"I meant I hoped—"
"Heard you," said the clerk. "Let's not say the same thing more than once." The car stopped and he opened the doors. Lampley could see nothing clearly through the clouds of steam outside. After a slight hesitation the girl left, followed by the model. The Governor moved after them; the clerk barred his way. "Ladies only," he said politely.
"You weren't so particular at the doctor's office," argued Lampley angrily.
"Yang and Yin," explained the clerk. "Circumstances alter faces."
The elevator shot upward. The noise of airhammers and riveting machines grew loud; it was succeeded by the sounds of distant motors, wind rustling in the trees, surf spuming against rocks, hooves clopping on soft asphalt. "You want out here?" asked the clerk. "Or will you try for a higher number?" Before the Governor could answer, the elevator stopped. Lampley stepped out on linoleum with the pattern worn off, the burlap backing showing through in streaks. A gloomy corridor, warm and fetid, stretched ahead of him. He turned back to the elevator but the doors were shut.
He paced along the corridor, past tarnished spittoons, sagging chairs, earthenware umbrella stands. The saffron wallpaper hung in shaggy strips, spiderwebs loaded with the dried chitin of insect victims tied it to the pocked plaster. Tarnished metal signs exhorted, NO SMOKING, DON'T SPIT ON THE FLOOR, SILENCE, NO WOMEN ALLOWED, FIREARMS PROHIBITED, ACT LIKE YOUR MOTHER SAW YOU. The light bulbs were the ancient carbon type; their filaments glowed an angry red through the flawed, smeared glass.
He entered a room whose wooden walls were riddled with holes, the remaining surfaces powdery and fragile, reeking with slime and foul smells. Men lay on the floor in their own filth and vomit, their greasy clothes clutched across thin chests, sagging bellies, protruding Adam's apples. They quivered and twitched, squirmed and tossed, turned on their sides and then on their backs. They moved their arms under their uneasy heads, rolled over on them, jerked them up. They snored, wheezed, gasped, cried out. They burrowed unshaven faces, heavy with sores, scars, bloody cuts, into their elbows or against hunched shoulders. The Governor picked his way between them as best he could, anxious not to stumble, dreading to touch one of them with his foot.
At the end of the room an alabaster basin, perhaps twenty feet across, was full to the brim with sewage. Gorged and sluggish flies hovered, or lit briefly on bobbing orange-peels. He shuddered lest some tremor of the floor, some unseen current of air cause the loathsome bog to overflow and reach him.
He finished his cautious tour and entered a circular anteroom whose sides were completely taken up by divans and easy-chairs upholstered in faded green plush. Gas brackets curved outward from the walls, holding fan-shaped yellow flames like halting palms. A chandelier was suspended from the ceiling, its glass prisms and teardrops reflecting the violet end of the spectrum. Below it was a round settee with a blunted cone of upholstery rising in its center; the seat might have accommodated twenty pairs of buttocks; no more than four shoulders could have found space against the spindling back. This cone supported a cast-iron statuette of an effeminate youth or a mannish girl—it was impossible to tell which because of the chaste metallic drapery. There was no one in the room.