr. Danziger said, “All right, tell me.”
“They started saying we’d had no results.”
“No results!”
“That’s right. That we’d spent a lot of mon—”
“No results! What the hell do they mean!”
“They said we didn’t. I don’t know who said it first: somebody. And it was like the kid saying the emperor has no clothes—they all joined in. Yeah, look! No clothes! Hell, they’re mostly politicians, Dr. D, what do you expect! The kind who beat the rats off the ship! Remember Si? Simon Morley?”