Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said

1

On Tuesday, October 11, 1988, the Jason Taverner Show ran thirty seconds short. A technician, watching through the plastic bubble of the control dome, froze the final credit on the video section, then pointed to Jason Taverner, who had started to leave the stage. The technician tapped his wrist, pointed to his mouth.

Into the boom mike Jason said smoothly, “Keep all those cards and V-letters coming in, folks. And stay tuned now for The Adventures of Scotty, Dog Extraordinary.”

The technician smiled; Jason smiled back, and then both the audio and the video clicked off. Their hour-long music and variety program, which held the second highest rating among the year’s best TV shows, had come to an end. And it had all gone well.

“Where’d we lose half a minute?” Jason said to his special guest star of the evening, Heather Hart. It puzzled him. He liked to time his own shows.

Heather Hart said, “Baby bunting, it’s all right.” She put her cool hand across his slightly moist forehead, rubbed the perimeter of his sand-colored hair affectionately.

“Do you realize what power you have?” Al Bliss, their business agent, said to Jason, coming up close—too close as always—to him. “Thirty million people saw you zip up your fly tonight. That’s a record of sorts.”

“I zip up my fly every week,” Jason said. “It’s my trademark. Or don’t you catch the show?”

“But thirty million,” Bliss said, his round, florid face spotted with drops of perspiration. “Think of it. And then there’s the residuals.”

Jason said crisply, “I’ll be dead before the residuals on this show pay off. Thank God.”

“You’ll probably be dead tonight,” Heather said, “with all those fans of yours packed in outside there. Just waiting to rip you into little tiny squares like so many postage stamps.”

“Some of them are your fans, Miss Hart,” Al Bliss said, in his doglike panting voice.

“God damn them,” Heather said harshly. “Why don’t they go away? Aren’t they breaking some law, loitering or something?”

Jason took hold of her hand and squeezed it forcefully, attracting her frowning attention. He had never understood her dislike for fans; to him they were the lifeblood of his public existence. And to him his public existence, his role as worldwide entertainer, was existence itself, period. “You shouldn’t be an entertainer,” he said to Heather, “feeling the way you do. Get out of the business. Become a social worker in a forced-labor camp.”

“There’re people there, too,” Heather said grimly.

Two special police guards shouldered their way up to Jason Taverner and Heather. “We’ve got the corridor as clear as we’re going to get it,” the fatter of the two cops wheezed. “Let’s go now, Mr. Taverner. Before the studio audience can trickle around to the side exits.” He signaled to three other special police guards, who at once advanced toward the hot, packed passageway that led, eventually, to the nocturnal street. And out there the parked Rolls flyship in all its costly splendor, its tail rocket idling throbbingly. Like, Jason thought, a mechanical heart. A heart that beat for him alone, for him the star. Well, by extension, it throbbed in response to the needs of Heather, too.

She deserved it: she had sung well, tonight. Almost as well as—Jason grinned inwardly, to himself. Hell, let’s face it, he thought. They don’t turn on all those 3-D color TV sets to see the special guest star. There are a thousand special guest stars scattered over the surface of earth, and a few in the Martian colonies.

They turn on, he thought, to see me. And I am always there. Jason Taverner has never and will never disappoint his fans. However Heather may feel about hers.

“You don’t like them,” Jason said as they squirmed and pushed and ducked their way down the steaming, sweatsmelling corridor, “because you don’t like yourself. You secretly think they have bad taste.”

“They’re dumb,” Heather grunted, and cursed quietly as her flat, large hat flopped from her head and disappeared forever within the whale’s belly of close-pressing fans.

“They’re ordinaries,” Jason said, his lips at her ear, partly lost as it was in her great tangle of shiny red hair. The famous cascade of hair so widely and expertly copied in beauty salons throughout Terra.

Heather grated, “Don’t say that word.”

“They’re ordinaries,” Jason said, “and they’re morons. Because”—he nipped the lobe of her ear—“because that’s what it means to be an ordinary. Right?”

She sighed. “Oh, God, to be in the flyship cruising through the void. That’s what I long for: an infinite void. With no human voices, no human smells, no human jaws masticating plastic chewing gum in nine iridescent colors.”

“You really do hate them,” he said.

“Yes.” She nodded briskly. “And so do you.” She halted briefly, turning her head to confront him. “You know your goddamn voice is gone; you know you’re coasting on your glory days, which you’ll never see again.” She smiled at him, then. Warmly. “Are we growing old?” she said, above the mumbles and squeaks of the fans. “Together? Like man and wife?”

Jason said, “Sixes don’t grow old.”

“Oh yes,” Heather said. “Oh yes they do.” Reaching upward, she touched his wavy brown hair. “How long have you ‘been tinting it, dearheart? A year? Three?”

“Get in the flyship,” he said brusquely, maneuvering her ahead of him, out of the building and onto the pavement of Hollywood Boulevard.

“I’ll get in,” Heather said, “if you’ll sing me a high B natural. Remember when you—”

He thrust her bodily into the flyship, squeezed in after her, turned to help Al Bliss close the door, and then they were up and into the rain-clouded nighttime sky. The great gleaming sky of Los Angeles, as bright as if it were high noon. And that’s what it is for you and for me, he thought. For the two of us, in all times to come. It will always be as it is now, because we are sixes. Both of us. Whether they know it or not.

And it’s not, he thought grimly, enjoying the bleak humor of it. The knowledge which they together had, the knowledge unshared. Because that was the way it was meant to be. And always had … even now after it had all turned out so badly. Badly, at least, in the designers’ eyes. The great pundits who had guessed and guessed wrong. Forty-five beautiful years ago, when the world was young and droplets of rain still clung to the now-gone Japanese cherry trees in Washington, D.C. And the smell of spring that had hovered over the noble experiment. For a short while, anyhow.

“Let’s go to Zurich,” he said aloud.

“I’m too tired,” Heather said. “Anyhow, that place bores me.”

“The house?” He was incredulous. Heather had picked it out for the two of them, and for years there they had gotten away—away especially from the fans that Heather hated so much.

Heather sighed and said, “The house. The Swiss watches. The bread. The cobblestones. The snow on the hills.”

“Mountains,” he said, feeling aggrieved still. “Well, hell,” he said. “I’ll go without you.”

“And pick up someone else?”

He simply could not understand. “Do you want me to take someone else with me?” he demanded.

“You and your magnetism. Your charm. You could get any girl in the world into that big brass bed with you. Not that you’re so much once you get there.”

“God,” he said with disgust. “That again. Always the same old gripes. And the ones that’re fantasy—they’re the ones you really hang on to.”

Turning to face him, Heather said earnestly, “You know how you look, even now at the age you are. You’re beautiful. Thirty million people ogle you an hour a week. It’s not your singing they’re interested in … it’s your incurable physical beauty.”

“The same can be said for you,” he said caustically. He felt tired and he yearned for the privacy and seclusion that lay there on the outskirts of Zurich, silently waiting for the two of them to come back once more. And it was as if the house wanted them to stay, not for a night or a week of nights, but forever.

“I don’t show my age,” Heather said.

He glanced at her, then studied her. Volumes of red hair, pale skin with a few freckles, a strong roman nose. Deepset huge violet eyes. She was right; she didn’t show her age. Of course she never tapped into the phone-grid transex network, as he did. But in point of fact he did so very little. So he was not hooked, and there had not been, in his case, brain damage or premature aging.

“You’re a goddamn beautiful-looking person,” he said grudgingly.

“And you?” Heather said.

He could not be shaken by this. He knew that he still had his charisma, the force they had inscribed on the chromosomes forty-two years ago. True, his hair had become mostly gray and he did tint it. And a few wrinkles had appeared here and there. But—.

“As long as I have my voice,” he said, “I’ll be okay. I’ll have what I want. You’re wrong about me—it’s your six aloofness, your cherished so-called individuality. Okay, if you don’t want to fly over to the house in Zurich, where do you want to go? Your place? My place?”

“I want to be married to you,” Heather said. “So then it won’t be my place versus your place but it’ll be our place. And I’ll give up singing and have three children, all of them looking like you.”

“Even the girls?”

Heather said, “They’ll all be boys.”

Leaning over he kissed her on the nose. She smiled, took his hand, patted it warmly. “We can go anywhere tonight,” he said to her in a low, firm, controlled, and highly projected voice, almost a father voice; it generally worked well with Heather, whereas nothing else did. Unless, he thought, I walk off.

She feared that. Sometimes in their quarrels, especially at the house in Zurich, where no one could hear them or interfere, he had seen the fear on her face. The idea of being alone appalled her; he knew it; she knew it; the fear was part of the reality of their joint life. Not their public life; for them, as genuinely professional entertainers, there they had complete, rational control: however angry and estranged they became they would function together in the big worshiping world of viewers, letter writers, noisy fans. Even outright hatred could not change that.

But there could be no hate between them anyhow. They had too much in common. They got so damn much from each other. Even mere physical contact, such as this, sitting together in the Rolls skyfly, made them happy. For as long, anyhow, as it lasted.

Reaching into the inner pocket of his custom-tailored genuine silk suit—one of perhaps ten in the whole world—he brought out a wad of government-certified bills. A great number of them, compressed into a fat little bundle.

“You shouldn’t carry so much cash on you,” Heather said naggingly, in the tone he disliked so much: the opinionated mother tone.

Jason said, “With this”—he displayed the package of bills—“we can buy our way into any—”

“If some unregistered student who has sneaked across from a campus burrow just last night doesn’t chop your hand off at the wrist and run away with it, both your hand and your flashy money. You always have been flashy. Flashy and loud. Look at your tie. Look at it!” She had raised her voice, now; she seemed genuinely angry.

“Life is short,” Jason said. “And prosperity even shorter.” But he placed the package of bills back in his inside coat pocket, smoothed away at the lump it created in his otherwise perfect suit. “I wanted to buy you something with it,” he said. Actually the idea had just come to him now; what he had planned to do with the money was something a little different: he intended to take it to Las Vegas, to the blackjack tables. As a six he could—and did—always win at blackjack; he had the edge over everyone, even the dealer. Even, he thought sleekly, the pit boss.

“You’re lying,” Heather said. “You didn’t intend to get me anything; you never do, you’re so selfish and always thinking about yourself. That’s screwing money; you’re going to buy some big-chested blonde and go to bed together with her. Probably at our place in Zurich, which, you realize, I haven’t seen for four months now. I might as well be pregnant.”

It struck him as odd that she would say that, out of all the possible retorts that might flow up into her conscious, talking mind. But there was a good deal about Heather that he did not understand; with him, as with her fans, she kept many things about her private.

But, over the years, he had learned a lot about her. He knew, for example, that in 1982 she had had an abortion, a well-kept secret, too. He knew that at one time she had been illegally married to a student commune leader, and that for one year she had lived in the rabbit warrens of Columbia University, along with all the smelly, bearded students kept subsurface lifelong by the pols and the nats. The police and the national guard, who ringed every campus, keeping the students from creeping across to society like so many black rats swarming out of a leaky ship.

And he knew that one year ago she had been busted for possession of drugs. Only her wealthy and powerful family had been able to buy her out of that one: her money and her charisma and fame hadn’t worked when confrontation time with the police came.

Heather had been scarred a little by all that had overtaken her, but, he knew, she was all right now. Like all sixes she had enormous recuperative ability. It had been carefully built into each of them. Along with much, much else. Even he, at forty-two years, didn’t know them all. And a lot had happened to him, too. Mostly in the form of dead bodies, the remains of other entertainers he had trampled on his long climb to the top.

“These ‘flashy’ ties—” he began, but then the skyfly’s phone rang. He took it, said hello. Probably it was Al Bliss with the ratings on tonight’s show.

But it was not. A girl’s voice came to him, penetrating sharply, stridently into his ear. “Jason?” the girl said loudly.

“Yeah,” he said. Cupping the mouthpiece of the phone he said to Heather, “It’s Marilyn Mason. Why the hell did I give her my skyfly number?”

“Who the hell is Marilyn Mason?” Heather asked.

“I’ll tell you later.” He uncupped the phone. “Yes, dear; this is Jason for real, in the true reincarnated flesh. What is it? You sound terrible. Are they evicting you again?” He winked at Heather and grinned wryly.

“Get rid of her,” Heather said.

Again cupping the mouthpiece of the phone he said to her, “I will; I’m trying to; can’t you see?” Into the phone he said, “Okay, Marilyn. Spill your guts out to me; that’s what I’m for.”

For two years Marilyn Mason had been his protégée, so to speak. Anyhow, she wanted to be a singer—be famous, rich, loved—like him. One day she had come wandering into the studio, during rehearsal, and he had taken notice of her. Tight little worried face, short legs, skirt far too short—he had, as was his practice, taken it all in at first glance. And, a week later, he had arranged for an audition for her with Columbia Records, their artists and repertoire chief.

A lot had gone on in that week, but it hadn’t had anything to do with singing.

Marilyn said shrilly into his ear, “I have to see you. Otherwise I’ll kill myself and the guilt will be on you. For the rest of your life. And I’ll tell that Heather Hart woman about us sleeping together all the time.”

Inwardly he sighed. Hell, he was tired already, worn out by his hour-long show during which it was smile, smile, smile. “I’m on my way to Switzerland for the rest of tonight,” he said firmly, as if speaking to a hysterical child. Usually, when Marilyn was in one of her accusatory, quasi-paranoid moods it worked. But not this time, naturally.

“It’ll take you five minutes to get over here in that million dollar Rolls skyfly of yours,” Marilyn dinned in his ear. “I just want to talk to you for five seconds. I have something very important to tell you.”

She’s probably pregnant, Jason said to himself. Somewhere along the line she intentionally—or maybe unintentionally—forgot to take her pill.

“What can you tell me in five seconds that I don’t already know?” he said sharply. “Tell me now.”

“I want you here with me,” Marilyn said, with her customary total lack of consideration. “You must come. I haven’t seen you in six months and during that time I’ve done a lot of thinking about us. And in particular about that last audition.”

“Okay,” he said, feeling bitter and resentful. This was what he got for trying to manufacture for her—a no-talent—a career. He hung up the phone noisily, turned to Heather and said, “I’m glad you never ran into her; she’s really a—”

“Bullshit,” Heather said. “I didn’t ‘run into her’ because you made damn sure you saw to that.”

“Anyhow,” he said, as he made a right turn for the skyfly, “I got her not one but two auditions, and she snurfled them both. And to keep her self-respect she’s got to blame it on me. I somehow herded her into failing. You see the picture.”

