He went down the four steps to the sidewalk and looked for a pedestrian crossing area where he could get across the street. But it was no use. He scanned his surroundings as carefully as he could, bending down until his face was at ground level, peering past the legs of the pedestrians and under the wheels of the passing vehicles in an attempt to catch sight of the distinctive white stripes, then going back up the four steps and standing on tiptoe on the top one, trying to descry a traffic light, whether near or far, but, try as he might, he could discover no crossing anywhere.
The Investigator pondered for a few moments, told himself he’d lost enough time already, and resolved to cross the stream of vehicles. It shouldn’t be much of a problem, he thought, given their greatly reduced speed.
XIII
THE INITIAL PROBLEM, whose difficulty he had in fact totally underestimated, was to get to the edge of the sidewalk, that is, to traverse the moving, compact mass of men and women who were hurrying past him. They formed a sort of border, two or three yards wide, with a dense, mobile, quietly hostile texture.
At first, the Investigator tried various forms of apology, all uttered in a loud voice and accompanied by modest gestures expressing his desire to pass. Those proved ineffective, as did all his demonstrations of the most consummate politeness; no one stopped, no one shifted position to allow him to slip between the moving bodies. The men and women walking hurriedly along didn’t look at him, either. Many of them were wearing headphones or had earpieces stuck in their ears; others, also very numerous, were sending messages or receiving calls on a kind of mobile telephone with a single button, identical to the phone the Policeman carried.
The Investigator told himself that in these conditions he would have to grit his teeth and force his way through. The time had come for him to stop hesitating and start using his elbows, even if that meant stepping on a few feet or jostling some pedestrians. In any case, he’d had it with people not paying attention to him. He took a deep breath and plunged in.
It was a strange stampede. There was no aggressiveness in its forward surge—a great throng of bodies moving implacably along without outcries, without insults, without inappropriate gestures, without hatred—but it was fraught with mute, extreme, perplexing violence. The Investigator had two distinct, simultaneous impressions: that he was swimming in a torrent of tumultuous water, and that he was being pushed by a bulldozer made of some soft and yielding material. He thrashed, grabbed, scratched, seized, released, yelled, cried, apostrophized, groaned, begged, even abased himself. He exhibited an energy that he summoned up from his very depths. Finally, he reached the curb.
His effort had truly been as enormous as the distance covered was small. Out of breath, he noticed that his raincoat, which already looked like an old, badly ironed sheet, had greatly suffered in the struggle: The right pocket had been torn, and a flap of fabric was hanging down like a big dog’s ear, soft and ungainly. He wasted no time bemoaning the loss, for he still had to make his way across the stream of vehicles.
The Investigator raised his hand and gestured in the direction of the first vehicle to his left, signaling to the driver that he was going to cross the street, but he hadn’t gone more than two or three steps, just enough to get past the first car and prepare to slip between the next two, when innumerable automobile horns started blowing all at once, setting up a racket that petrified him.
The noise was so outrageously loud that he wondered whether it could actually be real. He reopened his eyes—he’d shut them, as if reflexively, a few seconds earlier—and saw that all the vehicles had stopped moving. In each of them, the driver, whether a man or a woman, was sounding the horn most ferociously, and worst of all, worst of all, every one of those drivers, dozens, hundreds of drivers, was looking at him, the Investigator, frozen in place among the vehicles.
Cold sweat ran down the nape of his neck. All at once, the horns stopped. But immediately, the sound of thousands of voices—mingled, concurrent, united—rose from the sidewalks in a phenomenal hubbub. It was as if all the spectators in a stadium had started shouting at the same time. And as with the vehicles, all the men and women on the sidewalks, people who a few moments ago had been hurrying along in order and silence, maintaining an even, regular pace, absorbed in their own thoughts, their own music, their telephone conversations, and not in the least concerned with their surroundings—they had all stopped short, and they were all looking at him and shouting inaudible words in his direction, inaudible because they collided with, smashed against, shattered upon one another, distorted by the ricochets of their ground-up syllables. He panicked, tottered, barely caught himself by leaning on the hood of a car, and then turned back and stepped up onto the sidewalk he’d stepped off of less than a minute before.
He was trembling. All interest in him had ceased. On the street, the vehicles were slowly streaming past, their drivers’ eyes staring straight ahead. Similarly, on both sidewalks, people had begun to walk again. Order had retuned everywhere. But what kind of order?
Imperceptibly, the Crowd caught him up in its movement. There was no resisting it. Even before his brain could decide, his legs had adopted the rhythm of the other legs around them. Now he was walking, too, and in the direction dictated by the Crowd, even though that direction was wrong, since it took him off to the right, whereas the entrance to the Enterprise, the Guardhouse, was over there, a few hundred yards away, on the left.
