All the Colors of Darkness. Lloyd Biggle jr.
length with a patiently grinning ticket agent, and finally bought their tickets. Ahead of Darzek the blond woman was just reaching the window.
She swung a monstrosity of a handbag from her shoulder, opened it, and paused to study herself in a mirror while the ticket agent tapped a pencil irritably. Finally she snapped the bag shut, and regarded the ticket agent with the same analytical detachment she had turned upon Darzek. “I want to go to Honolulu,” she said.
“Certainly. Do you have some identification?”
“Identification.” It was difficult to tell whether she had asked a question or answered one.
“I need some kind of identification in order to make out your insurance certificate. With your ticket you receive fifty thousand dollars’ worth of insurance, effective from the time you enter the transmitting gate here in New York until you leave the receiving gate at Honolulu. Do you have some identification? Driver’s license, Internal Revenue ID—”
“Do the passengers wear life jackets?” the woman asked.
The ticket agent caught his breath. “No. No life jackets.”
“But are you sure it’s safe? There’s a lot of water between here and Honolulu, and I’d hate to fall in. I can’t even swim.”
The ticket agent drew on a thin reserve of patience. “It’s perfectly safe. Nothing can happen to you. Did you try the transmitter in the lobby?”
“Oh, gracious, no! I couldn’t get through that crowd.”
“You can watch from here. It’s like walking from one room to another. You walk through a door here, and out of a door at Honolulu, or wherever you’re going. That’s all there is to it.”
“It’s Honolulu,” she said. “I told you I want to go to Honolulu. Don’t send me to China or somewhere.”
“You’d like to buy a ticket to Honolulu?”
“That’s what I keep telling you!”
“Your identification, please.”
“You’re sure it’s safe?”
“Miss, if you have any doubt at all, why don’t you go watch the lobby transmitters for a while?”
With evident reluctance she surrendered a driver’s license. “I do hope I don’t fall in the ocean. Salt water does terrible things to my hair.”
“This is your present address?”
“That’s right. I just don’t like the idea of going over all that water without an airplane, or boat, or something under me.”
The ticket agent wrote busily. Darzek turned his attention to the other windows. All of the agents looked harassed, and a couple of them were starting to snarl.
The blonde was rummaging in her handbag for her money. Since the operation took place directly under Darzek’s nose, he thoughtfully studied the handbag. It was a boxlike contraption of glistening black leather, artfully embossed with a complex network of designs that seemed reminiscent of ancient Mayan art. He couldn’t remember ever having seen anything quite like it. He wondered if it were Mexican.
She pushed her money through the window, and received in return her change, a ticket, an insurance certificate, and the Universal Trans pamphlet.
“This book,” the ticket agent said, “contains all you’ll need to know about transmitting. Report at Gate Ten, please.”
The woman carelessly stuffed everything into her handbag. “You’re sure—I mean, all that water—”
“Lady,” the ticket agent burst out, “you won’t even have a chance to wash your feet.”
The woman wheeled haughtily, to the accompaniment of guffaws from the line behind Darzek. Darzek stepped forward.
“Yes?” the ticket agent said wearily.
Darzek slid his driver’s license through the window. “This is my present address. Paris, please.”
The ticket agent wrote, accepted his money, made change. “Here you are. This book—”
“I know,” Darzek said. “I’ll read it after I get there.”
The ticket agent solemnly raised his grille and leaned out to grab Darzek’s hand. “Report at Gate Nine, please,” he said.
There were facilities for perhaps fifty transmitting gates on the mezzanine, with only a dozen in operation. Work was already going forward on the next section. Darzek saw Ted Arnold bustling about, waving his arms in eleven directions and sending men hurrying this way and that. Darzek moved among the waiting passengers with a feeling of exhilaration that only a long-frustrated Universal Trans stockholder could have understood. He found Gate Nine, and got in line.
Pretty young hostesses in smart costumes hurried about, answering questions, administering bright doses of courage at the slightest sign of faintheartedness. Darzek saw the blonde from the ticket line trying the patience of one of the hostesses. But the hostess was quickly crowded aside by male passengers, who met the crisis eagerly and enthusiastically, congregating around the blonde and reading whole paragraphs of the company’s pamphlet to her.
Darzek turned away with a grimace of disgust. There was such a thing as carrying even a good act too far, and the blonde’s had been less than tolerable to start with.
A hostess smiled up at him. “All set?”
Darzek nodded. “They seem to be moving slowly.”
“That’s because there are so few transmitters in operation. We rarely have two passengers in succession for the same destination, and the setting has to be changed every time. This is the European gate, with passengers for London, Paris, Berlin, Oslo, Madrid, Rome, and Athens. When each of those places has its own gate, the whole line will move right on through.”
She hurried off to bolster the courage of a plump woman who had reached the gate and showed signs of wavering. Darzek looked after her thoughtfully. Offhand he could think of at least two ways to solve that particular problem: they could sort out all the passengers for one place, and run them through; or they could schedule a time for each destination. He reminded himself that the company had only one day’s experience, and doubtless it would experiment until it found a satisfactory arrangement. And of course more transmitters would help.
Another hostess moved along the line with a speech about the extensive safety checks Universal Trans was applying, and a reminder to walk carefully when transmitting. Only that morning, she said, a man had sprained his ankle when he ran through a transmitter. She was followed by a third hostess who attributed the slow-moving lines to the fact that the passengers were too cautious, and asked everyone to please move through the transmitter quickly. The line edged forward.
The passenger gates seemed to be operating smoothly. Each gate was supervised by an attendant who sat in an elevated control booth. On a signal from the attendant the passenger surrendered his ticket, passed through a turnstile, and turned at a sharp angle into a narrow passageway. He quickly disappeared from the sight of those anxiously waiting in line, but Darzek noted that the gate attendant had an unobstructed view of the slanting passageway, and could watch the passenger until he stepped into the transmitter. The passageways were separated by tall partitions, which kept the passengers from wandering through the wrong transmitters.
Darzek had almost reached his gate when he heard a commotion in the next line. The blonde had been passed through Gate Ten, and then she decided she needed further instructions. The gate attendant and three hostesses pleaded with her as she stood her ground and tapped one expensively shod foot. From long training Darzek had already committed her features to memory. Now he began to study her critically. The mole on her left cheek—she should have that removed. Her long lashes were probably false. She wore more make-up than she needed, and her nervous mannerisms—the foot tapping, the way she repeatedly brushed her long hair back with her left hand, the way her right hand fidgeted with the clasp