“Does she have nice boobs?” Heather said.

“Actually, yes.” He grinned and Heather laughed. “You know my weakness. But I did my part of the bargain; I got her an audition—two auditions. The last one was six months ago and I know goddamn well she’s still smoldering and brooding over it. I wonder what she wants to tell me.”

He punched the control module to set up an automatic course for Marilyn’s apartment building with its small but adequate roof field.

“She’s probably in love with you,” Heather said, as he parked the skyfly on its tail, releasing then the descent stairs.

“Like forty million others,” Jason said genially.

Heather, making herself comfortable in the bucket seat of the skyfly said, “Don’t be gone very long or so help me I’m taking off without you.”

“Leaving me stuck with Marilyn?” he said. They both laughed. “I’ll be right back.” He crossed the field to the elevator, pressed the button.

When he entered Marilyn’s apartment he saw, at once, that she was out of her mind. Her entire face had pinched and constricted; her body so retracted that it looked as if she were trying to ingest herself. And her eyes. Very few things around or about women made him uneasy, but this did. Her eyes, completely round, with huge pupils, bored at him as she stood silently facing him, her arms folded, everything about her unyielding and iron rigid.

“Start talking,” Jason said, feeling around for the handle of the advantage. Usually—in fact virtually always—he could control a situation that involved a woman; it was, in point of fact, his specialty. But this … he felt uncomfortable. And still she said nothing. Her face, under layers of makeup, had become completely bloodless, as if she were an animated corpse. “You want another audition?” Jason asked. “Is that it?”

Marilyn shook her head no.

“Okay; tell me what it is,” he said wearily but uneasily. He kept the unease out of his voice, however; he was far too shrewd, far too experienced, to let her hear his uncertainty. In a confrontation with a woman it ran nearly ninety per cent bluff, on both sides. It all lay in how you did it, not what you did.

“I have something for you,” Marilyn turned, walked off out of sight into the kitchen. He strolled after her.

“You still blame me for the lack of success of both—” he began.

“Here you are,” Marilyn said. She lifted up a plastic bag from the drainboard, stood holding it a moment, her face still bloodless and stark, her eyes jutting and unblinking, and then she yanked the bag open, swung it, moved swiftly up to him.

It happened too fast. He backed away out of instinct, but too slowly and too late. The gelatinlike Callisto cuddle sponge with its fifty feeding tubes clung to him, anchored itself to his chest. Already he felt the feeding tubes dig into him, into his chest.

He leaped to the overhead kitchen cabinets, grabbed out a half-filled bottle of scotch, unscrewed the lid with flying fingers, and poured the scotch onto the gelatinlike creature. His thoughts had become lucid, even brilliant; he did not panic, but stood there pouring the scotch onto the thing.

For a moment nothing happened. He still managed to hold himself together and not flee into panic. And then the thing bubbled, shriveled, fell from his chest onto the floor. It had died.

Feeling weak, he seated himself at the kitchen table. Now he found himself fighting off unconsciousness; some of the feeding tubes remained inside him, and they were still alive. “Not bad,” he managed to say. “You almost got me, you fucking little tramp.”

“Not almost,” Marilyn Mason said flatly, emotionlessly. “Some of the feeding tubes are still in you and you know it; I can see it on your face. And a bottle of scotch isn’t going to get them out. Nothing is going to get them out.”

At that point he fainted. Dimly, he saw the green-and-gray floor rise to take him and then there was emptiness. A void without even himself in it.

Pain. He opened his eyes, reflexively touched his chest. His hand-tailored silk suit had vanished; he wore a cotton hospital robe and he was lying flat on a gurney. “God,” he said thickly as the two staff men wheeled the gurney rapidly up the hospital corridor.

Heather Hart hovered over him, anxious and in shock, but, like him, she retained full possession of her senses. “I knew something was wrong,” she said rapidly as the staff men wheeled him into a room. “I didn’t wait for you in the skyfly; I came down after you.”

“You probably thought we were in bed together,” he said weakly.

“The doctor said,” Heather said, “that in another fifteen seconds you would have succumbed to the somatic violation, as he calls it. The entrance of that thing into you.”

“I got the thing,” he said. “But I didn’t get all the feeding tubes. It was too late.”

“I know,” Heather said. “The doctor told me. They’re planning surgery for as soon as possible; they may be able to do something if the tubes haven’t penetrated too far.”

“I was good in the crisis,” Jason grated; he shut his eyes and endured the pain. “But not quite good enough. Just not quite.” Opening his eyes, he saw that Heather was crying. “Is it that bad?” he asked her; reaching up he took hold of her hand. He felt the pressure of her love as she squeezed his fingers, and then there was nothing. Except the pain. But nothing else, no Heather, no hospital, no staff men, no light. And no sound. It was an eternal moment and it absorbed him completely.

2

Light filtered back, filling his closed eyes with a membrane of illuminated redness. He opened his eyes, lifted his head to look around him. To search out Heather or the doctor.

He lay alone in the room. No one else. A bureau with a cracked vanity mirror, ugly old light fixtures jutting from the grease-saturated walls. And from somewhere nearby the blare of a TV set:

He was not in a hospital.

And Heather was not with him; he experienced her absence, the total emptiness of everything, because of her.

God, he thought. What’s happened?

The pain in his chest had vanished, along with so much else. Shakily, he pushed back the soiled wool blanket, sat up, rubbed his forehead reflexively, gathered together his vitality.

This is a hotel room, he realized. A lousy, bug-infested cheap wino hotel. No curtains, no bathroom. Like he had lived in years ago, at the start of his career. Back when he had been unknown and had no money. The dark days he always shut out of his memory as best he could.

Money. He groped at his clothes, discovered that he no longer wore the hospital gown but had back, in wrinkled condition, his hand-tailored silk suit. And, in the inner coat pocket, the wad of high-denomination bills, the money he had intended to take to Vegas.

At least he had that.

Swiftly, he looked around for a phone. No, of course not. But there’d be one in the lobby. But whom to call? Heather? Al Bliss, his agent? Mory Mann, the producer of his TV show? His attorney, Bill Wolfer? Or all of them, as soon as possible, perhaps.

Unsteadily, he managed to get to his feet; he stood swaying, cursing for reasons he did not understand. An animal instinct held him; he readied himself, his strong six body, to fight. But he could not discern the antagonist, and that frightened him. For the first time in as long as he could remember he felt panic.

Has a lot of time passed? he asked himself. He could not tell; he had no sense of it either way. Daytime. Quibbles zooming and bleating in the skies outside the dirty glass of his window. He looked at his watch; it read ten-thirty. So what? It could be a thousand years off, for all he knew. His watch couldn’t help him.

But the phone would. He made his way out into the dust saturated corridor, found the stairs, descended step by step, holding on to the rail until at last he stood in the depressing, empty lobby with its ratty old overstuffed chairs.

Fortunately he had change. He dropped a one-dollar gold piece into the slot, dialed Al Bliss’s number.

“Bliss Talent Agency,” Al’s voice came presently.

“Listen,” Jason said. “I don’t know where I am. In the name of Christ come and get me; get me out of here; get me someplace else. You understand, Al? Do you?”

Silence from the phone. And then in a distant, detached voice Al Bliss said, “Who am I talking to?”

He snarled his answer.

“I don’t know you, Mr. Jason Taverner,” Al Bliss said, again in his most neutral, uninvolved voice. “Are you sure you have the right number? Who did you want to talk to?”

“To you, Al. Al Bliss, my agent. What happened in the hospital? How’d I get out of there into here? Don’t you know?” His panic ebbed as he forced control on himself; he made his words come out reasonably. “Can you get hold of Heather for me?”

“Miss Hart?” Al said, and chuckled. And did not answer.

“You,” Jason said savagely, “are through as my agent. Period. No matter what the situation is. You are out.”

In his ear Al Bliss chuckled again and then, with a click, the line became dead. Al Bliss had hung up.

I’ll kill the son of a bitch, Jason said to himself. I’ll tear that fat balding little bastard into inch-square pieces.

What was he trying to do to me? I don’t understand. What all of a sudden does he have against me? What the hell did I do to him, for chrissakes? He’s been my friend and agent nineteen years. And nothing like this has ever happened before.

I’ll try Bill Wolfer, he decided. He’s always in his office or on call; I’ll be able to get hold of him and find out what this is all about. He dropped a second gold dollar into the phone’s slot and, from memory, once more dialed.

“Wolfer and Blame, Attorneys-at-law,” a female receptionist’s voice sounded in his ear.

“Let me talk to Bill,” Jason said. “This is Jason Taverner. You know who I am.”

The receptionist said, “Mr. Wolfer is in court today. Would you care to speak to Mr. Blame instead, or shall I have Mr. Wolfer call you back when he returns to the office later on this afternoon?”

“Do you know who I am?” Jason said. “Do you know who Jason Taverner is? Do you watch TV?” His voice almost got away from him at that point; he heard it break and rise. With great effort he regained control over it, but he could not stop his hands from shaking; his whole body, in fact, shook.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Taverner,” the receptionist said. “I really can’t talk for Mr. Wolfer or—”

“Do you watch TV?” he said.

“Yes.”

“And you haven’t heard of me? The Jason Taverner Show, at nine on Tuesday nights?”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Taverner. You really must talk directly to Mr. Wolfer. Give me the number of the phone you’re calling from and I’ll see to it that he calls you back sometime today.”

He hung up.

I’m insane, he thought. Or she’s insane. She and Al Bliss, that son of a bitch. God. He moved shakily away from the phone, seated himself in one of the faded overstuffed chairs. It felt good to sit; he shut his eyes and breathed slowly and deeply. And pondered.

I have five thousand dollars in government high-denomination bills, he told himself. So I’m not completely helpless. And that thing is gone from my chest, including its feeding tubes. They must have been able to get at them surgically in the hospital. So at least I’m alive; I can rejoice over that. Has there been a time lapse? he asked himself. Where’s a newspaper?

He found an L.A. Times on a nearby couch, read the date. October 12, 1988. No time lapse. This was the day after his show and the day Marilyn had sent him, dying, to the hospital.

An idea came to him. He searched through the sections of newspaper until he found the entertainment column. Currently he was appearing nightly at the Persian Room of the Hollywood Hilton—had been in fact for three weeks, but of course less Tuesdays because of his show.

The ad for him which the hotel people had been running during the past three weeks did not seem to be on the page anywhere. He thought groggily, maybe it’s been moved to another page. He thereupon combed that section of the paper thoroughly. Ad after ad for entertainers but no mention of him. And his face had been on the entertainment page of some newspaper or another for ten years. Without an ellipsis.

I’ll make one more try, he decided. I’ll try Mory Mann.

Fishing out his wallet, he searched for the slip on which he had written Mory’s number.

His wallet was very thin.

All his identification cards were gone. Cards that made it possible for him to stay alive. Cards that got him through pol and nat barricades without being shot or thrown into a forcedlabor camp.

I can’t live two hours without my ID, he said to himself. I don’t even dare walk out of the lobby of this rundown hotel and onto the public sidewalk. They’ll assume I’m a student or teacher escaped from one of the campuses. I’ll spend the rest of my life as a slave doing heavy manual labor. I am what they call an unperson.

So my first job, he thought, is to stay alive. The hell with Jason Taverner as a public entertainer; I can worry about that later.

He could feel within his brain the powerful six-determined constituents moving already into focus. I am not like other men, he told himself. I will get out of this, whatever it is. Somehow.

For example, he realized, with all this money I have on me I can get myself down to Watts and buy phony ID cards. A whole walletful of them. There must be a hundred little operators scratching away at that, from what I’ve heard. But I never thought I’d be using one of them. Not Jason Taverner.

Not a public entertainer with an audience of thirty million. Among all those thirty million people, he asked himself, isn’t there one who remembers me? If “remember” is the right word. I’m talking as if a lot of time has passed, that I’m an old man now, a has-been, feeding off former glories. And that’s not what’s going on.

Returning to the phone, he looked up the number of the birth-registration control center in Iowa; with several gold coins he managed to reach them at last, after much delay.

“My name is Jason Taverner,” he told the clerk. “I was born in Chicago at Memorial Hospital on December 16, 1946. Would you please confirm and release a copy of my certificate of birth? I need it for a job I’m applying for.”

“Yes, sir.” The clerk put the line on hold; Jason waited.

The clerk clicked back on. “Mr. Jason Taverner, born in Cook County on December 16, 1946.”

“Yes,” Jason said.

“We have no birth registration form for such a person at that time and place. Are you absolutely sure of the facts, sir?”

“You mean do I know my name and when and where I was born?” His voice again managed to escape his control, but this time he let it; panic flooded him. “Thanks,” he said and hung up, shaking violently, now. Shaking in his body and in his mind.

I don’t exist, he said to himself. There is no Jason Taverner. There never was and there never will be. The hell with my career; I just want to live. If someone or something wants to eradicate my career, okay; do it. But aren’t I going to be allowed to exist at all? Wasn’t I even born?

Something stirred in his chest. With terror he thought, They didn’t get the feed tubes out entirely; some of them are still growing and feeding inside of me. That goddamn tramp of a no-talent girl. I hope she winds up walking the streets for two bits a try.

After what I did for her: getting her those two auditions for A and R people. But hell—I did get to lay her a lot. I suppose it comes out even.

Returning to his hotel room, he took a good long look at himself in the flyspecked vanity mirror. His appearance hadn’t changed, except that he needed a shave. No older. No more lines, no gray hair visible. The good shoulders and biceps. The fat-free waist that let him wear the current formfitting men’s clothing.

And that’s important to your image, he said to himself. What kind of suits you can wear, especially those tucked-in waist numbers. I must have fifty of them, he thought. Or did have. Where are they now? he asked himself. The bird is gone, and in what meadow does it now sing? Or however that goes. Something from the past, out of his days at school. Forgotten until this moment. Strange, he thought, what drifts up into your mind when you’re in an unfamiliar and ominous situation. Sometimes the most trivial stuff imaginable.

If wishes were horses then beggars might fly. Stuff like that. It’s enough to drive you crazy.

He wondered how many pol and nat check stations there were between this miserable hotel and the closest ID forger in Watts? Ten? Thirteen? Two? For me, he thought, all it takes is one. One random check by a mobile vehicle and crew of three. With their damn radio gear connecting them to pol-nat data central in Kansas City. Where they keep the dossiers.

