Other

  A bellperson came out just then—it was one of the men, with four carrycases, one under each arm and an extra one in each hand. Turning right, he went off around the corner of the hotel to their right.

  “Interesting,” said Bleys, feeling a small inner excitement. He was humming a tune to himself cheerfully. Suddenly aware of Toni, Henry and Dahno gazing at him, he stopped and made his face expressionless.

  But he strolled in the direction in which the bellperson had gone. Toni, Dahno and Henry went with him. They turned the corner, but the bellperson they had just seen was nowhere in sight. They continued along one short, blank side of the hotel, turned again and found themselves looking into something like a cave in the side of the hotel building.

  A vehicle entrance cut through the curb of the walkway they were on to the relatively open space that terminated in a loading dock. A flight of concrete steps led up to it; and their bags were being piled on the loading dock there.

  The bellperson, who had just put down the four bags he was carrying, turned and went back past them again without looking at them.

  “What’s got into them?” Toni demanded. “What’re they bringing it all here for?”

  Bleys’s inner excitement sharpened.

  “I think someone’s come to our rescue, after all,” he said. She looked at him. At that moment, still another bellperson loaded with luggage came around the corner, carried his load up the steps to the loading dock, and set it down. He was the short man with the heavy tan on his face. He stopped and turned to them, and Bleys noted that his name-tag read Anjo.

  “It’s all right,” he said. “You’ll be back in your own rooms in a few minutes. Nobody actually moved in there. I’ll be back in a moment.”

  He went from the loading dock through a pair of swinging doors in the wall behind it. He was gone only a few moments before he came back with a room waiter, in white shirt and black jacket, and with a name badge pinned to the jacket. The room-service man picked up as many of the bags as he could handle and carried them away through the swinging doors. The bellperson picked up the rest and followed him.

  He was gone for some minutes—not many—and came back empty-handed, followed by two more of the room-service waiters. He watched as they picked up some more carrycases, since delivered by bellpeople. He turned to Bleys.

  “Most of us watched the broadcast part of your speech, Great Teacher,” he said. “Don’t concern yourself. We’ll take care of you.”

  With that he turned and went away down the steps and back toward the front of the building.

  Very shortly, the last of the luggage was delivered by two of the other bellpeople, one of them a woman, with dark, curly hair.

  “Shall we stay and help?” the woman asked the brown-faced bellperson, who had just brought an armful of bags himself.

  “No, you’d better go back,” Brown-face said. “Bring those guards of the Great Teacher with you.”

  “Wait,” said Henry, “I’ll need to go back with you.”

  “Right, said the woman. She and Henry went off. Brown-face turned back to the pile of luggage, but it was almost gone by this time, carried off by the waiters. He picked up the last few cases himself.

  “Come with me,” he said.

  He led them back through the swinging double doors, into a kitchen area and to a wall in which there was a lift entrance.

  He punched an ordinary button set in the wall, rather than a wrist control pad, that was normally all that was necessary to give access to a hotel’s customer lifts. The elevator tube they stepped into was half again as large as the one leading to Bleys’s rooms; and its walls were hung with thick padding.

  “Service lift,” he explained briefly, punching a combination on the wall control pad.

  The lift rose swiftly, then slowed. Its doors opened, and they stepped out into the kitchen area of Bleys’s quarters.

  “As I said downstairs, there’s no one here,” their guide said.

  He was speaking as he moved,.heading deeper into the living area of Bleys’s suite and into the bedroom in which the bags belonged. Clearly, he knew whose carrycases they were. The room he led them to first, like the cases he carried, had been Toni’s, and she began to unpack immediately. He led Dahno and Bleys back out into the hall and returned to the kitchen of the suite, pausing outside the doors of the service lift.

