Free Flash and Filigree by Terry Southern

officials; scanning the back-issues of newspapers, periodicals, legal journals; devouring everything that might in any way relate to the situation.
    Before the evening was out, he had even familiarized himself with a plan of the County Records Building, and now, as he stood outside it, shading his eyes, at 10:20, precisely ten minutes before the scheduled convening of the Jury, he surveyed the whole with interest, mentally checking the accuracy of the detailed description he had previously read. Standing close, the building was a formless stretch of flat plastered white, without depth or surface quality except at the farthest end where one brief section was flung so abruptly against the sky it seemed to die away entirely, leaving only a texture, a sick glaze in the heat of noon. More than anything else the modern building resembled a huge uncertain mausoleum.
    In five minutes the Doctor walked half the frontal length of the building, retraced his steps to the cloistered dome and entered the main door, past which he was inside a great, octagonal reception room. The temperature here, like that in an air-conditioned cinema, was immediately refreshing. High above were countless thin panels of frosted skylight, meeting ice-white walls and, below the floor of green slate, an effect given point at the great room’s center by the location there of a booth structure, also octagonal, marked on each side Information, and made entirely of aluminum. Standing just inside the door, the Doctor examined the room at length. The surrounding walls held numbered glass doors, three to each of the eight sides, leading, as Dr. Eichner knew, to the various chambers of law, opening and closing in both directions, soundlessly.
    Having digested the scene, he went directly, as planned, to the Information Booth and, without a word, presented his convocation. The booth was occupied by a pale old man in a seersucker suit who was reading a pocket-book held flat before him on the metal counter. The old man looked first at the convocation, then at the Doctor with an air of annoyance, perhaps for his speechlessness since he in turn kept an exaggerated silence and, returning the convocation, simply pointed to a directional indicator, near one of the doors, marked, like the convocation, “16th District, 8th Sessions.” Dr. Eichner had not expected these directional indicators, apparently a recent innovation, as they had not been mentioned in the description of the building; so, for the moment, he was taken aback.
    “Good!” he said then, receiving the convocation in his hand again and starting to leave; but he stopped short, as on an afterthought, and spoke out amiably to the old man who had already gone back to his book.
    “This is Judge Fisher’s Session, isn’t it?”
    “Judge Thornton Fisher?” said the other, raising his thin gray head. He looked at the Doctor cagily, as though suspecting a trap, and shook his head, a slow wag with eyes closed. “Not Judge Fisher,” he said flatly, but continued at once in a forgiving tone, “Judge Fisher is not here any more.” Unmistakably, there was finality and an irritating piety in his voice, and he might have returned straightaway to his reading, but Dr. Eichner was not to be put off.
    “Where is Judge Fisher then?” he asked abruptly. “If there’s been a change in 8th Sessions, why wasn’t public notice given? That’s customary, isn’t it?”
    The querulous edge in the Doctor’s voice was so genuine that the old man realized then he wasn’t being baited after all, and so, even closed the book to make the most of it, leaning forward across the aluminum, his white face livid now in sudden and almost obscene confidence.
    “Well, he’s dead,” he said in a soft whining effort to get some of the Doctor’s sympathy himself, and so saying, half-satisfied, sat back stiffly to hold his book in readiness and continue as matter-of-fact: “Day before yesterday. Or maybe it was Wednesday; it was