To Visit the Queen Read Free Page A

robbed and assaulted, perhaps indecently; they left the matter alone. They were right, though as regarded the nature of the indecency, they could not have been more wrong.
    Patel fled too soon ever to see the men who came down along Cooper's Row after a little while, talking among themselves: men who paused curiously at the sight of the dropped book, then stooped to pick it up. One of them produced a kerchief and wiped the worst of the mud away from the strange material that covered the contents. Another reached out and slowly, carefully, peeled the slick, thin white stuff away, revealing the big heavy book. A third took the book from the second man and turned the pages, marveling at the paper, the quality of the printing, the embossing on the cover. They moved a little down the street to where it met Great Tower Street, where the light was better. As they paused there, a ray of sun suddenly pierced down through the bleak sky above them, that atypical winter's sky here at the thin end of summer. One of the men looked up at this in surprise, for sun had been a rare sight of late. In that brief light the other two men leaned over the pages, read the words there, and became increasingly excited.
    Shortly the three of them hurried away with the book, unsure whether they held in their hands an elaborate fraud or some kind of miracle. Behind and above them, the clouds shut again, and a gloom like premature night once more fell over the Thames estuary, a darkness in which those who had ears to hear could detect, at the very fringes of comprehension, the sound of a slowly stirring laughter.

One

    At just before 5 P.M. on a weekday, the upper-track level of Grand Central Terminal looks much as it does at any other time of day: a striped gray landscape of long concrete islands stretching away from you into a dry, iron-smelling night, under the relentless fluorescent glow of the long lines of overhead lighting. Much of the view across the landscape will be occluded by the thirteen Metro-North trains whose business it is to be there at that time, and by the rush and flow of commuters through the many doors leading from the echoing main concourse to the twelve accessible platforms' near ends. The commuters' thousands of voices on the platforms and out in the concourse mingle into a restless, undecipherable roar, above which the amplified voice of the station announcer desperately attempts to rise, reciting the cyclic poetry of the hour: "Now boarding, the five-oh- two departure of Metro-North train number nine-five- three, stopping at One Hundred and Twenty- fifth Street, Scars dale, Harts dale, White Plains, North White Plains, Val hal la, Haw thorne, Pleas antville, Chap paqua..." And over it all, effortlessly drowning everything out, comes the massive basso B-flat bong of the Accurist clock, echoing out there under the blue-painted backward heaven, two hundred feet above the terrazzo floor.
    Down on the tracks, even that huge note falls somewhat muted, having as it does to fight with the more immediate roar and thunder of the electric diesel locomotives clearing their throats and getting ready to go. By now Rhiow knew them all better than any train spotter, knew every engine by name and voice and (in a few specialized cases) by temperament, for she saw them every day in the line of work. Right now they were all behaving themselves, which was just as well: she had other work in hand. It was no work that any of the other users of the Terminal would have noticed— not that the rushing commuters would in any case have paid much attention to a small black cat, a patchy black-and-white one, and a big gray tabby sitting down in the relative dimness at the near end of Adams Platform— even if the cats hadn't been invisible.
    Bong, said the clock again. Rhiow sighed and looked up at the elliptical multicolored shimmer of the worldgate matrix hanging in the air before them, the colors that presently ran through its warp and woof indicating a