He rolled back his sleeve and examined his forearm. Yes, there it was: his tattooed ident number. His somatic license plate, to be carried by him throughout his life, buried at last with him in his longed-for grave.

Well, the pols and nats at the mobile check station would read off the ident number to Kansas City and then—what then? Was his dossier still there or was it gone, too, like his birth certificate? And if it wasn’t there, what would the pol-nat bureaucrats think it meant?

A clerical error. Somebody misfiled the microfilm packet that made up the dossier. It’ll turn up. Someday, when it doesn’t matter, when I’ve spent ten years of my life in a quarry on Luna using a manual pickax. If the dossier isn’t there, he mused, they’ll assume I’m an escaped student, because it’s only students who don’t have pol-nat dossiers, and even some of them, the important ones, the leaders—they’re in there, too.

I am at the bottom of life, he realized. And I can’t even climb my way up to mere physical existence. Me, a man who yesterday had an audience of thirty million. Someday, somehow, I will grope my way back to them. But not now. There are other things that come first. The bare bones of existence that every man is born with: I don’t even have that. But I will get it; a six is not an ordinary. No ordinary could have physically or psychologically survived what’s happened to me—especially the uncertainty—as I have.

A six, no matter what the external circumstances, will always prevail. Because that’s the way they genetically defined us.

He left his hotel room once more, walked downstairs and up to the desk. A middle-aged man with a thin mustache was reading a copy of Box magazine; he did not look up but said, “Yes, sir.”

Jason brought out his packet of government bills, laid a five-hundred-dollar note on the counter before the clerk. The clerk glanced at it, glanced again, this time with wide-opened eyes. Then he cautiously looked up into Jason’s face, questioningly.

“My ident cards were stolen,” Jason said. “That five-hundred-dollar bill is yours if you can get me to someone who can replace them. If you’re going to do it, do it right now; I’m not going to wait.” Wait to be picked up by a pol or a nat, he thought. Caught here in this rundown dingy hotel.

“Or caught on the sidewalk in front of the entrance,” the clerk said. “I’m a telepath of sorts. I know this hotel isn’t much, but we have no bugs. Once we had Martian sand fleas, but no more.” He picked up the five-hundred-dollar bill. “I’ll get you to someone who can help you,” he said. Studying Jason’s face intently, he paused, then said, “You think you’re world-famous. Well, we get all kinds.”

“Let’s go,” Jason said harshly. “Now.”

“Right now,” the clerk said, and reached for his shiny plastic coat.

3

As the clerk drove his old-time quibble slowly and noisily down the street he said casually to Jason, seated beside him, “I’m picking up a lot of odd material in your mind.”

“Get out of my mind,” Jason said brusquely, with aversion. He had always disliked the prying, curiosity-driven telepaths, and this time was no exception. “Get out of my mind,” he said, “and get me to the person who’s going to help me. And don’t run into any pol-nat barricades. If you expect to live through this.”

The clerk said mildly, “You don’t have to tell me that; I know what would happen to you if we got stopped. I’ve done this before, many times. For students. But you’re not a student. You’re a famous man and you’re rich. But at the same time you aren’t. At the same time you’re a nobody. You don’t even exist, legally speaking.” He laughed a thin, effete laugh, his eyes fixed on the traffic ahead of him. He drove like an old woman, Jason noted. Both hands fixedly hanging on to the steering wheel.

Now they had entered the slums of Watts proper. Tiny dark stores on each side of the cluttered streets, overflowing ashcans, the pavement littered with pieces of broken bottles, drab painted signs that advertised Coca-Cola in big letters and the name of the store in small. At an intersection an elderly black man haltingly crossed, feeling his way along as if blind with age. Seeing him, Jason felt an odd emotion. There were so few blacks alive, now, because of Tidman’s notorious sterilization bill passed by Congress back in the terrible days of the Insurrection. The clerk carefully slowed his rattly quibble to a stop so as not to harass the elderly black man in his rumpled, seam-torn brown suit. Obviously he felt it, too.

“Do you realize,” the clerk said to Jason, “that if I hit him with my car it would mean the death penalty for me?”

“It should,” Jason said.

“They’re like the last flock of whooping cranes,” the clerk said, starting forward now that the old black had reached the far side. “Protected by a thousand laws. You can’t jeer at them; you can’t get into a fistfight with one without risking a felony rap—ten years in prison. Yet we’re making them die out—that’s what Tidman wanted and I guess what the majority of Silencers wanted, but”—he gestured, for the first time taking a hand off the wheel—“I miss the kids. I remember when I was ten and I had a black boy to play with … not far from here as a matter of fact. He’s undoubtedly sterilized by now.”

“But then he’s had one child,” Jason pointed out. “His wife had to surrender their birth coupon when their first and only child came … but they’ve got that child. The law lets them have it. And there’re a million statutes protecting their safety.”

“Two adults, one child,” the clerk said. “So the black population is halved every generation. Ingenious. You have to hand it to Tidman; he solved the race problem, all right.”

“Something had to be done,” Jason said; he sat rigidly in his seat, studying the street ahead, searching for a sign of a pol-nat checkpoint or barricade. He saw neither, but how long were they going to have to continue driving?

“We’re almost there,” the clerk said calmly. He turned his head momentarily to face Jason. “I don’t like your racist views,” he said. “Even if you are paying me five hundred dollars.”

“There’re enough blacks alive to suit me,” Jason said.

“And when the last one dies?”

Jason said, “You can read my mind; I don’t have to tell you.”

“Christ,” the clerk said, and returned his attention to the street traffic ahead.

They made a sharp right turn, down a narrow alley, at both sides of which closed, locked wooden doors could be seen. No signs here. Just shut-up silence: And piles of ancient debris.

“What’s behind the doors?” Jason asked.

“People like you. People who can’t come out into the open. But they’re different from you in one way: they don’t have five hundred dollars … and a lot more besides, if I read you correctly.”

“It’s going to cost me plenty,” Jason said acidly, “to get my ID cards. Probably all I’ve got.”

“She won’t overcharge you,” the clerk said as he brought his quibble to a halt half on the sidewalk of the alley. Jason peered out, saw an abandoned restaurant, boarded up, with broken windows. Entirely dark inside. It repelled him, but apparently this was the place. He’d have to go along with it, his need being what it was: he could not be choosy.

And—they had avoided every checkpoint and barricade along the way; the clerk had picked a good route. So he had damn little to complain about, all things considered.

Together, he and the clerk approached the open-hanging broken front door of the restaurant. Neither spoke; they concentrated on avoiding the rusted nails protruding from the sheets of plywood hammered into place, presumably to protect the windows.

“Hang on to my hand,” the clerk said, extending it in the shadowy dimness that surrounded them. “I know the way and it’s dark. The electricity was turned off on this block three years ago. To try to get the people to vacate the buildings here so that they could be burned down.” He added, “But most of them stayed on.”

The moist, cold hand of the hotel clerk led him past what appeared to be chairs and tables, heaped up into irregular tumbles of legs and surfaces, interwoven with cobwebs and grainy patterns of dirt. They bumped at last against a black, unmoving wall; there the clerk stopped, retrieved his hand, fiddled with something in the gloom.

“I can’t open it,” he said as he fiddled. “It can only be opened from the other side, her side. What I’m doing is signaling that we’re here.”

A section of the wall groaningly slid aside. Jason, peering, saw into nothing more than additional darkness. And abandonment.

“Step on through,” the clerk said, and maneuvered him forward. The wall, after a pause, slid shut again behind them.

Lights winked on. Momentarily blinded, Jason shielded his eyes and then took a good look at her workshop.

It was small. But he saw a number of what appeared to be complex and highly specialized machines. On the far side a workbench. Tools by the hundreds, all neatly mounted in place on the walls of the room. Below the workbench large cartons, probably containing a variety of papers. And a small generator-driven printing press.

And the girl. She sat on a high stool, hand-arranging a line of type. He made out pale hair, very long but thin, dribbling down the back of her neck onto her cotton work shirt. She wore jeans, and her feet, quite small, were bare. She appeared to him to be, at a guess, fifteen or sixteen. No breasts to speak of, but good long legs; he liked that. She wore no makeup whatsoever, giving her features a white, slightly pastel tint.

“Hi,” she said.

The clerk said, “I’m going. I’ll try not to spend the five hundred dollars in one place.” Touching a button, he caused the section of wall to slide aside; as it did so the lights in the workroom clicked out, leaving them once again in absolute darkness.

From her stool the girl said, “I’m Kathy.”

“I’m Jason,” he said. The wall had slid shut, now, and the lights had come on again. She’s really very pretty, he thought. Except that she had a passive, almost listless quality about her. As if nothing to her, he thought, is worth a damn. Apathy? No, he decided. She was shy; that was the explanation.

“You gave him five hundred dollars to bring you here?” Kathy said wonderingly; she surveyed him critically, as if seeking to make some kind of value judgment about him, based on his appearance.

“My suit isn’t usually this rumpled,” Jason said.

“It’s a nice suit. Silk?”

“Yes.” He nodded.

“Are you a student?” Kathy asked, still scrutinizing him. “No, you’re not; you don’t have that pulpy pasty color they have, from living subsurface. Well, that leaves only one other possibility.”

“That I’m a criminal,” Jason said. “Trying to change my identity before pols and nats get me.”

“Are you?” she said, with no sign of uneasiness. It was a simple, flat question.

“No.” He did not amplify, not at that moment. Perhaps later.

Kathy said, “Do you think a lot of those nats are robots and not real people? They always have those gas masks on so you can’t really tell.”

“I’m content just to dislike them,” Jason said. “Without looking into it any further.”

“What ID do you need? Driver’s license? Police-file ident card? Proof of employment at a legal job?”

He said, “Everything. Including membership tab in the Musicians Union Local Twelve.”

“Oh, you’re a musician.” She regarded him with more interest, now.

“I’m a vocalist,” he said. “I host an hour-long TV variety show Tuesday night at nine. Maybe you’ve seen it. The Jason Taverner Show.”

“I don’t own a TV set any more,” the girl said. “So I guess I wouldn’t recognize you. Is it fun to do?”

“Sometimes. You meet a lot of show-biz people and that’s fine if that’s what you like. I’ve found them mostly to be people like anybody else. They have their fears. They’re not perfect. Some of them are very funny, both on and off camera.”

“My husband always used to tell me I have no sense of humor,” the girl said. “He thought everything was funny. He even thought it was funny when he was drafted into the flats.”

“Did he still laugh by the time he got out?” Jason asked.

“He never did. He was killed in a surprise attack by students. But it wasn’t their fault; he was shot by a fellow nat.”

Jason said, “How much is it going to cost me to get my full set of ID? You better tell me now before you start on them.”

“I charge people what they can afford,” Kathy said, once more setting up her line of type. “I’m going to charge you a lot because I can tell you’re rich, by the way you gave Eddy five hundred dollars to get you here, and by your suit. Okay?” Briefly she glanced in his direction. “Or am I wrong? Tell me.”

“I have five thousand dollars on me,” Jason said. “Or, rather, less five hundred. I’m a world-famous entertainer; I work a month every year at the Sands in addition to my show. In fact, I appear at a number of first-class clubs, when I can squeeze them into my tight schedule.”

“Gee,” Kathy said. “I wish I had heard of you; then I could be impressed.”

He laughed.

“Did I say something stupid?” Kathy asked timidly.

“No,” Jason said. “Kathy, how old are you?”

“I’m nineteen. My birthday is in December, so I’m almost twenty. How old did you think I am by looking at me?”

“About sixteen,” he said.

Her mouth turned down in a childlike pout. “That’s what everybody says,” she said in a low voice. “It’s because I don’t have any bosom. If I had a bosom I’d look twenty-one. How old are you?” She stopped fiddling with her type and eyed him intently. “I’d guess about fifty.”

Fury flowed through him. And misery.

“You look like your feelings are hurt,” Kathy said.

“I’m forty-two,” Jason said tightly.

“Well, what’s the difference? I mean, they’re both—”

“Let’s get down to business,” Jason broke in. “Give me a pen and paper and I’ll write down what I want and what I want each card to say about me. I want this done exactly right. You better be good.”

“I made you mad,” Kathy said. “By saying you look fifty. I guess on closer examination you really don’t. You look about thirty.” She handed him pen and paper, smiling shyly. And apologetically.

Jason said, “Forget it.” He patted her on the back.

“I’d rather people didn’t touch me,” Kathy said; she slid away.

Like a fawn in the woods, he thought. Strange; she’s afraid to be touched even a little and yet she’s not afraid to forge documents, a felony that could get her twenty years in prison. Maybe nobody bothered to tell her it’s against the law. Maybe she doesn’t know.

Something bright and colorful on the far wall caught his attention; he walked over to inspect it. A medieval illuminated manuscript, he realized. Or rather, a page from it. He had read about them but up until now he had never set eyes on one.

“Is this valuable?” he asked.

“If it was the real thing it might be worth a hundred dollars,” Kathy said. “But it’s not; I made it years ago, when I was in junior high school at North American Aviation. I copied it, the original, ten times before I had it right. I love good calligraphy; even when I was a kid I did. Maybe it’s because my father designed book covers; you know, the dust jackets.”

He said, “Would this fool a museum?”

For a moment Kathy gazed intently at him. And then she nodded yes.

“Wouldn’t they know by the paper?”

“It’s parchment and it’s from that period. That’s the same way you fake old stamps; you get an old stamp that’s worthless, eradicate the imprint, then—” She paused. “You’re anxious for me to get to work on your ID,” she said.

“Yes,” Jason said. He handed her the piece of paper on which he had written the information. Most of it called for pol-nat standard postcurfew tags, with thumbprints and photographs and holographic signatures, and everything with short expiration dates. He’d have to get a whole new set forged within three months.

“Two thousand dollars,” Kathy said, studying the list.

He felt like saying, For that do I get to go to bed with you, too? But aloud he said, “How long will it take? Hours? Days? And if it’s days, where am I—”

“Hours,” Kathy said.

He experienced a vast wave of relief.

“Sit down and keep me company,” Kathy said, pointing to a three-legged stool pushed off to one side. “You can tell me about your career as a successful TV personality. It must be fascinating, all the bodies you have to walk over to get to the top. Or did you get to the top?”

