The Shockwave Rider

BOOK 2

THE DELPHI CORACLE

SHALLOW MAN IN ALL HIS GORY WAS NOT DISMAYED BY ONE OF THESE

Take no thought for the morrow; that’s your privilege. But don’t complain if when it gets here you’re off guard.

ARARAT

With a distant … Too weak a word. With a remote part of his mind he was able to observe himself doing all the wrong things: heading in a direction he hadn’t chosen, and running when he should and could have used his company electric car, in sum making a complete fool of himself.

In principle he had made the correct decisions. He would turn up for his appointment with the interview board, he would outface the visitor from Tarnover, he would win the argument because you don’t, simply don’t, haul into custody someone who is being offered permanent employment by a corporation as powerful as G2S. Not without generating a continental stink. And if there’s one thing they’re afraid of at Tarnover, it’s having the media penetrate their guise of feigned subimportance.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. His were fine. They simply had no effect on his behavior.

“Yes, who is it?” In a curt voice from the speaker under the veephone camera. And then, almost in the same breath, “Sandy! Hey, you look sick, and I don’t mean that as a compliment! Come right on up!”

Sound of antithief locks clicking to neutral.

Sick?

He pondered the word with that strange detached portion of his awareness which was somehow isolated from his body at present, yet continued to function as though it were hung under a balloon trailed behind this fleshly carcass now ascending stairs not by legs alone but by arms clutching at the banister to stop from falling over. Legs race combines with arms race to make brain race and his brain was definitely racing. An invisible tight band had clamped on his head at the level of his temples. Pain made him giddy. He was double-focusing. When the door of Kate’s apt opened he saw two of it, two of her in a shabby red wrap-around robe and brown sandals … but that wasn’t so bad, because her face was eloquent of sympathy and worry and a double dose of that right now was to be welcomed. He was sweating rivers and imagined that he could have heard his feet squelching in his shoes but for the drumming of his heart, which also drowned out the question she shot at him.

Repeated louder, “I said, what the hell have you taken?”

He hunted down his voice, an elusive rasp in the caverns of a throat which had dried like a creek bed in a bad summer all the way to his aching lungs.

“No-uh-thing!”

“My God. In that case have you ever got it strong. Come quickly and he down.”

As swiftly and unreally as in a dream, with as much detachment as though he were viewing these events through the incurious eyes of old Bagheera, he witnessed himself being half-led, half-carried to a couch with a tan cover. In the Early Pleistocene he had sat on it to eat omelets and drink beer. It was a lovely sunny morning. He let his lids fall to exclude it, concentrated on making the best use of the air, which was tinted with a faint lemony fragrance.

She drew drapes against the sun by touching a button, then came in twilight to sit by him and hold his hand. Her fingers sought his pulse as expertly as a trained nurse.

“I knew you were straining too hard,” she said. “I still can’t figure out why—but get the worst of it over and then you can tell me about it. If you like.”

Time passed. The slam of his heart lessened. The sweat streaming from his pores turned from hot to cool, made his smart clothing clammy. He began to shiver and then, with no warning, found he was sobbing. Not weeping—his eyes were dry—but sobbing in huge gusting gasps, as though he were being cruelly and repeatedly punched in the belly by a fist that wasn’t there.

At some stage she brought a thick woolen blanket, winterweight, and laid it on him. It had been years since he felt the rough bulk of such a fabric—now, one slept on a pressure bed, insulated by a directed layer of air. It evoked thousands of inchoate childhood memories. His hands clamped like talons to draw it over his head and his knees doubled into the fetal posture and he rolled on his side and miraculously was asleep.

When he awoke he felt curiously relaxed. He felt purged. In the … How long? He checked his watch. In the at-most hour since he dozed off, something more than calm had occupied his mind.

He formed a word silently and liked its taste.

Peace.

But—!

He sat up with a jerk. There was no peace—must be none—could be none! It was the wrong world for peace. At the G2S HQ someone from Tarnover must now be adding—correction, must already have added—two plus two. This person Sandy Locke “overlooked as kind of a national resource” might have been identified as the lost Nickie Haflinger!

He threw aside the blanket and stood up, belatedly realizing that Kate was nowhere to be seen and perhaps Bagheera had been left on guard and …

But his complicated thought dissolved under a wave of dizziness. Before he had taken as much as one pace away from the couch, he’d had to lean an outstretched hand against the wall.

Upon which came Kate’s voice from the kitchen.

“Good timing, Sandy. Or whatever your real name is. I just fixed some broth for you. Here.”

It approached him in a steaming cup, which he accepted carefully by the less-hot handle. But he didn’t look at it. He looked at her. She had changed into a blue and yellow summer shirt and knee-long cultoons also of yellow with the blue repeated in big Chinese ideograms across the seat. And he heard himself say, “What was that about my name?”

Thinking at the same time: I was right. There is no room for peace in this modern world. It’s illusory. One minute passes, and it’s shattered.

“You were babbling in your sleep,” she said, sitting down on a patched old chair which he had expected her to throw out yet perversely had been retained. “Oh, please stop twitching your eyes like that! If you’re wondering what’s become of Bagheera, I took him downstairs; the girls said they’d look after him for a while. And if you’re trying to spot a way of escape, it’s too soon. Sit down and drink that broth.”

Of the alternatives open, the idea of obeying seemed the most constructive. The instant he raised the cup he realized he was ravenous. His blood-sugar level must be terribly debased. Also he was still cold. The warmth of the savory liquid was grateful to him.

At long last he was able to frame a one-word question.

“Babbling …?”

“I exaggerate. A lot of it made sense. That was why I told G2S you weren’t here.”

“What?” He almost let go of the cup.

“Don’t tell me I did the wrong thing. Because I didn’t. Ina got them to call me when you didn’t show for your interview. I said no, of course I haven’t seen him. He doesn’t even like me, I told them. Ina would believe that. She’s never realized that men can like me, because I’m all the things she didn’t want her daughter to be, such as studious and intelligent and mainly plain. She never dug deeper into any man’s personality than the level she dealt with you on: looks good, sounds good, feels good and I can use him.” She gave a harsh laugh, not quite over the brink of bitterness.

He disregarded that comment. “What did I—uh—let slip?” he demanded. And trembled a little as he awaited the answer.

She hesitated. “First off … Well, I kind of got the impression you never overloaded before. Can that be true?”

He had been asked often by other people and had always declared, “No, I guess I’m one of the lucky ones.” And had believed his claim to be truthful. He had seen victims of overload; they hid away, they gibbered when you tried to talk to them, they screamed and struck out and smashed the furniture. These occasional bouts of shaking and cramp and cold, aborted in minutes with one tranquilizer, couldn’t be what you’d call overload, not really!

But now he had sensed such violence in his own body, he was aware that from outside his behavior must have paralleled that of a member of his Toledo congregation, and his former chief at the Utopia consultancy, and two of his colleagues at the three-vee college, and … Others. Countless others. Trapped in fight-or-flight mode when there was no way to attain either solution.

He sighed, setting aside his cup, and drove himself to utter an honest answer.

“Before, drugs have always straightened me in no time. Today—well, somehow I didn’t want to think of taking anything … if you see what I mean.”

“You never sweated it out before? Not even once? Small wonder this is such a bad attack.”

Nettled, he snapped back. “It happens to you all the time, hm? That’s why you’re so knowledgeable?”

She shook her head, expression neutral. “No, it never did happen to me. But I’ve never taken tranquilizers, either. If I feel like crying myself to sleep,. I do. Or if I feel like cutting classes because it’s such a beautiful day, I do that too. Ina overloaded when I was about five. That was when she and Dad split up. After that she started riding constant herd on my mental state as well as her own. But I got this association fixed in my mind between the pills she took and the way she acted when she broke down—which wasn’t pleasant—so I always used to pretend I’d swallowed what she gave me, then spit it out when I was alone. I got very good at hiding tablets and capsules under my tongue. And I guess it was the sensible thing to do. Most of my friends have folded up at least once, some of them two or three times beginning in grade school. And they all seem to be the ones who had—uh—special care taken of them by their folks. Care they’ll never recover from.”

Somehow a solitary fly had escaped the defenses of the kitchen. Sated, heavy on its wings, it came buzzing in search of a place to rest and digest. As though a saw blade’s teeth were adding an underscore to the words, he felt his next question stressed by the sound.

“Do you mean the sort of thing Anti-Trauma does?”

“The sort of thing parents hire Anti-Trauma to do to their helpless kids!” There was venom in her tone, the first strong feeling he had detected in her. “But they were far from the first. They’re the largest and best-advertised, but they weren’t the pioneers. Ina and I were having a fight last year, and she said she wished she’d given me that type of treatment. Once upon a time I quite liked my mother. Now I’m not so sure.”

He said with weariness born of his recent tormented self-reappraisal, “I guess they think they’re doing the right and proper thing. They want their kids to be able to cope, and it’s claimed to be a way of adjusting people to the modern world.”

“That,” Kate said, “is Sandy Locke talking. Whoever you are, I now know for sure that you’re not him. He’s a role you’ve put on. In your heart you know what Anti-Trauma does is monstrous … don’t you?”

He hesitated only fractionally before nodding. “Yes. Beyond any hope of argument, it’s evil.”

“Thank you for leveling with me at last. I was sure nobody who’s been through what you have could feel otherwise.”

“What am I supposed to have been through?”

“Well, in your sleep you moaned about Tarnover, and since everybody knows what Tarnover is like—”

He jerked as though he had been kicked. “Wait, wait! That can’t be true! Most people don’t know Tarnover exists!”

She shrugged. “Oh, you know what I mean. I’ve met several of their so-called graduates. People who could have been individuals but instead have been standardized—filed down—straitjacketed!”

“But that’s incredible!”

It was her turn to be confused and startled. “What?”

“That you’ve met all these people from Tarnover.”

“No, it’s not. UMKC is crawling with them. Turn any wet stone. Oh, I exaggerate, but there are five or six.”

The sensations he had been victim of when he arrived threatened to return. His mouth dried completely, as though it had been swabbed with cottonwool; his heart pounded; he instantly wanted to find a bathroom. But he fought back with all the resources at his command. Steadying his voice was as exhausting as climbing a mountain.

“So where are they in hiding?”

“Nowhere. Stop by the Behavioral Sciences Lab and—Say, Sandy!” She rose anxiously to her feet. “You’d better he down again and talk about this later. Obviously it hasn’t penetrated that you’re suffering from shock, just as surely as if you’d walked away from a veetol crash.”

“I do know!” he barked. “But there was someone from Tarnover sitting in with the G2S selection board, and if they think to make a physical check of this place … They thought of calling you up, didn’t they?”

She bit her lip, eyes scanning his face in search of clues that were not to be found.

“Why are you so afraid?” she ventured. “What did they do to you?”

“It’s not so much what they did. It’s what they will do if they catch me.”

“Because of something you did to them? What?”

“Quit cold after they’d spent thirty million on trying to turn me into the sort of shivver you were just describing.”

During the next few seconds he was asking himself how he could ever have been so stupid as to say that. And with surprise so terrific it was almost worse than what had gone before he then discovered he hadn’t been stupid after all.

For she turned and walked to the window to peer out at the street between the not-completely-closed curtains. She said, “Nobody in sight who looks suspicious. What’s the first thing they’ll do if they figure out who you are—deevee your code? I mean the one you’ve been using at G2S.”

“I let that out too?” he said in renewed horror.

“You let a lot out. Must have been stacking up in your head for years. Well?”

“Uh—yes, I guess so.”

She checked her watch and compared it with an old-fashioned digital clock that was among the few ornaments she had not disposed of. “There’s a flight to Los Angeles in ninety minutes. I’ve used it now and then; it’s one that you can get on without booking. By tonight we could be at—”

He put his hands to his head, giddy again. “You’re going too fast for me.”

“Fast it’s got to be. What can you do apart from being a systems rash? Everything?”

“I …” He took an enormous grip on himself. “Yes, or damn nearly.”

“Fine. So come on.”

He remained irresolute. “Kate, surely you’re not going to—”

“Forget about school next year, abandon friends and home and mother, and Bagheera?” Her tone was scathing. “Shit, no. But how are you going to make out if you don’t have a usable code to prop you up while you’re building another they don’t know about? I guess that must be how you work the trick, hm?”

“Uh—yes, more or less.”

“So move, will you? My code is in good standing, and the girls downstairs will mind Bagheera for a week as willingly as for an evening, and apart from that all I have to do is leave a note for Ina saying I’ve gone to stay with friends.” She seized the nearest phone and began to compose the code for her mother’s mail-store reel.

“But I can’t possibly ask you to—”

“You’re not asking, I’m offering. You damn well better grab the chance. Because if you don’t you’ll be as good as dead, won’t you?” She waved him silent and spoke the necessary words to mislead Ina.

When she had finished he said, “Not as good as. Worse than.” And followed her out the door.

IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE HERD

At Tarnover they explained it all so reasonably!

Of course everybody had to be given a personal code! How else could the government do right by its citizens, keep track of the desires, tastes, preferences, purchases, commitments and above all location of a continentful of mobile, free individuals?

Granted, there was an alternative approach. But would you want to see it adopted here? Would you like to find your range of choice restricted to the point where the population became predictable in its collective behavior?

So don’t dismiss the computer as a new type of fetters. Think of it rationally, as the most liberating device ever invented, the only tool capable of serving the multifarious needs of modern man.

Think of it, for a change, as him. For example, think of the friendly mailman who makes certain your letters reach you no matter how frequently you move or over what vast distances. Think of the loyal secretary who always pays your bills when they come due, regardless of what distractions may be on your mind. Think of the family doctor who’s on hand at the hospital when you fall sick, with your entire medical history in focus to guide the unknown specialist. Or if you want to be less personal and more social, think of computers as the cure for the monotony of primitive mass-production methods. As long ago as the sixties of last century it became economic to turn out a hundred items in succession from an assembly line, of which each differed subtly from the others. It cost the salary of an extra programer and—naturally—a computer to handle the task … but everybody was using computers anyhow, and their capacity was so colossal the additional data didn’t signify.

(When he pondered the subject, he always found himself flitting back and forth between present and past tense; there was that sensitive a balance between what had been expected, indeed hoped for, and what had eventuated. It seemed that some of the crucial decisions were still being made although generations had elapsed since they were formulated.)

The movement pattern of late twentieth-century America was already the greatest population flow in history. More people moved annually at vacation time than all the armies led by all the world’s great conquerors put together, plus the refugees they drove from home. What a relief, then, to do no more than punch your code into a public terminal—or, since 2005, into the nearest veephone, which likely was in the room where you were sitting—and explain once that because you’d be in Rome the next two weeks, or surfing at Bondi, or whatever, your house should be watched by the police more keenly than usual, and your mail should be held for so many days unless marked “urgent,” in which case it should be redirected to so-and-so, and the garbage truck needn’t come by on its next weekly round, and—and so forth. The muscles of the nation could be felt flexing with joyous new freedom.

Except …

The theory was and always had been: this is the thing the solid citizen has no need to worry about.

Important, later all-important question: what about the hollow citizen?

Because, liberated, the populace took off like so many hot-air balloons.

“Okay, let’s!”—move, take that job in another state, go spend all summer by the lake, operate this winter out of a resort in the Rockies, commute by veetol over a thousand miles, see how island living suits us and forget the idea if it’s a bust …

Subtler yet, more far-reaching: let’s trade wives and children on a monthly rota, good for the kids to get used to multiple parents because after all you’ve been married twice and I’ve been married three times, and let’s quit the city fast before the boss finds out it was me who undercut him on that near-the-knuckle deal, and let’s move out of shouting distance of that twitch you were obsessed with so you can cool down, and let’s go someplace where the word isn’t out on the mouth-to-mouth circuit that you’re skew else you’ll never have the chance to give up men, and let’s see if it’s true about those fine dope connections in Topeka and let’s—let’s—let’s …

Plus, all the time and everywhere, the sneaking suspicion: don’t look now, I think we’re being followed.

Two years after they spliced the home-phone service into the continental net the system was screaming in silent agony like the limbs of a marathon runner who knows he can shatter the world’s best time provided he can make the final mile.

But, they asked at Tarnover in the same oh-so-reasonable tones, what else could we have done?

LET’S ALL BE DIFFERENT SAME AS ME

“That,” Freeman said thoughtfully, “sounds like a question you still have found no answer to.”

“Oh, shut up. Put me back in regressed mode, for God’s sake. I know you don’t call this torture—I know you call it stimulus-response evaluation—but it feels like torture all the same and I’d rather get it over and done with. Since there isn’t an alternative.”

Freeman scanned his dials and screens.

“Unfortunately it’s not safe to regress you again at the moment. It will take a day or so for the revived effects of your overload at KC to flush out of your system. It was the most violent experience you’ve undergone as an adult. Extremely traumatizing.”

“I’m infinitely obliged for the data. I suspected so, but it’s nice to have it confirmed by your machines.”

“Sweedack. Just as it’s good to have what the machines tell us confirmed by your conscious personality.”

“Are you a hockey ’fish?”

“Not in the sense of following one particular team, but the game does offer a microcosm of modern society, doesn’t it? Group commitment, chafing against restrictive rules, enactment of display-type aggression more related to status than hate or fear, plus the use of banishment as a means of enforcing conformity. To which you can add the use of the most primitive weapon, the club, albeit stylized.”

“So that’s how you view society. I’ve been wondering. How trivial! How oversimplified! You mention restrictive rules … but rules only become restrictive when they’re obsolescent. We’ve revised our rules at every stage of our social evolution, ever since we learned to talk, and we’re still making new ones that suit us better. We’ll carry right on unless fools like you contrive to stop us!”

Leaning forward, Freeman cupped his sharp chin in his right palm.

“We’re into an area of fundamental difference of opinion,” he said after a pause. “I put it to you that no rule consciously invented by mankind since we acquired speech has force equivalent to those inherited from perhaps fifty, perhaps a hundred thousand generations of evolution in the wild state. I further suggest that the chief reason why modern society is in turmoil is that for too long we claimed that our special human talents could exempt us from the heritage written in our genes.”

“It’s because you and those like you think in strict binary terms—‘either-or’—as though you’ve decided machines are our superiors and you want to imitate them, that I have to believe you not only don’t have the right answer but can never find it. You treat human beings on the black-box principle. Cue this reflex, that response ensues; cue another and get something different. There’s no room in your cosmos for what you call special talents.”

“Come, now.” Freeman gave a faint, gaunt smile. “You’re talking in terms at least two generations old. Have you deleted from your mind all awareness of how sophisticated our methodology has become since the 1960s?”

“And have you suppressed all perception of how it’s rigidified, like medieval theology, with your collective brilliance concentrated on finding means to abolish any view not in accord with yours? Don’t bother to answer that. I’m experiencing the reality of your black-box approach. You’re testing me to destruction, not as an individual but as a sample that may or may not match your idealized model of a person. If I don’t react as predicted, you’ll revise the model and try again. But you won’t care about me.”

“Sub specie aeternitatis,” Freeman said, smiling anew, “I find no evidence for believing that I matter any more than any other human being who ever existed or who ever will exist. Nor does any of them matter more than I do. We’re elements in a process that began in the dim past and will develop through who knows what kind of future.”

“What you say reinforces my favorite image of Tarnover: a rotting carcass, pullulating with indistinguishable maggots, whose sole purpose in life is to grab more of the dead flesh more quickly than their rivals.”

