Hebster looked up, startled.
“No, I don’t read your mind,” Braganza laughed through tobacco-stained teeth. He gestured at the window behind his desk. “I saw you jump just the littlest bit when you noticed that cigar store. And then you stared at it for two full minutes. I knew what you were thinking about.”
“Extremely perceptive of you,” Hebster remarked dryly.
The SIC official shook his head in a violent negative. “No, it wasn’t. It wasn’t a bit perceptive. I knew what you were thinking about because I sit up here day after day staring at that cigar store and thinking exactly the same thing. Braganza, I tell myself, that’s the end of your job. That’s the end of scientific world government. Right there on that cigar-store window.”
He glowered at his completely littered desk top for a moment. Hebster’s instincts woke up—there was a sales talk in the wind. He realized the man was engaged in the unaccustomed exercise of looking for a conversational gambit. He felt an itch of fear crawl up his intestines. Why should the SIC, whose power was almost above law and certainly above governments, be trying to dicker with him?
Considering his reputation for asking questions with the snarling end of a rubber hose, Braganza was being entirely too gentle, too talkative, too friendly. Hebster felt like a trapped mouse into whose disconcerted ear a cat was beginning to pour complaints about the dog upstairs.
“Hebster, tell me something. What are your goals?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“What do you want out of life? What do you spend your days planning for, your nights dreaming about? Yost likes the girls and wants more of them. Funatti’s a family man, five kids. He’s happy in his work because his job’s fairly secure, and there are all kinds of pensions and insurance policies to back up his life.”
Braganza lowered his powerful head and began a slow, reluctant pacing in front of the desk.