“Yes,” he said shortly. “But there’s no bodies. That’s a myth. You make it on talent and talent alone, not what you do or say to other people either above or below you. And it’s work; you don’t breeze in and do a soft-shoe shuffle and then sign your contract with NBC or CBS. They’re tough, experienced businessmen. Especially the A and R people. Artists and Repertoire. They decide who to sign. I’m talking about records now. That’s where you have to start to be on a national level; of course you can work club dates all over everywhere until—”

“Here’s your quibble driver’s license,” Kathy said. She carefully passed him a small black card. “Now I’ll get started on your military service-status chit. That’s a little harder because of the full-face and profile photos, but I can handle that over there.” She pointed at a white screen, in front of which stood a tripod with camera, a flash gun mounted at its side.

“You have all the equipment,” Jason said as he fixed himself rigidly against the white screen; so many photos had been taken of him during his long career that he always knew exactly where to stand and what expression to reveal.

But apparently he had done something wrong this time. Kathy, a severe expression on her face, surveying him.

“You’re all lit up,” she said, half to herself. “You’re glowing in some sort of phony way.”

“Publicity stills,” Jason said. “Eight-by-ten glossy—”

“These aren’t. These are to keep you out of a forced-labor camp for the rest of your life. Don’t smile.”

He didn’t.

“Good,” Kathy said. She ripped the photos from the camera, carried them cautiously to her workbench, waving them to dry them. “These damn 3-D animateds they want on the military service papers—that camera cost me a thousand dollars and I need it only for this and nothing else … but I have to have it.” She eyed him. “It’s going to cost you.”

“Yes,” he said, stonily. He felt aware of that already.

For a time Kathy puttered, and then, turning abruptly toward him, she said, “Who are you really? You’re used to posing; I saw you, I saw you freeze with that glad smile in place and those lit-up eyes.”

“I told you. I’m Jason Taverner. The TV personality guest host. I’m on every Tuesday night.”

“No,” Kathy said; she shook her head. “But it’s none of my business—sorry—I shouldn’t have asked.” But she continued to eye him, as if with exasperation. “You’re doing it all wrong. You really are a celebrity—it was reflexive, the way you posed for your picture. But you’re not a celebrity. There’s no one named Jason Taverner who matters, who is anything. So what are you, then? A man who has his picture taken all the time that no one’s ever seen or heard of.”

Jason said, “I’m going about it the way any celebrity who no one has ever heard of would go about it.”

For a moment she stared at him and then she laughed. “I see. Well, that’s cool; that’s really cool. I’ll have to remember that.” She turned her attention back to the documents she was forging. “In this business,” she said, absorbed in what she was doing, “I don’t want to get to know people I’m making cards for. But”—she glanced up—“I’d sort of like to know you. You’re strange. I’ve seen a lot of types—hundreds, maybe—but none like you. Do you know what I think?”

“You think I’m insane,” Jason said.

“Yes.” Kathy nodded. “Clinically, legally, whatever. You’re psychotic; you have a split personality. Mr. No One and Mr. Everyone. How have you survived up until now?”

He said nothing. It could not be explained.

“Okay,” Kathy said. One by one, expertly and efficiently, she forged the necessary documents.

Eddy, the hotel clerk, lurked in the background, smoking a fake Havana cigar; he had nothing to say or do, but for some obscure reason he hung around. I wish he’d fuck off, Jason thought to himself. I’d like to talk to her more.

“Come with me,” Kathy said, suddenly; she slid from her work stool and beckoned him toward a wooden door at the right of her bench. “I want your signature five times, each a little different from the others so they can’t be superimposed. That’s where so many documenters”—she smiled as she opened the door—“that’s what we call ourselves—that’s where so many of us fuck it up. They take one signature and transfer it to all the documents. See?”

“Yes,” he said, entering the musty little closetlike room after her.

Kathy shut the door, paused a moment, then said, “Eddy is a police fink.”

Staring at her he said, “Why?”

“‘Why?’ Why what? Why is he a police fink? For money. For the same reason I am.”

Jason said, “God damn you.” He grabbed her by the right wrist, tugged her toward him; she grimaced as his fingers tightened. “And he’s already—”

“Eddy hasn’t done anything yet,” she grated, trying to free her wrist. “That hurts. Look; calm down and I’ll show you. Okay?”

Reluctantly, his heart hammering in fear, he let her go. Kathy turned on a bright, small light, laid three forged documents in the circle of its glare. “A purple dot on the margin of each,” she said, indicating the almost invisible circle of color. “A microtransmitter, so you’ll emit a bleep every five seconds as you move around. They’re after conspiracies; they want the people you’re with.”

Jason said harshly, “I’m not with anyone.”

“But they don’t know that.” She massaged her wrist, frowning in a girlish, sullen way. “You TV celebrities no one’s ever heard of sure have quick reactions,” she murmured.

“Why did you tell me?” Jason asked. “After doing all the forging, all the—”

“I want you to get away,” she said, simply.

“Why?” He still did not understand.

“Because hell, you’ve got some sort of magnetic quality about you; I noticed it as soon as you came into the room. You’re”—she groped for the word—“sexy. Even at your age.”

“My presence,” he said.

“Yes.” Kathy nodded. “I’ve seen it before in public people, from a distance, but never up close like this. I can see why you imagine you’re a TV personality; you really seem like you are.”

He said, “How do I get away? Are you going to tell me that? Or does that cost a little more?”

“God, you’re so cynical.”

He laughed, and again took hold of her by the wrist. “I guess I don’t blame you,” Kathy said, shaking her head and making a masklike face. “Well, first of all, you can buy Eddy off. Another five hundred should do it. Me you don’t have to buy off—if, and only if, and I mean it, if you stay with me awhile. You have … allure, like a good perfume. I respond to you and I just never do that with men.”

“With women, then?” he said tartly.

It passed her without registering. “Will you?” she said.

“Hell,” he said, “I’ll just leave.” Reaching, he opened the door behind her, shoved past her and out into her workroom. She followed, rapidly.

Among the dim, empty shadows of the abandoned restaurant she caught up with him; she confronted him in the gloom. Panting, she said, “You’ve already got a transmitter planted on you.”

“I doubt it,” he answered.

“It’s true. Eddy planted it on you.”

“Bullshit,” he said, and moved away from her toward the light of the restaurant’s sagging, broken front door.

Pursuing him like a deft-footed herbivore, Kathy gasped, “But suppose it’s true. It could be.” At the half-available doorway she interposed herself between him and freedom; standing there, her hands lifted as if to ward off a physical blow, she said swiftly, “Stay with me one night. Go to bed with me. Okay? That’s enough. I promise. Will you do it, for just one night?”

He thought, Something of my abilities, my alleged and well-known properties, have come with me, to this strange place I now live in. This place where I do not exist except on forged cards manufactured by a pol fink. Eerie, he thought, and he shuddered. Cards with microtransmitters built into them, to betray me and everyone with me to the pols. I haven’t done very well here. Except that, as she says, I’ve got allure. Jesus, he thought. And that’s all that stands between me and a forced-labor camp.

“Okay,” he said, then. It seemed the wiser choice—by far. “Go pay Eddy,” she said. “Get that over with and him out of here.”

“I wondered why he’s still hanging around,” Jason said. “Did he scent more money?”

“I guess so,” Kathy said.

“You do this all the time,” Jason said as he got out his money. SOP: standard operating procedure. And he had tumbled for it.

Kathy said blithely, “Eddy is psionic.”

4

Two city blocks away, upstairs in an unpainted but once white wooden building, Kathy had a single room with a hotcompart in which to fix one-person meals.

He looked around him. A girl’s room: the cotlike bed had a handmade spread covering it, tiny green balls of textile fibers in row after row. Like a graveyard for soldiers, he thought morbidly as he moved about, feeling compressed by the smallness of the room.

On a wicker table a copy of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past.

“How far’d you get into it?” he asked her.

“To Within a Budding Grove.” Kathy double-locked the door after them and set into operation some kind of electronic gadget; he did not recognize it.

“That’s not very far,” Jason said.

Taking off her plastic coat, Kathy asked, “How far did you get into it?” She hung her coat in a tiny closet, taking his, too.

“I never read it,” Jason said. “But on my program we did a dramatic rendering of a scene … I don’t know which. We got a lot of good mail about it, but we never tried it again. Those out things, you have to be careful and not dole out too much. If you do it kills it dead for everybody, all networks, for the rest of the year.” He prowled, crampedly, about the room, examining a book here, a cassette tape, a micromag. She even had a talking toy. Like a kid, he thought; she’s not really an adult.

With curiosity, he turned on the talking toy.

“Hi!” it declared. “I’m Cheerful Charley and I’m definitely tuned in on your wavelength.”

“Nobody named Cheerful Charley is tuned in on my wavelength,” Jason said. He started to shut it off, but it protested. “Sorry,” Jason told it, “but I’m tuning you out, you creepy little bugger.”

“But I love you!” Cheerful Charley complained tinnily.

He paused, thumb on off button. “Prove it,” he said. On his show he had done commercials for junk like this. He hated it and them. Equally. “Give me some money,” he told it.

“I know how you can get back your name, fame, and game,” Cheerful Charley informed him. “Will that do for openers?”

“Sure,” he said.

Cheerful Charley bleated, “Go look up your girl friend.”

“Who do you mean?” he said guardedly.

“Heather Hart,” Cheerful Charley bleeped.

“Hard by,” Jason said, pressing his tongue against his upper incisors. He nodded. “Any more advice?”

“I’ve heard of Heather Hart,” Kathy said as she brought a bottle of orange juice out of the cold-cupboard of the room’s wall. The bottle had already become three-fourths empty; she shook it up, poured foamy instant ersatz orange juice into two jelly glasses. “She’s beautiful. She has all that long red hair. Is she really your girl friend? Is Charley right?”

“Everybody knows,” he said, “that Cheerful Charley is always right.”

“Yes, I guess that’s true.” Kathy poured bad gin (Mountbatten’s Privy Seal Finest) into the orange juice. “Screwdrivers,” she said, proudly.

“No, thanks,” he said. “Not at this hour of the day.” Not even B & L scotch bottled in Scotland, he thought. This damn little room … isn’t she making anything out of pol finking and card-forging, whichever it is she does? Is she really a police informer, as she says? he wondered. Strange. Maybe she’s both. Maybe neither.

“Ask me!” Cheerful Charley piped. “I can see you have something on your mind, mister. You good-looking bastard, you.”

He let that pass. “This girl,” he began, but instantly Kathy grabbed Cheerful Charley away from him, stood holding it, her nostrils flaring, her eyes filled with indignation.

“The hell you’re going to ask my Cheerful Charley about me,” she said, one eyebrow raised. Like a wild bird, he thought, going through elaborate motions to protect her nest.

He laughed. “What’s funny?” Kathy demanded.

“These talking toys,” he said, “are more nuisance than utilitarian. They ought to be abolished.” He walked away from her, then to a clutter of mail on a TV-stand table. Aimlessly, he sorted among the envelopes, noticing vaguely that none of the bills had been opened.

“Those are mine,” Kathy said defensively, watching him.

“You get a lot of bills,” he said, “for a girl living in a one-room schmalch. You buy your clothes—or what else?—at Metter’s? Interesting.”

“I—take an odd size.”

He said, “And Sax and Crombie shoes.”

“In my work—” she began, but he cut her off with a convulsive swipe of his hand.

“Don’t give me that,” he grated.

“Look in my closet. You won’t see much there. Nothing out of the ordinary, except that what I do have is good. I’d rather have a little amount of something good…” Her words trailed off. “You know,” she said vaguely, “than a lot of junk.”

Jason said, “You have another apartment.”

It registered; her eyes flickered as she looked into herself for an answer. That, for him, constituted plenty.

“Let’s go there,” he said. He had seen enough of this cramped little room.

“I can’t take you there,” Kathy said, “because I share it with two other girls and the way we’ve divided up the use, this time is—”

“Evidently you weren’t trying to impress me.” It amused him. But also it irritated him; he felt downgraded, nebulously.

“I would have taken you there if today were my day,” Kathy said. “That’s why I have to keep this little place going; I’ve got to have someplace to go when it’s not my day. My day, my next one, is Friday. From noon on.” Her tone had become earnest. As if she wished very much to convince him. Probably, he mused, it was true. But the whole thing irked him. Her and her whole life. He felt, now, as if he had been snared by something dragging him down into depths he had never known about before, even in the early, bad days. And he did not like it.

He yearned all at once to be out of here. The animal at bay was himself.

“Don’t look at me like that,” Kathy said, sipping her screwdriver.

To himself, but aloud, he said, “You have bumped the door of life open with your big, dense head. And now it can’t be closed.”

“What’s that from?” Kathy asked.

“From my life.”

“But it’s like poetry.”

“If you watched my show,” he said, “you’d know I come up with sparklers like that every so often.”

Appraising him calmly, Kathy said, “I’m going to look in the TV log and see if you’re listed. “ She set down her screwdriver, fished among discarded newspapers piled at the base of the wicker table.

“I wasn’t even born,” he said. “I checked on that.”

“And your show isn’t listed,” Kathy said, folding the newsprint page back and studying the log.

“That’s right,” he said. “So now you have all the answers about me.” He tapped his vest pocket of forged ID cards. “Including these. With their microtransmitters, if that much is true.”

“Give them back to me,” Kathy said, “and I’ll erad the microtransmitters. It’ll only take a second.” She held out her hand.

He returned them to her.

“Don’t you care if I take them off?” Kathy inquired.

Candidly, he answered, “No, I really don’t. I’ve lost the ability to tell what’s good or bad, true or not true, anymore. If you want to take the dots off, do it. If it pleases you.”

A moment later she returned the cards, smiling her sixteen-year-old hazy smile.

Observing her youth, her automatic radiance, he said,” ‘I feel as old as yonder elm.’

“From Finnegans Wake,” Kathy said happily. “When the old washerwomen at dusk are merging into trees and rocks.”

“You’ve read Finnegans Wake?” he asked, surprised.

“I saw the film. Four times. I like Hazeltine; I think he’s the best director alive.”

“I had him on my show,” Jason said. “Do you want to know what he’s like in real life?”

“No,” Kathy said.

“Maybe you ought to know.”

“No,” she repeated, shaking her head; her voice had risen. “And don’t try to tell me—okay? I’ll believe what I want to believe, and you believe what you believe. All right?”

“Sure,” he said. He felt sympathetic. The truth, he had often reflected, was overrated as a virtue. In most cases a sympathetic lie did better and more mercifully. Especially between men and women; in fact, whenever a woman was involved.