“Ah, yes. The conqueror worm. I find it curious that you should have turned out to be of a religious bent, given the cynicism with which you exploited the trappings of your minister’s role at Toledo.”

“But I’m not religious. Chiefly because the end point of religious faith is your type of blind credulity.”

“Excellent. A paradox. Resolve it for me.” Freeman leaned back, crossing his thin legs and setting his thin fingers tip to tip with elbows on the side of his chair.

“You believe that man is comprehensible to himself, or at any rate you act as though you do. Yet you refer constantly to processes that began back then and will continue for ever and ever amen. What you’re trying to do is step out of the flow of process, just as superstitious savages did—do!—by invoking divine forces not confined by human limitations. You give lip service to the process, but you won’t accept it. On the contrary, you strive to dominate it. And that can’t be done unless you stand outside it.”

“Hmm. You’re an atavism, aren’t you? You have the makings of a schoolman! But that doesn’t save you from being wrong. We are trying not to want to step out of the flow, because we’ve recognized the nature of the process and its inevitability. The best that can be hoped for is to direct it into the most tolerable channels. What we’re doing at Tarnover is possibly the most valuable service any small group ever performed for mankind at large. We’re diagnosing our social problems and then deliberately setting out to create the person who can solve them.”

“And how many problems have been solved to date?”

“We haven’t yet exterminated ourselves.”

“You claim credit for that? I knew you had gall, but this is fantastic! You could just as well argue that in the case of human beings it took the invention of nuclear weapons to trigger the life-saving response most species show when faced with the fangs and claws of a tougher rival.”

“That in fact appears to be true.”

“If you believed that you wouldn’t be working so hard to universalize the new conformity.”

“Is that a term you coined yourself?”

“No, I borrowed it from someone whose writings aren’t particularly loved at Tarnover: Angus Porter.”

“Well, it’s a resounding phrase. But does it mean anything?”

“I wouldn’t bother to answer except that it’s better to be talking in present time than sitting back inside my head while you interrogate my memory … because you know damned well what it means. Look at yourself. You’re part of it. It’s a century old. It began when for the first time people in a wealthy country started tailoring other cultures to their own lowest common denominator: people with money to spend who were afraid of strange food, who told the restaurateur to serve hamburgers instead of enchiladas or fish and chips instead of couscous, who wanted something pretty to hang on the wall at home and not what some local artist had sunk his heart and soul in, who found it too hot in Rio and too cold in Zermatt and insisted on going there anyhow.”

“We’re to be blamed because that’s how people reacted long before Tarnover was founded?” Freeman shook his head. “I remain unconvinced.”

“But this is the concept you started with, the one you’ve clung to! You walked straight into a trap with no way out. You wanted to develop a generalized model of mankind, and this was the handiest to build on: more general than pre-World War I European royalty despite the fact that that was genuinely cosmopolitan, and more homogeneous than the archetypal peasant culture, which is universal but individualized. What you’ve wound up with is a schema where the people who obey those ancient evolutionary principles you cite so freely—as for example by striking roots in one place that will last a lifetime—are regarded by their fellows as ‘rather odd.’ It won’t be long before they’re persecuted. And then how will you justify your claim that the message in the genes overrides consciously directed modern change?”

“Are you talking about the so-called economists, who won’t take advantage of the facilities our technology offers? More fool them; they choose to be stunted.”

“No, I’m talking about the people who are surrounded by such a plethora of opportunity they dither and lapse into anxiety neurosis. Friends and neighbors rally round to help them out, explain the marvels of today and show them how, and go away feeling virtuous. But if tomorrow they have to repeat the process, and the day after, and the day after that …? No, from the patronizing stage to the persecuting stage has always been a very short step.”

After a brief silence Freeman said, “But it’s easy to reconcile the views I really hold, as distinct from the distorted versions you’re offering. Mankind originated as a nomadic species, following game herds and moving from one pasture to another with the seasons. Mobility of similar order has been reintegrated into our culture, at least in the wealthy nations. Yet there are advantages to living in an urban society, like sanitation, easy communications, tolerably cheap transportation … And thanks to our ingenuity with computers, we haven’t had to sacrifice these conveniences.”

“One might as well claim that the tide which rubs pebbles smooth on a beach is doing the pebbles a service because being round is prettier than being jagged. It’s of no concern to a pebble what shape it is. But it’s very important to a person. And every surge of your tide is reducing the variety of shapes a human being can adopt.”

“Your extended metaphors do you credit,” Freeman said. “But I detect, and so do my monitors, that you’re straining after them like a man at a party who’s desperately pretending that he’s not quite drunk. Today’s session is due to end in a few minutes; I’ll cut it short and renew the interrogation in the morning.”

THE RIGHT-ON THING FOR THE WRONG-OFF REASON

The experience was exactly like riding in a car when the driver, seeing ahead a patch of bad road with a lot of potholes, tramps hard on the accelerator in preference to slowing down. There was a drumming sound, and certain landmarks beside the route were noticeable, but essentially it was a matter of being there then and subsequently here now.

Just about enough time was perceived as having elapsed for the passenger to realize he wouldn’t have traveled so fast on such a lousy bumpy bit of road … and ask himself why not, since it gave excellent results.

Then, very abruptly, it stopped.

“Where the hell have you brought me?”

Looking around a room with rough brown walls, an old-style spring bed, carpet on the floor which wasn’t even fitted, a view of sunset through broad shallow windows that distracted him before he could enumerate other objects like chairs and a table and so forth. They registered as belonging in the sort of junk store whose owner would label as antique anything older than himself.

“You poor shivver,” Kate said. She was there too. “You have one hell of a bad case. I asked you, did you think it was a good idea to head for Lap-of-the-Gods? And you said yes.”

He was sitting on a chair which happened to be near him. He closed his hands on its arms until his knuckles were almost white. With much effort he said, “Then I was crazy. I thought of coming to a town like this long ago and realized it was the first place they’d think of looking.”

Theoretically, for somone trying to mislay a previous identity, no better spot could be found on the continent than this, or some other of the settlements created by refugees from Northern California after the Great Bay Quake. Literally millions of traumatized fugitives had straggled southward. For years they survived in tents and shanties, dependent on federal handouts because they were too mentally disturbed to work for a living and in most cases afraid to enter a building with a solid roof for fear it would crash down and kill them. They were desperate for a sense of stability, and sought it in a thousand irrational cults. Confidence-tricksters and fake evangelists found them easy prey. Soon it was a tourist lure to visit their settlements on Sunday and watch the running battles between adherents of rival—but equally lunatic—beliefs. Insurance extra.

There had been nothing comparable in western civilization since the Lisbon Earthquake shook the foundations of Christianity across half of Europe in 1755.

Now some semblance of regular government was in effect and had been for a quarter-century. But the scars left by the quake were cicatrized into the names of the new cities: Insecurity, Precipice, Protempore, Waystation, Transience … and Lap-of-the-Gods.

Inevitably, because these were new cities in a nation that had lacked a frontier these hundred years, they had attracted the restless, the dissident, sometimes the criminal elements from elsewhere. Up-to-date maps showed them dotted like accidental inkblots from Monterey to San Diego and inland over a belt almost two hundred miles wide. They constituted a nation within a nation. Tourists could still come here. But most often they decided not to. It felt more like home in Istanbul.

“Sandy!” Sitting down in a chair facing him, Kate tapped his knee. “You’re out of it so don’t slip back. Talk! And this time make sense. What makes you so terrified of Tarnover?”

“If they catch me they’ll do what they meant to do in the first place. What I fled from.”

“That being—?”

“They’ll make me over in a version of myself I don’t approve.”

“That happens to everybody all the time. The lucky ones win, the others suffer. There’s something deeper. Something worse.”

He gave a weary nod. “Yes, there is. My conviction that if they get the chance to try they’ll do it, and I won’t have a hope in hell of fighting back.”

There was a dull silence. At last Kate nodded, her face grave.

“I got there. You’d know what was being done to you. And later you’d be fascinated by the tape of your reactions.”

With a humorless laugh he said, “I think you lie about your age. Nobody could be that cynical so young. Of course you’re right.”

Another pause, this time full of gray depression. She broke it by saying, “I wish you’d been in a fit state to talk before we left KC. You must have been just going through the motions. But never mind. I think we came to a right place. If you’ve been avoiding towns like Lap-of-the-Gods for—what is it?—six years, then they won’t immediately start combing California for you.”

It was amazing how calmly he took that, he thought. To hear his most precious secret mentioned in passing … Above all, it was nearly beyond belief that someone finally was on his side.

Hence the calmness? Very probably.

“Are we in a hotel?” he inquired.

“Sort of. They call it an open lodge. You get a room and then fend for yourself. There’s a kitchen through there”—a vague gesture toward the door of the bedroom—“and there’s no limit on how long you can stay. Nor any questions asked when you check in, luckily.”

“You used your code?”

“Did you expect me to use yours? I have lots of credit. I’m not exactly an economist, but I’m blessed with simple tastes.”

“In that case the croakers will come calling any moment.”

“Shit on that. You’re thinking in contemporary terms. Check into a hotel, ten seconds later the fact’s on file at Canaveral, right? Not here, Sandy. They still process credit by hand. It could be a week before I’m debbed for this room.”

Hope he had almost ceased to believe in burgeoned in his eyes. “Are you sure?”

“Hell, no. Today could be the day the desk clerk makes up his bills. All I’m saying is it isn’t automatic. You know about this town, don’t you?”

“I know about so many paid-avoidance areas …” He rubbed his forehead with the heel of his hand. “Is this one that’s settled down to about a 1960 level?”

“I guess that would be fairly close. I haven’t been here before, though I have been to Protempore, and I’m told the two are comparable. That’s why I hit on it. I didn’t want to take you anywhere I might be recognized.”

She leaned toward him. “Now let’s concentrate, shall we? The dobers aren’t howling at the door, and it’s long past time for me to learn the rest of your history. You seem to have spent a long while at Tarnover. Think you’re fettered by a posthypnotic?”

He drew a deep breath. “No. I wondered about that myself and concluded that I can’t be. Hypnosis isn’t one of their basic tools. And if it were, the command would have been activated long ago, when I first quit the place. Of course, by now they may well use posthypnotics to stop others copying my example. … But what I’m hamstrung by is in myself.”

Kate bit her lower lip with small and very white teeth. She said at length, “Funny. Meeting those grads from Tarnover that I mentioned, I felt sure they’d been treated with some quasi-hypnotic technique. They make my skin crawl, you know. They give the impression that they’ve learned everything, they could never possibly be wrong. Kind of inhuman. So my assumption has always been that Tarnover is some sort of behavioral-intensive education center for bright deprived kids, where they use extreme forms of stimulation as an inducement to learn. Zero-distraction environments—drugs, maybe—I don’t know.”

He picked on one key word. “You said … deprived?”

“Mm-hm.” With a nod. “I noticed that at once. Either they were orphaned, or they made no bones about hating their parents and family. It gave them a curious solidarity. Almost like White House aides. Or maybe more like the Jesus bit: ‘Who is my father and my mother?’ ” She spread her hands.

“When did you first hear about Tarnover?”

“Oh, it was news when I graduated from high school and went to UMKC four years ago. There was no publicity, at least not the drums-and-trumpets type. More kind of, ‘We got the answer to Akadiemgorodok—we think.’ Low-key stuff.”

“Shit, but they’re clever!” he said savagely. “If I didn’t hate them I’d have to admire them.”

“What?”

“It’s the ideal compromise. You just described what they obviously want the world to think about Tarnover; how did you put it? An intensive education center for bright deprived kids? Very admirable!”

“And it isn’t?” Her sharp eyes rested on his face like sword points.

“No. It’s where they’re breeding the elite to run the continent.”

“I wish,” she said, “I didn’t suspect you of being literal.”

“Me too! But … Look, you’re in power. Think what’s the most dangerous thing about a kid with no parents and a high IQ.”

She stared at him for a long moment, then suggested, “He won’t look at things the way the men in charge do. But he could be more right than they are.”

He slapped his thigh in delight. “Kate, you impress the hell out of me! You’ve hit on it. Who are the people recruited to Tarnover and Crediton Hill and the rest of the secret centers? Why, those who might invent sides of their own if the government doesn’t enroll them on its side while they’re still tractable. Yes, yes! But on top of that— Say, did you check this room for bugs?”

The exclamation was overdue; what had become of his customary caution? He was half out of his chair before she said with a trace of scorn, “Of course I did! And I have a damned good bug detector. One of my boyfriends built it for me. He’s a post-grad in the UMKC school of industrial espionage. So relax and keep talking.”

He sank back in relief and mopped his forehead.

“You said these Tarnover trainees you’ve met are mostly in the Behavioral Sciences Lab. Any of them in biology?”

“I met a couple but not at UMKC. Over the state line in Lawrence. Or they were. I loathed them and didn’t keep in touch.”

“Did they ever mention the pride and joy of Tarnover—the crippled kids they build with genius IQ?”

“What?”

“I met the first of them, who was called Miranda. Of course she was not a genius, so they counted it small loss when she died at four. But techniques have improved. The last example I heard about before I I quit still couldn’t walk, or even eat, but she could use a computer remote with the best of us and sometimes she was quicker than her teachers. They specialize in girls, naturally. Men, embryonically speaking, are imperfect women, as you know.”

There was never much color in Kate’s face. In the next few seconds what little there was drained away, leaving the flesh of her forehead and cheeks as pale as candlewax.

In a tight, thin voice she said, “Give me the details. There must be a lot more to it than that.”

He complied. When he had recited the full story, she shook her head with an incredulous expression.

“But they must be insane. We need a rest from ultrarapid change, not an extra dose of it. Half the population has given up trying to cope, and the other is punch-drunk without knowing it.”

“Sweedack,” he said dully. “But of course their defense is that whether or not it’s done here, it’s bound to be done somewhere by somebody, so …” An empty shrug.

“That’s okay. Maybe the people who come along second will profit from our example; maybe they won’t repeat all our mistakes. But … Don’t the people at Tarnover realize they could reduce our society to hysterics?”

“Apparently not. It’s a prime example of Porter’s Law, isn’t it? They’ve carried over the attitudes of the arms race into the age of the brain race. They’re trying to multiply incommensurables. You must have heard that applying minimax strategy to the question of rearmament invariably results in the conclusion that you must rearm. And their spiritual ancestors kept right on doing so even after H-bombs had written a factor of infinity into the equation of military power. They sought security by piling up more and more irrelevant weapons. At Tarnover today they’re making the analogous error. They claim to be hunting for the genetic element of wisdom, and I’m sure most of them believe that’s what they’re really doing. They aren’t, of course. What they’re on the track of is the 200-plus IQ. And intelligence and wisdom aren’t the same.”

He clenched his fists. “The prospect terrifies me! They must be stopped. Somehow and at any cost. But I’ve been struggling for six years to think of a way, hoping that the thirty million they lavished on me won’t go completely to waste, and I haven’t achieved one goddamned thing!”

“Are you held back by fear of being—well, punished?”

He started. “You’re sharp, aren’t you? I guess I am!”

“Just for opting out?”

“Oh, I’ve committed a slew of federal crimes. Used false identities, obtained a notary’s seal by fraud, entered forged data in the continental net … Just take it for granted they could find plenty of reasons for me to go to jail.”

“I’m surprised they let you get away in the first place.”

“But they don’t compel where they can persuade. They’re not stupid. They’re aware that one volunteer working his guts out on their behalf is worth a score of reluctant conscripts.”

Gazing past him into nowhere, she said, “I see. Thinking you were trustworthy, they gave you too much rope. So when you did escape, what did you do?”

He summarized his careers.

“Hm! If nothing else, you took in a broad cross-section of society. What made you settle for a post at G2S after all that?”

“I needed to gain access to some restricted areas of the net. In particular I had to find out whether my code was still valid. Which it was. But now that they’re closing on my identity at KC it’s high time I made one last use of it and rewrote myself again. It costs, of course, but I have some won Delphi tickets to collect on, and I’m sure I can adopt a well-paid profession for the time being. Don’t they go big for mystical things out here? I can run computerized horoscopes, and I can offer gene counseling—I think you can do that in California without a state license—and … Oh, anything that involves use of a computer terminal.”

She gave him a level look.

“But you’re in a paid-avoidance area,” she said.

“Hell, so I am!” Suddenly he felt very much alone, unspeakably vulnerable. “Does the avoidance go deep? I mean even if you can’t use any public phone to tap the net, do they forcibly exclude computers?”

“No, but you have to make special application to get time. And there’s more cash in circulation than anywhere else on the continent, and veephone service is restricted: you can’t dial out to the rest of the country, you have to cable and ask to be called back. Things like that.”

“But if I can’t rewrite myself, what am I going to do?” He was on his feet, shaking.

“Sandy!” She rose also, confronting him with a glare. “Have you never tried to outface the enemy?”

“What?” He blinked at her.

“I get the impression that every time one of your schemes went wrong, you abandoned it—and the identity that went with it—and switched to something else. Maybe that’s why you’ve always failed. You’ve relied on this trick talent of yours to bail you out of trouble instead of seeing through what you started. The overload you’ve suffered today ought to be a warning to you. There’s a limit to the number of times you can revise your personality. There’s a limit to the load you can pile on your powers of reasoning. Your body just told you, loud and clear, you’ve gone too far at last.”

“Oh, shit …” His voice was full of misery. “In principle I’m certain you’re right. But is there any alternative?”

“Sure I have an alternative. One of the best things about a paid-avoidance area is you can still get manual cooking. I don’t know what it’s like here, but at Protempore it was delicious. We go find a good restaurant and a jug of wine.”

FENCED BUT NOT FOILED

Inter alia the Handbook of the National Association of Players at the Game of Fencing states:

The game may be played manually or electronically.

The field shall consist of 101 parallel equidistant lines coded AA, AB, AC … BA, BB, BC … to EA (omitting the letter I), crossed at 90° by 71 parallel equidistant lines 01 to 71.

The object is to enclose with triangles a greater number of coordinate points than the opponent.

The players shall toss or draw for red or blue; red begins.

At each turn each player shall claim two points, one by visibly marking it in the field, the other by entering its coordinates in a list concealed from the opponent (but subject to scrutiny by a referee in match play).

After at least 10 points (5 red, 5 blue) have been visibly claimed, having claimed his visible point for that turn either player may forego the option of claiming a concealed point and attempt to enclose a triangle by connecting three of his visibly claimed points. Prior to doing so he must require the opponent to enter his concealed points in the field. He may then enclose any triangle that does not include a point claimed by the opponent. A point claimed in a concealed list, which proves on inspection to have been claimed visibly by the opponent, shall be deleted from the concealed list. A triangle may enclose a point claimed by the same color. A point once enclosed may not be claimed. If a player claims such a point in error he shall forfeit both the visible and the concealed point due on that turn.

If a player finds, when the opponent’s concealed points are entered in the field, he can enclose no valid triangle, he shall at once enter all his own concealed points, after which play shall proceed normally.

All triangles must have sides at least 2 units long, i.e. two adjacent coordinates cannot serve as apices of the same triangle, though they may serve as apices of two triangles of the same or different colors. No coordinate may serve as the apex of more than one triangle. No triangle may enclose a point enclosed by another triangle. A coordinate claimed by the opponent which lies on a horizontal or vertical line between apices of a proposed triangle shall be deemed included and renders the triangle invalid. A coordinate claimed by the opponent which lies on a true diagonal (45°) between apices of a proposed triangle shall be deemed excluded.

