Gordon R. Dickson Read Free Page A

wrong?"
asked Kil. "There's no mistake, is there?"
    "Files doesn't make mistakes," she said. But it was a mechanical
answer and the look of puzzlement remained until, with a conscious effort, she
cleared the expression from her face.
    "You
go from here to another office." She looked at Kil. "The man you'll
talk to there will be a Mr. McElroy. I'll send a wand along to show you the
route."
    She
pressed a stud on her desk, a narrow slot opened in the wall of the cubicle,
and one of the guiding devices she had mentioned rolled out. It was nothing
more than a slender antenna sprouting from a small box-like receiver mounted
on a floton—not a wheel, but a sort of underinfiated sausage-shaped bag which
could manage to go almost anywhere, short of up the side of a vertical wall.
The girl reached down and made a setting on the box.
    "Follow
the wand," she said. Kil rose, then turned back to thank her, but she was
looking at him with such a strange, curious expression in her eyes that he
turned away again without a word and followed the wand into the hallway, for
the first time since Ellen had gone, disturbed by something beyond the
immediate problem of finding her again.
    The
wand trundled ahead of him, leading him down the hallway, off a branching
corridor to a disk elevator. It rolled onto the first descending disk to come
level with the floor of the corridor. Kil stepped hurriedly on beside it, and they dropped down to the next level.
    Emerging
into a new hallway, the wand went on, guiding him through a complicated route
that ended eventually before a plain door, no different from many others they
had passed. Kil faced his Key into the cup and the door opened to show a
square, middle-sized room, whose only remarkable feature was a window opening
on the lake, on a level less than a dozen feet above the surface of the water
itself. This, a desk and a few chairs, broke up the monotony of the place.
    The
room was empty and Kil, his gaze drawn irresistibly to the window, felt a
sudden wild and powerful wave of feeling sweep through him, staggering him. The
sight of the lake had at one sweep brought back his memory of the sea in the
moment when Ellen had left him. He swayed, putting out a hand to the antenna of
the wand, to steady himself, and at that second, the door of the room opened
behind him and a man's voice spoke to him.
    "Mr. Bruner?"
    Kill
took his hand from the. wand and turned to confront a short, dark, wiry-looking
man perhaps a dozen years older than himself, in grey kilt and tunic with a
small oval framing the Police emblem on each piece of clothing. The man did
not wait to hear Kil acknowledge himself, but walked around Kil with a springy,
athletic stride, to seat himself behind the desk.
    "Sit
down," he said, waving Kil to a facing chair.
    Kil
sat.
    "You're
McElroy?" he asked.
    "That's
right. Now—" McElroy leaned forward, putting both elbows on the desk. His
thin, dark features were intense. "Suppose you run through it once more
for me. Just what happened when your wife left you?"
    Kil
told him. McElroy listened without interrupting, elbows on the desk, hands clasped, his head a little on one side and eyes
noncommitally on Kil's face.
    When
Kil had finished, McElroy nodded, straightened up and put his slim hands flat
on the desk.
    "Yes,"
he said. He looked across at Kil with an expression in which curiosity and
sympathy were somehow mixed. "You know," he said softly, "we
can't help you."
    Kil stared at him, stunned.
    "Can't help me?" The words seemed
to be perfectly nonsensical noises with no meaning whatsoever. "No."
McElroy still regarded him.
    "But
you know where she is! I mean—Files will know the next time she checks her Key.
And you—"
    "Yes.
We can get the information from Files." McElroy still spoke softly.
"But we won't." He seemed to be walking on eggs, verbally, tiptoeing
around some delicate subject.
    "It's
that business of the stopping!" said Kil suddenly. He stared furiously at
the other man. "You