XIV
HIS EXPERIENCES WHILE HE WAS involuntarily adrift in the Crowd were without a doubt the strangest he’d gone through since his arrival in the City. When he allowed himself to be carried away like a wisp of straw on the current of a mighty river, the Investigator surrendered. For the first time in his existence, he gave up thinking of himself as an individual with a free will and freedom of choice, residing in a country that guaranteed fundamental human rights, so fundamental that most of the time its citizens, including the Investigator, enjoyed those rights without being fully conscious of them. Dissolved in the immense, moving mass of silent pedestrians, he slid along, stopped thinking, refused to analyze the situation, made no effort to fight it. It was almost as though he’d abandoned his body in order to enter into another body, vast and limitless.
How long did it all last? Who could really know? Not the Investigator, in any case, and that was for sure. He no longer knew very much. Like a man afflicted by a powerful psychotropic drug, he’d forgotten his raison d’être. He continued to exist, but weakly. He was losing thickness.
It started to get cooler again, and then it abruptly became cold. The sky was covered with a gray veil from which a few snowflakes soon escaped. Two or three of them, little, icy, ephemeral points, fell on the Investigator’s head and brought him back to his present condition. Shivering, he realized that a sign was becoming visible up ahead in the distance, above the flowing masses of people and vehicles: a hotel sign, his Hotel’s sign, the sign for the Hope Hotel. He told himself it had come to this: His perceptions were obviously in total disarray. He’d thought the Crowd had been sweeping him along for hours, but in fact he hadn’t gone very far at all.
All the same, one detail gave him pause. Was that really the same Hotel? The same sign? Something had changed. The Hotel was in its place on the other side of the street, between two buildings he also positively recognized. On the other side of the street. On the other si—! But of course! That was what was different. If the Hotel was on the other side of the street, that meant he couldn’t be on that side anymore, which therefore meant that he’d crossed over at some point, and that he was now walking on the side where the entrance to the Enterprise was located! And, yes, there, there it was, on his left, a little farther on, that was the entrance! He could even make out the Guardhouse.
He had to move fast. He had only a few seconds to get as far to the left as he could, slipping sideways across the current of humanity, so that he might escape from the streaming Crowd, leave the mass, and become again a discrete, unique creature. Just a fe
w steps more, a few more yards, he didn’t want to time his exit wrong, he didn’t want to be blocked at the last moment by somebody he hadn’t seen closing up behind him.…
Phew! Made it!
XV
BY DAY, THE GUARDHOUSE LOOKED much less hostile than it did at night. After all, it was just an ordinary building, simple, graceless, almost ugly, and there was nothing military about it. The Investigator didn’t have to buzz the intercom to get a response. By stepping up close to the window and bending forward a little toward the twenty or so concentrically arranged holes that pierced it, he was able to address the Guard—a man neither young nor old, with a full face and thinning hair, dressed in white like a Lab Assistant or a Chemist—who was sitting on the other side of the glass barrier, smiling and waiting.
“Good morning!” said the Investigator, sensing that he was finally going to talk to someone attentive.
“Good morning,” the Guard replied affably.
“I’m the Investigator.”
The Guard didn’t lose his smile, but the Investigator noticed that his eyes had changed. The Guard looked him over. This examination lasted several seconds, at the end of which the Guard consulted a large register that lay open in front of him. Apparently failing to find what he was looking for, he checked the preceding pages, shifting his gaze from line to line with the help of his right index finger. Eventually, he stopped at one of the lines and tapped it three times. “Your arrival was scheduled for yesterday at five p.m.”
“Indeed,” replied the Investigator, “but I was considerably delayed.”
“May I see some identification, please?” the Guard asked.
“Of course!” The Investigator thrust his hand into his inside jacket pocket, found nothing, rummaged in his other pockets, began to grow pale, patted his raincoat, and then suddenly remembered that he’d given his identity papers as well as his credit card to the Giantess, who had deposited them in the Hotel safe while he looked on. On leaving the Hotel that morning, he’d completely forgotten to ask for them back. “I’m very sorry,” he said, “but I’ve left everything at my Hotel. The Hope Hotel, you must know it, it’s only a few hundred yards from here. On the other side of the street.”
These words caused a darkening of the Guard’s heretofore pleasant expression. He seemed to reflect for a while. The Investigator tried to maintain his own broad smile, as if doing so would convince the other of his honesty.
“Please give me a few seconds,” the Guard said. He closed the register, switched off the microphone that linked him to the exterior, picked up a telephone, and dialed a number. His call must have been answered pretty quickly, because the Investigator could see him talking. The conversation went on and on. The Guard opened the register again, placed his finger on the line where the time of the Investigator’s arrival was recorded, engaged in a lengthy discussion, appeared to reply to numerous questions, scrutinized the Investigator carefully, and then, finally, hung up and switched the microphone back on. “Someone will come for you,” he said. “You can wait in front of the security barrier on your right.”
The Investigator thanked the Guard and directed his steps to the indicated area.
The chevaux-de-frise, the rolls of barbed wire, the portcullises, and the chicanes had all been removed. Only a large, automated metal barrier blocked the entrance of the Enterprise. A Security Officer stood near the barrier. He was wearing a gray paramilitary uniform and a peaked cap of the same color, and numerous objects hung from the broad belt that girded his waist: a nightstick, a paralyzing-gas grenade, an electric pistol, a pair of handcuffs, a bunch of keys, a portable telephone, a pocket flashlight, a knife in its sheath, and a walkie-talkie. His other equipment included an earphone and a little microphone attached to the lapel of his military jacket.
