Beyond the Doors of Death by Robert Silverberg, Damien Broderick

shirts, all of whom reminded him disturbingly of Kent Zacharias; but these were warms, Britishers from their accents, engineers, he suspected, from their conversation. They were building a dam and a power plant somewhere up the coast, it seemed, or perhaps a power plant without a dam; it was hard to follow what they said. They drank a good deal of gin and spoke in hearty booming shouts. There were also a good many Japanese businessmen, of course, looking trim and restrained in dark-blue suits and narrow ties, and at the table next to Klein’s were five tanned curly-haired men talking in rapid Hebrew—Israelis, surely. The only Africans in sight were waiters and bartenders. Klein ordered Mombasa oysters, steak, and a carafe of red wine, and found the food unexpectedly good, but left most of it on his plate. It was late evening in Tanzania, but for him it was ten o’clock in the morning, and his body was confused. He tumbled into bed, meditated vaguely on the probable presence of Sybille just a few air-minutes away in Zanzibar, and dropped into a sound sleep from which he awakened, what seemed like many hours later, to discover that it was still well before dawn.
    He dawdled away the morning sightseeing in the old native quarter, hot and dusty, with unpaved streets and rows of tin shacks, and at midday returned to his hotel for a shower and lunch. Much the same national distribution in the restaurant—British, Japanese, Israeli—though the faces seemed different. He was on his second beer when Anthony Gracchus came in. The white hunter, broad-shouldered, pale, densely bearded, clad in khaki shorts, khaki shirt, seemed almost to have stepped out of the picture-cube Jijibhoi had once shown him. Instinctively Klein shrank back, turning toward the window, but too late: Gracchus had seen him. All chatter came to a halt in the restaurant as the dead man strode to Klein’s table, pulled out a chair unasked, and seated himself; then, as though a motion-picture projector had been halted and started again, the British engineers resumed their shouting, sounding somewhat strained now. “Small world,” Gracchus said. “Crowded one, anyway. On your way to Zanzibar, are you, Klein?”
    “In a day or so. Did you know I was here?”
    “Of course not.” Gracchus’ harsh eyes twinkled slyly. “Sheer coincidence is what this is. She’s there already.”
    “She is?”
    “She and Zacharias and Mortimer. I hear you wiggled your way into Zion.”
    “Briefly,” Klein said. “I saw Sybille. Briefly.”
    “Unsatisfactorily. So once again you’ve followed her here. Give it up, man. Give it up.”
    “I can’t.”
    “ Can’t! ” Gracchus scowled. “A neurotic’s word, can’t. What you mean is won’t . A mature man can do anything he wants to that isn’t a physical impossibility. Forget her. You’re only annoying her, this way, interfering with her work, interfering with her—” Gracchus smiled. “With her life. She’s been dead almost three years, hasn’t she? Forget her. The world’s full of other women. You’re still young, you have money, you aren’t ugly, you have professional standing—”
    “Is this what you were sent here to tell me?”
    “I wasn’t sent here to tell you anything, friend. I’m only trying to save you from yourself. Don’t go to Zanzibar. Go home and start your life again.”
    “When I saw her at Zion,” Klein said, “she treated me with contempt. She amused herself at my expense. I want to ask her why she did that.”
    “Because you’re a warm and she’s a dead. To her you’re a clown. To all of us you’re a clown. It’s nothing personal, Klein. There’s simply a gulf in attitudes, a gulf too wide for you to cross. You went to Zion drugged up like a Treasury man, didn’t you? Pale face, bulgy eyes? You didn’t fool anyone. You certainly didn’t fool her . The game she played with you was her way of telling you that. Don’t you know that?”
    “I know it, yes.”
    “What