He pushed the bundle to me across the desk.
"Just a second," he said in a low voice, gentle but insistent, just as I began to read. "Perhaps we should first take care of certain -- formalities. An ugly, bureaucratic term, I know, but. . . you"ll cooperate, won"t you?"
"Formalities?" I had a sinking feeling.
"Isn"t there a call you ought to make?. . ." he suggested discreetly.
"Of course, I completely forgot! That priest in the Theological Department. May I use your phone?"
"Don"t bother, I already took care of that for you."
"You did? But how --"
"Forget it, it"s nothing. But wasn"t there something else --?"
"I can"t think of anything. . . Unless you want me to make a report."
"If you like, but I don"t insist."
"Major Erms, was this whole thing -- a test?"
"A test?"
"Oh, some sort of entrance exam. I mean, the abilities of a novice might be questioned, so they might want to, you know, set up certain situations. . ."
"Really!" Apparently I had hurt his feelings; he sounded injured, grieved. "Tests? Entrance exams? Setting up situations? How can you think of such a thing? No, what I had in mind was. . . you took something there, didn"t you? Something for me? Tsk-tsk, how absentminded!" My confusion amused him. "Come now, it was in the chapel. . . you have it with you, it"s right in your pocket, isn"t it?"
"Oh, that!"
I pulled out the painted membrane finger and handed it over.
"Fine," he said. "This will be added to the evidence against nun."
"What"s in it?" I asked.
He raised the pink sausage to the light. It was empty, like a balloon.
"Proof of ostentation -- a damaging entry in his dossier."
"The old man?"
"Of course."
"But he"s dead."
"So? It was clearly a hostile act. You were a witness! Right there, on the flag --"
"But he"s dead!"
He chuckled.
"My dear boy, wouldn"t we be in fine shape if death excused everything! But enough of that. I want to thank you for your cooperation. Now let"s get back to business. Before you start out we have to go through some things."
"What exactly?"
"Oh, nothing unpleasant, I a.s.sure you. Routine induction. Propaedeutics. Are you familiar, for example, with the basic codes you"ll have to use?"
"No, I guess not."
"You see? Now, there are calling codes, stalling codes, departmental codes, special codes, and -- you"ll like this," he grinned, "they"re changed every day. A necessary precaution, but what a bother! Each section, of course, has its own system, so the same word or name will have different meanings on different levels."
"Even names?"
"Sure. If you could only see the look on your face!" He laughed. "Take the official name of our Commander in Chief, for example. Haven"t you noticed that all the names of his staff have a certain ring to them?"
"True. . ."
"There, you see?"
He grew serious.
"Grade, rank, even greetings, everything is coded."
"Greetings?"
"Certainly. Suppose you"re talking with someone over the phone, someone on the outside, and you say, for instance, "Good Evening." From that alone one can deduce that our work goes on at night, that there are shifts in other words, which is important information -- for someone," he stressed the last word. "Every conversation. . ."
"Wait! You mean, even now. . ."
He cleared his throat, embarra.s.sed.
"Unavoidable."
"Then how am I to understand. . .?"
He looked straight at me.
"Why do you say that?" he said, lowering his voice. "Of course you understand, you must. Completely forgot, Can"t think of anything, Some sort of entrance exam -- how could you not understand? But I can see that you do! Now why that look of despair? Each one codes according to his ability and mission. Don"t worry, you"ll catch on soon enough."
"If you say so."
"Have a little confidence in yourself! Business is business, I know, the impersonal routine, the complications, frustrations. . . yet your mission is so fantastically difficult that it"s silly to let a few little mistakes discourage you, even if they are irreparable. I"ll direct you to the Department of Codes, they"ll tell you everything you need to know -- nothing rigorous, you understand, just enough to handle a social conversation. And the instructions will be waiting for you here."
"I didn"t even get a chance to look at them."
"No one"s stopping you."