When he saw the Investigator approaching the barrier, the Security Officer moved from his position and took a few slow steps forward to block the newcomer’s passage, but the earphone and little microphone started sizzling at once. The Security Officer stopped, froze, listened to what he was being told, and replied simply: “Got it.”
The Security Officer, who stood two heads taller than the Investigator, gazed absently at the distant roofs and ignored him. Once again, the Investigator felt uneasy. “Really, what must I look like?” he wondered. He was unshaven; he had a sizable swollen wound on his forehead; his nose was raw and running nonstop; the torn pocket of his thoroughly wrinkled raincoat was hanging down like a flap; his shoes, still wet, resembled small wads of badly tanned animal skin; and no matter how much he tugged at the lapels of his raincoat, his efforts to conceal the two big coffee stains on his jacket and trousers were in vain.
“A bum, that’s what,” he thought, answering his own question. “Maybe even a drunk—me, a drunk, when I hardly ever touch alcohol.” The Security Officer’s outfit, by contrast, was impeccable: no wrinkles, no stains, no torn fabric. His perfectly polished boots mocked the snowflakes that fell on them. His face was closely shaven. Everything about him was clean and new, as though he’d just come out of a box.
“What weather!” the Investigator said with a little smile, but the Security Officer made no reply. This didn’t so much offend the Investigator as hurt his feelings. Did he count for so little? Was he so utterly insignificant? The effects of the two tablets he’d washed down with the awful coffee were fading. A great weariness invaded his whole body, while at the same time each of his bones became a focal point of pain. His head was caught in a vise, and the jaws of the vise, cranked tighter and tighter by a pitiless hand, were gradually crushing his temples. He was hot. He was cold. He shivered, sweated, sneezed, coughed, choked, and coughed again.
“Keep your germs to yourself, we really don’t need them right now!”
XVI
THOROUGHLY OCCUPIED IN SNEEZING, he hadn’t heard the approach of the man who’d just addressed him so peremptorily.
“Are you the Investigator?”
The Investigator nodded almost reluctantly, blowing his nose at the same time.
“I’m the Guide. I’ll be escorting you to the Manager’s office. Don’t be offended if I don’t shake your hand. Here, this is for you.”
The Guide looked as though he might be the Investigator’s age. Of about middle height, with a slightly fleshy face and not much hair, he was wearing an elegant gray suit. He handed the Investigator a bag in which the latter found various objects: a long white coat, a hard hat of the same color, a pen, a key ring adorned with a photograph of an old man with a mustache—the same man whose framed photograph hung on the wall of his Hotel room?—a notebook and a little plastic flag, both bearing the logo of the Enterprise, and a badge with the words “External Element” printed in bold type.
“It’s the traditional welcome gift. I’ll ask you to put on the coat immediately, clip your badge to the upper left pocket, and place the hard hat on your head.”
“Of course,” said the Investigator, as if he found these instructions completely natural. The long white coat was several sizes too big and the hat too small. As for the badge, it was perfect.
“Will you please follow me?”
The Investigator needed no second invitation. Things were finally starting to get serious. He was glad to have the coat on, big as it was, because it hid the state his own clothes were in; furthermore, the hard hat offered his skull a little gentle warmth, as if a beloved hand were caressing his head, and sheltered him from the snow, which was falling more and more thickly. His strength was returning.
“You don’t wear anything?” the Investigator asked.
“I beg your pardon?”
“A hard hat, a white coat. You don’t wear anything like that?”
“No. They’re useless, to tell you the truth, but absolutely obligatory for External Elements. We always observe the rules. Please take care not to drift away from the line!”
As they walked, they followed a red line painted on the ground. Parallel to the red line were three others: a
yellow line, a green line, and a blue line. The Investigator took advantage of this opportunity to ask the Guide exactly what activities the Enterprise was engaged in. “That’s a vast question,” the Guide began, “and I’m not the person best qualified to respond to it. I don’t know everything. Actually, I don’t know very much. The Enterprise is active in so many areas: communications, engineering, water treatment, renewable energy, nuclear chemistry, oil and gas production, stock analysis, pharmaceutical research, nanotechnology, gene therapy, food processing, banking, insurance, mining, concrete, real estate, storage and consolidation of nonconventional data resources, armaments, humanitarian development, micro-credit aid programs, education and training, textiles, plastics, publishing, public works, patrimony preservation, investment and tax counseling, agriculture, logging, mental analysis, entertainment, surgery, aid to disaster victims, and obviously other fields I’m forgetting! In fact, I’m not sure there’s any sector of human activity that doesn’t depend directly or indirectly on the Enterprise or one of its subsidiaries. Well, we’re almost there.”
The Investigator was having trouble digesting the list the Guide had just enumerated. He’d been far from suspecting that the Enterprise covered all those areas; it was difficult for him to understand how such a range could be possible. The fleeting sensation that he was going alone to face a body with a thousand heads panicked him.
The Investigation Page 5
