Variable Star by Robert A HeinLein & Spider Robinson Page A

soon as I reached it. I allowed myself one breath, mostly because I had to, and entered.
    B ut it was only Rennick’s office.
    He did not say, “You’re late,” even by facial expression. But in the time it took me to walk three steps into the room. he had risen from his workstation, come all the way round it, and reached my side, without seeming to hurry “Good morning, Joel,” he said pleasantly. He took my elbow, turned me, and we were back out in the corridor and walking again—not as fast as I had arrived, but not slowly either. “I trust you slept well.”
    “Yes, thank you, Alex. And yourself?”
    “There are things I must tell you, and we no longer have time for the standard set speech. As you know, there is only one Mr. Conrad in this house, and that is what he is called in his presence or out of it. But when one directly addresses him, he prefers, strongly, to be called simply Conrad. Thus, you might hear someone say, for instance, ‘Mr. Conrad approves of this—isn’t that so, Conrad?’ Am I clear?”
    “No honorific to his face. Not even ‘sir’?”
    “Not even ‘sir.’ ‘Yes, Conrad.’ ‘No, Conrad.’”
    I nodded. “Got it. Thanks. Do I call Mr. Albert ‘Albert’ to his face, too?”
    “Not unless he invites you to. Which is unlikely. Until then he is Mr. Albert.”
    We came to a checkpoint. Five large men, four of them heavily armed and the deadliest one sitting at a workstation. Rennick didn’t even slow down, and nobody killed him, so I didn’t slow down either.
    “Mr. Conrad does not shake hands. Mr. Conrad does not care for humor. Mr. Conrad is not interrupted.”
    Right turn. Another checkpoint. Another five armed men, but not large this time. Gurkhas. Their knives were sheathed. Rennick came to a halt and stood still, but ignored them. I did likewise. I could almost feel myself being scanned and sniffed and candled by invisible machinery.
    “When Mr. Conrad says ‘Thank you,’ he means ‘good-bye.’ The correct response is not ‘You’re welcome,’ but ‘Yes, Conrad.’ You say it on your way to the door.”
    “Got it.” A Gurkha produced something I’d only seen in cop or spy stories, and gave it to Rennick: an identifier. He held it up to his eyes like binoculars for a moment, then poked his right index finger into a socket on the side, and removed it. Almost at once there was a soft chiming sound, and a blue light on top of the device flashed three times. Rennick passed the device to me.
    Fighting an impulse to grin like an imbecile, I lifted it to my own eyes and looked into the lenses. Nothing but a white field. I lowered it, hesitated a second, and stuck my finger in the slot. I expected to be poked for a blood sample, but what I got was even more disconcerting, a sensation as if someone were sucking gently on that fingertip. Whether it was taking skin scrapings or sampling my fingernail I couldn’t say. In any event it decided it approved of my DNA and my retinas, and awarded me the same chime and flash Rennick had received.
    The Gurkha’s forearms and hands relaxed slightly, and his cousins relaxed too, slightly. He accepted the identifier back from me, saluted to both me and Rennick, held it, and stepped smartly backward out of our way. Rennick was off again at once, with me at his heels.
    I wondered if anyone else in the Inner System was as paranoid as these people. Or, now that I came to think of it, had better reason to be.
    The pause had been almost enough to let me get my breath back. “Anything else?”
    “Yes. A piece of personal advice. There’s only one way to say this. Don’t bullshit. If Mr. Conrad asks you a question and you don’t know the answer, there is only one acceptable response—‘I don’t know Conrad.’ Try and bluff, and he’ll smell it.”
    We came to a large door that looked like a polished slab of real wood. It lacked the customary ID scanner, but at about the same location it had an antique fitting I guessed at once