This, of course, was not, properly speaking, a woman, but a girl. And therefore, he decided the kind lie was even more of a necessity.

“He’s a scholar and an artist,” he said.

“Really?” She regarded him hopefully.

“Yes.”

At that she sighed in relief.

“Then you believe,” he said, pouncing, “that I have met Michael Hazeltine, the finest living film director, as you said yourself. So you do believe that I am a six—” He broke off; that had not been what he intended to say.

“‘A six,’ “ Kathy echoed, her brow furrowing, as if she were trying to remember. “I read about them in Time. Aren’t they all dead now? Didn’t the government have them all rounded up and shot, after that one, their leader—what was his name?—Teagarden; yes, that’s his name. Willard Teagarden. He tried to—how do you say it?—pull off a coup against the federal flats? He tried to get them disbanded as an illegal parimutuel—”

“Paramilitary,” Jason said.

“You don’t give a damn about what I’m saying.”

Sincerely, he said, “I sure do.” He waited. The girl did not continue. “Christ,” he spat out. “Finish what you were saying!”

“I think,” Kathy said at last, “that the sevens made the coup not come off.”

He thought. Sevens. Never in his life had he heard of sevens. Nothing could have shocked him more. Good, he thought, that I let out that lapsus linguae. I have genuinely learned something, now. At last. In this maze of confusion and the half real.

A small section of wall creaked meagerly open and a cat, black and white and very young, entered the room. At once Kathy gathered him up, her face shining.

“Dinman’s philosophy,” Jason said. “The mandatory cat.” He was familiar with the viewpoint; he had in fact introduced Dinman to the TV audience on one of his fall specials.

“No, I just love him,” Kathy said, eyes bright as she carried the cat over to him for his inspection.

“But you do believe,” he said, as he patted the cat’s little head, “that owning an animal increases a person’s empathic—”

“Screw that,” Kathy said, clutching the cat to her throat as if she were a five-year-old with its first animal. Its school project: the communal guinea pig. “This is Domenico,” she said.

“Named after Domenico Scarlatti?” he asked.

“No, after Domenico’s Market, down the Street; we passed it on our way here. When I’m at the Minor Apartment—this room—I shop there. Is Domenico Scarlatti a musician? I think I’ve heard of him.”

Jason said, “Abraham Lincoln’s high school English teacher.”

“Oh.” She nodded absently, now rocking the cat back and forth.

“I’m kidding you,” he said, “and it’s mean. I’m sorry.”

Kathy gazed up at him earnestly as she clutched her small cat. “I never know the difference,” she murmured.

“That’s why it’s mean,” Jason said.

“Why?” she asked. “If I don’t even know. I mean, that means I’m just dumb. Doesn’t it?”

“You’re not dumb,” Jason said. “Just inexperienced.” He calculated, roughly, their age difference. “I’ve lived over twice as long as you,” he pointed out. “And I’ve been in the position, in the last ten years, to rub elbows with some of the most famous people on earth. And—”

“And,” Kathy said, “you’re a six.”

She had not forgotten his slip. Of course not. He could tell her a million things, and all would be forgotten ten minutes later, except the one real slip. Well, such was the way of the world. He had become used to it in his time; that was part of being his age and not hers.

“What does Domenico mean to you?” Jason said, changing the subject. Crudely, he realized, but he went ahead. “What do you get from him that you don’t get from human beings?”

She frowned, looked thoughtful. “He’s always busy. He always has some project going. Like following a bug. He’s very good with flies; he’s learned how to eat them without their flying away.” She smiled engagingly. “And I don’t have to ask myself about him, Should I turn him in to Mr. McNulty? Mr. McNulty is my pol contact. I give him the analog receivers for the microtransmitters, the dots I showed you—”

“And he pays you.”

She nodded.

“And yet you live like this.”

“I—” she struggled to answer—“I don’t get many customers.”

“Nonsense. You’re good; I watched you work. You’re experienced.”

“A talent.”

“But a trained talent.”

“Okay; it all goes into the apartment uptown. My Major Apartment.” She gritted her teeth, not enjoying being badgered.

“No.” He didn’t believe it.

Kathy said, after a pause, “My husband’s alive. He’s in a forced-labor camp in Alaska. I’m trying to buy his way out by giving information to Mr. McNulty. In another year”—she shrugged, her expression moody now, introverted—“he says Jack can come out. And come back here.”

So you send other people into the camps, he thought, to get your husband out. It sounds like a typical police deal. It’s probably the truth.

“It’s a terrific deal for the police,” he said. “They lose one man and get—how many would you say you’ve bugged for them? Scores? Hundreds?”

Pondering, she said at last, “Maybe a hundred and fifty.”

“It’s evil,” he said.

“Is it?” She glanced at him nervously, clutching Domenico to her flat chest. Then, by degrees, she became angry; it showed on her face and in the way she crushed the cat against her rib cage. “The hell it is,” she said fiercely, shaking her head no. “I love Jack and he loves me. He writes to me all the time.”

Cruelly, he said, “Forged. By some pol employee.”

Tears spilled from her eyes in an amazing quantity; they dimmed her gaze. “You think so? Sometimes I think they are, too. Do you want to look at them? Could you tell?”

“They’re probably not forged. It’s cheaper and simpler to keep him alive and let him write his own letters.” He hoped that would make her feel better, and evidently it did; the tears stopped coming.

“I hadn’t thought of that,” she said, nodding, but still not smiling; she gazed off into the distance, reflexively still rocking the small black and white cat.

“If your husband’s alive,” he said, cautiously this time, “do you believe it to be all right for you to go to bed with other men, such as me?”

“Oh, sure. Jack never objected to that. Even before they got him. And I’m sure he doesn’t object now. As a matter of fact, he wrote me about that. Let’s see; it was maybe six months ago. I think I could find the letter; I have them all on microfilm. Over in the shop.”

“Why?”

Kathy said, “I sometimes lens-screen them for customers. So that later on they’ll understand why I do what I did.”

At this point he frankly did not know what emotion he felt toward her, nor what he ought to feel. She had become, by degrees, over the years, involved in a situation from which she could not now extricate herself. And he saw no way out for her now; it had gone on too long. The formula had become fixed. The seeds of evil had been allowed to grow.

“There’s no turning back for you,” he said, knowing it, knowing that she knew it. “Listen,” he said to her in a gentle voice. He put his hand on her shoulder, but as before she at once shrank away. “Tell them you want him out right now, and you’re not turning in any more people.”

“Would they release him, then, if I said that?”

“Try it.” Certainly it wouldn’t do any harm. But—he could imagine Mr. McNulty and how he looked to the girl. She could never confront him; the McNultys of the world did not get confronted by anyone. Except when something went strangely wrong.

“Do you know what you are?” Kathy said. “You’re a very good person. Do you understand that?”

He shrugged. Like most truths it was a matter of opinion. Perhaps he was. In this situation, anyhow. Not so in others. But Kathy didn’t know about that.

“Sit down,” he said, “pet your cat, drink your screwdriver. Don’t think about anything; just be. Can you do that? Empty your mind for a little while? Try it.” He brought her a chair; she dutifully seated herself on it.

“I do it all the time,” she said emptily, dully.

Jason said, “But not negatively. Do it positively.”

“How? What do you mean?”

“Do it for a real purpose, not just to avoid facing unfortunate verities. Do it because you love your husband and you want him back. You want everything to be as it was before.”

“Yes,” she agreed. “But now I’ve met you.”

“Meaning what?” He proceeded cautiously; her response puzzled him.

Kathy said, “You’re more magnetic than Jack. He’s magnetic, but you’re so much, much more. Maybe after meeting you I couldn’t really love him again. Or do you think a person can love two people equally, but in different ways? My therapy group says no, that I have to choose. They say that’s one of the basic aspects of life. See, this has come up before; I’ve met several men more magnetic than Jack … but none of them as magnetic as you. Now I really don’t know what to do. It’s very difficult to decide such things because there’s no one you can talk to: no one understands. You have to go through it alone, and sometimes you choose wrong. Like, what if I choose you over Jack and then he comes back and I don’t give a shit about him; what then? How is he going to feel? That’s important, but it’s also important how I feel. If I like you or someone like you better than him, then I have to act it out, as our therapy group puts it. Did you know I was in a psychiatric hospital for eight weeks? Morningside Mental Hygiene Relations in Atherton. My folks paid for it. It cost a fortune because for some reason we weren’t eligible for community or federal aid. Anyhow, I learned a lot about myself and I made a whole lot of friends, there. Most of the people I truly know I met at Morningside. Of course, when I originally met them back then I had the delusion that they were famous people like Mickey Quinn and Arlene Howe. You know—celebrities. Like you.”

He said, “I know both Quinn and Howe, and you haven’t missed anything.”

Scrutinizing him, she said, “Maybe you’re not a celebrity; maybe I’ve reverted back to my delusional period. They said I probably would, sometime. Sooner or later. Maybe it’s later now.”

“That,” he pointed out, “would make me a hallucination of yours. Try harder; I don’t feel completely real.”

She laughed. But her mood remained somber. “Wouldn’t that be strange if I made you up, like you just said? That if I fully recovered you’d disappear?”

“I wouldn’t disappear. But I’d cease to be a celebrity.”

“You already have.” She raised her head, confronted him steadily. “Maybe that’s it. Why you’re a celebrity that no one’s ever heard of. I made you up, you’re a product of my delusional mind, and now I’m becoming sane again.”

“A solipsistic view of the universe—”

“Don’t do that. You know I haven’t any idea what words like that mean. What kind of person do you think I am? I’m not famous and powerful like you; I’m just a person doing a terrible, awful job that puts people in prison, because I love Jack more than all the rest of humanity. Listen.” Her tone became firm and crisp. “The only thing that got me back to sanity was that I loved Jack more than Mickey Quinn. See, I thought this boy named David was really Mickey Quinn, and it was a big secret that Mickey Quinn had lost his mind and he had gone to this mental hospital to get himself back in shape, and no one was supposed to know about it because it would ruin his image. So he pretended his name was David. But I knew. Or rather, I thought I knew. And Dr. Scott said I had to chose between Jack and David, or Jack and Mickey Quinn, which I thought it was. And I chose Jack. So I came out of it. Maybe”—she wavered, her chin trembling—“maybe now you can see why I have to believe Jack is more important than anything or anybody, or a lot of anybodys, else. See?”

He saw. He nodded.

“Even men like you,” Kathy said, “who’re more magnetic than him, even you can’t take me away from Jack.”

“I don’t want to.” It seemed a good idea to make that point.

“Yes—you do. On some level you do. It’s a competition.”

Jason said, “To me you’re just one small girl in one small room in one small building. For me the whole world is mine, and everybody in it.”

“Not if you’re in a forced-labor camp.”

He had to nod in agreement to that, too. Kathy had an annoying habit of spiking the guns of rhetoric.

“You understand a little now,” she said, “don’t you? About me and Jack, and why I can go to bed with you without wronging Jack? I went to bed with David when we were at Morningside, but Jack understood; he knew I had to do it. Would you have understood?”

“If you were psychotic—”

“No, not because of that. Because it was my destiny to go to bed with Mickey Quinn. It had to be done; I was fulfilling my cosmic role. Do you see?”

“Okay,” he said, gently.

“I think I’m drunk.” Kathy examined her screwdriver. “You’re right; it’s too early to drink one of these.” She set the half-empty glass down. “Jack saw. Or anyhow he said he saw. Would he lie? So as not to lose me? Because if I had had to chose between him and Mickey Quinn”—she paused—“but I chose Jack. I always would. But still I had to go to bed with David. With Mickey Quinn, I mean.”

I have gotten myself mixed up with a complicated, peculiar, malfunctioning creature, Jason Taverner said to himself. As bad as—worse than—Heather Hart. As bad as I’ve yet encountered in forty-two years. But how do I get away from her without Mr. McNulty hearing all about it? Christ, he thought dismally. Maybe I don’t. Maybe she plays with me until she’s bored, and then she calls in the pols. And that’s it for me.

“Wouldn’t you think,” he said aloud, “that in four decades plus, I could have learned the answer to this?”

“To me?” she said. Acutely.

He nodded.

“You think after you go to bed with me I’ll turn you in.”

At this point he had not boiled it down to precisely that. But the general idea was there. So, carefully, he said, “I think you’ve learned in your artless, innocent, nineteen-yearold way, to use people. Which I think is very bad. And once you begin you can’t stop. You don’t even know you’re doing its—”

“I would never turn you in. I love you.”

“You’ve known me perhaps five hours. Not even that.”

“But I can always tell.” Her tone, her expression, both were firm. And deeply solemn.

“You’re not even sure who I am!”

Kathy said, “I’m never sure who anybody is.”

That, evidently, had to be granted. He tried, therefore, another tack. “Look. You’re an odd combination of the innocent romantic, and a”—he paused; the word “treacherous” had come to mind, but he discarded it swiftly—“and a calculating, subtle manipulator.” You are, he thought, a prostitute of the mind. And it’s your mind that is prostituting itself, before and beyond anyone else’s. Although you yourself would never recognize it. And, if you did, you’d say you were forced into it. Yes; forced into it, but by whom? By Jack? By David? By yourself, he thought. By wanting two men at the same time—and getting to have both.

Poor Jack, he thought. You poor goddamn bastard. Shoveling shit at the forced-labor camp in Alaska, waiting for this elaborately convoluted waif to save you. Don’t hold your breath.

That evening, without conviction, he had dinner with Kathy at an Italian-type restaurant a block from her room. She seemed to know the owner and the waiters, in some dim fashion; anyhow, they greeted her and she responded absentmindedly, as if only half hearing them. Or, he thought, only half aware of where she was.

Little girl, he thought, where is the rest of your mind?

“The lasagna is very good,” Kathy said, without looking at the menu; she seemed a great distance away now. Receding further and further. With each passing moment. He sensed an approaching crisis. But he did not know her well enough; he had no idea what form it would take. And he did not like that.

“When you blep away,” he said abruptly, trying to catch her off guard, “how do you do it?”

“Oh,” she said tonelessly. “I throw myself down on the floor and scream. Or else I kick. Anyone who tries to stop me. Who interferes with my freedom.”

“Do you feel like doing that now?”

She glanced up. “Yes.” Her face, he saw, had become a mask, both twisted and agonized. But her eyes remained totally dry. This time no tears would be involved. “I haven’t been taking my medication. I’m supposed to take twenty milligrams of Actozine per diem.”

