There were two people in it. (Bron swallowed, opened his mouth, started to step back, didn’t, started to step forward, didn’t do that either, closed his mouth.) A section of wall, and crumbled powdery stuff, had fallen across them.
Bron’s first thought: The woman, she’s my age!
It didn’t look that heavy!
It didn’t look that heavy at all!
A very dark oriental lay naked, on her back, one arm pinned. Her other had been trying to push the wall away. Her head had fallen to the side, her mouth and one eye wide.
Alfred lay on his stomach beside her, arms folded under his cheek.
Bron stepped forward.
Under straggly hair, Alfred’s ear was full of blood, mostly dried now. It had trickled his jaw, forked around his mouth, run across his wrist to make a rusty blotch on the sheet, the size of Bron’s hand.
The edge of the falling wall had cracked the red Q. The top part lay on Alfred’s left shoulder, black suspenders wrinkled around it. (How, Bron wondered, could a nine-foot slab of plastic walling—well, maybe twelve-foot—be heavy enough to do all that?) Alfred’s legs were visible (heels up, toes in) from midthigh down, the woman’s (toes up, both leaning left) just from the ankles. The bottom part of the sheet was completely blood-soaked, some still wet.
Suddenly Bron backed toward the door, hit his shoulder, spun out into the hall.
He did not cross the hall to his own room.
Lawrence’s door was six down from his.
Bron reached it, pounding with both fists. He stepped back, wondering if he should try the doors right and left (Fifty-odd men lived in this co-op. Bron thought. Fifty!), then pounded again because he heard something inside.
The door opened. Lawrence, naked, with wrinkled chin and knees, grizzled hair, and watery eyes, said: “Yes, what can I ... Bron?”
“Lawrence! Alfred’s dead! And some girl!”
“Yes.” Lawrence opened the door the rest of the way. “That’s right. And so is Max. And so is Wang. And then there are two at the end of the hall I don’t even know. I think they may be visitors. I don’t know them at all. I’ve never seen them before in my—”
“What about Freddie and Flossie?”
“Nobody’s seen them since this morning.”
“Oh,” Bron said. “Oh, because I thought I saw—No, that’s okay. Never mind. How—?”
“Only on the left side of the corridor,” Lawrence said, frowning again. “Isn’t it strange? The gravity deflection that got us must have stopped halfway under the building. The public channels have been saying that some of the gravity deflections that have hit parts of the city have been as high as three hundred times Triton normal for as much as seven whole seconds. Seven seconds at three hundred gravities! That’s really incredible. I’m surprised that side of the house is even standing.”
“But what about everyone else?”
Lawrence blinked. “Oh, they’ve evacuated. That’s what we were instructed to do over the public channels. The sabotage attempts have been incredibly effective. They still don’t know whether they can get it under control. Evacuate ...” The knuckly finger rubbed at the unshaven cheek. “Yes, that’s what they—”
“Then what the hell are you doing here!”
“Oh ... ?” Lawrence frowned, reached down to scratch his knee. “Well, I ... I’ve been playing pieces from my subscription series of aleotoric compositions from the late twentieth century. I played the Bette Midler track of Friends, which lasts—” Lawrence looked up again, blinking wet eyes—“not quite two and three-quarter minutes. Then I put on the Stoekhausen Aus Den Siegen Tagen, which lasts slightly more than five and three-quarter hours.” (From inside the room came the familiar clicks, electric viola glissandi, and single piano notes, spaced with resonating silences.) “Of course, I’ve heard them before. Both of them. But I just thought I’d ...” Lawrence began to cry. “Oh, Lord, I’m sorry ... !” The bony hands grasped Bron’s arms.
“Hey, come on ... !” Bron said, trying to support him. “Look, you better ...
“They’re dead—Max and Wang and Alfred and ...” The face rocked against Bron’s shoulder, wet as a baby’s, “And I’m an old man and I don’t have any place to go!”
“Come on,” Bron said, his arm around the loose, dry back. Annoyance contended with fear. “Come on, now. Come on ...”
“I’m sorry ....” Rubbing his cheeks, Lawrence pulled away. “I’ll be all right. But they’re all dead. And I’m alive. And I’m an old man with no ...”He took a breath, blinked his reddened eyes. “I’m sorry ... just no place to go. I’m all right now. I’m ... What are you doing here?”
“I just ...” Bron rubbed his own shoulder, still slick with Lawrence’s tears. “I wanted to come back and ... well, make sure you were all right. See about my things; about you. And Alfred—” and then remembered Alfred; he decided he didn’t want to go into his own room at all. If it looked like Alfred’s (up to three hundred times normal gravity? That was almost as high as the surface of Neptune!), he just didn’t want to see.
Lawrence thumbed his eyes. “I doo’t know why it should, but it makes an old body like me feel ... well, it’s nice of you to say it, even if it isn’t true.”
“If everybody’s evacuated, we better evacuate too. There’s a lot of debris around. You should put some shoes on.”
“I haven’t owned a pair of shoes since I was seventy,” Lawrence said. “Don’t like them. Never have.”
“Well, I’ve got another pair. Maybe you can get into them. Look, put something on, just for protection—come on, now.” He tugged Lawrence by his skinny arm down the hall.
Bron really didn’t want to go into his own room:
He pushed the door in. The room was perfectly in order. It’s waiting for someone to move in, he thought.
On the floor next to the wall sat his yellow plastic luggage sack, delivered by pneumatic tube from the spaceport.
On his desk, beside the reader, was a black—and gold-edged envelope—this one, presumably, not a facsimile.
“Here,” Bron said, opening a cupboard. Crouching down, he pawed through the slippers, boots, and shoes on the floor. That green pair that were too small for him ... ? No, he hadn’t returned them to his design rental house. “Put these on.”
“Socks?” Lawrence asked, wearily, sitting on one corner of the desk.
“In there.” Bron stood, pushed around the clothes hanging from the circular rack. “Look, put this cape on too. Out there, things fall on you, now. Wrap that around you and it’ll be some help.”
“Bright yellow?” Lawrence, holding the cape up by the hood, brushed through its folds with his other hand. “Lined with iridescent red and blue stripes ... naturally.”
“It may not be the highest style but it’ll do the job.”
Lawrence dropped the cloak over one arm and went back to snapping closed the shoes. The socks he’d slipped on were knee-length and lavender. “I always did think clothes were an obscenity.”
“On you, sweetheart, they look good.” Bron closed the cabinet. “Come on. Move!”
“Well—” Lawrence stood, pulling the cape around his shoulders and frowning down where it brushed the rug—“I suppose, in time of war ...” He pulled the hood up, frowned, then pushed it back again.
At the door, Bron said: “It is the war, isn’t it ... ?”
Lawrence’s wrinkled face wrinkled more. “That’s what the public channels have been saying for the last hour.” Lawrence pulled the cloak around him. “Now that I’m properly attired, just where do you propose to go?”
“Well, first let’s get out of here.” Bron went into the hall. The drive that had returned him had been thrown into reverse by the disaster of Alfred’s room.