I opened the bundle and glanced at the top of the first page: ". . . You won"t be able to find the right room -- none of them will have the number designated on your pa.s.s. First you will wind up at the Department of Verification, then Department of Misinformation, then some clerk from the Pressure Section will advise you to try level eight, but on level eight they will ignore you. . ."
I skipped a few pages and read: ". . . you will have suspected for some time now that the Cosmic Command, obviously no longer able to supervise every a.s.signment on an individual basis when there are literally trillions of matters in its charge, has switched over to a random system. The a.s.sumption will be that every doc.u.ment, circulating endlessly from desk to desk, must eventually hit upon the right one."
"What -- what is this?" I stammered, looking up at Major Erms, paralyzed by a sudden stab of fear.
"Code," he answered absently, searching for something in his desk. "Instructions have to be in code."
"But -- but this sounds like. . ." I couldn"t finish.
"Code should sound like anything but code."
Reaching across the desk, he lifted the instructions from my hands.
"I couldn"t. . . take them with me?"
"Whatever for?"
His voice registered genuine surprise.
"They could help me decipher them in that -- that Department of Codes," I said.
He laughed.
"What an amateur! But you"ll learn. After a while these things become second nature. Look, how could you allow your instructions to end up in anyone else"s hands? Remember, only three people know about your Mission: the Commander in Chief, the Chief Commander, and myself."
I watched meekly as he put the bundle back inside the safe and spun the combination dials a few times.
"But at least tell me what my Mission is about," I urged. "Give me a rough idea."
"A rough idea?" He bit his lip; an unruly shock of hair fell into his left eye. He leaned against the desk with his fingertips, whistled softly like a schoolboy, then heaved a sigh and smiled. There was a dimple in his left cheek.
"What on earth am I going to do with you?" He shrugged, went back to the safe, took out the same bundle and asked: "You have a folder, I believe? We"ll stuff the lot in there."
The empty yellow folder I brought with me but had left outside now turned up on his desk, and he filled it with my instructions.
"There you are," he said, handing it over with a broad grin. "Your Instructions -- and in a yellow folder, yet!"
"The color signifies something?"
My innocence amused him.
"Does it signify something, he asks. That"s great! But no more jokes, let"s be off. I"ll show you the way. . ."
I hurried after him, holding the heavy folder tightly under my arm. We went through an office as large and long as a cla.s.sroom. On the walls above the heads of the clerical staff were blueprints of aquaducts and dams, and above those, almost at the ceiling, huge maps of the Red Planet -- I recognized the ca.n.a.ls at once. Major Erms opened a door for me and we pa.s.sed between rows of desks. No one looked up from his work. Another room: an enormous chart representing the body of a rat, and rat skeletons in gla.s.s cages looking like empty walnuts tied together with wire. The walls curved. Around the bend several people peered into microscopes, each surrounded by slides, tweezers, jars of glue. Farther on, people were ironing out and meticulously a.s.sembling tiny bits of dirty paper. There was a sharp smell of chlorine in the air.
"By the way," said Major Erms, in a confidential whisper when we were walking alone down a white corridor, "if you ever need to throw anything away -- an unimportant doc.u.ment, a note, or a rough draft of something -- never use the toilet for that purpose. It only makes unnecessary work for our people."
"How come?" I asked. He frowned impatiently.
"Must everything be spelled out for you? That was the Department of Sanitation we just pa.s.sed. I use it as a shortcut. All our drainpipes are monitored, the sewage carefully filtered, every bit of it, before it can be cleared. These are, after all, roads to the outside, hence potential information leaks. Ah, our elevator."
It opened and an officer in a trench coat stepped out with a violin case tucked under his arm. He asked us if we would mind waiting while he moved his packages off the elevator. Suddenly there was a loud bang, quite close -- he leaped from the elevator, tossed his packages at us and dashed up the corridor, frantically opening the violin case. One package caught me in the chest and I fell back against the closing elevator door. The chatter of an automatic began around the corner; something cracked overhead and a cloud of chalky dust came down the walls.