“Why don’t you take it?” They never did; he had run across that anomaly several times.

“It dulls my mind,” she answered, touching her nose with her forefinger, as if involved in a complex ritual that had to be done absolutely correctly.

“But if it—”

Kathy said sharply, “They can’t fuck with my mind. I’m not letting any MFs get to me. Do you know what a MF is?”

“You just said.” He spoke quietly and slowly, keeping his attention firmly fixed on her … as if trying to hold her there, to keep her mind together.

The food came. It was terrible.

“Isn’t this wonderfully authentically Italian?” Kathy said, deftly winding spaghetti on her fork.

“Yes,” he agreed, aimlessly.

“You think I’m going to blep away. And you don’t want to be involved with it.”

Jason said, “That’s right.”

“Then leave.”

“I”—he hesitated—“I like you. I want to make sure you’re all right.” A benign lie, of the kind he approved. It seemed better than saying, Because if I walk out of here you will be on the phone to Mr. McNulty in twenty seconds. Which, in fact, was the way he saw it.

“I’ll be all right. They’ll take me home.” She vaguely indicated the restaurant around them, the customers, waiters, cashier. Cook steaming away in the overheated, underventilated kitchen. Drunk at the bar, fiddling with his glass of Olympia beer.

He said, calculating carefully, fairly, reasonably sure that he was doing the right thing, “You’re not taking responsibility.’’

“For who? I’m not taking responsibility for your life, if that’s what you mean. That’s your job. Don’t burden me with it.”

“Responsibility,” he said, “for the consequences to others of your acts. You’re morally, ethically drifting. Hitting out here and there, then submerging again. As if nothing happened. Leaving it to everyone else to pick up the sweltering moons.”

Raising her head she confronted him and said, “Have I hurt you? I saved you from the pols; that’s what I did for you. Was that the wrong thing to do? Was it?” Her voice increased in volume; she stared at him pitilessly, unblinkingly, still holding her forkful of spaghetti.

He sighed. It was hopeless. “No,” he said, “it wasn’t the wrong thing to do. Thanks. I appreciate it.” And, as he said it, he felt unwavering hatred toward her. For enmeshing him this way. One puny nineteen-year-old ordinary, netting a fullgrown six like this—it was so improbable that it seemed absurd; he felt on one level like laughing. But on the other levels he did not.

“Are you responding to my warmth?” she inquired.

“Yes.”

“You do feel my love reaching out to you, don’t you? Listen. You can almost hear it.” She listened intently. “My love is growing, and it’s a tender vine.”

Jason signaled the waiter. “What have you got here?” he asked the waiter brusquely. “Just beer and wine?”

“And pot, sir. The best-grade Acapulco Gold. And hash, grade A.”

“But no hard liquor.”

“No, sir.”

Gesturing, he dismissed the waiter.

“You treated him like a servant,” Kathy said.

“Yeah,” he said, and groaned aloud. He shut his eyes and massaged the bridge of his nose. Might as well go the whole way now; he had managed, after all, to inflame her ire. “He’s a lousy waiter,” he said, “and this is a lousy restaurant. Let’s get out of here.”

Kathy said bitterly, “So that’s what it means to be a celebrity. I understand.” She quietly put down her fork.

“What do you think you understand?” he said, letting it all hang out; his conciliatory role was gone for good now. Never to be gotten back. He rose to his feet, reached for his coat. “I’m leaving,” he told her. And put on his coat.

“Oh, God,” Kathy said, shutting her eyes; her mouth, bent out of shape, hung open. “Oh, God. No. What have you done? Do you know what you’ve done? Do you understand fully? Do you grasp it at all?” And then, eyes shut, fists clenched, she ducked her head and began to scream. He had never heard screams like it before, and he stood paralyzed as the sound—and the sight of her constricted, broken face—dinned at him, numbing him. These are psychotic screams, he said to himself. From the racial unconscious. Not from a person but from a deeper level; from a collective entity.

Knowing that did not help.

The owner and two waiters hustled over, still clutching menus; Jason saw and marked details, oddly; it seemed as if everything, at her screams, had frozen over. Become fixed. Customers raising forks, lowering spoons, chewing … everything stopped and there remained only the terrible, ugly noise.

And she was saying words. Crude words, as if read off some back fence. Short, destructive words that tore at everyone in the restaurant, including himself. Especially himself.

The owner, his mustache twitching, nodded to the two waiters, and they lifted Kathy bodily from her chair; they raised her by her shoulders, held her, then, at the owner’s curt nod, dragged her from the booth, across the restaurant and out onto the street.

He paid the bill, hurried after them.

At the entrance, however, the owner stopped him. Holding out his hand. “Three hundred dollars,” the owner said.

“For what?” he demanded. “For dragging her outside?”

The owner said, “For not calling the pols.”

Grimly, he paid.

The waiters had set her down on the pavement, at the curb’s edge. She sat silent now, fingers pressed to her eyes, rocking back and forth, her mouth making soundless images. The waiters surveyed her, apparently essaying whether or not she would make any more trouble, and then, their joint decision made, they hurried back into the restaurant. Leaving him and Kathy there on the sidewalk, under the red-andwhite neon sign, together.

Kneeling by her, he put his hand on her shoulder. This time she did not try to pull away. “I’m sorry,” he said. And he meant it. “For pushing you.” I called your bluff, he said to himself, and it was not a bluff. Okay; you won. I give up. From now on it’s whatever you want. Name it. He thought, Just make it brief, for God’s sake. Let me out of this as quickly as you possibly can.

He had an intuition that it would not be soon.

5

Together, hand in hand, they strolled along the evening sidewalk, past the competing, flashing, winking, flooding pools of color created by the rotating, pulsating, jiggling, lit-up signs. This kind of neighborhood did not please him; he had seen it a million times, duplicated throughout the face of earth. It had been from such as this that he had fled, early in his life, to use his sixness as a method of getting out. And now he had come back.

He did not object to the people: he saw them as trapped here, the ordinaries, who through no fault of their own had to remain. They had not invented it; they did not like it; they endured it, as he had not had to. In fact, he felt guilty, seeing their grim faces, their turned-down mouths. Jagged, unhappy mouths.

“Yes,” Kathy said at last, “I think I really am falling in love with you. But it’s your fault; it’s your powerful magnetic field that you radiate. Did you know I can see it?”

“Gee,” he said mechanically.

“It’s dark velvet purple,” Kathy said, grasping his hand tightly with her surprisingly strong fingers. “Very intense. Can you see mine? My magnetic aura?”

“No,” he said.

“I’m surprised. I would have thought you could.” She seemed calm, now; the explosive screaming episode had left, trailing after it, relative stability. An almost pseudoepileptoid personality structure, he conjectured. That works up day after day to—“My aura,” she broke into his thoughts, “is bright red. The color of passion.”

“I’m glad for you,” Jason said.

Halting, she turned to peer into his face. To decipher his expression. He hoped it was appropriately opaque. “Are you mad because I lost my temper?” she inquired.

“No,” he said

“You sound mad. I think you are mad. Well, I guess only Jack understands. And Mickey.”

“Mickey Quinn,” he said reflexively.

“Isn’t he a remarkable person?” Kathy said.

“Very.” He could have told her a lot, but it was pointless. She did not really want to know; she believed she understood already.

What else do you believe, little girl? he wondered. For example, what do you believe you know about me? As little as you know about Mickey Quinn and Arlene Howe and all the rest of them who, for you, do not in reality exist? Think what I could tell you if, for a moment, you were able to listen. But you can’t listen. It would frighten you, what you might hear. And anyhow, you know everything already.

“How does it feel,” he asked, “to have slept with so many famous people?”

At that she stopped short. “Do you think I slept with them because they were famous? Do you think I’m a CF, a celebrity fucker? Is that your real opinion of me?”

Like flypaper, he thought. She enmeshed him by every word he said. He could not win.

“I think,” he said, “you’ve led an interesting life. You’re an interesting person.”

“And important,” Kathy added.

“Yes,” he said. “Important, too. In some ways the most important person I’ve ever encountered. It’s a thrilling experience.”

“Do you mean that?”

“Yes,” he said emphatically. And in a peculiar, ass-backward way, it was true. No one, not even Heather, had ever tied him up so completely as this. He could not endure what he found himself going through, and he could not get away. It seemed to him as if he sat behind the tiller of his custom-made unique quibble, facing a red light, green light, amber light all at once; no rational response was possible. Her irrationality made it so. The terrible power, he thought, of illogic. Of the archetypes. Operating out of the drear depths of the collective unconscious which joined him and her—and everyone else—together. In a knot which never could be undone, as long as they lived.

No wonder, he thought, some people, many people, long for death.

“You want to go watch a captain kirk?” Kathy asked.

“Whatever,” he said, briefly.

“There’s a good one on at Cinema Twelve. It’s set on a planet in the Betelgeuse System, a lot like Tarberg’s Planet—you know, in the Proxima System. Only in the captain kirk it’s inhabited by minions of an invisible—”

“I saw it,” he said. As a matter of fact, a year ago they had had Jeff Pomeroy, who played the captain kirk in the picture, on his show; they had even run a short scene: the usual flick-plugging, you-visit-us deal with Pomeroy’s studio. He had not liked it then and he doubted if he would like it now. And he detested Jeff Pomeroy, both on and off the screen. And that, as far as he was concerned, was that.

“It really wasn’t any good?” Kathy asked trustingly.

“Jeff Pomeroy,” he said, “as far as I’m concerned, is the itchy asshole of the world. He and those like him. His imitators.”

Kathy said, “He was at Morningside for a while. I didn’t get to know him, but he was there.”

“I can believe it,” he said, half believing it.

“Do you know what he said to me once?”

“Knowing him,” Jason began, “I’d say—”

“He said I was the tamest person he ever knew. Isn’t that interesting? And he saw me go into one of my mystic states—you know; when I lie down and scream—and still he said that. I think he’s a very perceptive person; I really do. Don’t you?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Shall we go back to my room, then?” Kathy asked. “And screw like minks?”

He grunted in disbelief. Had she really said that? Turning, he tried to make out her face, but they had come to a patch between signs; all was dark for the moment. Jesus, he said to himself. I’ve got to get myself out of this. I’ve got to find my way back to my own world!

“Does my honesty bother you?” she asked.

“No,” he said grimly. “Honesty never bothers me. To be a celebrity you have to be able to take it.” Even that, he thought. “All kinds of honesty,” he said. “Your kind most of all.”

“What kind is mine?” Kathy asked.

“Honest honesty,” he said.

“Then you do understand me,” she said.

“Yes,” he said, nodding. “I really do.”

“And you don’t look down on me? As a little worthless person who ought to be dead?”

“No,” he said, “you’re a very important person. And very honest, too. One of the most honest and straightforward individuals I’ve ever met. I mean that; I swear to God I do.”

She patted him friendlily on the arm. “Don’t get all worked up over it. Let it come naturally.”

“It comes naturally,” he assured her. “It really does.”

“Good,” Kathy said. Happily. He had, evidently, eased her worries; she felt sure of him. And on that his life depended … or did it really? Wasn’t he capitulating to her pathological reasoning? At the moment he did not really know.

“Listen,” he said haltingly. “I’m going to tell you something and I want you to listen carefully. You belong in a prison for the criminally insane.”

Eerily, frighteningly, she did not react; she said nothing.

“And,” he said, “I’m getting as far away from you as I can.” He yanked his hand loose from hers, turned, made his way off in the opposite direction. Ignoring her. Losing himself among the ordinaries who milled in both directions along the cheap, neon-lit sidewalks of this unpleasant part of town.

I’ve lost her, he thought, and in doing so I have probably lost my goddamn life.

Now what? He halted, looked around him. Am I carrying a microtransmitter, as she says? he asked himself. Am I giving myself away with every step I take?

Cheerful Charley, he thought, told me to look up Heather Hart. And as everybody in TV-land knows, Cheerful Charley is never wrong.

But will I live long enough, he asked himself, to reach Heather Hart? And if I do reach her and I’m bugged, won’t I simply be carrying my death onto her? Like a mindless plague? And, he thought, if Al Bliss didn’t know me and Bill Wolfer didn’t know me, why should Heather know me? But Heather, he thought, is a six, like myself. The only other six I know. Maybe that will be the difference. If there is any difference.

He found a public phone booth, entered, shut the door against the noise of traffic, and dropped a gold quinque into the slot.

Heather Hart had several unlisted numbers. Some for business, some for personal friends, one for—to put it bluntly—lovers. He, of course, knew that number, having been to Heather what he had, and still was, he hoped.

The viewscreen lit up. He made out the changing shapes as indicating that she was taking the call on her carphone.

“Hi,” Jason said.

Shading her eyes to make him out, Heather said, “Who the hell are you?” Her green eyes flashed. Her red hair dazzled.

“Jason.”

“I don’t know anybody named Jason. How’d you get this number?” Her tone was troubled but also harsh. “Get the hell off my goddamn phone!” she scowled at him from the viewscreen and said, “Who gave you this number? I want his name.”

Jason said, “You told me the number six months ago. When you first had it installed. Your private of the private lines; right? Isn’t that what you called it?”

“Who told you that?”

“You did. We were in Madrid. You were on location and I had me a six-day vacation half a mile from your hotel. You used to drive over in your Rolls quibble about three each afternoon. Right?”

Heather said in a chattering, staccato tone, “Are you from a magazine?”

“No,” Jason said. “I’m your number one paramour.”

“My what?”

“Lover.”

“Are you a fan? You’re a fan, a goddamn twerp fan. I’ll kill you if you don’t get off my phone.” The sound and image died; Heather had hung up.

He inserted another quinque into the slot, redialed.

“The twerp fan again,” Heather said, answering. She seemed more poised, now. Or was it resigned?

“You have one imitation tooth,” Jason said. “When you’re with one of your lovers you glue it into place in your mouth with a special epoxy cement that you buy at Harney’s. But with me you sometimes take it out, put it in a glass with Dr. Sloom’s denture foam. That’s the denture cleanser you prefer. Because, you always say, it reminds you of the days when Bromo Seltzer was legal and not just black market made in somebody’s basement lab, using all three bromides that Bromo Seltzer discontinued years ago when—”

“How,” Heather interrupted, “did you get hold of this information?” Her face was stiff—her words brisk and direct. Her tone … he had heard it before. Heather used it with people she detested.

“Don’t use that ‘I don’t give a fuck’ tone with me,” he said angrily. “Your false tooth is a molar. You call it Andy. Right?”

