“Third floor—Corpse Reception and Classification,” the operator sang out.
“Fifth floor—Preliminary Organ Processing.”
“Seventh floor—Brain Reconstitution and Neural Alignment.”
“Ninth floor—Cosmetics, Elementary Reflexes, and Muscular Control.”
At this point, I forced myself to stop listening, the way you do when you’re on a heavy cruiser, say, and the rear engine room gets flicked by a bolt from an Eoti scrambler. After you’ve been around a couple of times when it’s happened, you learn to sort of close your ears and say to yourself, “I don’t know anybody in that damned engine room, not anybody, and in a few minutes everything will be nice and quiet again.” And in a few minutes it is. Only trouble is that then, like as not, you’ll be part of the detail that’s ordered into the steaming place to scrape the guck off the walls and get the jets firing again.
Same way now. Just as soon as I had that girl’s voice blocked out, there we were on the fifteenth floor (“Final Interviews and Shipping”) and the kid and I had to get out.
He was real green. A definite sag around the knees, shoulders sloping forward like his clavicle had curled. Again I was grateful to him. Nothing like having somebody to take care of.
“Come on, Commander,” I whispered. “Up and at ’em. Look at it this way: for characters like us, this is practically a family reunion.”
It was the wrong thing to say. He looked at me as if I’d punched his face. “No thanks to you for the reminder, Mister,” he said. “Even if we are in the same boat.” Then he walked stiffly up to the receptionist.
I could have bitten my tongue off. I hurried after him. “I’m sorry, kid,” I told him earnestly. “The words just slid out of my big mouth. But don’t get sore at me; hell, I had to listen to myself say it too.”