In Limbo The concierge was watching the valet clean the foyer when the new tenant came down the stairs. Normally, she wasn’t given to worrying about the occupants of the rooming house—mostly settlers working on short-term contracts, they came and went so quickly. But this young man was different. For one thing he dressed too well. Today, he was wearing a black and white overjacket vee’d over a baggy mesh jumper, grey pleated slacks, soft leather boots. The casual clothes of a citizen, a professional. Those, and his always clean hands, his neatly trimmed hair (blond, already thinning, it enhanced his scholarly appearance) were out of place there. For another, he rarely went out much before noonbreak. As if there wasn’t a war. Anyway, the concierge thought, he surely couldn’t be any sort of subversive, or the police already would have taken him away. She remembered the way they’d arrested an automat worker who’d arrived in the city only a week before the troubles had begun—a big man with long black hair, the front part of it wet with blood as he had tried to wrestle away from the two cops, right there in the foyer.
