The Investigation

XII

A BRIGHT SUN WAS BLEACHING the already very pale sky. The temperature was mild, almost hot, totally unlike the chill of the previous night. The Investigator blinked and stood unmoving for a moment on the Hotel steps, incredulous, happy, and relieved to be outside at last, however late in the day. He felt a little better. Could that be because of the medicine the Policeman had given him?

After having been so harried and upset during the past few hours, he was ready to become the Investigator again: a scrupulous, professional, careful, disciplined, and methodical person who didn’t allow himself to be surprised or bothered by the circumstances or individuals he was required to encounter in the course of his investigations.

On the sidewalk a few yards away, a human flood — a dense, fast-moving, utterly silent Crowd — was streaming past him as though pulled along by a powerful force of suction. The Crowd consisted of men and women of all ages, but they were all walking at the same speed, in silence, their eyes fixed on the ground or staring straight ahead. Equally strange was the fact that the Crowd on the nearer sidewalk was moving from left to right, while the Crowd on the sidewalk across the street was moving in the opposite direction, as though someone somewhere had instituted foot-traffic rules and no one dared go the wrong way.

The only perceptible sound, very soft, came from the vehicles on the street as they crawled along in one direction, from right to left. It was a huge traffic jam! The cars drove past extremely slowly, but in a most orderly fashion, and the Investigator was unable to detect any signs of agitation on the faces of the drivers; they kept their eyes fixed on what was in front of them and seemed to be suffering in silence. There were no horns blowing, no shouted insults — nothing but the elegant, muffled, almost inaudible hum of the engines.

The rhythm of the City had decidedly changed. Though deserted by night, by day it presented an image of great liveliness, of an industrious, concentrated, steady, fluid animation that excited the Investigator and provoked a surge of energy in him. Of course, given the empty desolation of the streets at night, the dense Crowd and heavy traffic were surprising, but when he considered the disconcerting events he’d just lived through and the weird persons he’d had to deal with, he felt he was getting back to a kind of normality. He wanted to accept it and avoid pondering hard questions.

Once again, however, the Investigator had to get his bearings. He’d chosen not to ask the Policeman for directions, being certain that the man, policeman or not, would use the request as an excuse to ask him another endless series of questions and maybe even to place him in custody in his cubbyhole.

The Investigator examined the structures he was able to see: immense warehouses, rows of large metal or stone sheds, office towers, administrative buildings, huge parking garages, laboratories, metal chimneys emitting clouds of nearly transparent smoke. The heterogeneity of those structures was in fact only superficial, for they all belonged to the operations of the Enterprise, as was demonstrated by the wall that encompassed them; and as the wall defined a boundary, it also created bonds, connections, bridges, and attachments between the entities it enclosed, absorbing them into the cells and members of a single, individual, gigantic body.

The whole City seemed to consist of the Enterprise, as if little by little, in a process of expansion nothing had been able to check, the Enterprise had extended itself beyond its original limits, swallowing up, digesting, and assimilating the neighborhoods on its perimeter by imbuing them with its own identity. The mysterious force emanating from the whole caused the Investigator to suffer a brief dizzy spell. Although he’d been aware for a long time that his place in the world and in society was microscopic in scale, this vision of the Enterprise, this glimpse of its brazen extent, allowed him to discover another unsettling fact: his anonymity. Over and above the knowledge that he wasn’t anything, he suddenly realized that he wasn’t anyone, either. The thought didn’t distress him, but all the same, it entered his mind as a narrow, curious worm penetrates an already fragile fruit.

But when he spotted a recess in the wall about two hundred yards to his left, on the other side of the street, he was strangely captivated by the sight and broke off his reverie. Yes, that wide angle, that break in the even line of the wall — there was no doubt about it — had to be the entrance. The entrance to the Enterprise. The entrance where the Guardhouse was located. And to think that the Hotel was barely a minute away. He’d needed several hours to trudge from one to the other, and by God knew what impossible route. It was pretty laughable. The Investigator felt almost euphoric.

He went down the four steps to the sidewalk and looked for a pedestrian crossing area where he could get across the street. But it was no use. He scanned his surroundings as carefully as he could, bending down until his face was at ground level, peering past the legs of the pedestrians and under the wheels of the passing vehicles in an attempt to catch sight of the distinctive white stripes, then going back up the four steps and standing on tiptoe on the top one, trying to descry a traffic light, whether near or far, but, try as he might, he could discover no crossing anywhere.

The Investigator pondered for a few moments, told himself he’d lost enough time already, and resolved to cross the stream of vehicles. It shouldn’t be much of a problem, he thought, given their greatly reduced speed.