Scores shall be calculated in terms of coordinate points enclosed by valid triangles. An approved device shall be employed such that as each triangle is validly enclosed its apices may be entered into the memory store of the device and upon entry of the third apex the device shall unambiguously display the number of points enclosed. It shall be the responsibility of the player to keep accurate record of his cumulative score, which he shall not conceal from the opponent, except in matches played for stake money or on which there has been wagering or by mutual agreement of the players, when the cumulative score may be kept by a referee or electronically or mechanically, but in such cases there shall be no grounds for appeal by either player against the score shown at the conclusion or at any stage of the game.

It is customary but not obligatory for any game in which one player’s score exceeds that of the other by 100 points to be regarded as lost and won.

METONYMIA

According to the instrument display the metabolic level of the subject remained satisfactory; however, his voice was weakening and his reaction times were slowing. It was becoming necessary to update him from regressed mode at ever-shorter intervals. Very probably this was due to the low-stimulus environment, excessively low for someone whose ability to tolerate rapid and extreme change had been graphically documented over the past several weeks. Accordingly Freeman indented for some equipment to ameliorate the situation: a large projection-type three-vee screen, an electrotoner and a personifactor which would give the illusion of one, two or three other people watching.

Waiting for the new machinery to be delivered, though, he perforce had to continue in the former manner, conversing with the subject in present time.

“You’re a good fencing player, I believe.”

“Care for a game to break the monotony?” A ghost of old defiance tinted the words.

“I’m a poor player myself; it would be a mismatch. But why did fencing appeal to you rather than, say, go, or even chess?”

“Chess has been automated,” was the prompt reply. “How long is it since a world champion has done without computer assistance?”

“I see. Yes, I understand nobody has yet written a competent fencing program. Did you try it? You had adequate capacity.”

“Oh, using a program to play Chess is work. Games are for fun. I guess I could have spoiled fencing, if I’d spent a year or two on the job. I didn’t want to.”

“You wanted to retain it as a nondeterminate analogy of your own predicament, because of its overtones of captivity, enclosure, secure ground and the like—is that it?”

“Think of it in any way you choose. I say the hell with it. One of the worst things wrong with people like you is inability to enjoy themselves. You don’t like the idea that there are processes that can’t be analyzed. You’re the lineal descendant, on the sociological side of the tree, of the researchers who pithed cats and dogs because even their personalities were too complex for comfort. Which is fine for studying synapse formation but no damned good for studying cats.”

“You’re a holist.”

“I might have guessed that sooner or later you’d turn that word into an insult.”

“On the contrary. Having studied, as you rightly say, the separate components of the nervous system, we finally feel we’re equipped to attack their interaction. We declined to accept personality as a datum. Your attitude resembles that of a man content to gaze at a river without being interested in the springs and the watershed and the seasonal variations in rainfall and the silt it’s carrying along.”

“I notice you make no mention of fish in the river. Nor of taking a drink from it.”

“Will watching from the bank inform you why there are no fish this year?”

“Will counting the liters-per-minute tell you why it’s beautiful?”

Freeman sighed. “Always we reach the same sort of deadlock, don’t we? I regard your attitude as complementary to mine. You on the other hand deny that mine has any validity. Impasse.”

“Wrong. Or at best only half right. Your problem’s this: you want to file my attitude as a subcategory of yours, and it doesn’t work because the whole can’t be included in the part.”

GAME FOR ANYTHING

Venturing out on the streets of Lap-of-the-Gods, he felt a little like someone raised in an inhibited family braving a naturist beach, but the sensation did not last long. This was a surprisingly attractive little town. The architecture was miscellaneous because it had been thrown together in a hurry, yet the urgency had resulted in a basic unity enhanced now by reddish evening sunlight.

The sidewalks were crowded, the roadways not. The only vehicles they saw were bicycles and electric buses. There were many trees, bushes and flowering shrubs. Most of the people seemed to care little about dress; they wore uninspiring garments in blue, buff and tan, and some were shabby. But they smiled a lot and said hello to someone—even to himself and Kate, strangers—every half-dozen paces.

Shortly they came across a restaurant modeled on a Greek taverna, with tables on a terrace under a roof made of vines trained along poles and wires. Three or four games of fencing were in progress, each watched by a group of intent kibitzers.

“That’s an idea,” he muttered to Kate, halting. “Maybe I could pick up a bit of credit if they play for money.”

“Are you a good player? Sorry. Stupid question. But I’m told competition here is stiff.”

“But they’re playing manually. Look!”

“Does that have to make them poor players?”

He gazed at her for a long moment. Eventually he said, “Know something? I think you’re good for me.”

“So I should hope,” she answered tartly, and pulled the same face he’d seen at their first meeting, wrinkling her nose and raising her upper lip so her front teeth showed like a rabbit’s. “Moreover I knew you liked me before you knew it, which is kind of rare and to be treasured. Come on, let’s add fencing hustler to your list of occupations.”

They found a table where they could watch the play while eating pizza and sipping a rough local wine, and about the time they finished their meal one of the nearest players realized he had just allowed his opponent to notch up the coveted hundred-point margin with a single slender triangle running almost the full width of the field. Swearing at his own incompetence, he resigned and strode away fuming.

The winner, a fat bald once-fair man in a faded pink singlet, complained to anybody who cared to listen, “But he didn’t have to be such a sore loser, did he? I mean did he?” Appealing to Kate, who smiled and shook her head.

“And I can spare at least another hour before I have to go, and—Hey, would either of you care to take over? I noticed you were watching.”

The tone and manner were unmistakable. Here was a full-timer, counterpart of those chess hustlers who used to sit around anonymously pretending to be no good until someone was fool enough to stake money on a game.

Well, it’s a way in. …

“Sure I’ll play you, and be glad to. This is Kate, by the way, and I’m—” He hoped the hesitation would go unremarked; one could convert to Alexander and since Kate was accustomed … “I’m Sandy.”

“I’m Hank. Sit down. Want to think about odds? I’m kind of competent, as you may have gathered.” The bald man tailed the words with a toothy grin.

“Let’s play level, argue about odds when we have grounds for debate.”

“Fine, fine! Would you care to let—uh—a little cash ride on the outcome?” A glint of greed lighted Hank’s eyes.

“Cash? Uh … Well, we’re fresh into town, so you’d have to take scrip, but if that’s okay—? Good. Shall we say a hundred?”

“By all means,” Hank purred, and rubbed his hands under the table. “And I think we ought to play the first one or two games blitz-tempo.”

The first game aborted almost at once, a not uncommon happening. Attempting on successive turns to triangulate, both found it was impossible, and according to custom rather than rule agreed to try again. The second game was close and Hank lost. The third was even closer and he still lost, and the expiry of his hour gave him an excuse to depart in annoyance, two hundred the poorer. By then many more customers had arrived, some to play—a dozen games were now in progress—and some preferring to kibitz and assess a stranger’s form. One of the newcomers, a plump girl carrying a baby, challenged the victor and went down in twelve turns. Two of the other watchers, a thin young black and a thin elderly white, whistled loudly, and the latter promptly took the girl’s place.

What is it that feels so weird about this evening … ? Got it. I’ll be damned. I’m not playing Lazarus’s game, or even Sandy Locke’s; I’m playing mine, and I’m far better than I ever dreamed!

The sensation was giddying. He seemed to be walking up steps inside his head until he reached a place where there was nothing but pure white light, and it showed him as plainly as though he were telepathic what his opponent was planning. Potential triangles outlined themselves on the board as though their sides were neon bars. The elderly man succumbed in twenty-eight turns, not beaten but content to resign on a margin of fifty points he was unlikely to make up, and ceded his place to the thin young black saying, “Morris, I think we finally found someone who can give you a hard time.”

Faint warning bells began to sound at that stage, but he was having too much fun to pay attention.

The newcomer was good. He obtained a margin of twenty on the first triangulation and concentrated on preserving it. He did so for another six turns, growing more and more smug. But on the fifteenth turn his smugness vanished. He had tried another triangulation, and when the concealed points were entered there was nothing valid, and he had to post his own concealed list, and on the next turn found himself cut out of an entire corner worth ninety points. His face turned sour and he scowled at the score machine as though suspecting it of lying. Then he gathered his resources in an effort to regain the lost lead.

He failed. The game went to its bitter end and left him fourteen down. Whereupon he thrust his way through the bystanders—by now a couple of dozen strong—and stormed off, slamming fist into palm in impotent fury.

“I’ll be damned,” said the elderly man. “Well, well! Look—uh—Sandy, I didn’t make too good a showing against you, but believe it or not I’m the area secretary of the Fencing Association, and if you can use a light-pen and screen as well as you use a manual board …!” Beaming, he made an all-embracing gesture. “I take it you have club qualifications where you come from? If you intend to shift your residential commitment to Lap-of-the-Gods, I can predict who’ll win the winter championships. You and Morris together would make an unstoppable—”

“You mean that was Morris Fagin?”

All around the group of onlookers there were puzzled reactions: this poker claims he didn’t know?

“Sandy,” Kate murmured in the nick of time, “it’s getting late. Even later for us than it is for these nice people.”

“I—uh … Yes, you’re right. Excuse us, friends; we came a long way today.” He rose, collecting the grimy unfamiliar bills which had accumulated on the corner of the table. It had been years since he handled this much of the generalized scrip known as paper money; at the church in Toledo it had been collected and counted automatically. For most people cash payments stopped at the number of dollar coins you would drop in a pocket without noticing their weight.

“I’m flattered,” he said to the elderly man. “But you’ll have to let me think about it. We may be only passing through. We have no plans to settle here.”

He seized Kate’s arm and hurried her away, terribly aware of the sensation he had caused. He could hear his feat being recounted already along the mouth-to-mouth circuit.

As they were undressing he said miserably, “I sabotaged that one, didn’t I?”

Admitting the blunder was novel to him. The experience was just as unpleasant as he had imagined it would be. But in memory echoed Kate’s description of the graduates from Tarnover: convinced they were incapable of error.

That’s not human. That’s mechanical. It’s machines whose view of the world is so circumscribed they go right on doing the only thing they can although it’s wrong.

“I’m afraid so.” Her tone was matter-of-fact, devoid of criticism. “Not that you could help it. But to be spotted by an area secretary of the Fencing Association and then to beat the incumbent West Coast champion—yes, that is apt to provoke comment. I’m sorry; I didn’t realize you hadn’t recognized Fagin.”

“You knew who he was?” In the middle of shedding his pants he stood ridiculous, one leg in and the other out. “So why the hell didn’t you warn me?”

“Do me a favor? Before you pick your first quarrel with me, get a little better acquainted. Then you can do it with justification.”

He had been on the verge of anger. The inclination vanished. He completed undressing, as did she, and then took her in his arms.

“I like you very much as a person,” he said, and bestowed a grave kiss on her forehead. “I think I’m going to like you just as much as a woman.”

“I hope so,” she answered with equal formality. “We may have to go a lot of places together.”

He drew back to full stretch, hands on her shoulders.

“Where next? What next?”

As rare in his life as admitting mistakes was asking for advice. It too was disturbing. But it would have to become a habit if he was to stay afloat.

She shook her head. “Think about that in the morning. It has to be somewhere else, that’s definite. But this town is already halfway right … No, too much has happened today. Let’s overload it and sleep it out and worry about decisions afterwards.”

With abrupt tigerish violence, as though she had borrowed from Bagheera, she clamped her arms around him and sank her sharp tongue—sharp as her gaze—between his lips.

A LOAD OF CRYSTAL BALLS

In the twentieth century one did not have to be a pontificating pundit to predict that success would breed success and the nations that first were lucky enough to combine massive material resources with advanced knowhow would be those where social change would accelerate until it approximated the limit of what human beings can endure. By 2010, in the wealthiest countries, a classic category of mental patient was composed of boys and girls in their late teens who had come back for a first vacation from college to discover that “home” was unrecognizable, either because the parents had moved into a new framework, changed jobs and cities, or simply because—as they’d done a dozen times before—they had refurnished and redecorated … without realizing they were opening a door to what came to be termed the “final straw syndrome.”

It was also not difficult to forecast that no matter how well endowed they were with material resources those countries where the Industrial Revolution arrived late would change proportionately more slowly. After all, the rich get richer and the poor get children. Which is okay so long as lots of them starve in infancy.

What many otherwise well-informed people apparently preferred to overlook was the phenomenon baptized by Angus Porter “the beetle and wedge,” which retained its name long after even the poor nations found it uneconomic to split logs with a hammer and a chunk of steel. Even if your circular saws were pedal-driven, they were much less wasteful. Moreover, you could dictate a neat dividing line.

Beetling forward at full pelt split society. Some did their utmost to head the other way. A great many more decided to go sideways. And some simply dug in their heels and stayed put. The resultant cracks were unpredictable.

One and only one thing preserved even the illusion of national integrity. The gossamer strands of the data-net proved amazingly strong.

Unfortunately nothing came along to reinforce them.

People drew comfort from knowing there were certain objects near at hand, in the U.S.A. or the Soviet Union or Sweden or New Zealand, of which they could boast, “This is the biggest/longest/fastest frammistan on Earth!” Alas, however, tomorrow it might not be. Paradoxically, therefore, they derived even more emotional sustenance from being able to say, “This is the most primitive potrzebie, you know, still at work in any industrialized country!”

It was so precious to be able to connect with the calmer, stabler past.

The cracks spread. From national level they reached provincial level, from provincial they reached municipal, and there they met cracks going the other way, which had begun in the privacy of the family.

“We sweated blood to put the son-of-a-bitch through college! He ought to be paying us back, not sunning his ass in New Mexico!”

(For New Mexico read, at will, the Black Sea resort of Varna—or the beaches of Quemoy and Matsu where young Chinese by the thousand were content to pass their time practicing calligraphy, playing fan-tan, and smoking opium—or any of fifty other locations where la dolce-far-niente vita had spilled the contents of its seine-net after trawling through a nation, an ethnic grouping, or in the case of India a subcontinent. Sri Lanka had had no government to speak of for a generation.)

As much as anything else, it was the sense of exploitable talent going to waste that prompted the establishment of genius centers like Tarnover, funded on the scale previously reserved to weaponry. It was beyond the comprehension of those raised in traditional patterns of thinking that resources of whatever kind should not be channeled and exploited to dynamize ever-faster growth.

Secret, these centers—like the unseen points claimed in a fencing field—provoked consequences that now and then turned out to be disastrous.

SCENT REFUGE

Even after two solid days in his company Ina Grierson couldn’t get over how closely the man from Tarnover resembled Baron Samedi—very dark, very thin, head like a skull overlaid with parchment—so that one constantly expected a black tribe to march in and wreck the place. Some of his time had been devoted to Dolores van Bright, naturally, but she had admitted right away her attempt to help Sandy Locke by warning him there’d be an extra member of the interview board, and after that not even the influence of G2S was going to keep her out of jail.

But it was Ina the man from Tarnover was chiefly concerned to question. Sandy Locke had been hired on her say-so, whence the rest followed logically.

She grew terribly tired of saying over and over to the thin black man (whose name was Paul T. Freeman, but maybe only for the purposes of this assignment), “Of course I go to bed with men I know nothing about! If I only went to bed with men I do know about I’d never get any sex, would I? They all turn out to be bastards in the end.”

Late on the afternoon of the second day of questioning the subject of Kate arose. Ina claimed to be unaware that her daughter had left the city, and the skull-faced man was obliged to believe her, since she had had no chance to go home and check her mail-store reel. Moreover, the girls in the apartment below Kate’s, currently looking after Bagheera, insisted she had given no least hint in advance of her intention to travel.

Still, she’d done so. Gone west, and what was more with a companion. Very likely one of her fellow students, of course; many of her friends hailed from California. Besides, she’d talked freely about “Sandy Locke” to her downstairs neighbors, and called him plastic, artificial, and other derogatory terms. Her mother confirmed that she had said the same on various occasions both public and private.

There being no trace of Haflinger, however, and no other potential clue to his whereabouts, and no recent record of Kate’s code being used—which meant she must have gone to a paid-avoidance area—Freeman, who was a thorough person, set the wheels in motion, and was rewarded by being able to advise the FBI that lodging for two people had been debbed against Kate Lilleberg in Lap-of-the-Gods.

Very interesting. Very interesting indeed.

TODAY’S SPECIAL

He woke to alarm, recalling his gaffe of yesterday and along with that a great many details he’d have preferred to remain ignorant of concerning the habits of people in paid-avoidance areas. Their federal grants meant that few of them had to work at full-time jobs; they supplemented their frugal allowance by providing services—he thought of the restaurants where there were manual chefs and the food was brought by waiters and waitresses—or making handicrafts. Tourism in towns like this, however, was on the decline, as though people no longer cared to recall that this, the richest nation in history, had been unable to transcend a mere earthquake, so they spent much of their time in gossip. And what right now would offer a more interesting subject than the poker who blew out of nowhere and beat the local fencing champion?

“Sooner or later you’re going to have to learn to live with one inescapable fact about yourself,” Kate said over her shoulder as she sat brushing her hair before the room’s one lighted mirror. Listening, he curled his fingers. The color of that hair might be nothing out of the ordinary, but its texture was superb. His fingertips remembered it, independently of his mind.

“What?”

“You’re a very special person. Why else would they have recruited you to Tarnover? Wherever you go you’re bound to attract attention.”

“I daren’t!”

“You can’t help it.” She laid aside her brush and swiveled to face him; he was sitting glum on the edge of the bed.

“Consider,” she went on. “Would the people at G2S have offered to perm you if they didn’t think you were special even disguised as Sandy Locke? And—and I realized you were special, too.”

“You,” he grunted, “just have more insight than is good for you.”

“You mean: more than is good for you.”

“I guess so.” Now at last he rose to his feet, imagining he could hear his joints creak. To be this frustrated must, he thought, resemble the plight of being old: clearly recalling what it was like to act voluntarily and enjoy life as it came, now trapped in a frame that forbade anything except slow cautious movements and a diet prescribed by doctors.

“I don’t want to go through life wearing fetters,” he said abruptly.

“Tarnover talking!” she snapped.

“What?”

“Wear fetters? Wear fetters? I never heard such garbage. Has there ever been a time in the whole of history when someone with amazing exceptional gifts could be deluded into thinking they’re a handicap?”

“Sure,” he said at once. “How about conscripts who would rather maim themselves than obey a government order to go fight somebody they never met? Their gifts may have been no more than youth and health, but they were gifts.”

“That’s not being deluded. That’s being compelled. A recruiting sergeant with a gun on his hip—”

“Same thing! They’ve merely brought it into finer focus!”

There was a brief electric silence. At length she sighed.

“I give in. I have no right to argue with you about Tarnover—you’ve been there and I haven’t. And in any case it’s too early for a row. Go get showered and shaved, and then we’ll find some breakfast and talk about where we’re going next.”

IS THIS YOU?

Did you have trouble last night in dropping off to sleep?

Even though you were tired in spite of doing nothing to exhaust yourself?

Did you hear your heart? Did it break its normal rhythm?

Do you suffer with digestive upsets? Get a feeling that your gullet has been tied in a knot behind your ribs?

Are you already angry because this advertisement hits the nail on your head?

Then come to Calm Springs before you kill somebody or go insane!

COUNT A BLAST

“You’re beginning to be disturbed by me,” the dry hoarse voice announced.