"Down! Down!" yelled Major Erms, pulling my arm. We hit the floor together. The corridor thundered from one end to the other, bullets whined above our heads, plaster sprinkled down. The officer fell, his violin case flew open -- confetti came swirling out like snow. The smell of gunpowder seared our nostrils. A small capsule was pressed into my hand.
"When I give the signal, put that between your teeth and bite!" Major Erms shouted in my ear. Someone was running.
A deafening explosion. Major Erms pulled out several envelopes, stuffed them in his mouth and chewed like mad, spitting out stamps as if they were pits. Another explosion, a grenade.
The fallen officer gave the death rattle, his left leg beat against the hard floor. Erms counted the kicks, got up on his elbows -- and gave a cheer: "Two plus five! We won!" He sprang to his feet, dusted himself off and handed me the folder. "Come on, we"ll try to get you some meal tickets."
"What was all that about?" I gasped, still shaken.
.The dying man kicked the floor twice, five times, twice, five times. . .
"That? An unmasking."
"And. . . now we just leave?"
"Sure. This," he pointed to the twitching body, "is not our Department."
"But --"
"Section Seven will take care of him. There, you see? Here come the Theologicals."
A chaplain approached, preceded by an altar boy ringing a Sanctus bell. As we entered the elevator, I could still hear the dying man"s coded agony. At the tenth level Major Erms held out his hand instead of getting off.
"Well?"
"Well what?"
"The capsule."
"Oh. Here it is."
I was clutching it in my hand. He put it in a wallet.
"What was it?"
"Nothing."
He let me out first, and we headed for the nearest door. A fat officer sat by a table in a perfectly square room, munching candy from a paper bag. Other than that, there was only a very small black door, barely large enough for even a child.
"Where"s Prandtl?" asked Major Erms. The fat officer, still chewing, held up three fingers. His uniform was unb.u.t.toned. He seemed to pour out over his chair. The face was bloated, the neck full of folds, and he wheezed terribly when he breathed.
"Good," said Major Erms. "Prandtl will be here any minute. Make yourself at home, he"ll take good care of you. And whenever you have a free moment, drop in for those meal tickets. Be seeing you!"
After he left, I took a seat by the wall and watched the fat man. The candy crunched in his teeth, the lips smacked. I looked away, afraid he might have a stroke right before my eyes -- the skin around his neck was awfully blue, and his breathing came in great, tortured gasps. But this was apparently normal for the fat man; he hardly seemed to notice. He fought for breath, he munched candy. I wanted to grab the paper bag from his hands. He stuffed himself, one candy after another, swallowing hard, turning red, then purple; the sticky fingers reached for another. I looked away, but I couldn"t turn my back on him altogether -- I was afraid he might choke to death behind my back, and I didn"t want a corpse behind me. I closed my eyes and tried to think.
Had my situation unproved or not? Apparently it had. But then there were so many but"s. For instance, Major Erms had been quite prepared to poison me (I had no doubts about the contents of that capsule). Then there was the little old man in the gold spectacles -- chances were I wasn"t free of him yet. But my big worry was the instructions. They duplicated to the letter my every step inside the Building -- more, my every thought! This indicated I was still under observation, though Erms had vehemently denied that -- however, he later admitted that our conversation was not to be taken literally, that everything was in code, an allusion to other meanings, hidden meanings, meanings on different levels. But this was not what really bothered me. I was beginning to doubt the very existence of the instructions themselves. Of course, that was utter nonsense. Why would they observe me and subject me to all these tests if I were not on a Special Mission, if I were not of great importance to them? Clearly, I was no earthly use to anyone without this a.s.signment, this a.s.signment which had come so unexpectedly, so mysteriously, and which they sometimes suspended, sometimes half-heartedly confirmed.