"Sure." Numbly, he passed her, entered her small, contemporarily furnished office; in one glance he saw artifacts from the extinct cultures of six planets. "But Miss Holm," he said, then, candidly, "maybe your employers didn't explain; there's pressure here. I've got one of the most powerful economic syndromes in the Sol system after me. Trails of Hoffman — "
"THL," Miss Holm said, seating herself at her desk and touching the on ofher aud recorder, "is the owner of Dr. Sepp von Einem's teleportation construct and hence monopolistically has made obsolete the hyper-see liners and freighters of Applebaum Enterprise." On her desk before her she had a folio, which she consulted. "You see, Mr. Rachmael ben Applebaum — " She glanced up. "I wish to keep you in data-reference distinct from your father, the late Maury Applebaum. So may I call you Rachmael?"
"Y-yes," he said, nettled by her coolness, her small, firm poise — and the folio which lay before her; long before he had consulted Listening Instructional Educational Services — or, as the pop mind called it in UN-egged-on derision, Lies Incorporated — the police
agency had gathered, with its many data-monitors, the totality of information pertaining to him and to the collapse from abrupt technological obsolescence of the once formidable Applebaum Enterprise. And —
"Your late father," Freya Holm said, "died evidently at his own instigation. Officially the UN police list it as Selbstmort... suicide. We however — " She paused, consulted the folio. "Hmm."
Rachmael said, "I'm not satisfied, but I'm resigned." After all, he could not bring back his heavy, red-faced, nearsighted and highly over-taxed father, Selbstmort, in the official German of the UN, or not. "Miss Holm," he began, but she cut him off, gently.