“Yeah. I saw.”

“Do you know why?”

“He was trying to figure out whether we’d met before.”

“Had you?”

I nodded. “Right about where I met you, only back when I’d just gotten out of jail. I told you I’d been here once before.”

“Oh.”

Blue carpet covered three-quarters of the lobby. A great pool filled the rest in which a row of twelve foot trellises stood, crowned with flaming braziers. The lobby itself was three stories high, domed and mirror tiled.

Twisting smoke curled towards the ornate grill. Broken reflections sagged and recovered on the walls.

The elevator door folded about us its foil petals. There was the distinct feeling of not moving while seventy-five stories shucked down around us.

We got out on the landscaped roof garden. A very tanned, very blond man wearing an apricot jump-suit, from the collar of which emerged a black turtleneck dicky, came down the rocks (artificial) between the ferns (real) growing the stream (real water; phony current).

“Hello! Hello!” Pause. “I’m terribly glad you decided to come after all.” Pause. “For a while I thought you weren’t going to make it.” The Pauses were to allow Hawk to introduce me. I was dressed so that Spinnel had no way of telling whether I was a miscellaneous Nobel laureate that Hawk happened to have been dining with, or a varlet whose manners and morals were even lower than mine happen to be.

“Shall I take your jacket?” Alexis offered.

Which meant he didn’t know Hawk as well as he would like people to think. But I guess he was sensitive enough to realize from the little cold things that happened in the boy’s face that he should forget his offer.

He nodded to me, smiling—about all he could do—and we strolled towards the gathering.

Edna Silem was sitting on a transparent inflated hassock. She leaned forward, holding her drink in both hands, arguing politics with the people sitting on the grass before her.