  He pushed the button to open the lift and turned to Bleys. Bleys saw that the man was younger than he had assumed before. The tan was misleading. Bleys had “filed an image”—as he called it privately—of this man in his memory when Anjo had first spoken to them. The tan, and later the shadowy dimness of the loading dock, had seemed to deepen the color of his face and emphasized the lines at the outer corners of his brown eyes under the black eyebrows and hair. But the lines were squint lines from long hours out in the sunlight. He had noticed such lines on Henry when, as a boy of eleven, he had first seen the man he called “Uncle.”

  Anjo was no more than in his thirties—possibly under thirty.

  “As I said, Great Teacher,” he said, turning to Bleys, “we’ll take care of you. Most of the service people at work here now will help, and by tomorrow I think there won’t be anyone around the place below managerial level who won’t. —Oh, I almost forgot.”

  He reached into his upper jacket pocket and pulled out a piece of paper with some numbers listed on them. Next to each number was a word. He passed the piece of paper to Bleys.

  “Your inside lines are cut off from the switchboard, you’ll find. But they can’t cut off the outside lines. If you want to reach room service for food, or anything like that, make an outside call back in to the number I’ve printed here. You’ll be put through the switchboard automatically, directly to the department you want. By tomorrow, everybody on the switchboard will be safe. Meanwhile, use the safe way and seem to call in from outside.”

  He pointed to the top number, opposite which Bleys now saw was written the word “bellperson” and one other word he could not quite make out.

  “That’s my name, Anjo.” He indicated the second word with his thumbnail. “If you call for a bellperson, don’t trust whoever answers just yet. Ask for Anjo. Then, when I get on, you can tell me what you want.”

  “Thank you.” Bleys took the paper between his long fingers. “Indeed, we all thank you, very much.”

  “It’s nothing, Great Teacher,” said Anjo. “A lot of us have seen and heard your recordings before this. The manager may try to give you some trouble, but it won’t amount to anything—that is, once he finds out you’re up here, and he may not find out until tomorrow. Don’t be surprised though, if some people show up wanting to move in. If they do, just send them back down to the desk—”

  “We’ll do that,” said Dahno, with a merry smile.

  “Yes,” Anjo went on. “When you do that, the manager will probably come up; but he really can’t make you get out of here, now that you’re back inside. That’s the law. Just say there was someone here all the time, so that the quarters weren’t unoccupied; and the bellpeople will swear that when they helped pick up baggage from here and pack your things, they saw a couple of people still here.”

  He started to turn away toward the lift.

  “Just a moment,” said Bleys. Anjo turned back.

  “We’re going to need to know who else around the city will help us,” Bleys said. “Would you find out what you can? Particularly, see if you can find out whether our drivers will still show up with their vehicles if we call for them. In fact, if you can round up people who can speak for a large number of others, why don’t you bring some of those leaders here to us, so we can plan what we’ll do?”

  “Be glad to, Great Teacher,” said Anjo. “Make yourself comfortable now. Call for room service for anything you want—”

  He broke off and smiled suddenly, his brown face looking less formal and almost as merry as Dahno’s.

  “—And by the way, you won’t be charged for anything you order from room
service. In fact, you won’t be charged for anything at all from now on unless the manager somehow forges a bill for you and enters it in the records, himself.”

  He turned away and stepped into the waiting lift, and the doors closed behind him. Almost at the same moment, the door to the adjoining room opened, and Henry joined them.

  “I called in the Soldiers and sent them around by the loading dock with that bell-lady as guide,” Henry said. “They’ll be mostly back, by now.”

  “You told them to stay there until further notice?” Bleys asked. “You might explain to them that if they leave their rooms, they could be locked behind them. Better phone now and tell them that—but call outside the hotel and then in again to their room numbers so you don’t go through a live operator. Here’s a list Anjo gave me of department phone numbers in the hotel. Would you make copies of it for Toni and Dahno?”

  “Yes.” Henry took the paper.