“A twerp fan knows all this about me. God. My worst nightmare confirmed. What’s the name of your club and how many fans are there in it and where are you from and how, God damn it, did you get hold of personal details from my private life that you have no right to know in the first place? I mean, what you’re doing is illegal; it’s an invasion of privacy. I’ll have the pols after you if you call me once more.” She reached to hang up the receiver.

“I’m a six,” Jason said.

“A what? A six what? You have six legs; is that it? Or more likely six heads.”

Jason said, “You’re a six, too. That’s what’s kept us together all this time.”

“I’m going to die,” Heather said, ashen, now; even in the dim light of her quibble he could make out the change of color in her features. “What’ll it cost me to have you leave me alone? I always knew that some twerp fan would eventually—”

“Stop calling me a twerp fan,” Jason said bitingly; it infuriated him absolutely. It struck him as the ultimate in something or other; maybe a bird down, as the expression went now.

Heather said, “What do you want?”

“To meet you at Altrocci’s.”

“Yes, you’d know about that, too. The one place I can go without being ejaculated on by nerds who want me to sign menus that don’t even belong to them.” She sighed wretchedly. “Well, now that’s over. I won’t meet you at Altrocci’s or anywhere. Keep out of my life or I’ll have my prive-pols deball you and—”

“You have one private pol,” Jason interrupted. “He’s sixty-two years old and his name is Fred. Originally he was a sharpshooter with the Orange County Minutemen; used to pick off student jeters at Cal State Fullerton. He was good then, but he’s nothing to worry about now.”

“Is that so,” Heather said.

“Okay, let me tell you something else that how do you think I would know. Remember Constance Ellar?”

“Yes,” Heather said. “That nonentity starlet that looked like a Barbie Doll except that her head was too small and her body looked as if someone had inflated her with a CO2 cartridge, overinflated her.” Her lip curled. “She was utterly damn dumb.”

“Right,” he agreed. “Utterly damn dumb. That’s the exact ward. Remember what we did to her on my show? Her first planetwide exposure, because I had to take her in a tie-in deal. Do you remember that, what we did, you and I?”

Silence.

Jason said, “As a sop to us for having her on the show, her agent agreed to let her do a commercial for one of our quarter-time sponsors. We got curious as to what the product was, so before Miss Ellar showed up we opened the paper bag and discovered it was a cream for removing leg hair. God, Heather, you must—”

“I’m listening,” Heather said.

Jason said, “We took the spray can of leg-hair cream out and put a spray can of FDS back in with the same ad copy, which simply read, ‘Demonstrate use of product with expression of contentment and satisfaction,’ and then we got the hell out of there and waited.”

“Did we.”

“Miss Ellar finally showed up, went into her dressing room, opened the paper bag, and then—and this is the part that still makes me break up—she came up to me, perfectly seriously, and said, ‘Mr. Taverner, I’m sorry to bother you about this, but to demonstrate the Feminine Hygiene Deodorant Spray I’ll have to take off my skirt and underpants. Right there before the TV camera.’ ‘So?’ I said. ‘So what’s the problem?’ And Miss Ellar said, ‘I’ll need a little table on which I can put my clothes. I can’t just drop them on the floor; that wouldn’t look right. I mean, I’ll be spraying that stuff into my vagina in front of sixty million people, and when you’re doing that you can’t just leave your clothes lying all around you on the floor; that isn’t elegant.’ She really would have done it, too, right on the air, if Al Bliss hadn’t—”

“It’s a tasteless story.”

“All the same, you thought it was pretty funny. That utterly dumb girl with her first big break ready to do that. ‘Demonstrate use of product with expression of contentment and—’”

Heather hung up.

How do I make her understand? he asked himself savagely, grinding his teeth together, nearly biting off a silver filling. He hated that sensation: grinding off a piece of filling. Destroying his own body, impotently. Can’t she see that my knowledge of everything about her means something important? he asked himself. Who would know these things? Obviously only someone who had been very close physically with her for some time. There could be no other explanation, and yet she had conjured up such an elaborate other reason that he couldn’t penetrate through to her. And it hung directly in front of her eyes. Her six’s eyes.

Once more he dropped in a coin, dialed.

“Hi again,” he said, when Heather at last picked up the phone in her car. “I know that about you, too,” he said. “You can’t let a phone ring; that’s why you have ten private numbers, each for a different purpose of your very special own.”

“I have three,” Heather said. “So you don’t know everything.”

Jason said, “I merely meant—”

“How much?”

“I’ve had enough of that today,” he said sincerely. “You can’t buy me off because that’s not what I want. I want—listen to me, Heather—I want to find out why nobody knows me. You most of all. And since you’re a six I thought you might be able to explain it. Do you have any memory of me? Look at me on the picture screen. Look!”

She peered, one eyebrow cocked. “You’re young but not too young. You’re good-looking. Your voice is commanding and you have no reluctance about brigging me like this. You’re exactly what a twerp fan would look like, sound like, act like. Okay; are you satisfied?”

“I’m in trouble,” he said. It was blatantly irrational for him to tell her this, since she had no recollection of any sort of him. But over the years he had become accustomed to laying his troubles before her—and listening to hers—and the habit had not died. The habit ignored what he saw the reality situation to be: it cruised on under its own power.

“That’s a shame,” Heather said.

Jason said, “Nobody remembers me. And I have no birth certificate; I was never born, never even born! So naturally I have no ID cards except a forged set I bought from a pol fink for two thousand dollars plus one thousand for my contact. I’m carrying them around, but, God: they may have microtransmitters built into them. Even knowing that I have to keep them on me; you know why—even you up at the top, even you know how this society works. Yesterday I had thirty million viewers who would have shrieked their aggrieved heads off if a pol or a nat so much as touched me. Now I’m looking into the eyes of an FLC.”

“What’s an FLC?”

“Forced-labor camp.” He snarled the words at her, trying to pin her down and finally nail her. “The vicious little bitch who forged my papers made me take her out to some Godforsaken broken-down wop restaurant, and while we were there, just talking, she threw herself down on the floor screaming. Psychotic screaming; she’s an escapee from Morningside, by her own admission. That cost me another three hundred dollars and by now who knows? She’s probably sicced the pols and nats both on me.” Pushing his self-pity gingerly a little further, he said, “They’re probably monitoring this phone line right now.”

“Oh, Christ, no!” Heather shrieked and again hung up.

He had no more gold quinques. So, at this point, he gave up. That was a stupid thing to say, he realized, that about the phone lines. That would make anybody hang up. I strangled myself in my own word web, right down the old freeber. Straight down the middle. Beautifully flat at both ends, too. Like a great artificial anus.

He shoved the door of the phone booth aside and stepped out onto the busy nocturnal sidewalk … down here, he thought acidly, in Slumsville. Down where the pol finks hang out. Jolly good show, as that classic TV muffin ad went that we studied in school, he said to himself.

It would be funny, he thought, if it were happening to someone else. But it’s happening to me. No, it’s not funny either way. Because there is real suffering and real death passing the time of day in the wings. Ready to come on any minute.

I wish I could have taped the phone call, plus everything Kathy said to me and me to her. In 3-D color, on videotape it would be a nice bit on my show, somewhere near the end where we run out of material occasionally. Occasionally, hell: generally. Always. For the rest of my life.

He could hear his intro now. “What can happen to a man, a good man without a pol record, a man who suddenly one day loses his ID cards and finds himself facing…” And so forth. It would hold them, all thirty million of them. Because that was what each of them feared. “An invisible man,” his intro would go, “yet a man all too conspicuous. Invisible legally; conspicuous illegally. What becomes of such a man, if he cannot replace…” Blah blah. On and on. The hell with it. Not everything that he did or said or had happen to him got onto the show; so it went with this. Another loser, among many. Many are called, he said to himself, but few are chosen. That’s what it means to be a pro. That’s how I manage things, public and private. Cut your losses and run when you have to, he told himself, quoting himself from back in the good days when his first full worldwide show got piped onto the satellite grid.

I’ll find another forger, he decided, one that isn’t a pol informer, and get a full new set of ID cards, ones without microtransmitters. And then, evidently, I need a gun.

I should have thought of that about the time I woke up in that hotel room, he said to himself. Once, years ago, when the Reynolds syndicate had tried to buy into his show, he had learned to use—and had carried—a gun: a Barber’s Hoop with a range of two miles with no loss of peak trajectory until the final thousand feet.

Kathy’s “mystical trance,” her screaming fit. The audio portion would carry a mature male voice saying against her screams as BG, “This is what it is to be psychotic. To be psychotic is to suffer, suffer beyond…” And so forth. Blah blah. He inhaled a great, deep lungful of cold night air, shuddered, joined the passengers on the sea of sidewalk, his hands thrust deep into his trouser pockets.

And found himself facing a queue lined up ten deep before a pol random checkpoint. One gray-clad policeman stood at the end of the line, loitering there to make sure no one doubled back in the opposite direction.

“Can’t you pass it, friend?” the pol said to him as he involuntarily started to leave.

“Sure,” Jason said.

“That’s good,” the pol said good-humoredly. “Because we’ve been checking here since eight this morning and we still don’t have our work quota.”

6

Two husky gray pols, confronting the man ahead of Jason, said in unison, “These were forged an hour ago; they’re still damp. See? See the ink run under the heat? Okay.” They nodded, and the man, gripped by four thungly pols, disappeared into a parked van-quibble, ominously gray and black: police colors.

“Okay,” one of the husky pols said genially to Jason, “let’s see when yours were printed.”

Jason said, “I’ve been carrying these for years.” He handed his wallet, with the seven ID cards, to the pols.

“Graph his signatures,” the senior pol told his companion. “See if they superimpose.”

Kathy had been right.

“Nope,” the junior pol said, putting away his official camera. “They don’t super. But it looks like this one, the military service chit, had a trans dot on it that’s been scraped off. Very expertly, too, if so. You have to view it through the glass.” He swung the portable magnifying lens and light over, illuminating Jason’s forged cards in stark white detail. “See?”

“When you left the service,” the senior pol said to Jason, “did this record have an electronic dot on it? Do you remember?” Both of them scrutinized Jason as they awaited his response.

What the hell to say? he asked himself. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t even know what a”—he started to say, “microtransmitter dot,” but quickly corrected himself—soon enough, he hoped—“what an electronic dot looks like.”

“It’s a dot, mister,” the junior pol informed him. “Aren’t you listening? Are you on drugs? Look; on his drug-status card there isn’t an entry for the last year.”

One of the thungly pols spoke up. “Proves they’re not faked, though, because who would fake a felony onto an ID card? They’d have to be out of their minds.”

“Yes,” Jason said.

“Well, it’s not part of our area,” the senior pol said. He handed Jason’s ID cards back to him. “He’ll have to take it up with his drug inspector. Move on.” With his nightstick the pol shoved Jason out of the way, reaching meanwhile for the ID cards of the man behind him.

“That’s it?” Jason said to the thungly pols. He could not believe it. Don’t let it show, he said to himself. Just move on!

He did so.

From the shadows beneath a broken streetlight, Kathy reached out, touched him; he froze at the touch, feeling himself turn to ice, starting with his heart. “What do you think of me now?” Kathy said. “My work, what I did for you.”

“They did it,” he said shortly.

“I’m not going to turn you in,” Kathy said, “even though you insulted and abandoned me. But you have to stay with me tonight like you promised. You understand?”

He had to admire her. By lurking around the random checkpoint she had obtained firsthand proof that her forged documents had been well enough done to get him past the pols. So all at once the situation between them had altered: he was now in her debt. He no longer held the status of aggrieved victim.

Now she owned a moral share of him. First the stick: the threat of turning him in to the pols. Then the carrot: the adequately forged ID cards. The girl had him, really. He had to admit it, to her and to himself.

“I could have gotten you through anyhow,” Kathy said. She held up her right arm, pointing to a section of her sleeve. “I’ve got a gray pol-ident tab, there; it shows up under their macrolens. So I don’t get picked up by mistake. I would have said—”

“Let it lie there,” he broke in harshly. “I don’t want to hear about it.” He walked away from her; the girl skimmed after him, like a skillful bird.

“Want to go back to my Minor Apartment?” Kathy asked.

“That goddamn shabby room.” I have a floating house in Malibu, he thought, with eight bedrooms, six rotating baths and a four-dimensional living room with an infinity ceiling. And, because of something I don’t understand and can’t control, I have to spend my time like this. Visiting run-down marginal places. Crappy eateries, crappier workshops, crappiest one-room lodgings. Am I being paid back for something I did? he asked himself. Something I don’t know about or remember? But nobody pays back, he reflected. I learned that a long time ago: you’re not paid back for the bad you do nor the good you do. It all comes out uneven at the end. Haven’t I learned that by now, if I’ve learned anything?

“Guess what’s at the top of my shopping list for tomorrow,” Kathy was saying. “Dead flies. Do you know why?”

“They’re high in protein.”

“Yes, but that’s not why; I’m not getting them for myself. I buy a bag of them every week for Bill, my turtle.”

“I didn’t see any turtle.”

“At my Major Apartment. You didn’t really think I’d buy dead flies for myself, did you?”

“De gustibus non disputandum est,” he quoted.

“Let’s see. In matters of taste there’s no dispute. Right?”

“Right,” he said. “Meaning that if you want to eat dead flies go ahead and eat them.”

“Bill does; he likes them. He’s just one of those little green turtles … not a land tortoise or anything. Have you ever watched the way they snap at food, at a fly floating on their water? It’s very small but it’s awful. One second the fly’s there and then the next, glunk. It’s inside the turtle.” She laughed. “Being digested. There’s a lesson to be learned there.”

“What lesson?” He anticipated it then. “That when you bite,” he said, “you either get all of it or none of it, but never part.”

“That’s how I feel.”

“Which do you have?” he asked her. “All or none?”

“I—don’t know. Good question. Well, I don’t have Jack. But maybe I don’t want him anymore. It’s been so fucking long. I guess I still need him. But I need you more.”

Jason said, “I thought you were the one who could love two men equally.”

“Did I say that?” She pondered as they walked. “What I meant was is that’s ideal, but in real life you can only approximate it … do you see? Can you follow my line of thought?”

“I can follow it,” he said, “and I can see where it’s leading. It’s leading to a temporary abandonment of Jack while I’m around and then a psychological returning to him when I’m gone. Do you do it every time?”

