“My name’s not chief.”
“Okay, sorry, bro. And, uh, we’ll need the weapon, too.”
Abashed at having forgotten it, Jesse retrieved the pistol from his pocket and handed it over. It was sleek, complex, and finely machined. Definitely not a contemporary handgun. “I broke my Oakleys wrestling with this man.”
“Sorry to hear that. Maybe you can pick up another pair from the supply room.”
They frog-marched the subdued assailant away.
Jesse sighed and went back to the rope line. But Grant was in Guest Reception now, and the crowd was already beginning to disperse. There was no panic. A few people had seen Jesse tackle the gunman, but no one seemed to have noticed the pistol. From any distance, the encounter would have looked like an unexplained scuffle between a security guard and an unruly guest. Protection and discretion, Jesse thought. They ought to give him a damn medal.
He headed to staff quarters for his afternoon break.
Two colossal, nearly identical buildings comprised the City of Futurity. Both buildings could be described as hotels, if you stretched that word to the limits of its definition. Both buildings were designed to house, feed, and entertain large numbers of paying guests. But the two buildings were carefully segregated. The guests who resided in Tower Two had all been born in the world outside the gate: Jesse’s world. The guests who occupied the other building had been born elsewhere, in a place that claimed to be the future. The second kind of guests didn’t enter by the gate, as President Grant had. They came up from underground, through the Mirror.
Jesse worked in Tower Two and slept in a windowless room in one of Tower Two’s sub-basements. He took his meals at the commissary on the same floor. Staff quarters were clean and acceptably private, but never entirely quiet. The sound of the machines that circulated the tower’s air and generated its electrical power seeped up from an even lower level of the tower, a faint ceaseless murmur, like the breath of a sleeping giant.
Jesse took his break at the staff commissary. Employees were issued food chits with which they could buy meals from a choice of vendors in the commissary concourse: booths with gaudy signs proclaiming them as McDonald’s, Burger King, Taco Bell, Starbucks. Locals had been hired to staff these kiosks, and most of them knew Jesse by name. He used a chit to buy coffee in a paper cup and a glutinous muffin on a paper plate from a woman wearing a hairnet: her name was Dorothy, and her husband had been killed at Second Manassas fourteen years ago. “Looks like you scuffed up your jacket,” Dorothy said.
“You think I ought to change it? I’m off duty in a couple of hours and I figured on taking it to housekeeping after that.”
She reached across the counter and brushed his sleeve. “You’ll pass, if there’s not a formal inspection.”
“I busted my Oakleys today. The sunglasses.”
“Oh, that’s a shame. You want a second muffin, Jesse? Big fellow like you needs to eat.”
“I’m saving my chits.”
“On the house, then. Since you lost your eyeglasses and all.”
He carried his two muffins and steaming coffee to a vacant table. There were twenty minutes left in his official break, but he had taken no more than a single bite when his pager went off. He unhooked the device from his belt and read the message on the tiny display:
jesse cullum to sec office asap
Summoned by his boss. He finished the first of his two muffins in a few hasty bites, wrapped the second in a napkin and put it in his jacket pocket. He had no choice but to abandon the coffee.
He used his pass card to summon an elevator. The City’s elevators were astonishing to new visitors, but Jesse had long since grown accustomed to them. His pass card was a more enduring marvel. It was a kind of key: it opened certain doors, but not others. It let him into all the places where he might be expected to go in the course of his duties, and into none of the places where his presence was forbidden. He could not imagine how this thin sliver of what was called plastic, or the slots into which he inserted it, knew or remembered which doors to allow him through. Everyone on staff carried a similar card, and each card was endowed with powers particular to its owner.
The elevator arrived with its customary pinging and sighing. Jesse stepped inside and pushed the button marked “21.” The twenty-first floor of Tower Two was the administrative level. Jesse had been there before, but only on rare occasions. His boss, Mr. Paul Booking, usually came down to the staff room to issue the day’s assignments. If someone was summoned to twenty-one, it was usually for a promotion, a dismissal, or a special assignment.
The elevator stopped and the door slid open on a wide, immaculate corridor. Jesse’s shoes tapped cadences on the smooth and polished floor as he made for Booking’s office. Secretarial persons gave him incurious glances from open doors as he passed. Some were men, some were women; some were white, many were not. And none of them was local. The City imported all its managers and paper-handlers from the far side of the Mirror.
Booking’s secretary was a woman with features Jesse once would have called Oriental, though he knew the word was considered objectionable by people from the twenty-first century. She looked up from the illuminated screen in front of her and smiled. “Mr. Cullum?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Thanks for being so prompt. You can go on into Mr. Booking’s office—he’s waiting for you.”
Booking’s office possessed a large window, and even four years in the City had not accustomed Jesse to the view from the twenty-first floor. Even calling it a window seemed to mock it. It was a wall of glass from floor to ceiling, so finely manufactured as to be almost indistinguishable from empty air. There were vertically hung blinds to ward off the sun, but it was late afternoon now and the blinds had been fully retracted. Jesse felt as if he were standing on the scarp of an artificial mountain. A flock of passenger pigeons wheeled over a distant creek, and isolated stands of slippery elms sparkled in the long light like scattered emeralds.
“Your jacket’s a little scuffed,” Booking said.
God damn it, Jesse thought. “Yes, sir, I’m sorry.”
“Don’t apologize.” Booking sat behind his desk giving him a thoughtful look. Booking was bald and appeared to be forty years old or thereabouts, though it was hard to tell with people from the future. He wore a goatee so meticulously trimmed it seemed nervous about its own continued existence. He was generally kind to hired help, and he spoke to the security hands as casually as an old friend, though that was not a two-way street: Jesse knew Booking’s first name only because it was printed on the badge clipped to his lapel. “You had an encounter on the reception grounds today.”
“Encounter is one word for it. It didn’t amount to much, in the end.”
“Don’t be modest, Jesse. I’ve seen the video.”
Like his secretary, Booking kept an illuminated display on his desk. He swiveled it to show Jesse the screen. The pictures it displayed had been captured by a wall-mounted camera, so the view was distant and a little indistinct, but Jesse recognized himself in his uniform and his Oakleys, lumbering along the rope line. What followed was pretty much as he remembered it. He shrugged.
“President Grant is grateful to you,” Booking said.
“He saw what happened?”
“You were quick and careful, but the president has a keen eye.”