Elbows on chair arms as usual, Freeman set his fingertips together. “How so?” he parried.

“For one thing, you’ve taken to talking to me in present-time mode for the last three-hour session every day.”

“You should be grateful for small mercies. Our prognostications show it would be risky to maintain you in regressed mode.”

“Half the truth. The rest can be found in your omission to use that expensive three-vee setup you had installed. You realized that I thrive on high levels of stimulus. But you’re groping your way toward my lower threshold. You don’t want me to start functioning at peak efficiency. You think that even pinned down like a butterfly on a board I may still be dangerous.”

“I don’t think of my fellow men as dangerous. I think of them as capable of occasional dangerous mistakes.”

“You include yourself?”

“I remain constantly alert for the possibility.”

“Being on guard like that itself constitutes aberrant behavior.”

“How can you say that? So long as you were fully on guard we failed to catch you. In terms of your purposes that wasn’t aberrant; it was functional. In the end, however … Well, here you are.”

“Yes, here I am. Having learned a lesson you’re incapable of learning.”

“Much good may it bring you.” Freeman leaned back. “You know, last night I was thinking over a new approach—a new argument which may penetrate your obstinacy. Consider this. You speak of us at Tarnover as though we’re engaged in a brutal arbitrary attempt to ensure that the best minds of the current generation get inducted into government service. Not at all. We are simply the top end of a series of cultural subgroupings that evolved of their own accord during the second half of last century. Few of us are equipped to cope with the complexity and dazzling variety of twenty-first-century existence. We prefer to identify with small, easily isolable fractions of the total culture. But just as some people can handle only a restricted range of stimuli, and prefer to head for a mountain commune or a paid-avoidance area or even emigrate to an underdeveloped country, so some correspondingly not only cope well but actually require immensely strong stimuli to provoke them into functioning at optimum. We have a wider range of life-style choices today than ever before. The question of administration has been rendered infinitely more difficult precisely because we have such breadth of choice. Who’s to manage this multiplex society? Must the lot not fall to those who flourish when dealing with complicated situations? Would you rather that people who demonstrably can’t organize their own lives were permitted to run those of their fellow citizens?”

“A conventional elitist argument. From you I’d have expected better.”

“Elitist? Nonsense. I’d expected better from you. The word you’re looking for is ‘aesthetic.’ An oligarchy devoted by simple personal preference to the search for artistic gratification in government—that’s what we’re after. And it would be rather a good system, don’t you think?”

“Provided you were in the top group. Can you visualize yourself in the lower echelons, a person who obeys instead of issuing orders?”

‘Oh, yes. That’s why I work at Tarnover. I hope that perhaps within my lifetime there will appear people so skilled in dealing with modern society that I and others like me can step out of their way with a clear conscience. In a sense I want to work myself out of a job as fast as possible.”

“Resigning control to crippled kids?”

Freeman sighed. “Oh, you’re obsessed with those laboratory-gestated children! Maybe it will relieve your mind to hear that the latest batch—six of them—are all physically whole and run and jump and feed and dress themselves! If you met them by chance you couldn’t tell them from ordinary kids.”

“So why bother to tell me about them? All that’s registered in my mind is that they may look like ordinary kids … but they never will be ordinary kids.”

“You have a positive gift for twisting things. No matter what I say to you—”

“I find a means of casting a different light on it. Let me do just that to what you’ve been saying. You, and the others you mentioned, acknowledge you’re imperfect. So you’re looking for superior successors. Very well: give me grounds for believing that they won’t just be projections on a larger scale of your admittedly imperfect vision.”

“I can’t. Only results that speak for themselves can do that.”

“What results do you have to date? You’ve sunk a lot of time and money in the scheme.”

“Oh, several. One or two may impress even a skeptic.”

“The kids that look like any other kids?”

“No, no. Healthy adults like yourself capable of doing things that have never been done before, such as writing a complete new identity into the data-net over a regular veephone. Bear in mind that before trying to invent new talents we decided to look for those that had been undervalued. The odds there were in our favor. We have records from the past—descriptions of lightning calculators, musicians capable of improvising without a wrong note for hours on end, mnemonists who commited whole books to memory by reading them through once … Oh, there are examples in every field of human endeavor from strategy to scrimshaw. With these for guidelines, we’re trying to generate conditions in which corresponding modern talents can flourish.”

He shifted casually in his chair; he sounded more confident by the minute.

“Our commonest current form of mental disorder is personality shock. We have an efficient way to treat it without machinery or drugs. We allow the sufferer to do something he long ago wanted to do and lacked either the courage or the opportunity to fit into his life. Do you deny the claim?”

“Of course not. This continent is littered coast to coast with people who were compelled to study business administration when they should have been painting murals or practicing the fiddle or digging a truck garden, and finally got their chance when it was twenty years too late to lead them anywhere.”

“Except back to a sense of solid identity,” Freeman murmured.

“In the case of the lucky few. But yes, okay.”

“Then let me lay this on you. If you hadn’t met Miranda—if you hadn’t found out that our suspicions concerning the genetic component of personality were being verified by experiment—would you have deserted from Tarnover?”

“I think sooner or later I’d have quit anyhow. The attitude that can lead to using crippled children as experimental material would have disconnected me.”

“You spin like a weather vane. You’ve said, or implied, repeatedly that at Tarnover we’re conditioning people not to rebel. You can’t maintain at the same time that what we’re doing would have encouraged you to rebel.”

Freeman gave his skull-like grin and rose, stretching his cramped limbs.

“Our methods are being tested in the only available lab: society at large. So far they show excellent results. Instead of condemning them out of hand you should reflect on how much worse the alternatives are. After what you underwent last summer, you of all people should appreciate what I mean. In the morning we’ll rerun the relevant memories and see if they help to straighten you.”

CLIFFHANGER

They had to continue in a paid-avoidance zone. So, to supplement recollection, they bought a four-year-old tourist guide alleged to contain full details of all the post-quake settlements. Most rated four or even six pages of text, plus as many color pictures. Precipice was dismissed in half a page. On the fold-out map included with the booklet only one road—and that a poor one—was shown passing through it, from Quemadura in the south to Protempore thirty miles northwest, plus tracks for an electric railcar service whose schedule was described as irregular. The towns were graded according to what modern facilities could be found there; Precipice came bottom of the list. Among the things Precipicians didn’t like might be cited the data-net, veephones, surface vehicles not running on tracks, heavier-than-air craft (though they tolerated helium and hot-air dirigibles), modern merchandising methods and the federal government. This last could be deduced from the datum that they had compounded to pay a flat-rate tax per year instead of income tax, though the sum appeared absurdly high considering there was no industry bar handicrafts (not available to wholesalers).

“It sounds like some sort of Amish setup,” Kate commented, frowning over the brief entry in the guide.

“No, it can’t be. They won’t allow churches or other religious buildings.” He was gazing into nowhere, focusing on facts casually encountered long ago. “I borrowed some ideas from the paid-avoidance zones while I was a utopia designer. I needed to figure a way of editing dogmatic religion into a community without the risk of breeding intolerance. I checked out several of these towns, and I distinctly remember ignoring Precipice because in any case I couldn’t spare the time to dig right down deep for more data. Almost nothing about the place, bar its location, was in store. Oh, yes: and a population limit of three thousand.”

“Huh? A legally imposed limit, you mean?” On his nod: “Imposed by whom—the citizens or the state government?”

“The citizens.”

“Compulsory birth control?”

“I don’t know. I told you: when I found how little I could fish from the banks, I didn’t bother to pursue the matter.”

“Do they ride visitors out again on a rail?”

He gave a half-smile. “No, that’s one other fact I remember. It’s an open community, administered by some sort of town meeting, I think, and you may indeed go there to look it over or even to stay indefinitely. They just don’t care for advertising, and apparently they regard noising their existence abroad as the same thing in principle.”

“We go there, then,” Kate said decisively, slapping shut the booklet.

“My choice would be the opposite. To be trapped in a backwater … But tell me why.”

“Precisely because there’s so little information in the banks. It’s beyond belief that the government won’t have tried—probably tried extremely hard—to tie Precipice into the net at least to the same extent as Protempore and Lap-of-the-Gods. If the citizens are dogged enough to stand out against such pressure, they might sympathize with your plight the way I do.”

Appalled, he blurted out, “You mean you want me to march in and announce it?”

“Will you stop that?” Kate stamped her foot, eyes flashing. “Grow out of your megalomania, for pity’s sake! Quit thinking in terms of ‘Sandy Locke versus the world’ and start believing that there are other people dissatisfied with the state of things, anxious to set it right. You know”—a level, caustic glare—“I’m beginning to think you’ve never sought help from others for fear you might wind up being the one who does the helping. You always like to be in charge, don’t you? Particularly of yourself!”

He drew a deep breath and let it out very slowly, forcing his embryonic annoyance to go with it. He said at length, “I knew what they offered me under the guise of ‘wisdom’ at Tarnover wasn’t the genuine article. It was so totally wrong it’s taken me until now to realize I finally ran across it. Kate, you’re a wise person. The first one I ever met.”

“Don’t encourage me to think so. If I ever come to believe it, I shall fall flat on my face.”

OUBLIETTE

By about then the lean black man from Tarnover was through with Ina Grierson and let her go home, stumbling with weariness. Before she fell asleep, however, she had to know one thing that Freeman had declined to tell her:

What the hell was so earthmoving about Sandy Locke?

She was not the most expert of data-mice; however, her position as head-of-dept for transient execs gave her access to the files of G2S employees. Trembling, she punched the code that started with 4GH.

The screen stayed blank.

She tried every route she could think of to gain access to the data, including some that were within the ace of being illegal … though they bent, rather than broke, the regulations laid down by the Bureau of Data Processing, and a blind eye was generally turned.

The result was invariably the same blank screen.

At first she only nibbled her nails; later, she started to gnaw them; finally, she had to cram her fingers into her mouth to stop herself whimpering in mingled terror and exhaustion.

If all her best attempts had failed, there was just one conclusion to be drawn. Sandy Locke, so far as the data-net was concerned, had been deleted from the human race.

For the first time since she broke her heart at seventeen, Ina Grierson cried herself to sleep.

A SHOULDER TO BE WEPT ON BY THE WORLD

So they went to Precipice, where there wasn’t one. The town had been founded on the levelest ground for miles, a patch of soft but stable silt due to some long-ago river which still had a few creeks meandering across it. Though hills could be seen on three sides, their slopes were gentle and any earthquake that shifted them in their eon-long slumber would be violent enough to cast loose California entire.

They rode toward it in the electric railcar with the irregular schedule, which they boarded at Transience. Small wonder the car didn’t stick to a fixed timetable. As they were informed by the driver—a burly smiling man wearing shorts, sunglasses and sandals—a local ordinance obliged it to give precedence at all crossings to anyone on foot, cycle or horseback, as well as to farm animals and agricultural vehicles. Moreover, when making its final loop around Precipice proper it had to let passengers on or off at any point. Taking full advantage of this facility, local people boarded and descended every few hundred meters. All of them gazed with unashamed curiosity at the strangers.

Who became uncomfortable. Both of them had overlooked one problem involved in traveling around the paid-avoidance zones, being so used to the devices that in theory could eliminate the need for baggage from the plug-in life-style. At all modern hotels could be found ultrasonic clothing cleansers capable of ridding even the bulkiest garment of its accumulated dust and grime in five minutes, and when the cloth began to give way under repeated applications of this violent treatment, there were other machines that would credit you for the fiber, tease it apart, store it for eventual re-use, and issue another garment the same size but a different style and/or color, debbing the customer for the additional fiber and the work involved. Nothing like that was to be found at Lap-of-the-Gods.

Kate had snatched up toilet gear for them before departure, including an old-fashioned reciprocating-head razor left behind by one of her boyfriends, but neither had thought to bring spare clothing. Consequently they were by now looking, and even more feeling, dirty … and those strange eyes constantly scanning them made them fidget.

But things could have been a great deal worse. In many places people would have felt it their duty to put hostile questions to wanderers whose clothes looked as though they had been slept in and who carried almost no other possessions. Luggage might have dwindled; the list of what people felt to be indispensable had long ago reached the stage where both sexes customarily carried bulky purses when bound for any but their most regular destinations.

Yet until they were almost at the end of their journey no one in the railcar, except the informative driver, addressed anything but a greeting to them.

By then they had been able to look over the neighborhood, which they found impressive. The rich alluvial soil was being efficiently farmed; watered by irrigation channels topped up by wind-driven pumps, orchards and cornfields and half-hectare plots of both leaf and root vegetables shimmered in the sun. That much one could have seen anywhere. Far more remarkable were the buildings. They were virtually invisible. Like partridges hiding among rough grass, some of them eluded the eye altogether until a change of angle revealed a line too straight to be other than artificial, or a flash of sunlight on the black glass of a solar energy collector. The contrast with a typical modern farm, a factory-like place where standard barns and silos prefabricated out of concrete and aluminum were dumped all anyhow, was astonishing.

In a low voice he said to Kate, “I’d like to know who designed these farms. This isn’t junk cobbled together by refugees in panic. This is the sort of landscaping a misanthropic millionaire might crave but not afford! Seen anything as good anywhere else?”

She shook her head. “Not even at Protempore, much as I liked it. I guess maybe what the refugees originally botched up didn’t last. When it fell to bits they were calm enough to get it right on the second try.”

“But this is more than just right. This is magnificent. The town itself can’t possibly live up to the same standard. Are we in sight of it yet, by the way?”

Kate craned to look past the driver. Noticing, a middle-aged woman in blue seated on the opposite side of the car inquired, “You haven’t been to Precipice before?”

“Ah … No, we haven’t.”

“Thought I didn’t recognize you. Planning to stay, or just passing through?”

“Can people stay? I thought you had a population limit.”

“Oh, sure, but we’re two hundred under at the moment. And in spite of anything you may have heard”—a broad grin accompanied the remark—“we like to have company drop in. Tolerable company, that is. My name’s Polly, by the way.”

“I’m Kate, and—”

Swiftly inserted: “I’m Alexander—Sandy! Say, I was just wondering who laid out these farms. I never saw buildings that fit so beautifully into a landscape.”

“Ah! Matter of fact, I was about to tell you, go see the man who does almost all our building. That’s Ted Horovitz. He’s the sheriff, too. You get off at Mean Free Path and walk south until you hit Root Mean Square and then just ask for Ted. If he’s not around, talk to the mayor—that’s Suzy Dellinger. Got that? Fine. Well, nice to have met you, hope to see you around, this is where I get off.”

She headed for the door.

Involuntarily Kate said, “Mean Free Path? Root Mean Square? Is that some kind of joke?”

There were four other passengers at this stage of the journey. All of them chuckled. The driver said over his shoulder, “Sure, the place is littered with jokes. Didn’t you know?”

“Kind of rarefied jokes, aren’t they?”

“I guess maybe. But they’re a monument to how Precipice got started. Of all the people who got drove south by the Bay Quake, the ones who came here were the luckiest. Ever hear mention of Claes College?”

Kate exploded just as he began to say he hadn’t.

“You mean this was ‘Disasterville U.S.A.’?” She was half out of her seat with excitement, peering eagerly along the curved track toward the town that was now coming into view. Even at first glance, it promised that indeed it did maintain the standard set by the outlying farms; at any rate, there was none of the halfhearted disorganization found at the edge of so many modern communities, but a real sense of border: here, rural; there, urban. No, not after all a sharp division. A—a—

An ancient phrase came to mind: dissolving view.

But there was no chance to sort out his confused initial impressions; Kate was saying urgently, “Sandy, you must have heard of Claes, surely … ? No? Oh, that’s terrible!”

She dropped back into her seat and gave him a rapid-fire lecture.

“Claes College was founded about 1981 to revive the medieval sense of the name, a community of scholars sharing knowledge regardless of arbitrary boundaries between disciplines. It didn’t last; it faded away after only a few years. But the people involved left one important memorial. When the Bay Quake let go, they dropped everything and moved en masse to help with relief work, and someone hit on the idea of undertaking a study of the social forces at work in the post-catastrophe period so that if it ever happened again the worst tragedies could be avoided. The result was a series of monographs under the title ‘Disaster ville U.S.A.’ I’m amazed you never heard of it.”

She rounded on the driver. “Practically nobody has heard of it! I must have mentioned it a hundred times and always drawn a blank. But it’s not only important—it’s unique.”

Dryly the driver said, “You didn’t mention it at Precipice, that’s for sure. We grow up on it in school. Ask Brad Compton the librarian to show you our first edition.”

He applied the brakes. “Coming up to Mean Free now!”

Mean Free Path was indeed a path, winding among shrubs, trees and—houses? They had to be. But they were something else, too. Yes, they had roofs (although the roofs were never four-square) and walls (what one could see of them through masses of creeper) and doubtless doors, none of which happened to be visible from where they had left the railcar … already out of sight and sound despite its leisurely pace, lost in a tunnel of greenery.

“They are like the farms,” Kate breathed.

“No.” He snapped his fingers. “There’s a difference, and I just figured out what it is. The farms—they’re factors in landscape. But these houses are landscape.”

“That’s right,” Kate said. Her voice was tinged with awe. “I have the most ridiculous feeling. I’m instantly ready to believe that an architect who could do this …” The words trailed away.

“An architect who could do this could design a planet,” he said briefly, and took her arm to urge her onward.

Though the path wound, it was level enough to ride a cycle or draw a cart along, paved with slabs of rock conformable to the contour of the land. Shortly they passed a green lawn tinted gold by slanting sunshine. She pointed at it.

“Not a garden,” she said. “But a glade.”

“Exactly!” He put his hand to his forehead, seeming dizzy. Alarmed, she clutched at him.

“Sandy, is something the matter?”

“No—yes—no … I don’t know. But I’m okay.” Dropping his arm, he blinked this way, then that. “It just hit me. This is town—yes? But it doesn’t feel like it. I simply know it must be, because …” He swallowed hard. “Seeing it from the railcar, could you have mistaken this place for anything else?”

“Never in a million years. Hmm!” Her eyes rounded in wonder. “That’s a hell of a trick, isn’t it?”

“Yes, and if I didn’t realize it was therapeutic I could well be angry. People don’t enjoy being fooled, do they?”

“Therapeutic?” She frowned. “I don’t follow you.”

“Set-destruction. We use sets constantly instead of seeing what’s there—or feeling or tasting it, come to that. We have a set ‘town,’ another ‘city,’ another ‘village’ … and we often forget there’s a reality the sets were originally based on. We’re in too much of a hurry. If this effect is typical of Precipice, I’m not surprised it gets so little space in the guidebook. Tourists would find a massive dose of double-take indigestible. I look forward to meeting this poker Horovitz. As well as being a builder and a sheriff I think he must be a …”

“A what?”

“A something else. Maybe something I don’t know a word for.”

The path had been a path. The square proved not to be a square, more a deformed cyclic quadrilateral, but it implied all the necessary elements of a public urban space. It was a great deal bigger than one might have guessed. They found this out by crossing it. Part of it, currently deserted, was paved and ornamented with flower-filled urns; part was park-like, though miniaturized, a severe formal garden; part sloped down to a body of water, less a lake than a pond, some three or four meters below the general level of the land, from whose banks steps rose in elegant curves. Here there were people: old folk on benches in the sun, two games of fencing in progress amid the inevitable cluster of kibitzers, while down by the water—under the indulgent but watchful eyes of a couple of teeners—some naked children were splashing merrily about in pursuit of a huge light ball bigger than any two of their heads.

