Hausbotcher waved a threatening finger at Acey.
"Misinformation, misinformation, Ace. In the first place, at least a month must elapse between the actions, otherwise all the misdemeanors will be regarded as one and the transgressor will simply be put in jail without any further steps being taken within the Directorate. Secondly, following the second misdemeanor, they send the convicted man to the forest at once under guard, so that he will be deprived of any opportunity to carry out a third offense at his own discretion. Don't pay any attention to him, Pepper, he knows nothing about these matters."
Acey took a mouthful of yogurt, frowned, and wheezed out a confession.
"True, enough. I really ... well. I'm sorry, Mister Pepper."
"Doesn't matter, what the..." said Pepper sadly. "I still can't hit a man in the face whichever way you put it."
"It doesn't have to be the ... jaw," said Acey. "You can make it the ... the behind. Or just rip his suit." "No, I can't do it," said Pepper. "Too bad, then," said Acey. "That's your trouble, Mister Pepper. Here's what we'll do. Tomorrow morning around sevenish, come around to the garage, get in my truck, and wait. I'll take you." "You will?" Pepper was overjoyed. "Well I've got to take a load of scrap metal to the mainland. We'll go together."
Somebody suddenly gave a terrible shout in the corner. "What do you think you're doing? You've spilled my soup!"
"A man ought to be simple and straightforward," said Hausbotcher. "I don't understand, Pepper, why you want to get away from here. Nobody wants to leave,just you."
"I'm always like that," said Pepper. "I always do the opposite. Anyway, why should a man always be simple and straightforward?"
"A man ought to be teetotal," announced Acey, sniffing the joint of his index finger, "what d'you think, eh?"
"I don't drink," said Hausbotcher. "And I don't drink for a very simple reason, one that anyone can understand. I have a liver complaint. You can't catch me out, Ace."
"What gets me about the forest," said Acey, "is the swamps. They're hot, get me? It turns me around. I just can't get used to it. You plop in somewhere ... then you're off the brushwood road. There I am in my cab, can't climb out. Just like hot cabbage soup. There's steam coming off it and it smells of cabbage soup - I tried a mouthful once, but it's no good, not enough salt or something ... no, the forest is no place for a man. What more do they want to know about it? They drive their machines on and on into it, like a hole in the ice - and they still write if off, and down they go, and they still...
"Green odorous abundance. Abundance of colors, abundance of smells. Abundance of life. And all of it alien. Somehow familiar, a resemblance somewhere, but profoundly alien. The hardest part was to accept it as alien and familiar at one and the same time, derived from our world, flesh of our flesh - but broken away, not wishing to know us. An apeman might think the same way about us, his descendants, grieving and fearful ..."
"When the order comes out," proclaimed Hausbotcher, "we shall move some real stuff in there, not your lousy bulldozers and landrovers - in two months will turn it all into ... er ... a concrete platform, dry and level."
"You will turn it," said Acey. "If you don't cop one in the jaw, you'll turn your own father into a concrete platform. For straighforwardness sake."
The siren started up thickly. The glass in the windows rattled and above the door a massive bell hammered out, lamps flickered on the walls, while above the counter a large sign lit up: "Get up and leave!" Hausbotcher rose hastily, adjusted his watch and without a word went off at a run.
"Well, I'm off," said Pepper. "Work to be done."
"Time to go," agreed Acey. "Time's up."
He divested himself of his quilted jacket, rolled it up neatly, and moved the chairs so as to lie down, using the jacket as a pillow.
"Tomorrow at seven, then?" said Pepper.
"What?" asked Acey in a drowsy voice.
"I'll be here tomorrow at seven."
"What d'you say?" Acey asked, tossing about on the chairs. "Place is going to the dogs, bastards," he mumbled. "How many times have I told them to get a sofa in here..."
"To the garage," said Pepper. "Your truck."
"Ah-h... Well, to do that thing, we'll see. It's not that easy."
He tucked up his legs, stuck his palms under his armpits, and started snuffling. His arms were heavy and a tattoo could be glimpsed under the hair. "What destroys us" was written there, also, "Ever onward." Pepper made for the exit.
He crossed an enormous puddle in the backyard on a board, skirted a mound of empty jam-jars, crept through a hole in the fence, and entered the Directorate building via the service entrance. It was cold and dark in the corridors, which reeked of tobacco, dust, and old papers. There wasn't a soul anyway, no sound could be heard from behind the leatherette doors. Pepper went up to the second floor by way of a narrow staircase without a handrail, clinging to the dilapidated wall. He went up to a door above which a sign flickered on and off. "Wash your hands before work." A large black letter M showed up on the door. Pepper thrust at the door and experienced a slight shock on discovering it was his own office. That is, of course, it wasn't his office; it was Kirn's, chief of Science Security, but Pepper had put a table in there and now it stood sideways near the door by the tiled wall; half the table was, as usual, taken up with a mothballed Mercedes. Kirn's table stood by the large, well-cleaned window; he was already at work, sitting hunched-up and consulting a slide rule.
"I wanted to wash my hands," said Pepper, at a loss.
"Wash away, wash away," Kim nodded. "There's the washbasin. It's going to be very convenient. Now everybody will be coming to see us."
Pepper went over to the basin and began washing his hands. He washed them in hot and cold water, two kinds of soap, and special grease-absorbent paste, rubbed them with a bast whisp and brushes of varying degrees of stiffness. After that he switched the electric dryer on and for some time held his moist pink hands in the howling stream of warm air.
"They announced at four that they were transferring us to the second floor," said Kim. "Whereabouts were you? With Alevtina?"
"No, I was at the cliff-edge," said Pepper, seating himself at his table.
The door opened wide and Proconsul entered the room with a rush, waved his briefcase in greeting, and disappeared behind the curtain. The door of his study creaked and the bolt shot home. Pepper took the sheet off the Mercedes, sat without moving, then went over to the window and flung it open.
The forest wasn't visible from here, but it was there. It always was there, though it could only be seen from the cliff. Anywhere else in the Directorate something was in the way. In the way were the cream structures of the mechanical workshops and the four-story garage for staff cars. In the way were the cattle-yards of the farm area and the washing hung out near the laundry with its spin dryer permanently out of commission. In the way was the park with its flowerbeds and pavilions, its big-wheel and plaster-of-paris bathers, covered with penciled grafitti. In the way stood cottages with ivy-draped verandahs adorned with the crosses of television antennae. From here, however, the first-floor window, the forest was hidden by a high brick wall, incomplete as yet, but very high, which rose around the flat-roofed one-story Engineering Penetration building. The forest could only be seen from the cliff-edge.
However, even a man who had never seen the forest, heard nothing about it, never thought about it, wasn't afraid of it, and never yearned for it, even such a man could easily have guessed at its existence if only because of the simple existence of the Directorate. I, for example, have thought about the forest, argued about it, dreamed about it, but I never even suspected its actual existence. I became convinced of its existence not when I first went out onto the cliff-edge, but when I first read the notice near the entrance: "Forest Directorate." I stood before this notice with a suitcase in my hand, dusty and dehydrated after the long journey, reading and re-reading it, and felt weak at the knees, for now I knew that the forest existed and that meant that everything that I had thought about it up till now was the toyings of a feeble imagination, pale impotent falsehoods. The forest exists and this vast, somewhat grim building is concerned with its fate.