  “Obviously,” said Bleys, “we’ll have to get out of this city, unless Anjo and his friends have some place in it where we can stay. Clearly, the CEOs are showing me what they can do in the way of cutting off services and everything else to me. Something has to have happened to trigger that reaction so quickly. I’d like to know what it is, but I imagine we’ll have to wait a bit to find out— again, unless Anjo and his friends can tell us.”

  “No more of this New Earth orange juice!” said Toni, looking at a room-service menu.

  “They’ve a fairly good local ale,” said Dahno. “It’s different, but not bad. I know you don’t care for alcohol, either one of you. But Toni, you could drink several bottles of this without even knowing you’d had any alcohol; and Bleys, you could probably drink three or four times as much.”

  “All right,” said Toni, “I’ll try it.”

  “So will I,” said Bleys.

  “Water.” Henry shook his head.

  “All right,” said Bleys. “Look at the room-service menu. As soon as you’ve all decided what you want to order, tell me, and I’ll try getting hold of them through the outside line, the way Anjo said, and see what happens.”

  What happened was that a very excellent dinner, including everything they had ordered, was shortly delivered to the lounge.

  “You’re acting pleased again,” said Toni, as they sat down to dinner.

  “I think I mentioned it to you,” said Bleys. “Reaction is faster than action, particularly in this case. I wanted the CEOs or the Guild to act, so I could take advantage of it. You know, when we first got here, Dahno mentioned to me an unnamed third element in the social situation here—”

  One of the doors of the room they were in burst open, and the same manager they had encountered downstairs stepped in. His face was ugly with congested blood and anger.

  “You’re here illegally!” he shouted at them. “I’ve called the police. Did you hear me? I’ve called the police! They’ll be here in a few minutes to put you out!”

  Chapter 11

  Casually, Bleys got to his feet from behind the table and started around it toward the manager. The manager’s eyes widened in his furious face, and he ducked back through the door, which closed behind him. Bleys came back to the table and picked up the fork he had just put down.

  “The police,” said Toni. “What about them? What’ll we do about them when they come?”

  “I don’t think they will,” said Bleys. “Arresting me would be news. We’d be on the front page of every news-sheet on this world. Even if he actually called them, they won’t move without checking with their superiors, and I can’t see their superiors letting them go ahead without first checking with the CEOs. The CEOs don’t want me to have that kind of publicity. For one thing, it would mean we could bring a damage suit against the hotel for everything from slander to false arrest. The CEOs wouldn’t like that. Don’t you think so, Dahno?”

  “Absolutely,” said Dahno.

  “Are you sure the laws here would let you do that?” asked Toni. “They may be different here.”

  “Not that different,” said Dahno. He stopped eating and wiped his lips with a napkin. “But, come to think of it, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t make some publicity for ourselves out of it, anyway.”

  He lifted his wrist control pad and spoke into it.

  “Give me a screen,” he said.

  The image of a screen about three feet on a side appeared in the air before him.

  “Directory listing, local,” he said. “Lawyers. Estate Planning.” A number of names began scrolling down the screen. Names with addresses and phone numbers beside them.

  He punched studs on his control pad. The scrolling stopped, the screen disappeared, and he spoke again into the air.

  “Yes,” he said. There was a pause while he waited and the others watched—Toni with considerable interest and curiosity. “Hello. This is Dahno Ahrens. I’m a lawyer from Association. I was directed to counselor Lief Williams, on a rather important matter, with ramifications both on Association and here on New Earth. If I could just speak to him?”

  Dahno had either forgotten or not elected to make audible the answering voice. The others heard only his side of the conversation.

  “—Yes, of course I’ll hold.”

  He touched his phone to mute and looked at the rest of them with a small mischievous smile.

  “The notion of a possible interstellar case should bring the credit signs into Lief Williams’ eyes,” he said.

  “Do you know this Lief Williams?” Toni asked.

  “No,” Dahno said. “I’m just hooking into the network.”

  “Are you a lawyer?” Toni demanded.