And enclosing this square were buildings of various heights linked together by slanting roofs and pierced by alleyways but for which they would have composed a solid terrace. As it was, every alley was bridged at first-story level and every bridge was ornamented with delicate carvings in wood or stone.

“My God,” Kate said under her breath. “It’s incredible. Not town. Not here. This is village.”

“And yet it’s got the city implicit in it—the Grand’ Place, the Plaza Mayor, Old London Bridge … Oh, it’s fantastic! And look a bit more closely at the houses. They’re ecofast, aren’t they? Every last one of them! I wouldn’t be surprised to find they’re running off ground heat!”

She paled a little. “You’re right! I hadn’t noticed. One thinks of an ecofast house as being—well, kind of one cell for a honeycomb, factory-made. There are ecofast communities around KC, you know, and they have no more character than an anthill!”

“Let’s track down the sheriff at once. I can stand just so many unanswered questions at one go. Excuse me!” He approached the group around the fencing tables.

“Where do we find Ted Horovitz?”

“Through that alley,” one of the watchers said, pointing. “First door on your right. If he’s not there, try the mayor’s office. I think he has business with Suzy today.”

Again, as they moved away, they felt many curious eyes on them. As though visitors were a rarity at Precipice. But why weren’t there thousands of them, millions? Why wasn’t this little town famous the world around?

“Though of course if it were famous—”

“Did you say something?”

“Not exactly. This must be the door. Mr. Horovitz?”

“Come right in!”

They entered, and found themselves in an extraordinary room at least ten meters long. Conventionally enough furnished, with chairs and a desk and sundry cases crammed with books and cassettes, it was more like a forest clearing bright with ferns or a cave behind a waterfall hung with strands of glistening vegetation than anybody’s office. Greenish light, reflected from wind-wavered panels outside irregular windows, flickered on flock-sprayed surfaces as soft as moss.

Turning to greet them from a carpenter’s bench that had seen long service was a stocky man in canvas pants with big pockets full of tools, laying aside a wooden object whose outline was at first elusive, then suddenly familiar: a dulcimer.

In the same moment something moved, emerging from shadow beside the workbench. A dog. A vast, slow-moving graceful dog whose ancestry might have included Great Dane, Irish wolfhound, possibly husky or Chinook … plus something else, something strange, for its skull was improbably high-domed and its eyes, deep-set, looked disturbingly uncanine.

Kate’s fingers clamped vise-tight on his arm. He heard her gasp.

“No need to be alarmed,” the man rumbled in a voice half an octave nearer the bass than might have been guessed from his size. “Never met a dog like this before? You’re in for an educational experience. His name is Natty Bumppo. Hold still a moment while he reads you. Sorry, but this is S.O.P. for any visitor. Nat, how do they rate? Any hard drugs—excessive liquor—anything apart from being a bit scared?”

The dog curled his wrinkled upper lip and inhaled a long slow breath, then gave a brisk headshake and a faint growl. Elegantly he lowered his massive hindquarters to the floor, keeping his eyes on the newcomers.

Kate’s fingers relaxed, but she was trembling.

“He says you’re clear,” Horovitz announced. “I understand this poker pretty well, you know. Not as well as he understands us humans, maybe, but there it is. Right, sit down!” With a wave toward a nearby lounge; he himself dropped into an armchair facing it and produced an ancient charred pipe from one of his immense pockets. “What can I do for you?”

They looked at one another. With sudden decision Kate said, “We found our way here more or less by accident. We were in Lap-of-the-Gods and before that I’d been to Protempore. They can’t stand comparison with Precipice. We’d like to visit with you for a while.”

“Mm-hm. Okay … probably.” Horovitz gestured to the dog. “Nat, go tell the councilmen we got applicants, please.”

Natty Bumppo rose, snuffed one last time at the strangers, and padded out. The door had a handle which he could open himself; punctiliously, he also closed it.

Following the animal with his eyes, Sandy said, “Oh, I forgot to tell you our names.”

“Kate and Sandy,” Horovitz murmured. “I knew to expect you. Polly Ryan said she met you on the railcar.”

“She—uh … ?”

“You heard of phones, I guess. We have ’em. Appearances to the contrary. Maybe you were reading up on us in that bad guidebook.” It was protruding from Kate’s side pocket; he leveled an accusing finger at it. “What we don’t have is veephone service. The feds have been on at us for years to link into the data-net on the same token basis as the other paid-avoidance communities, but to satisfy their computers you have to have veephone-sized bandpass capacity. They give all kinds of nice persuasive reasons—they keep reminding us of how Transcience was almost taken over by a criminal syndicate, and how nearly everybody in Ararat was fooled by a phony preacher wanted in seven different states for fraud and confidence-trickery … but we prefer to stay out and solve our own problems. They can’t oblige us to tie in so long as our taxes amount to more than our PA grants. So, on principle, no veephones. Don’t let that mislead you, though, into imagining we’re backward. We’re just about the size of a late medieval market town, and we offer almost precisely one hundred times as many facilities.”

“So you’ve proved it is cheaper to operate on an ecofast basis!” Sandy leaned forward eagerly.

“You noticed? Very interesting! Most people have preconceived ideas about ecofast building; they have to be factory products, they come in one size and one shape and if you want a bigger one you can only stick two together. In fact, as you say, once you really understand the principle you find you’ve accidentally eliminated most of your concealed overheads. Been to Trianon, either of you?”

“Visiting friends,” Kate said.

“They boast about running at seventy-five percent energy utilization, and they still have to take an annual subsidy from G2S because their pattern is inherently so wasteful. We run at eighty to eighty-five percent. There isn’t a community on the planet that’s doing better.”

Horovitz appended a half-embarrassed smile to the remark, as though to liberate it from any suspicion of conceit.

“And you’re responsible for that?” Sandy demanded. “The woman we met—Polly—said you do most of the building.”

“Sure, but I can’t claim the credit. I didn’t figure out the principles, nor how to apply them. That was—”

Kate butted in. “Oh, yes! The railcar-driver said this is the original Disasterville U.S.A.!”

“You heard about that deal?” Horovitz had been loading his pipe with coarse dark tobacco; he almost dropped the pouch and pipe both. “Well, hell! So they haven’t managed to clamp the lid down tight!”

“Ah … What do you mean?”

A shrug and a grunt. “The way I hear it, if you punch for data about the Disasterville study, or about anything to do with Claes College, over the regular continental net, you get some kind of discouragement. Like it’s entered as ‘of interest only to specialist students,’ quote and unquote. Any rate, that’s what I heard from Brad. Brad Compton, our librarian.”

“But that’s awful!” Kate stared at him. “I never did actually punch for those data—my father had a full set of Disasterville monographs, and I read them in my early teens. But … Well, isn’t it important that one of the projects they dreamed up at Claes turned into a functional community?”

“Oh, I think so. What sheriff wouldn’t, with a crime rate of nearly zero?”

“Are you serious?”

“Mm-hm. We never had a murder yet, and it’s two years since we had anybody hospitalized after a fight, and as to robbery—well, stealing just ain’t a habit around here.” A faint grin. “Occasionally it gets imported, but I swear there’s no future in it either way.”

Kate said slowly, “Don’t tell me. Let me guess. Is this place the reason why Claes went under? Did the really bright people stay on here instead of going home?”

Horovitz smiled. “Young lady, you’re the first visitor I’ve met who got that without having to be told. Yup; Precipice skimmed the cream off Claes, and the rump that was left just faded away. As I understand it, that was because only the people who took their own ideas seriously were prepared to face the responsibility entailed. And ridicule, too. After all, at the same time other refugee settlements were at the mercy of crooks and unscrupulous fake evangelists—like we were just talking about—so who was to believe that some crazy mix composed of bits of Ghirardelli and Portmeirion and Valencia and Taliesin and God knows what besides would turn out right when everything else went wrong?”

“I think you must like us,” Sandy said suddenly.

Horovitz blinked at him. “What?”

“I never saw a façade fall down so fast. The homey-folksy bit, I mean. It didn’t suit you anyhow; it’s no loss. But on top of being a builder and a sheriff, what are you? I mean, where did you start?”

Horovitz pulled the corners of his mouth down in a lugubrious parody of dismay.

“I plead guilty,” he said after a pause. “Sure, I regard myself as local, but I have a doctorate in social interaction from Austin, Texas, and a master’s in structural technology from Columbia. Which is not something I customarily admit to visitors, even the bright ones—particularly not to the bright ones, because they tend to come here for all possible wrong reasons. We’re interested in being functional, not in being dissected by in-and-out gangs of cultural anthropologists.”

“How long are you going to wait before becoming famous?”

“Hmm! You are a perceptive shivver, aren’t you? But a fair question rates a fair answer. We expect half a century will be enough.”

“Are we going to survive that long?”

Horovitz shook his head heavily. “We don’t know. Does anybody?”

The door swung wide. Natty Bumppo returned, giving Horovitz a nudge with his muzzle as he passed. Behind him came a tall stately black woman in a gaudy shirt and tight pants, arm in arm with a fat white man—heavily tanned—in shorts and sandals like the railcar driver.

Horovitz introduced them as Suzy Dellinger, the mayor, and Brad Compton; they were this year’s councilmen for the town. He gave a condensed but accurate version of his conversation with Kate and Sandy. The new arrivals listened intently. Having heard him out, Brad Compton made an extraordinary comment.

“Does Nat approve?”

“Seems to,” grunted Horovitz.

“Then I guess we found new tenants for the Thorgrim place. Suzy?” Glancing at the mayor.

“Sure, why not?” She turned to Kate and Sandy. “Welcome to Precipice! Now, from here you go back to the square, take the second alley on your right, and you’re on Drunkard’s Walk. Follow it to the intersection with Great Circle Course. The house on the near left of that corner is yours for as long as you care to stay.”

There was a moment of blank incredulity. Then Kate exclaimed, “Hold it! You’re going far too fast! I don’t know for certain what Sandy’s plans are, but I have to get back to KC in a few days’ time. You seem to have decided I’m a permanent settler.”

Sandy chimed in. “What’s more, on the basis of a dog’s opinion! Even if he is modded, I don’t see how—”

“Modded?” Horovitz broke in. “No, Nat’s not modified. I guess his however-many-great grandfather must have been tinkered with a bit, but he’s just the way he grew up. Best of his litter, admittedly.”

“You mean there are a lot of dogs like him around Precipice?” Kate demanded.

“A couple of hundred by now,” Mayor Dellinger replied. “Descendants of a pack that wandered into town in the summer of 2003. There was a young stud, and two fertile bitches each with four pups, and an old sterile bitch was leading them. She’d been neutered. Doc. Squibbs—he’s our veterinarian—he’s always maintained they must have escaped from some research station and gone looking for a place where they’d be better treated. Which was here. They’re great with kids, they can almost literally talk, and if only they lived to a ripe old age there’d be nothing wrong with them at all. Trouble is, they last seven or eight years at most, and that’s not fair, is it, Nat?” She reached out to scratch Natty Bumppo behind the ears, and he gave one absent thump with his thick tail. “But we got friends working on that, and we do our best to breed them for longevity.”

Another pause. Eventually Sandy said with determination, “Okay, so your dogs can work miracles. But handing us a house, without even asking what we intend to do while we’re here—”

Brad Compton gave a hoot of laughter. He broke off in confusion.

“Forgive Brad,” Horovitz said. “But I thought we’d been over that. Did you miss my point? I told you, we offer a hundred times as many services as a medieval town the same size. You don’t just arrive, squat a house, and live on your federal avoidance grant forever and a day, amen. Now and then people try it. They become unhappy and disillusioned and drift away.”

“Well, sure. I mean, I realize you must have all kinds of work to offer us … but that’s not what I’m driving at. I want to know what the hell supports this community.”

The three Precipicians smiled at one another. Mayor Dellinger said, “Shall I tell them?”

“Sure, it’s a job for the mayor,” Compton answered.

“Okay.” She turned to face Kate and Sandy. “We run an operation with no capital, no shareholders and scarcely any plant. Yet we receive a donated income fifteen times as large as our collective avoidance grants.”

“What?”

“That’s right.” Her tone was sober. “We provide a service which some people—some very rich people indeed—have found so precious that they’ve done things like covenant to pay us a tithe of their salary for life. Once we were left the income on an estate of sixty million, and though the family tried like hell to overturn the will in the courts … I believe you just recognized us, didn’t you?”

Shaking, fists clenched, mouth so dry he was almost unable to shape the proper words, Sandy blurted out his guess.

“There’s only one thing you could be. But— Oh, my God. Are you really Hearing Aid?”

CROSS TALK

“After which I immediately wanted to ask how they managed to keep that incredible promise of theirs, but—”

“Wait, wait!” Freeman was half out of his chair, peering closely at his data console as though shortening the range could alter what the instrument display was reporting.

“Is something wrong?”

“I … No, nothing’s wrong. I merely observed a rather remarkable event.” Freeman sank back in his chair, and with an air of guilt produced a handkerchief to mop his face. All of a sudden sweat had burst out in rivers on his forehead.

There was a brief silence. Then:

“Damn, you’re right. This is the first time you ever transferred me from regressed to present mode and I didn’t have to be steered back to the same subject. Ve-ery interesting! Don’t bother telling me this indicates how deeply I was affected; I know, and I still am. What I learned from that first conversation at Precipice left me with a weird tip-of-the-tongue sensation, as though I’d realized the people there had the answer to some desperately urgent problem, only I couldn’t work out what problem the answer belonged with. … Incidentally, please tell me something. I think I deserve it. After all, I can’t prevent you from making me tell you everything, can I?”

Freeman’s face was glistening as though he were being roasted on a spit before an immensely hot fire. He mopped away more perspiration before he replied.

“Go ahead and ask.”

“If it had become known that I’d called Hearing Aid and talked for an hour about Miranda and myself and Tarnover … would I have been expelled via an operating theater?”

Freeman hesitated, folding and refolding his handkerchief prior to returning it to his pocket. At long last he did so, and with reluctance spoke.

“Yes. With an IQ of 85 if you were lucky.”

As calmly as before: “What about Hearing Aid?”

“Nothing would have been done to them.” The admission was almost inaudible. “You must know why.”

“Oh, sure. Sorry—I admit I only asked to see you squirm with embarrassment. But there’s such a David-and-Goliath pattern about Precipice versus the U.S. government. Want me to continue?”

“Do you feel up to it?”

“I think so. Whether or not Precipice will work for everybody, it worked for me. And it’s high time I faced the reason why my stay there ended in a disaster, when if I hadn’t been a fool it need have been no worse than a minor setback.”

THE MESH OF A RIDDLE

“This is the most incredible place. I never dreamed—”

Walking uphill on the aptly named Drunkard’s Walk, Kate interrupted him.

“Sandy, that dog. Natty Bumppo.”

“He gave you quite a fright, didn’t he? I’m sorry.”

“No!”

“But you—”

“I know, I know. I was startled. But I wasn’t scared. I simply didn’t believe it. I thought none of Dad’s dogs was left.”

“What?” He almost stumbled, turning to stare at her. “What on earth could he have to do with your father?”

“Well, I never heard of anybody else who did such marvelous things with animals. Bagheera was one of Dad’s too, you know. Almost the last.”

He drew a deep breath. “Kate dear, would you please begin at the beginning?”

Eyes troubled and full of sadness, she said, “I guess I ought to. I remember asking if you knew about my father, and you said sure, he was Henry Lilleberg the neurophysiologist, and I left it at that. But it was a prime example of what you said only an hour ago Precipice is designed to cure. Slap a label on and forget about it. Say ‘neurophysiologist’ and you conjure up a stock picture of the sort of person who will dissect out a nervous system, analyze it in vitro, publish the findings and go away content, forgetting that the rest of the animal ever existed. That isn’t a definition of my father! When I was a little girl he used to bring me amazing pets, which never lasted long because they were already old. But they’d been of service at his labs, and as a result he couldn’t bear to throw them down the incinerator chute. He used to say he owed them a bit of fun because he’d cheated them of it when they were young.”

“What kind of animals?”

“Oh, little ones at first, when I was five or six—rats, hamsters, gerbils. Later on there were squirrels and gophers, cats and raccoons. Remember I mentioned he had a license to move protected species interstate? And finally, in the last couple of years before he was taken so ill he had to retire, he was working with some real big ones: dogs like Natty Bumppo and mountain lions like Bagheera.”

“Did he do any research with aquatic mammals—dolphins, porpoises?”

“I don’t believe so. At any rate he couldn’t have brought those home for me.” A touch of her normal wry humor returned with the words. “We lived in an apt. We didn’t have a pool to keep them in. Why do you ask?”

“I was wondering whether he might have been involved with—hell, I don’t know which of several names you might recognize. They kept changing designations as they ran into one dead end after another. But it was a project based in Georgia intended to device animals capable of defeating an invasion. Originally they thought of small creatures as disease-vectors and saboteurs, like they conditioned rats to gnaw compulsively on tire rubber and electrical insulation. Later there was all this hot air generated about surrogate armies, with animals substituted for infantry. Wars would still be fought, with lots of blood and noise, but no soldiers would be killed—not permanently.”

“I knew the project under the name of Parsimony. But Dad never worked on it. They kept asking him to join, and he kept declining because they’d never tell him all the details of what he’d have to do. It wasn’t until he’d contracted his terminal myelitis that he was able to find out how right he’d been.”

“The project was discontinued, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, and I know why. They’d been living off Dad’s back for years. He was the only man in the country, maybe the world, who was consistently successful in making superintelligent animals breed true.”

“Literally the only one?”

“Oh, even he scarcely believed it. He published his data and always swore he wasn’t holding anything back, but other researchers found they couldn’t get the same results. In the end it became a joke for him. He used to say, ‘I just have red fingers.’ ”

“I see. Like a gardener has green ones.”

“Exactly.”

“What were his methods?” The question was more rhetorical than literal. But she answered anyway.

“Don’t ask me, go punch a code. All the data are on open reels. Seemingly the government must hope another red-fingered genius will chance on them some day.”

Eyes fixed on nowhere, he said in a musing tone, “I got disenchanted with biology, but I do recall something about the Lilleberg Hypothesis. An ultrarefined subcategory of natural selection involving hormonal influence not only on the embryo but on the gonads of the parents, which was supposed to determine the crossover points on the chromosomes.”

“Mm-hm. He was ridiculed for proposing it. He was slandered by all his colleagues, accused of trying to show that Lysenko was right after all. Which,” she added hotly, “was a transparent lie! What he actually did was advance an explanation why in spite of being wrong the Lysenkoists could have fooled themselves. Sandy, why does an establishment always fossilize so quickly? It may be my imagination, but I have this paranoid notion that people in authority today make a policy of seizing on any really original idea and either distorting it or suppressing it. Ted Horovitz was saying something about people being discouraged from digging into the Disasterville studies, for example.”

“Do you really have to ask about government?” he countered grayly. “I’d have thought the reason was plain. It’s the social counterpart of natural selection. Those groups within society that craved power at the expense of everything else—morality, self-respect, honest friendship—they achieved dominance long ago. The mass of the public no longer has any contact with government; all they know is that if they step out of line they’ll be trodden on. And the means exist to make the statement literal. … Oh, they must hate Precipice, over there in Washington! A tiny community, and its citizens can thumb their noses at any federal diktat!”

