Hebster scraped a finger inside the mouthpiece rim. “He believes his own stuff.” he said in an awed voice. “For all of the decadent urbanity, he has to have the same reassurance he gives his followers—the horrible, superior thing just isn’t there!”
Greta Seidenheim was waiting at the door with his briefcase and both their coats. As he came away from the desk, he said, “I won’t tell you not to come along, Greta, but—”
“Good,” she said, swinging along behind him. “Think we’ll make it to—wherever we’re going?”
“Arizona. The first and largest Alien settlement. The place our friends with the funny names come from.”
“What can you do there that you can’t do here?”
“Frankly, Greta, I don’t know. But it’s a good idea to lose myself for a while. Then again, I want to get in the area where all this agony originates and take a close look; I’m an off-the-cuff businessman; I’ve done all of my important figuring on the spot.”
There was bad news waiting for them outside the helicopter. “Mr. Hebster,” the pilot told him tonelessly while cracking a dry stick of gum, “the stratojet’s been seized by the SIC. Are we still going? If we do it in this thing, it won’t be very far or very fast.”
“We’re still going,” Hebster said after a moment’s hesitation.
They climbed in. The two Primeys sat on the floor in the rear, sneezing conversationally at each other. Williams waved respectfully at his boss. “Gentle as lambs,” he said. “In fact, they made one. I had to throw it out.”
The large pot-bellied craft climbed up its rope of air and started forward from the Hebster Building.