"I am."
"Well, Mrs. Jeffries of the laundry just phoned and said when she got down to the laundry a few minutes ago the place was flooded with water. One of the taps sprung or something, and she called damage control and they told her to call water reclamation and I guess the water-rec squad was all over at hydroponics trying to figure out why the increase in humidity—anyhow, Mrs. Jeffries is upset because she can't get the captain and will you go down and smooth her out?" Loomis recited rapidly.
Avery turned to Samuel Wyckoff. "Guess you get right into harness. This is for you." Then to Loomis, "Sam's my righthand man for just this sort of thing. Give him all the help you can," and back to Wyckoff: "We'll see you up nose-side as soon as you're through. We've got to plan fast so's not to upset the whole crowd. You take the elevator down: we'll walk up. We're in no hurry."
As the elevator glided down out of sight past the transplast door, and Loomis returned along the corridor, Avery and White turned into the narrow winding stair to climb slowly to the fourth floor above. White looked up at Avery's back and asked, puzzled, "Do you think this came on suddenly? And why? I didn't see him too often, but he always seemed so tough, so ... well ... resilient, if you know what I mean. But he must have known it was coming if he took Wyckoff around last night. What do you think happened to him?"
The man ahead shrugged his shoulders and they climbed on and up.
The "New-Side Out Ball and Social Assembly" was in full swing the night after Turnover, when Jack White edged quickly through the door into the circular Great Saloon just in time to avoid collision with a fantastically costumed guest carrying a tray half full of tiny crystal coffee-glasses, and stood peering through the half-dark of lowered lights at the little clusters of people in easy chairs and loungettes which ringed the room and filled it with a confusion of talk and laughter. He moved a step or two away from the wall, his eyes seeking more intently through the small throng near the center of the room on his right where Captain Daneshaw, guarded by a solicitous Sam Wyckoff, sat in a great raised chair receiving congratulations on his recovery. Elbert Avery was not in that bunch. Mr. White picked his way to the left where a few couples were dancing to the slow strains of the xerxia being played by a small orchestra on a bit of a curtailed stage. So intent was his search, that he ran into the arm of a chair and almost fell into the midst of the gay little groups.
Helen Platt's voice was sweet, chiding, "You're quite out of character, Mister White. You have to give up the absent-minded math professor this evening. We're all somebody new tonight, you know."
Scattered laughter.
White looked down. The ex-Latin teacher, heavily made up, had hidden her thinning grey hair under a towering bejewelled turban. "I'm a movie actress and Phil here is a big game hunter," she added, swinging a ruby-shod toe toward a lamp-bronzed man wearing a chalk-white nilene tropojak and encircling crimson commerbund. "Tell us something about yourself and let us guess what kind of secret you've been hiding the last century."