She shuddered visibly. “But the scientists … ?” she said.

“Their reaction is a different matter. The explosion of human knowledge has accelerated to the point where even the most brilliant can’t cope with it any more. Theories have rigidified into dogma just as they did in the Middle Ages. The leading experts feel obligated to protect their creed against the heretics. Right?”

“That certainly fits in Dad’s case,” Kate said, nodding and biting her lip. “But—well, he proved his point! Bagheera’s evidence, if nothing else.”

“He wasn’t an isolated success, was he?”

“Hell, no. But the only one Dad was able to save from being sold to the big circus at Quemadura. It was just getting started then, and people were investing a lot of money in it and—Say, look there!”

They were passing a patch of level grass where two young children were lying asleep on a blanket. Beside them was a dog the same type and color as Natty Bumppo but smaller, a bitch. She was gazing levelly at the strangers; one corner of her upper lip was curled to show sharp white teeth, and she was uttering a faint—as it were a questioning—growl.

Now she rose, the hair on her spine erect, and approached them. They stopped dead.

“Hello,” Kate said, with a hint of nervousness. “We’re new here. But we’ve just been to call on Ted, and he and Suzy say we can live in the old Thorgrim house.”

“Kate, you can’t seriously expect a dog to understand a complex—”

He broke off, dumbfounded. For the bitch had promptly wagged her tail. Smiling, Kate held out her hand to be smelt. After a moment he copied her.

The dog pondered a while, then nodded in an entirely human fashion, and turned her head to show that on the collar she wore there was a plaque with a few words stamped on it.

“Brynhilde,” Kate read aloud. “And you belong to some people called Josh and Lorna Treves. Well, how do you do, Brynhilde?”

Solemn, the dog offered each of them her right paw, then returned to her guard duty. They walked on.

“Now do you believe me?” Kate murmured.

“Yes, damn it, I have to. But how on earth could a bunch of your father’s dogs have found their way here?”

“Like the mayor said, they probably escaped from a research station and went looking for a good home. Several centers had dogs bred by Dad. Say, I wonder how much further it is to Great Circle Course. Can we have come too far? No street names are marked up anywhere.”

“I noticed. That’s of a piece with everything else. Helps to force you back from the abstract set to the reality. Of course it’s something that can only work in a small community, but—well, how many thousands of streets have you passed along without registering anything but the name? I think that’s one of the forces driving people to distraction. One needs solid perceptual food same as one needs solid nutriment; without it, you die of bulk-hunger. There’s an intersection, see?”

They hurried the last few paces, and—

“Oh, Sandy!” Kate’s voice was a gusty sigh. “Sandy, can this possibly be right? It’s not a house, it’s a piece of sculpture! And it’s beautiful!”

After a long and astonished silence he said to the air, “Well, thank you!”

And in a fit of exuberance swept her off her feet and carried her over the not-exactly-a-threshold.

THE LOGICALITY OF LIKING

“I wonder what made you like Precipice so much,” Freeman muttered.

“I’d have thought it was obvious. The people there have got right what those at Tarnover got completely wrong.”

“To me it sounds like the regular plug-in life-style. You arrive, you take on a house that’s spare and waiting, you—”

“No, no, no!” In a crescendo. “The first thing we found when we walked in was a note from the former occupier, Lars Thorgrim, explaining that he and his family had had to move away because his wife had developed a disease needing regular radiation therapy so they had to live closer to a big hospital. Otherwise they’d never have moved because they’d been so happy in the house, and they hoped that the next people to use it would feel the same. And both their children sent love and kisses. That’s not the plug-in life-style, whose basis consists in leaving behind nothing of yourself when you move on.”

“But just as when you joined G2S you were immediately whisked away to a welcome party—”

“For pity’s sake! At places like G2S you need the excuse of a new arrival to hold a party; it’s a business undertaking, designed to let him and his new colleagues snuff around each other’s assholes like wary dogs! At Precipice the concept of the party is built into the social structure; those parties were going to be held anyhow, because of a birthday or an anniversary or just because it was a fine warm evening and a batch of homemade wine was shaping well enough to share. I’m disappointed in you. I’d imagined that you would have seen through the government’s attempt to deevee Precipice and gone back to the source material.”

For the first time Freeman seemed to be visibly on the defensive. He said in a guarded tone, “Well, naturally I—”

“Save the excuses. If you had dug deep, I wouldn’t be giving you this as news. Oh, think, man, think! The Disasterville U.S.A. study constitutes literally the only first-rank analysis of how the faults inherent in our society are revealed in a post-catastrophe context. Work done at other refugee settlements was trivial and superficial, full of learned clichés. But after saying straight out that the victims of the Bay Quake couldn’t cope because they’d quit trying to fend for themselves—having long ago discovered that the reins of power had been gathered into the hands of a corrupt and jealous in-group—the people from Claes College topped it off with what Washington felt to be the ultimate insult. They said, ‘And this is how to put it right!’ ”

A dry chuckle.

“Worse still, they proceeded to demonstrate it, and worst of all, they stopped the government from interfering.”

“How long after your arrival were you told about that?”

“I wasn’t told. I figured it out myself that same evening. It was a classic example of the kind of thing that’s so obvious you ignore it. In my case specifically, after my last contact with Hearing Aid I’d unconsciously blanked off all further consideration of the problem. Otherwise I’d have spotted the solution at once.”

Freeman sighed. “I thought you were going to defend your obsession with Precipice, not excuse your own shortcomings.”

“I enjoy it when you needle me. It shows that your control is getting ragged. Let me tatter it a bit more. I warn you, I intend to make you lose your temper eventually, and never mind how many tranquilizers you take per day. Excuse me; a joke in poor taste. But—oh, please be candid. Has it never surprised you that so few solid data emerged from the aftermath of the Bay Quake, the greatest single calamity in the country’s history?”

Freeman’s answer was harsh. “It was also the most completely documented event in our history!”

“Which implies that a lot of lessons should have been learned, doesn’t it? Name a few.”

Freeman sat silent. Once again his face gleamed with sweat. He interlocked his fingers as though to prevent them trembling visibly.

“I think I’m making my point. Fine. Consider. Vast hordes of people had to start from scratch after the quake, and the public at large felt obliged to help them. It was a perfect opportunity to allot priorities: to stand back and assess what was and was not worth having among the countless choices offered by our modern ingenuity. Years, in some cases as much as a decade, elapsed before the economy was strong enough to finance the conversion of the original shantytowns into something permanent. Granted that the refugees themselves were disadvantaged: what about the specialists from outside, the federal planners?”

“They consulted with the settlers, as you well know.”

“But did they help them to make value judgments? Not on your life. They counted the cost in purely financial terms. If it was cheaper to pay this or that community to go without something, that’s what the community wound up lacking. Under the confident misapprehension that they were serving the needs of the nation by acting as indispensable guinea pigs. Where was the follow-up? How much money was allocated to finding out whether a community without veephones, or without automatic instant credit-transfer facilities, or without home encyclopedia service, was in any sense better or worse than the rest of the continent? None—none! What halfhearted projects were allowed to show their heads were axed in the next session of Congress. Not profitable. The only place where constructive work was done was Precipice, and that was thanks to amateur volunteers.”

“It’s easy to prophesy after the event!”

“But Precipice did succeed. The founders knew what they wanted to do, and had valid arguments to support their ideas. The principle of changing one factor and seeing what happens may be fine in the lab. In the larger world, especially when you’re dealing with human beings who are badly disturbed following a traumatic experience and have been forcibly returned to basics—hunger, thirst, epidemics—you aren’t compelled to be so simplistic. Evidence exists from the historical record that certain social structures are viable and others aren’t. The people from Claes recognized that, and did their best to assemble a solid foundation for a new community without bothering to forecast what would evolve from it.”

“Evolution … or devolution?”

“An attempt to backtrack to that fork in our social development where we apparently took a wrong turning.”

“Invoking all kinds of undocumented half-mystical garbage!”

“Such as—?”

“Oh, this ridiculous notion that we’re imprinted before birth with the structure of the aboriginal family, the hunter-and-gatherer tribe and the initial version of the village.”

“Have you ever tried to silence a baby?”

“What?”

“You heard me. Humans make mouth noises with the intention of provoking a change in the outside world. Nobody denies any longer that even a dumb baby is printed in advance for language. Damn it, enough of our simian cousins have shown they can use a sound-to-symbol relationship! And equally nobody denies that habit patterns involving status, pack leadership—Whoops, hold everything. I just realized I’ve been manipulated into defending your viewpoint against myself.”

Freeman, relaxing, allowed himself a faint smile.

“And if you continue, you’ll expose a basic fallacy in your argument, won’t you?” he murmured. “Precipice may indeed function, after a fashion. But it does so in isolation. Having worked for a Utopia consultancy, you must realize that if they’re efficiently shielded from the rest of humanity the craziest societies can work … for a while.”

“But Precipice is not isolated. Every day between five hundred and two thousand people punch the ten nines and—well, make confession.”

“Thereby painting a picture of the state of things outside which can be relied on to make Precipicians shudder and feel thankful. True or false, the impression is no doubt comforting.”

Freeman leaned back, conscious of having scored. His voice was almost a purr as he continued, “You spent time actually listening to some of the calls, I presume?”

“Yes, and at her own insistence so did Kate, though since she wasn’t planning to stay she wasn’t obliged. They’re quite literal about their service. From the central, they route calls to private homes where one adult is always on duty. And someone literally sits and listens.”

“How about the people who can talk for hours nonstop?”

“There aren’t many of them, and the computers almost always spot them before they’re well under way.”

“For a community so proud of having evaded the data-net, they rely a great deal on computers, don’t they?”

“Mm-hm. Must be the only place on Earth where they’ve made a cottage industry out of the things. It’s amazing how useful they are when you don’t burden them with irrelevancies, like recording a transaction worth fifty cents.”

“I must find out some time where you draw your dividing line: fifty cents, fifty dollars, fifty thousand dollars … But go on. What were the calls like?”

“I was astonished at how few cranks there were. I was told that cranks get disheartened when they find they can’t provoke an argument. Someone who’s convinced all human faults are due to wearing shoes, or who just found evidence to impeach the president scrawled on the wall of a public toilet, wants to be met with open disagreement; there’s an element of masochism there which isn’t satisfied by punching pillows. But people with genuine problems—they’re a different matter.”

“Give some examples.”

“Okay. It’s a platitude you yourself have used to me to say that the commonest mental disorder now is personality shock. But I never realized before how many people are aware they’re lapsing into its subclinical penumbra. I recall one poker who confessed he’d tried the White House Trick, and it had worked.”

“What sort of trick?”

“Sometimes it’s known as going to the Mexican laundry.”

“Ah. You route a credit allotment—to avoid either tax or recriminations—into and out of a section of the net where nobody can follow it without special permission.”

“That’s it. When income-tax time rolls around, you always hear people mentioning it with an envious chuckle, because it’s part of modern folklore. That’s how politicians and hypercorp execs get away with a tenth of the tax you and I cough up. Well, this shivver I was listening to had vaulted half a million. And he was beside himself with horror. Not terror—he knew he couldn’t be caught—but horror. He said it was his first-ever lapse from rectitude, and if his wife hadn’t left him for a richer man he’d never have been tempted. Once having done it and found how easy it was, though … how could he ever trust anyone again?”

“But he was trusting Hearing Aid, wasn’t he?”

“Yes, and that’s one of the miracles performed by the service. While I was a minister I was resigned to having the croakers monitor the link to my confessional, even though what was said face-to-face in the actual booth was adequately private. And there was nothing to stop them noticing that a suspect had called on me, ambushing him as he left, and beating a repeat performance out of him. That type of dishonesty is at the root of our worst problem.”

“I didn’t know you acknowledged a ‘worst’—you seem to find new problems daily. But go on.”

“With pleasure. I’m sure that if I start to foam at the mouth there’s a machine standing by to wipe my chin. … Oh, hell! It’s hypocritical hair-splitting that makes me boil! Theoretically any one of us has access to more information than ever in history, and any phone booth is a gate to it. But suppose you live next door to a poker who’s suddenly elected to the state congress, and six weeks later he’s had a hundred-thousand-dollar face-lift for his house. Try to find out how he came by the money; you get nowhere. Or try confirming that the company you work for is going to be sold and you’re apt to be tossed on the street with no job, three kids and a mortgage. Other people seem to have the information. What about the shivver in the next office who’s suddenly laughing when he used to mope? Has he borrowed to buy the firm’s stock, knowing he can sell for double and retire?”

“Are you quoting calls to Hearing Aid?”

“Yes, both are actual cases. I bend the rules because I know that if I don’t you’ll break me.”

“Are you claiming those are typical?”

“Sure they are. Out of all the calls taken, nearly half—I think they say forty-five percent—are from people who are afraid someone else knows data that they don’t and is gaining an unfair advantage by it. For all the claims one hears about the liberating impact of the data-net, the truth is that it’s wished on most of us a brand-new reason for paranoia.”

“Considering how short a time you spent at Precipice, your identification with it is amazing.”

“Not at all. It’s a phenomenon known as ‘falling in love’ and it happens with places as well as people.”

“Then your first lover’s tiff happened rather quickly, too.”

“Needle, needle! Jab away. I’d done something to make amends in advance. A small but genuine consolation, that.”

Freeman tensed. “So you were the one responsible!”

“For frustrating the latest official assault on Hearing Aid? Yes indeed. I’m proud of it. Apart from marking the first occasion when I used my talent on behalf of other people without being asked and without caring whether I was rewarded—which was a major breakthrough in itself—the job was a pure masterpiece. Working on it, I realized in my guts how an artist or an author can get high on the creative act. The poker who wrote Precipice’s original tapeworm was pretty good, but you could theoretically have killed it without shutting down the net—that is, at the cost of losing thirty or forty billion bits of data. Which I gather they were just about prepared to do when I showed up. But mine … Ho, no! That, I cross my heart, cannot be killed without dismantling the net.”

THE BREAKDOWN OF REPRESENTATIVE GOVERNMENT

SUBJECT HAFLINGER NICHOLAS KENTON SELECTED

PROPOSE FACTORS TO ACCOUNT FOR SUBJECTS INFATUATION WITH P A COMMUNITY PRECIPICE CA

(A) FUNCTIONALITY (B) OBJECTIVITY (C) STABILITY AMPLIFY RESPONSE (A)

(A) IN MOST TOWNS OF SIMILAR SIZE ON THIS CONTINENT DECISIONS CONCERNING COMMUNAL SERVICES CAN NO LONGER BE TAKEN BY POPULAR VOTE OWING TO EXTREME MOBILITY OF POPULATION AND UNWILLINGNESS OF VOTERS TO PAY FOR FACILITIES THAT WILL BE ENJOYED ONLY BY THE SUCCEDENT GROUP E G BOND LEVIES TO FINANCE SCHOOLS SEWAGE SYSTEMS AND HIGHWAY MAINTENANCE HAVE BEEN REPLACED IN 93% OF CASES BY PATERNALIST LEVIES ON THE DOMINANT EMPLOYER ***REFERENCE BARKER PAVLOVSKI & QUAINT THE RESURRECTION OF FEUDAL OBLIGATIONS J ANTHROPOL SOC VOL XXXIX PP 2267–2274

AMPLIFY RESPONSE (B)

(B) INTENSIVE INTERACTION BETWEEN CITIZENS DEEVEES INCIDENTAL ATTRIBUTES E G STATUS TYPE OF JOB RELATIVE WEALTH/POVERTY EMPHASIZES CHARACTER SOCIABILITY TRUSTWORTHINESS ***REFERENCE ANON NEW ROLES FOR OLD AN ANALYSIS OF STATUS CHANGES AMONG A GROUP OF VICTIMS OF THE GREAT BAY QUAKE MONOGRAPH #14 DISASTERVILLE USA SERIES

AMPLIFY RESPONSE (C)

(C) POPULATION TURNOVER IN PRECIPICE DESPITE NEAR AVERAGE VACATION TIME MOBILITY IS LOWEST ON THE CONTINENT AND HAS NEVER EXCEEDED 1 % PER ANNUM ***REFERENCE U S CONTINUOUS SAMPLE CENSUS

THANK YOU

YOU ARE WELCOME

–AND THE LIKABILITY OF LODGING

The place took possession of them both so rapidly he could only just believe it. Tongue-tangled, he—and Kate, who was equally affected—strove to identify the reasons.

Perhaps most important, there was more going on here than in other places. There was a sense of time being filled, used, taken advantage of. At G2S, at UMKC, it was more a matter of time being divided up for you; if the ordained segments were too short, you got little done, while if they were too long, you got less done than you could have. Not here. And yet the Precipicians knew how to idle.

Paradox.

There were so many people to meet, not in the way one met them when taking on a new job or joining a new class, but by being passed on, as it were, from one to another. From Josh and Lorna (he, power engineer and sculptor; she, one of Precipice’s two medical doctors, organist and notary public) to Doc Squibbs (veterinarian and glass-blower) on to Ferdie Squibbs, his son (electronics maintenance and amateur plant genetics), and his girlfriend Patricia Kallikian (computer programing and anything to do with textiles) on again to …

It was giddying. And the most spectacular possible proof of how genuinely economical it was to run on a maximum-utilization basis. Everyone they met seemed to be pursuing at least two occupations, not moonlighting, not scuffling to make ends meet, but because here they had the chance to indulge more than one preference without worrying about the next hike in utilities charges. Accustomed to a routine five percent increase in the cost of electricity, and ten or twelve in any year when a nuclear reactor melted down—because such installations had long ago ceased to be insurable and the cost of failure could only be recouped from the consumer—the strangers were astonished at the cheapness of energy in this self-reliant community.

Wandering about, they discovered how ingeniously the town had been structured, right from the beginning: its main nucleus at Root Mean Square being echoed by subnuclei that acted as a focus for between three and four hundred people, but neither isolated nor inward-looking, and each with some unique attraction designed to draw occasional visitors from other parts of the town. One had a games area., another a swimming pool, another a constantly changing art exhibition, another a children’s zoo with scores of tame, cuddly animals, another a view down a vista flanked by unbelievably gorgeous flowering trees … and so forth. All, Suzy Dellinger admitted cheerfully, “of malice aforethought”—the founders of the town had tabulated what was known to help a community run pleasantly, then allotted elements of it to suitable sectors of what had then been a settlement of rickety hovels, battered trailer homes and many tents.

For the first year and a half, they were informed, the builders used nothing but scrap. Plus a great deal of imagination, to compensate for a near-total absence of money.

Additionally, the newcomers were immediately involved. Pausing to chat to a big husky man repairing an electrical connector, they were casually requested to help him lever the covering flagstone back into place; on being introduced to one Eustace Fenelli, who ran a popular bar and restaurant, they found themselves carrying a vast pot of minestrone out of the delectably aromatic kitchen—“since you happen to be going that way!” Strolling toward the main square with Lorna Treves, and passing a house from which a white-faced man emerged at a run, overjoyed to find Lorna because—as he said—he’d just called and heard she wasn’t home, they wound up standing by with sterile dressings and a bowlful of blood while she delicately removed a huge splinter of glass from the leg of a screaming child.

“I never found this before,” Kate whispered later. “This sense that everybody is ready to help everybody else. I’d heard it was possible. But I thought it was obsolete.”

He nodded thoughtfully. “On top of that, there’s a sense that being helped doesn’t demean you. That’s what I like most.”

