Samuel Delany - Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones

On a whim I went up to her. “Hey?”

She looked at me from under hair like trampled hay, eyes all pupil.

“You get the new Word yet?”

She rubbed her nose, already scratch red. “Pyrite,” she said. “It just came down about an hour ago.”

“Who told you?”

She considered my question. “I got it from a guy who says he got it from a guy who came in this evening from New York who picked it up there from a Singer named Hawk.”

The three grimies nearest made a point of not looking at me. Those further away let themselves glance.

“Oh,” I said. “Oh. Thanks.”

Occam’s Razor, along with any real information on how security works, hones away most such paranoia. Pyrite. At a certain level in my line of work, paranoia’s just an occupational disease. At least I was certain that Arty (and Maud) probably suffered from it as much as I did.

The lights were out on The Glacier’s marquee. Then I remembered what I had left inside and ran up the stairs.

The door was locked. I pounded on the glass a couple of times, but everyone had gone home. And the thing that made it worse was that I could see it sitting on the counter of the coat-check alcove under the orange bulb. The steward had probably put it there, thinking I might arrive before “everybody left. Tomorrow at noon Ho Chi Eng had to pick up his reservation for the Marigold Suite on the Interplanetary Liner The Platinum Swan , which left at one-thirty for Bellona. And there behind the glass doors of The Glacier, it waited with the proper wig, as well as the epicanthic folds that would halve Mr. Eng’s slow eyes of jet.

I actually thought of breaking in. But the more practical solution was to get the hotel to wake me at nine and come in with the cleaning man. I turned around and started down the steps; and the thought struck me, and made me terribly sad, so that I blinked and smiled just from reflex: it was probably just as well to leave it there till morning, because there was nothing in it that wasn’t mine, anyway.