  “Among other things,” said Dahno. “That is to say, I read all the books and passed the Board—there may have been a few shortcuts I made along the way as far as the ordinary route for becoming qualified as a lawyer goes, back on Association. But legally, I am one there. I thought it could be useful—”

  He broke off.

  “—Yes, counselor!” he went on in suddenly warm tones. “Good of you to drop what you’re doing and speak to me. This is Dahno Ahrens… Yes. Yes, the brother of Bleys Ahrens. The Others’ organizations we have on the various worlds come directly under my control. Oh, yes, I did say that to your receptionist, or secretary—whoever it was I talked to. As I mentioned to him, I’m a lawyer myself on Association, though I’m not in general practice. My job is advising my brother—yes, the ‘Great Teacher’; you’re quite right. Someone on Association mentioned your name—”

  He paused, listening.

  “Oh, I don’t remember just how it came up, but I remember you were mentioned as someone I should remember… in estate planning, obviously, you get to know other specialists—”

  Once more he interrupted himself to listen.

  “No, no,” he said. “You’re to bill me—directly, of course—for this call. No. No, I absolutely wouldn’t think of accepting it as a courtesy. I just need some local advice from you. Can you tell me who would be best to handle a large damage case against a hotel, here on New Earth?”

  “Oh? You think so?” Dahno touched his wrist control pad again. “Could I have that name and number once more? Thank you. Yes, yes, indeed, I’ll mention your name when I speak to her. No, certainly not. Now, remember, we definitely want to see your bill for this time of yours I’ve taken. Thank you. Yes, we must. The moment I have a little free time, you and I. Lunch. Yes. Good-bye, then.”

  He set his pad to off and looked at them.

  “I’ll mull a bit,” he said to Bleys, “if you don’t mind, about how I’m going to present our situation to the lady he recommends. I want to make an actual court action so possible that she can practically taste it. But we don’t actually want one to tie us up in court on this world, do we?”

  “No,” said Bleys. “Or on any other world, for that matter. I want to stay personally remote, even if it carries a high price.”

  They finished their dinner and the police did not show up. After a little while, the ph
one chimed with a call for Bleys. It was Anjo.

  “Great Teacher,” he said. “I’ve some news. The Guilds and the CEO reached some sort of agreement on you this morning, after some overnight talks. Also, some of our people have already had time to do some organizing. I’ve got those you wanted to talk to here with me now. Shall I bring them up?”

  “Fine,” Bleys said. “That’s what I’ve been hoping you’d do. By all means bring them up.”

  He punched the phone connection to off and told the others.

  Still no police appeared. Anjo and five other people did—three men and two women. They were invited to take chairs and offered food and drink, which they all turned down.

  Once seated, however, Anjo began with introductions.

  “This is Zara Ben,” he said, commencing with a small black-haired, olive-skinned woman in a tailored trouser-suit of muted orange, in her early thirties with a sharp-featured, combative-looking face. “She’s a traffic engineer for the city, here; and this is Vilma Choyse.”

  Vilma Choyse, the only other woman with Anjo, was possibly in her late forties. She was in a light blue dress, erect, and tall and brown-haired, with a round face.

  “Just call me a free-lance ombudswoman,” she said. Dahno nodded at her, and she smiled professionally back at him.

  The others—-all men—were Bill Delancy, blue business-suited, owner and operator of a stamping company that made small metal parts. He also was in his forties, but looked, if anything, older than Vilma. He was square-bodied, square-faced and had dark brown hair, with no touch of gray, but with something of a wave to it. Like Zara Ben, he appeared combative, but much more cheerfully so. Next was a younger, tall, slim, black-haired man named Trey Nolare, who had come wearing the black trousers and white shirt of a service waiter. Last was another business-suited thirty-year-old with a lean black face, dressed in gray, who turned out to be a local newsman for one of the information stations in Blue Harbor. His name was Alann Manders.

  Once they were seated, they all looked directly at Bleys, effectively ignoring Toni, Henry and Dahno.