“I never abandon him,” Kathy said sharply. They then continued on in silence until they reached her great old apartment building with its forest of no-longer-used TV masts jutting from every part of the roof. Kathy fumbled in her purse, found her key, unlocked the door to her room.

The lights had been turned on. And, seated on the moldering sofa facing them, a middle-aged man with gray hair and a gray suit. A heavy-set but immaculate man, with perfectly shaved jowls: no nicks, no red spots, no errors. He was perfectly attired and groomed; each hair on his head stood individually in place.

Kathy said falteringly, “Mr. McNulty.”

Rising to his feet, the heavy-set man extended his right hand toward Jason. Automatically, Jason reached out to shake it.

“No,” the heavy-set man said. “I’m not shaking hands with you; I want to see your ID cards, the ones she made for you. Let me have them.”

Wordlessly—there was nothing to say—Jason passed him his wallet.

“You didn’t do these,” McNulty said, after a short inspection. “Unless you’re getting a hell of a lot better.”

Jason said, “I’ve had some of those cards for years.”

“Have you,” McNulty murmured. He returned the wallet and cards to Jason. “Who planted the microtrans on him? You?” He addressed Kathy. “Ed?”

“Ed,” Kathy said.

“What do we have here?” McNulty said, scrutinizing Jason as if measuring him for a coffin. “A man in his forties, well dressed, modern clothing style. Expensive shoes … made of actual authentic leather. Isn’t that right, Mr. Taverner?”

“They’re cowhide,” Jason said.

“Your papers identify you as a musician,” McNulty said. “You play an instrument?”

“I sing.”

McNulty said, “Sing something for us now.”

“Go to hell,” Jason said, and managed to control his breathing; his words came out exactly as he wanted them to. No more, no less.

To Kathy, McNulty said, “He’s not exactly cowering. Does he know who I am?”

“Yes,” Kathy said. “I—told him. Part of it.”

“You told him about Jack,” McNulty said. To Jason he said, “There is no Jack. She thinks so but it’s a psychotic delusion. Her husband died three years ago in a quibble accident; he was never in a forced-labor camp.”

“Jack is still alive,” Kathy said.

“You see?” McNulty said to Jason. “She’s made a pretty fair adjustment to the outside world except for this one fixed idea. It will never go away; she’ll have it for the balance of her life.” He shrugged. “It’s a harmless idea and it keeps her going. So we’ve made no attempt to deal with it psychiatrically.”

Kathy, quietly, had begun to cry. Large tears slid down her cheeks and dropped, bloblike, onto her blouse. Tear stains, in the form of dark circles, appeared here and there.

“I’ll be talking to Ed Pracim in the next couple of days,” McNulty said. “I’ll ask him why he put the microtrans on you. He has hunches; it must have been a hunch.” He reflected. “Bear in mind, the ID cards in your wallet are reproductions of actual documents on file at various central data banks throughout earth. Your reproductions are satisfactory, but I may want to check on the originals. Let’s hope they’re in as good order as the repros you carry.”

Kathy said feebly, “But that’s a rare procedure. Statistically—”

“In this case,” McNulty said, “I think it’s worth trying.”

“Why?” Kathy said.

“Because we don’t think you’re turning everyone over to us. Half an hour ago this man Taverner passed successfully through a random checkpoint. We followed him using the microtrans. And his papers look fine to me. But Ed says—”

“Ed drinks,” Kathy said.

“But we can count on him.” McNulty smiled, a professional beam of sunshine in the shabby room. “And we can’t, not quite, on you.”

Bringing forth his military-service chit, Jason rubbed the small profile 4-D picture of himself. And it said tinnily, “How now, brown cow?”

“How can that be faked?” Jason said. “That’s the tone of voice I had back ten years ago when I was an invol-nat.”

“I doubt that,” McNulty said. He examined his wristwatch. “Do we owe you anything, Miss Nelson? Or are we clear for this week?”

“Clear,” she said, with an effort. Then, in a low, unsteady voice, she half-whispered, “After Jack gets out you won’t be able to count on me at all.”

“For you,” McNulty said genially, “Jack will never get out.” He winked at Jason. Jason winked back. Twice. He understood McNulty. The man preyed on the weaknesses of others; the kind of manipulation that Kathy employed had probably been learned from him. And from his quaint, genial companions.

He could understand now how she had become what she had become. Betrayal was an everyday event; a refusal to betray, as in his case, was miraculous. He could only wonder at it and thank it dimly.

We have a betrayal state, he realized. When I was a celebrity I was exempt. Now I’m like everyone else: I now have to face what they’ve always faced. And—what I faced in the old days, faced and then later on repressed from my memory. Because it was too distressing to believe … once I had a choice, and could choose not to believe.

McNulty put his fleshy, red-speckled hand on Jason’s shoulder and said, “Come along with me.”

“Where to?” Jason demanded, moving away from McNulty exactly, he realized, the way Kathy had moved away from him. She had learned this, too, from the McNultys of the world.

“You don’t have anything to charge him with!” Kathy said hoarsely, clenching her fists.

Easily, McNulty said, “We’re not going to charge him with anything; I just want a fingerprint, voiceprint, footprint, EEG wave pattern from him. Okay, Mr. Tavern?”

Jason started to say, “I hate to correct a police officer—” and then broke off at the warning look on Kathy’s face—“who’s doing his duty,” he finished, “so I’ll go along.” Maybe Kathy had a point; maybe it was worth something for the pol officer to get Jason Taverner’s name wrong. Who knew? Time would tell.

“‘Mr. Tavern,’ “ McNulty said lazily, propelled him toward the door of the room. “Suggests beer and warmth and coziness, doesn’t it?” He looked back at Kathy and said in a sharp voice, “Doesn’t it?”

“Mr. Tavern is a warm man,” Kathy said, her teeth locked together. The door shut after them, and McNulty steered him down the hallway to the stairs, breathing, meanwhile, the odor of onion and hot sauce in every direction.

At the 469th Precinct station, Jason Taverner found himself lost in a multitude of men and women who moved aimlessly, waiting to get in, waiting to get out, waiting for information, waiting to be told what to do. McNulty had pinned a colored tag on his lapel; God and the police alone knew what it meant.

Obviously it did mean something. A uniformed officer behind a desk which ran from wall to wall beckoned to him.

“Okay,” the cop said. “Inspector McNulty filled out part of your J-2 form. Jason Tavern. Address: 2048 Vine Street.”

Where had McNulty come up with that? Jason wondered. Vine Street. And then he realized that it was Kathy’s address. McNulty had assumed they were living together; overworked, as was true of all the pols, he had written down the information that took the least effort. A law of nature: an objector living creature—takes the shortest route between two points. He filled out the balance of the form.

“Put your hand into that slot,” the officer said, indicating a fingerprinting machine. Jason did so. “Now,” the officer said, “remove one shoe, either left or right. And that sock. You may sit down here.” He slid a section of desk aside, revealing an entrance and a chair.

“Thanks,” Jason said, seating himself.

After the recording of the footprint he spoke the sentence, “Down goes the right hut and ate a put object beside his horse.” That took care of the voiceprint. After that, again seated, he allowed terminals to be placed here and there on his head; the machine cranked out three feet of scribbled-on paper, and that was that. That was the electrocardiogram. It ended the tests.

Looking cheerful, McNulty appeared at the desk. In the harsh white overhead light his five-o’clock shadow could be seen over all his jaw, his upper lip, the higher part of his neck. “How’s it going with Mr. Tavern?” he asked.

The officer said, “We’re ready to do a nomenclature file-pull.”

“Fine,” McNulty said. “I’ll stick around and see what comes up.”

The uniformed officer dropped the form Jason had filled out into a slot, pressed lettered buttons, all of which were green. For some reason Jason noticed that. And the letters capitals.

From a mouthlike aperture on the very long desk a Xeroxed document slid out, dropped into a metal basket.

“Jason Tavern,” the uniformed officer said, examining the document. “Of Kememmer, Wyoming. Age: thirty-nine. A diesel engine mechanic.” He glanced at the photo. “Pic taken fifteen years ago.”

“Any police record?” McNulty asked.

“No trouble of any kind,” the uniformed officer said.

“There are no other Jason Taverns on record at Pol-Dat?” McNulty asked. The officer pressed a yellow button, shook his head. “Okay,” McNulty said. “That’s him.” He surveyed Jason. “You don’t look like a diesel engine mechanic.”

“I don’t do that anymore,” Jason said. “I’m now in sales. For farm equipment. Do you want my card?” A bluff; he reached toward the upper right-hand pocket of his suit. McNulty shook his head no. So that was that; they had, in their usual bureaucratic fashion, pulled the wrong file on him. And, in their rush, they had let it stand.

He thought, Thank God for the weaknesses built into a vast, complicated, convoluted, planetwide apparatus. Too many people; too many machines. This error began with a pol inspec and worked its way to Pol-Dat, their pool of data at Memphis, Tennessee. Even with my fingerprint, footprint, voiceprint and EEG print they probably won’t be able to straighten it out. Not now; not with my form on file.

“Shall I book him?” the uniformed officer asked McNulty.

“For what?” McNulty said. “For being a diesel mechanic?” He slapped Jason convivially on the back. “You can go home, Mr. Tavern. Back to your child-faced sweetheart. Your little virgin.” Grinning, he moved off into the throng of anxious and bewildered human men and women.

“You may go, sir,” the uniformed officer told Jason.

Nodding, Jason made his way out of the 469th Precinct police station, onto the nighttime street, to mix with the free and self-determined people who resided there.

But they will get me finally, he thought. They’ll match up the prints. And yet—if it’s been fifteen years since the photo was taken, maybe it’s been fifteen years since they took an EEG and a voiceprint.

But that still left the finger– and footprints. They did not change.

He thought, Maybe they’ll just toss the Xerox copy of the file into a shredding bin, and that will be that. And transmit the data they got out of me to Memphis, there to be incorporated in my—or rather “my”—permanent file. In Jason Tavern’s file, specifically.

Thank God Jason Tavern, diesel mechanic, had never broken a law, had never tangled with the pols or flats. Good for him.

A police flipflap wobbled overhead, its red searchlight glimmering, and from its PA speakers it said, “Mr. Jason Tavern, return to 469th Precinct Police Station at once. This is a police order. Mr. Jason Tavern—” It raved on and on as Jason stood stunned. They had figured it out already. In a matter not of hours, days, or weeks, but minutes.

He returned to the police station, climbed the styraplex stairs, passed through the light-activated doors, through the milling throng of the unfortunate, back to the uniformed officer who had handled his case—and there stood McNulty, too. The two of them were in the process of frowningly conferring.

“Well,” McNulty said, glancing up, “here’s our Mr. Tavern again. What are you doing back here, Mr. Tavern?”

“The police flipflap—” he began, but McNulty cut him off.

“That was unauthorized. We merely put out an APB and some figtail hoisted it to flipflap level. But as long as you’re here”—McNulty turned the document so that Jason could see the photo—“is that how you looked fifteen years ago?”

“I guess so,” Jason said. The photo showed a sallow-faced individual with protruding Adam’s apple, bad teeth and eyes, sternly staring into nothing. His hair, frizzy and corn-colored, hung over two near-jug ears.

“You’ve had plastic S,” McNulty said.

Jason said, “Yes.”

“Why?”

Jason said, “Who would want to look like that?”

“So no wonder you’re so handsome and dignified,” McNulty said. “So stately. So”—he groped for the word—“commanding. It’s really hard to believe that they could do to that”—he put his index finger on the fifteen-year-old photo—“something to make it look like that.” He tapped Jason friendlily on the arm. “But where’d you get the money?”

While McNulty talked, Jason had begun swiftly reading the data printed on the document. Jason Tavern had been born in Cicero, Illinois, his father had been a turret lathe operator, his grandfather had owned a chain of retail farm-equipment stores—a lucky break, considering what he had told McNulty about his current career.

“From Windslow,” Jason said. “I’m sorry; I always think of him like that, and I forget that others can’t.” His professional training had helped him: he had read and assimilated most of the page while McNulty was talking to him. “My grandfather. He had a good deal of money, and I was his favorite. I was the only grandson, you see.”

McNulty studied the document, nodded.

“I looked like a rural hick,” Jason said. “I looked like what I was: a hayseed. The best job I could get involved repairing diesel engines, and I wanted more. So I took the money that Windslow left me and headed for Chicago—”

“Okay,” McNulty said still nodding. “It fits together. We are aware that such radical plastic surgery can be accomplished, and at not too large a cost. But generally it’s done by unpersons or labor-camp inmates who’ve escaped. We monitor all graft-shops, as we call them.”

“But look how ugly I was,” Jason said.

McNulty laughed a deep, throaty laugh. “You sure were, Mr. Tavern. Okay; sorry to trouble you. Go on.” He gestured, and Jason began to part the throng of people before him. “Oh!” McNulty called, gesturing to him. “One more—” His voice, drowned out by the noise of the milling, did not reach Jason. So, his heart frozen in ice, he walked out.

Once they notice you, Jason realized, they never completely close the file. You can never get back your anonymity. It is vital not to be noticed in the first place. But I have been.

“What is it?” he asked McNulty, feeling despair. They were playing games with him, breaking him down; he could feel, inside him, his heart, his blood, all his vital parts, stagger in their processes. Even the superb physiology of a six tumbled at this.

McNulty held out his hand. “Your ID cards. I want some lab work on them. If they’re okay you’ll get them back the day after tomorrow.”

Jason said protestingly. “But if a random pol-check—”

“We’ll give you a police pass,” McNulty said. He nodded to a great-bellied older officer to his right. “Get a 4-D photo of him and set up a blanket pass.”

“Yes, Inspector,” the tub of guts said, reaching out an overstuffed paw to turn on the camera equipment.

Ten minutes later, Jason Taverner found himself out once more on the now almost deserted early evening sidewalk, and this time with a bona fide pol-pass—better than anything Kathy could have manufactured for him … except that the pass was valid only for one week. But still …

He had one week during which he could afford not to worry. And then, after that.

He had done the impossible: he had traded a walletful of bogus ID cards for a genuine pol-pass. Examining the pass under the streetlights, he saw that the expiration notice was holographic … and there was room for the insertion of an additional number. It read seven. He could get Kathy to alter that to seventy-five or ninety-seven, or whatever was easiest.

And then it occurred to him that as soon as the pol lab made out that his ID cards were spurious the number of his pass, his name, his photo, would be transmitted to every police checkpoint on the planet.

But until that happened he was safe.