Naturally, among the first places they asked to visit was the actual headquarters of Hearing Aid. With a warning that they might not find it particularly impressive, Brad Compton introduced them to the director, Sweetwater. Just Sweetwater. She was a tall, gaunt woman in her sixties, with long-faded traces on her face and arms of what, she commented, had once been elaborate medicine tattoos. She had believed herself to be a reincarnation of a great Shawnee chief, in touch with the spirit of the beyond, and had operated a clairvoyance and prediction business in Oakland.

“But”—with a wry smile—“not one of my spirits warned me about the quake. I had a son, and … Oh, it’s ancient history. But before I became a medium I’d been a switchboard operator, so I was one of the first people to volunteer to help with what developed into Hearing Aid. You know how it all started? No? Oh! Well, at all the places where the refugees were forced to settle, most of which were a lot less attractive than our own site—though you should have seen it the day we were stopped at gunpoint by the National Guard and told thus far, no further … Where was I? Oh, yes: of course everybody, once they’d calmed down, wanted to tell their friends and relatives they’d survived. So the Army spliced in some manual sound-only field telephone trucks, and people were allowed one call apiece not to last more than five minutes, or one other try if the first number didn’t answer. I saw people go right back to the end of the line time after time, because their second call had failed and they weren’t allowed a third immediately.”

As she talked, she was leading Kate and Sandy away from the library—characteristically, the largest single building in Precipice—down a narrow alley they had not traversed.

“It was a terrible time,” Sweetwater went on. “But I’m not sorry to have lived through it … Then, of course, as soon as it was known that there was a phone service, people started jamming every circuit in and into California because they hadn’t heard from their friends or kinfolk, and kept at it all night and all day regardless of how many pleas were made over the TV to get off the phone so they wouldn’t hold up the rescue work. They had to cut some cities out of circuit altogether, I remember. Just withdraw the phone service completely.”

She shook her head sorrowfully.

“In the end they had to rig facilities for incoming calls because people who got an answer instead of a circuit-overload signal tended not to come back and bother you until tomorrow. Like I say, I volunteered to run a board handling incoming traffic. At first I was kind of sharp with people. You know—brisk, brusque, whatever the hell. ‘You will be notified if your son/daughter/mother/father has survived but you’re holding up essential rescue work and how’d you like it if someone dear to you were dying right now because you’re using this circuit?’’

“And then I made this peculiar discovery. A lot of the calls were from people not trying to trace friends and relatives at all. Just—I don’t know—wanting contact with the disaster, I guess. As though their last consolation was to know that other people were even worse off. So sometimes, especially at night, I let them talk. They were pretty good about it—just a few minutes’ catharsis and that was that. Round about this time the people from Claes came in, and they found the same thing among the refugees. People simply needing to talk. Not just the older folk, who’d lost fine homes and prized possessions, but the youngsters. They were worse. I recall one kid—well, nineteen, twenty, she must have been—who ought to have become a famous sculptor. She was so good, they’d fixed her a one-man show at a San Francisco gallery. And she had to cling to a tree and watch as the earth gobbled up everything she’d got ready, plus her home, her studio, the lot. She never carved another thing; she went insane. And there were others. … They didn’t want counseling, they just wanted to tell people what their lives used to be like. The plans they had for an extension to the house; the way they meant to lay out the garden, only the house headed north and the garden went south; the trip around the world they were going to take next year—lives charted on a course the quake destroyed.”

Pausing now before an unremarkable door, she glanced at them.

“Hence—Hearing Aid. Which gave us a common purpose while we reconstructed, and then simply kept on snowballing.”

“Is that what made Precipice such a success compared to the other paid-avoidance towns?” Sandy demanded. “Offering a service that other people valued instead of just accepting charity and public money?”

Sweetwater nodded. “Or at any rate one of the things that helped. Common sense in using our few resources was the other. And here’s the central.”

She ushered them into a surprisingly small room, where some dozen comfortable chairs were occupied by people wearing headphones. There was another dozen vacant. The place was as hushed as a cathedral; only the faintest buzz of sound escaped the headphones. Eyes turned, heads nodded, but otherwise there was no break in the concentration.

The newcomers’ attention was instantly riveted by the expression of dismay on the face of one listener, a pretty black woman in her thirties. Sweetwater advanced on her, looking a question, but she shook her head, shut her eyes, set her teeth.

“A bad one there,” Sweetwater murmured, returning to the visitors. “But so long as she thinks she can stand it …”

“Is the job a great strain?”

“Yes.” Sweetwater’s tone was like herself: thin and long-drawn-out. “When someone vents a lifetime of hate on you and then makes sure you hear the hideous guggle as he cuts his carotid with a kitchen knife—yes, it’s a strain. Once I had to listen while a crazy woman threw spoonfuls of vitriol at her baby, tied in a feeding chair. She wanted to get back at its father. The poor kid’s screams!”

“But was there nothing you could do?” Kate blurted.

“Yes. Listen. That’s the promise that we make. We’ve always kept it. It may not make a lonely hell less hellish, but it makes it a fraction less lonely.”

They pondered that a while. Then Kate inquired, “Are these the only people on duty?”

“Oh, no. This central is for people who can’t stand their tour at home—interruptions from small children mainly. But most of us prefer to work from home. Granted, the traffic’s light right now; you should see our load come Labor Day, the end of the peak vacation season, when people who hoped against hope the summer would improve their lives realize there really will be another winter.”

“How soon do you want to call on us?” Sandy asked.

“No hurry. And it doesn’t have to be both of you. I gather Kate can’t stay.”

But it was only the following night that she said suddenly, “I think I will.”

“What?”

“Stay. Or rather, go away and come back as quickly as I can. Depending on a permit to move Bagheera.”

He started. “Do you really mean it?”

“Oh, yes. You plan to stay, don’t you?”

For a while he didn’t answer. At last he said, “Were you eavesdropping?”

“No, it’s nothing I’ve heard you or anybody else say. It—well, it’s the way you’ve acted today. All of a sudden you’re confident. I can literally scent it. I think maybe you’ve found the confidence to trust people.”

His voice shook a little. “I hope I have. Because if I can’t trust them … But I think I can, and I think you’re right to say I’ve finally learned how. Bless you, Kate. It was you who taught me. Wise woman!”

“Is this a safe place? The one from which you can’t be dragged back to Tarnover?”

“They promised me it would be.”

“Who did?”

“Ted, and Suzy, and Sweetwater. And Brynhilde.”

“What?”

“It was like this. …”

They had been invited for dinner by Josh and Lorna. Josh loved to cook; now and then he took over at Fenelli’s for the hell of it, feeding fifty people in an evening. Tonight he’d settled for ten, but when the company was sitting around in the garden afterward other people wandered up, by ones and twos, and accepted a glass of wine or a mug of beer and eventually there was a full-sized party numbering at least forty.

For a long time he stood by himself in a dark corner. Then Ted Horovitz and Suzy came toward him, intending—he gathered—to join Sweetwater, who was just arriving on her own. Catching sight of him, Ted said, “Sandy, you settling in okay?”

It was a moment of decision. He took that decision. He squared his shoulders and stepped from shadow.

“I’d like a word with you. And I guess it ought to be with Brad, too.”

They exchanged glances. Suzy said, “Brad won’t be here—he’s listening. But Sweetwater’s the first alternate councilman.”

“Fine.”

His palms sweated, his belly was taut, but in his head there was a great cool calm. The four of them found chairs and sat down a little apart from the rest of the party.

“Well, what is it?” Ted rumbled eventually.

Sandy drew a deep breath. He said, “I realized a few hours ago that I know something about Precipice that you don’t.”

They waited.

“Tell me first, though: am I right in thinking Hearing Aid is defended by a tapeworm?”

After a brief hesitation Sweetwater said with a shrug, “I’d have thought that was self-evident.”

“The Fedcomps are getting set to kill it.”

That provoked a reaction. All three of his listeners jolted forward on their chairs; Ted had been about to light his favorite pipe, and it was instantly forgotten.

“But they can’t without—” Suzy began.

“I don’t want the details,” Sandy interrupted. “I’m just assuming that you have the biggest-ever worm loose in the net, and that it automatically sabotages any attempt to monitor a call to the ten nines. If I’d had to tackle the job, back when they first tied the home-phone service into the net, I’d have written the worm as an explosive scrambler, probably about half a million bits long, with a backup virus facility and a last-ditch infinitely replicating tail. It should just about have been possible to hang that sort of tail on a worm by 2005. I don’t know whether yours has one or not and it doesn’t matter. What does matter is that while I was a systems rash with G2S recently I moused around the net considerably more than my employers required of me, and I ran across something I only today spotted as significant.”

They were hanging on his every word now.

“For about eighteen months they’ve been routinely copying Class-A Star data from G2S and every other hypercorporation with a maximum-national-advantage rating and lifting the copies clear of the net for storage. I thought maybe they were tired of hypercorp execs pulling the White House Trick and other similar gimmicks, so they needed a standard reference to appeal to. It didn’t occur to me that this might be the preliminary stages of a worm-killing job. I never guessed that big a worm was free and running. Now I see the implications, and I guess you do too, hm?”

Very pale, Ted said, “Too true! That makes nonsense of the virus facility, let alone the simple scrambler aspect. And in fact our worm doesn’t have the kind of tail you mentioned. Later, we were vaguely hoping we could add one … but Washington’s tolerance of Hearing Aid was wearing thin, and we didn’t want to irritate the authorities.”

“They must hate us,” Sweetwater said. “Really, they must loathe Precipice.”

“They’re scared of us, that’s what it is,” Suzy corrected. “But … Oh, I find it hard to believe they’d be willing to clear up the sort of mess our worm could cause. I’ve always understood it works in two stages: if someone tries to monitor a call to Hearing Aid it scrambles the nearest major nexus, and if they did try to kill it, they’d find over thirty billion bits of data garbled randomly but not know where the damage had been done. It might be years before the returns all came in. We never found out whether that virus facility actually works, but the front end—the scrambler—that works fine, and the BDP once proved it to their cost.”

Sandy nodded. “But they’re prepared to cope with the virus aspect now. Like I said, they’ve lifted the max-nat-ad stuff out of the net altogether, ready to be slotted in again afterward.”

He leaned back, reaching for his glass.

“We’re obliged to you, Sandy,” Sweetwater said after a brief silence. “I guess we better put on our thinking caps and see what we can—”

He cut her short. “No, I’ll do it. What you need is a worm with a completely different structure. The type they call a replicating phage. And the first thing you must give it to eat is your original worm.”

“A replicating phage?” Suzy repeated. “I never heard that term before.”

“Not surprising. They’re kind of dangerous. Plenty of them have been used in restricted situations. Like, come election time, you disguise one and slip it into the membership list of the opposition party, hoping they don’t have duplicate records. But there are very few in the continental net, and the only big one is inactive until called for. In case you’re interested, it was devised at a place called Electric Skillet, and its function is to shut the net down and prevent it being exploited by a conquering army. They think the job would be complete in thirty seconds.”

Ted frowned. “How come you talk about these phages with authority?” he demanded.

“Well …” Sandy hesitated, then took the plunge. “Well, I’ve had mine running behind me for over six years, and it’s stood me in good stead. I don’t see why one shouldn’t do the same for Hearing Aid.”

“So what the hell do you use one for?”

Keeping his voice level with immense effort, he told them. They listened. And then Ted did an extraordinary thing.

He whistled shrilly. From where she kept her watch Brynhilde rose and ambled over.

“Is this poker lying?” Ted inquired.

She snuffed at Sandy’s crotch—diffidently as though reluctant to take such liberties—shook her head, and went back the way she had come.

“Okay,” Suzy said. “What exactly will you need, and how long will it take?”

DOGGED

“Out of the question,” said Dr. Joel Bosch. “He must be lying.”

Acutely aware he was sitting in the same office, perhaps even in the same chair, as Nickie Haflinger the day he encountered the late Miranda, Freeman said patiently, “But our techniques eliminate all possibility of deliberate falsehood.”

“Clearly that cannot be the case.” Bosch’s tone was brisk. “I’m very well acquainted with Lilleberg’s work. It’s true he produced some spectacular anomalous results. His explanations of them, however, amounted to no more than doubletalk. We know now what processes must be applied to produce that kind of effect, and Lilleberg never even pretended to use them. They simply didn’t exist when he retired.”

“There was considerable controversy over the so-called Lilleberg Hypothesis,” Freeman persisted.

“That controversy was long ago resolved!” Bosch snapped. And added with a strained attempt at greater politeness: “For reasons which I’m afraid a … a nonspecialist like yourself might find difficult to follow. I’m sorry, but there has to be a flaw in your interrogation methods. I suggest you re-evaluate them. Good afternoon.”

Defeated, Freeman rose. Suddenly a muscle in his left cheek had started to go tic-tic-tic.

HIATUS

Outside, the noise of quiet-humming motors as the tribe assembled. Inside, agonized by indecision, she walked back and forth, back and forth, her nails bitten to the quick.

“… after that, of course, I couldn’t go on living with him. I mean could I? Flaunting around the neighborhood like that, not caring who knew what he was up to …”

The sound of the motors faded. There was a phone in the corner of the room. She made no move toward it, even now.

“… just sit there! I mean how can you? I mean here I am all alone and it’s the third night in a row and last week was the same and in the name of God come, somebody come and put some weight on these empty dusty stairs and …”

If he finds out, he’ll kill me. I know he will. But once I called them and in a way I guess it saved my sanity. Any rate it got me here without committing suicide. Tonight someone else—and yet I know Jemmy would kill me if he guessed.

“… not so much drinking it as lining it, catch? Jee-sowss if I found him cleaning his teeth with it I wouldn’t be surprised and if they marketed a bourbon-flavor toothpaste he’d be the first customer not that he brushes his teeth too often and the stink of them rotting is …”

At last, fatalistically, she did approach the phone. It took her two tries to punch the number; first time, she lost count partway through. The screen lit.

“Hey!” In a desperate whisper, as though Jemmy could hear her from kilometers away. “You got to do something, do it quick! See, my son rides with the Blackass tribe and they just started off for a match with—”

A girl’s quiet voice interrupted. “You have contacted Hearing Aid, which exists exclusively to listen. We do not act, intervene or hold conversations. If you wish assistance, apply to one of the regular emergency services.”

The stinking stupid twitches! Well, hell, what do I owe them anyway? Let ’em find out what fools they are. If they won’t take help when it’s offered. …

But the tribes must be nearly there by now. Burning and wrecking and looting and killing. And I remember my brother Archie with his eyeball hanging loose on his cheek and him only nineteen.

One last try. Then let ’em go to hell if they prefer.

“Now you listen this time! I’m calling you to warn you! My son Jemmy is riding with the Blackass tribe out of Quemadura and they got this match with the Mariachis out of San Feliciano and it’s about how many houses they can fire in Precipice and the warlord has a mortar, hear me, a real army mortar and a case of shells!”

And concluding in a tone close to sobs: “When he finds out Jemmy’s just naturally going to beat me to death. But I couldn’t let it happen without I warned you!”

SLACK SHIFT INTO HIGH GEAR

“Call the sheriff!”

At his yell everyone else on this undemanding shift in the headquarters of Hearing Aid—including Kate, who like himself was being trained under supervision before being permitted to take calls at home—looked daggers. Someone said, “Ssh, I’m listening.”

“Two tribes closing on Precipice for a match, and one of them has an army mortar!”

That worked, galvanizing people into action. But a little too late. Kate said, breaking rules and removing her headphones, “A while back I had to kill a call that said something about a tribal match. I wonder if—”

He had begun to turn and look at her when the first explosion smashed the evening quiet.

While the others were still jumping with alarm he completed the turn and said, “You killed a call that tried to warn us?”

To which her answer was drowned out by a sound such as had not been heard before in the history of Precipice, which none who heard it wished to hear again: as though instantly they were trapped inside the largest organ in the world, and its player were striking a full diapason just that teeth-gritting fraction off true pitch. Between a bay and a howl, it was the cry of a hundred and fifty giant dogs answering their leader’s call.

Arrgh-OOO … !

Only the pups were left on guard, and the bitches nursing young litters. The rest of Natty Bumppo’s forces tore into the night, following the scent of fear, for that first howl alone had been enough to throw the attackers in confusion. There were shots, and one more mortar shell was fired, but it fell wide.

Thirty minutes, and the dogs drove in the tribers, weeping, bleeding and disarmed, to have their bites bound up before being dumped in the town’s various lockable sheds and cellars for want of an actual jail. Two dogs were shot, one fatally, and another was stabbed but survived, while thirty-seven tribers—not prepared to encounter an enemy of this stamp—were placed under arrest. The oldest of them proved to be eighteen.

All this, however, was too late to save the house at Great Circle Course and Drunkard’s Walk.

GRIEVANCE

There were tears glistening on the cheeks of the subject, and the instruments advised returning him to present-time mode. Following their guidance, Freeman waited patiently until the man regained total consciousness.

He said at last, “It’s remarkable that you were so affected by the destruction of a house to which you barely had a chance to grow attached. Moreover, even if the first warning call had been heeded, there would still not have been enough time to forestall the attack, and it was the very first shell which struck your home.”

“You’re soulless. As well as heartless!”

Freeman remained silent.

“Oh-h-h … ! Sure, sure, I know. Kate was obeying the regulations; she’d got a grasp of them faster than I had. It is standard practice at Hearing Aid never to accept a call that orders the listener to do something, because services exist for that purpose. And even if the woman who called had managed to get the point across about a warning in the first couple of seconds, the reaction would still have been the same. They tell you to try and deevee any call that begins with a hysterical warning, because nine times out of ten it’s some religious nut threatening to visit the wrath of God on us. I mean Precipice. And I guess I was aware of that at the time. I know equally well it was pointless to scream and rant at her and I went ahead and did it anyhow, standing there by the burnt-out wreck of the house with the smoke stinging in my eyes and the stench in my nose and a dozen people trying to reason with me. Didn’t work. I lost my temper on the grand scale. I think what I did was let go all the potential for rage I’d been bottling up since babyhood. In the end ….” He had to swallow and resume.

“I did something I probably last did when I was ten. I hit somebody.”

“Predictably, it was Kate.”

“Yes, of course. And …” He started to laugh, incongruously because tears were still bright on his cheeks. “And I found myself a second later sprawling in the dirt, with Brynhilde’s paw on my chest and that great-toothed jaw looming close and she was shaking her head and—I swear—going ‘tsk-tsk, naughty boy!’ I could wish she had been a trifle quicker. Because I’ve never seen Kate since.”

The laughter failed. Misery overspread his face.

“Ah. Losing the house, then, affected you so deeply because it symbolized your relationship with Kate.”

“You don’t understand a fraction of the truth. Not a millionth of it. The whole scene, the whole framework, was composed of loss. Not just the house, even though it was the first place I’d been to where I felt I could grasp all the overtones of the word ‘home’—not just Kate, even though with her I’d also started to comprehend for the first time what one can imply by the word ‘love.’ No, there was more on top of that, something far closer to me. Loss of the control which had enabled me to change identities at will. That blew away on the wind the moment I realized I’d struck the last person in the world I could want to hurt.”

“Are you certain she would have kept that casual promise about returning from KC? Obtaining a permit to transport her pet mountain lion would have been incredibly difficult. What grounds did you have for believing that she was sincere?”

“Among other things, the fact that she had kept a promise made to that mountain lion. She’s not the sort to forget any promise. And by then I’d figured out why else she’d kept on enrolling for course after unrelated course at the same university. Basically it was to provide her with a sense of pattern. She wanted her world-picture to include a little of everything, viewed from the same spot with the same perspective. She’d have been prepared to continue for another decade if necessary.”

“But she met you, and living with you was an education in itself. I see. Well, I can accept the idea. Ten years at Tarnover, at three million per, should indeed have equipped you with data you could pass on.”

“I suspect your sense of humor is limited to irony. Do you ever laugh at a joke?”

“Seldom. I’ve heard virtually all of them before.”

“No doubt among the components of human personality you’re trying to analyze humor is on the list right next to grief.”

“Directly afterward. H follows G.”

There was a pause.

“You know, this is the first time I’ve not been sure whether you’re bleating me.”

“Work it out for yourself.” Freeman rose and stretched. “It will occupy your mind until our next session.”

STRIKE ONE

After hitting Kate …

That his world had been repainted in shades of bitterness was no defense. Some of these his new neighbors—his new friends—were old enough to have seen not one house but a whole city fall in ruin.

Anyhow, what apology could he offer in a context where even dogs could distinguish force from violence? The tribers who thought it amusing to lob mortar shells at random into a peaceful community had been rounded up. Some were tooth-marked. But the bites had been precisely controlled. That arm had wielded a gun or knife; therefore those fingers had been obliged to open and let the weapon fall. That pair of legs had tried to carry the owner away; therefore that ankle had been nipped just hard enough to make him stumble. All for good reason.

His reason for hitting Kate was not good. They told him why, in quiet patient tones. Deaf to their arguments, he hurled back false justification mixed with insult, until at last they glanced at one another, shrugged and left him.

It was not cold, that night he spent sitting on a stump and staring at the shell of the house. But in his heart there was an arctic chill of such indescribable shame as he had not felt since he became an adult.

In the end he simply walked away, not caring where.

And came many hours later to the place which had vomited over Precipice the Blackass tribe. It was sweaty dust from all-day walking which made his shoes loathsome to his feet, but it seemed to him like the detritus of human cruelty: the materialized version of bloodlust, its ectoplasm.

“I don’t know who I am,” he said to an incurious passerby as he entered Quemadura.

“I don’t know who the hell you are either,” the stranger snapped, pushing past.

He pondered that.

IGNORANTIA NIHIL EXCUSAT

Ted Horovitz made necessary adjustments to the form-letter program, tapped the print key, and read the result as it emerged from the machine. This, thank goodness, was the last of the thirty-seven.

“Dear Mrs. Young, your son Jabez was arrested here last night while in possession of four deadly weapons of which one, a pistol, had been used within the previous few minutes. The hearing has been set for 10:10 tomorrow. You may wish to employ counsel, in which case the enclosed summary of evidence should be furnished to him or her; otherwise you may rest assured that Jabez will be represented by a competent lawyer appointed by the court. He has declared himself unaware of the fact that under our judicial code conviction for this crime entails a mandatory sentence of not less than one year’s supervised rehabilitation during which period the convict is forbidden to leave the town limits. (There is no maximum length for such a sentence.) Please note that one of the oldest of all legal principles states: ‘Ignorance of the law excuses nothing.’ In other words neither a defense nor an appeal may be founded on the plea, ‘I didn’t know.’ Yours, &c.”

Turning hopefully to Brad Compton, who among his various other roles acted as their chief legal counselor, he said, “So that’s all until the court assembles, right?”

“Far as I’m concerned,” Brad grunted. “But don’t relax too soon. I was talking to Sweetwater this morning, and it seems she’s found something you have to—”

“Ted!” A shrill cry from outside.

“I could half believe that woman’s telepathic,” Ted sighed, tapping out his pipe prior to refilling it. “Yes, Sweetwater, come right in!”

She entered, carrying a folded stack of computer printouts, which she dumped on a table at Ted’s side. Dropping into a chair, she slapped the pile of paper with her open palm.

“I knew it. I knew what Sandy told us the other night at Josh and Lorna’s rang a bell in my memory. A long way back—over eleven years—but it was the kind of call you get once in a lifetime. Once I started digging, I got correlation after correlation. Take a look.”

Ted, frowning, complied; Brad came around behind his chair to read over his shoulder.

There was a long silence, but for the rustle of the concertinaed sheets.

At last Ted said, not looking up, “Any news of him?”

Sweetwater shook her head. “Nor Kate either.”

“Kate left town,” Brad said. “Took the railcar about seven thirty. But nobody knows what’s become of Sandy.”

“All of us, though,” Ted muttered, “know what’s apt to become of him … don’t we?”

They both nodded.

“Better call Suzy,” Ted said, leaning back with a sigh. “I got a councilman’s motion to submit.”

“Making Sandy a freeman of Precipice?” Sweet-water suggested. “Making our defenses his defenses?”

“Mm-hm.”

“Well, naturally you have my vote. But …”

“But what?”

“Have you forgotten? We don’t know who he is. He told us what. He didn’t think to tell us who.”

Ted’s jaw dropped. “His code?” he said after a pause.

“I checked immediately. No such. It’s been deleted. And doubtless his protective phage went with it.”

“That makes the job more difficult,” Brad said. “I still think it ought to be done. And when she reads this information you’ve uncovered, I’m certain Suzy will agree.”

COLLAPSE OF STOUT PARTY

“Interesting. Very interesting. This might save a lot of trouble. Say, Perce!”

“Yes?”

“Know that hole-in-corner place Precipice CA? Looks like their sheriff went a step too far.”

“Oh, Gerry. Oh, Gerry. If you weren’t new around here I guess you’d realize nothing at Precipice can go too far. The pokers from Claes who wrote the deal they have with the government were the smartest con men that ever pulled wool over the eyes of a Washington sheep. But for once I’ll bite. It would be great to undermine them. What you got?”

“Well, they arrested these here tribers, and—”

“And?”

“Hell, look at the sentences they handed down!”

“Not to leave town for one year minimum, to accept escort by a dog apiece … So?”

“Goddammit, escort by a dog?”

“They got kind of weird dogs out there. You didn’t check, did you?”

“Well, I guess I—”

“Save it, save it. You didn’t check. So, not having checked, what did you expect to get out of this?”

“I though maybe—uh—an injunction? Grounds of cruel-and-unusual? Or even kidnaping. I mean one of the tribers is only thirteen.”

“There are four states where they routinely agree applications to be declared competent if the applicant is past his or her thirteenth birthday. California’s one. It might be educational for you to find out what the others are. As to cruel-and-unusual, you should also know there’s one city where you can still legally be burned alive provided they don’t pick a Sunday. They didn’t do it much lately, but it’s on the books, not repealed. Ask any computer. Oh, get back to work, will you? While you’ve been gabbing they probably sneaked a brand-new tapeworm past you.”

Pause.

“Perce!”

“What is it this time?”

“Remember what you said about a tapeworm?”

“Oh my God. That was a joke. You mean they spat in our eye again?”

“See for yourself, It’s kind of—uh—fierce, isn’t it?”

“Fierce is only half of it. Well, I guess it better claim its first victim. You found it. You go tell Mr. Hartz to abandon the attack on Hearing Aid.”

“What?”

“You heard me. Carry the good news from Y to X! Tamper with this thing, and—and my God! The data-net would be in chaos in one minute flat or maybe sooner! Hurry!”

BIG TOP

Belly sour with hunger, throat dry with dust, he wandered the darkening streets of Quemadura, scarcely aware that he was part of a trend. There were people and vehicles converging. He went with the crowd. Drained, passive, he ignored reality until suddenly he was spoken to.

“Damn it, shivver, you deaf and dumb or something?”

What?

He emerged from his chrysalis of overload, blinking, and discovered where he was. He’d seen this place before. But only on three-vee, never in reality. Above all he had never smelt it. The air was foul with the stench of frightened animals and eager people.

Many signs, hurtfully bright, flashed on and off to confirm his discovery. Some said circus bocconi; others stated more discreetly that a Roman-style show would start in 11 minutes. The 11 changed to 10 as he watched.

“What kinda seat you want?” rapped the same grumpy voice. “Ten, twenty, thirty?”

“Uh …”

He fumbled in his pocket, finding some bills. As part of the ambience, tickets for this show were issued by a live human being, a scar-faced man missing fingers from his right hand. On seeing cash he scowled; however, the machine at the side of his booth decided it was genuine and parted with a ten-dollar ticket.

Wondering what he was doing here, he followed signs saying $10, $10, $10. Shortly he was in a hall: maybe a converted aircraft hangar. There were bleachers and boxes surrounding an arena and a pit. Machines were hanging up phony-looking decor, banners with misspelled Latin slogans, plastic fasces bundled around dull plastic axes.

Making his way with mechanical politeness to a vacant seat in a high row with a poor view, he shamelessly listened to what the earlier arrivals, the keen ’fishes, were saying.

“Wasting those ’gators on kids, hell! I mean I hate my kids as much as anybody, but if you can get real live ’gators—well, hell!”

“Hope they got some whites on the menu. Sickan-tired of these here blacks, allatime wanna make like grandpa, fight a lion singlehanded and clutched but clutched on the heaviest dope!”

“Course it’s all faked, like they got radio implants in the animals’ brains so they don’t get to really hurt anybody ’cause of the insurance being so stiff and—”

A hugely amplified voice rang out. “Five minutes! In just five short minutes the great spectacle begins! Absolutely and positively no one will be admitted after the start of the show! Remember only Circus Bocconi goes out live live live in real time up and down the whole West Coast! And we record as well, retransmit to the unlucky portions of the continent!”

Suddenly he was vaguely frightened, and cast around for a chance to leave again. But the customers were coming thick and fast now, and he was unwilling to push against the flow. Besides, there was a camera coasting his way. It rode a jointed metal arm, like a mantis’s foreleg, dangling from a miniature electric trolley on a rail under the roof. Its dual eye, faceted, seemed to be focusing on him. He was even more reluctant to attract attention by leaving than he was to stay and watch the show.

He folded his arms close around his body as though to stop himself from shivering.

It would only be an hour, he consoled himself.

The introductory acts he was more or less able to disregard though some nausea gathered in a bubble at the base of his gullet during the second item: imported from Iraq, one genuine snake-eater, an ugly man with a bulging forehead hinting at hydrocephalic idiocy who calmly offered his tongue to a snake, let it strike, then drew in his tongue again, bit off its head, chewed and swallowed, then rose shyly grinning to acknowledge the audience’s howls of applause.

Then came a stylized match between gladiators, a nod to the ostensible “Roman” format of the show, which concluded with the retiarius bleeding from a leg wound and the gladiator proper—the man with the sword and shield—strutting around the arena prouder than a turkeycock, having done nothing to speak of.

Dull resentment burgeoned in his mind.

It’s disgusting. Butchered to make a Roman holiday. A cheat from start to finish. Filthy. Horrible. This is where parents learn to raise the kids who get their kicks from tribaling a stranger’s home. This is where they get taught you should remember how you killed your mother. Cut off your father’s balls. Ate the baby to stop mom and dad loving it more than you. Sick. All sick. Crazy sick.

At Tarnover there had been a kind of subcult for circus. Something to do with channeling aggression into socially acceptable paths. The memory was a dim echo. There was a dreadful confusion inside his head. He was hungry and thirsty and above all miserable.

“And now a short break so our sponsors’ messages can reach the world,” boomed the master of ceremonies over the monstrously loud PA. “Time for me to let you know about a unique feature of our Roman shows. Al Jackson, who’s our champion gladiator, that you saw a minute back …”

Pause for a ripple of renewed clapping and shouting.

“Yea-hey! Tough as they come, with family following in his footsteps—y’know his son is warlord of the Blackass tribe?”

Pause. This time not filled. As though the speaker had been waiting for a scream and yell from the tribers, who weren’t present.

But he covered the hiatus expertly.

“Al issues a real-time challenge on all these shows—yes, literally a challenge in real time, no fixing, no prearrangement. Want to try your skill against him, take over the net and trident for the final slot? You can, any of you! Just stand up and holler how!”

Without intending, he was on his feet.

“He raised the warlord of the Blackass tribe?”

He heard his own voice as though it were coming from light-years’ distance.

“Yeah man! A son to be proud of, young Bud Jackson!”

‘Then I’m going to take Al to little tiny pieces.” He was leaving his seat, still listening to himself shout at the top of his lungs. “I’m going to make him weep and beg and plead for mercy. I’m going to teach him all the things his son taught me, and I am going to make him howl, and blubber, and plead and moan. And it’s going to go on for a lot longer than this show.”

There was a rattle of applause, and the audience sat up and looked eager. Someone patted him on the shoulder as he passed and wished him luck.

DEFINITION OF TERMS

“A classic instance of the death wish.”

“Garbage. I had no least intention of being dead. I’d watched that fat slob. I knew I could dismantle him even though I was weak and excessively angry. Didn’t I prove it? He was seven days in the hospital, you know, and he’ll never walk straight again.”

“Agreed. But on the other hand making yourself conspicuous before a three-vee audience … ?”

“Yes. Yes, there was that.”

THE MEDIUM IS THE MESS-UP

Traditionally one had defaced or scrawled on posters and billboards, or sometimes—mainly in rural areas—shot at them because the eyes or nipples of a model formed convenient targets.

Later, when a common gadget around the house was a set of transparent screens (like those later used for the electronic version of fencing) to place over the TV set for mock-tennis and similar games, strangely enough the viewers’ ratings for commercials went up. Instead of changing channels when advertising began, people took to switching in search of more of the same.

To the content of which they were paying no attention. What they wanted was to memorize the next movement of the actors and actresses and deform their gestures in hilarious fashion with a magnetic pencil. One had to know the timing of the commercials pretty well to become good at the game; some of the images lasted only half a second.

With horror the advertisers and network officials discovered that in nine cases out of ten the most dedicated watchers could not recall what product was being promoted. For them, it wasn’t “that Coke ad” or “that plug for Drãno”—it was “the one where you can make her swipe him in the chops.”

Saturation point, and the inception of diminishing returns, was generally dated to the early eighties, when the urban citizen of North America was for the first time hit with an average of over a thousand advertisements per diem.

They went right on advertising things, of course. It had become a habit.

SWORD, MASK AND NET

Chuckling, Shad Fluckner laid aside his magnetic pencil. The commercial break was over and the circus program was due to resume. Employees of Anti-Trauma Inc. were more than just encouraged, they were virtually compelled, to watch the broadcasts from Circus Bocconi in Quemadura. Sponsoring circus was one of the best ways the corporation had found to attract new clients. Precisely those parents who spent most time indulging violence on the vicarious level were those most afraid of what would happen if their children’s aggression were to be turned on them. In fact, the more circus the parents watched, the sooner they were inclined to sign the kids up for a course of treatment. The relationship could be shown to be linear plus or minus fourteen percent.

It was no sweat for him. He’d always enjoyed circus anyhow. But if they knew, at Anti-Trauma HQ, what one of their employees had figured out to do to their latest commercial, feathers would well and truly fly. Ho-ho! It was a shame he couldn’t share his discovery with anyone; his colleagues would interpret it as disloyal except for those who’d decided it was time to move to another job, and … Well, he had the same idea in mind himself, and might reach the decision before the lifetime of the commercial expired. Meanwhile it was great fun to fool with.

Still grinning, he composed himself to watch the final segment of the show, the bit where Al Jackson allegedly issued an open challenge to members of the audience. Rigged for sure, this deal, but occasionally …

Hey.

Not so heavily rigged, this one. Not unless they decided to surple Al and—Goddamn, he’s screaming! He really is screaming! This is great stuff for once. This is really very sick indeed. This is muchissimo. Hmm … yes!

Eyes bulbing, he leaned closer to the screen. No fake, that blood. Nor the howls of agony, either! Say, who could this poker be who was making mincemeat of Bocconi’s star turn—?

“But it’s Lazarus,” he said suddenly to the air. “Beard or no beard, I’d know that shivver anywhere. And he gave me the slip before and this time—oh, this time … !”

NEXT IN LINE

“And once he was recognized on three-vee it was only a matter of time,” Hartz said, leaning back behind his desk. It was captioned Deputy Director. Thumbing one of many switches, he shut off the rolling replay of the Haflinger tapes.

“Yes, sir,” Freeman said. “And the FBI was very quick to corner him.”

“Quicker than you to drain him,” Hartz said, and gave a sleepy smile. In the context of this office, his home base, he was a different person from the visitor who had called on Freeman at Tarnover. Perhaps that was why he had declined an invitation to return.

“I beg your pardon,” Freeman said stiffly. “My brief was to extract all possible data from him. That couldn’t be done quickly. Nonetheless, to within a margin of about half a percent, I’ve achieved it.”

“That may be good enough for you. It’s not enough for us.”

“What?”

“I believe I made myself clear. After your long-drawn-out interrogation of this subject we still do not know what we most want to know.”

“That being … ?” Freeman’s voice grew frostier by the moment.

“The answer, I submit, is self-evident. An intolerable situation exists concerning Precipice vis-à-vis the government. A small dissident group has succeeded in establishing a posture of deterrence in principle no different from that adopted by a crazy terrorist threatening to throw the switch on a nuke. We were ready to eliminate this anomaly. Only Haflinger—Locke—Lazarus—whatever he was calling himself at the time—intervened and sent us back to square one. You have spent weeks interrogating him. In all the mounds of data you’ve accumulated, in all the kilometers of tape you’ve totaled, there is no slightest clue to what we want to know.”

“How to deevee the phage he wrote to protect Hearing Aid?”

“Ah, brilliant! You worked it out!” Hartz’s tone was laden with excess irony. “It is, as I said, intolerable that one small community should interfere with the government’s right to monitor subversion, disaffection and treason. We have to know how to discontinue that tapeworm!”

“You’re crying for the moon,” Freeman said after a pause. “Haflinger doesn’t know how to do that himself. I’d stake my reputation on it.”

“And that’s your final word?”

“Yes.”

“I see. Hmm. Regrettable!” Hartz tipped his chair back as far as it would go, twisted it through a few degrees, gazed with concentration into the far corner of the room. “Well, what about the other contacts he had? What about Kate Lilleberg, for instance? What have you found out about her recent actions?”

“She would appear to have reverted to her former plans,” Freeman sighed. “She’s back in KC, she’s filed no application to move her pet mountain lion, and in fact I can think of only one positive decision she has made since her return.”

“That being, I gather, to alter one of her majors for the coming academic year. She now plans to take data processing, doesn’t she?”

“Ah … Yes, I believe she does.”

“A strange coincidence. A very weird coincidence indeed. Don’t you think?”

“A connection is possible—in fact it’s likely. Calling it coincidence … no.”

“Good. I’m glad that for once you and I agree on something.” Hartz returned his chair to the upright position and leaned intently toward Freeman. “Tell me, then: have you formed any opinion concerning the Lilleberg girl? I appreciate you never met her. But you’ve met people intimately involved with her, such as her mother, her lover and sundry friends.”

“Apparently a person with considerable common sense,” Freeman said after a pause for reflection. “I can’t deny that I’m impressed with what she did to help Haflinger. It’s no small achievement to elude …”

His words faded as though he had suddenly begun to hear, what he was saying ahead of time.

“Go on,” Hartz purred.

“I was going to add: such an intensive hunt as has been kept up over six years now. Since Haflinger absconded, I mean. She seemed to—well, to grasp the scale of it at once.”