Who Goes Here?

10

His month in the Space Legion had familiarized Peace with hardship and discomfort, but in retrospect—by the time he reached Porterburg— it seemed a halcyon period of comradeship, laughter and warmth.

He inched through the city in the steely light of dawn, trying not to draw attention to himself, but at intervals was overtaken by trembling fits so violent that his torn clothing flapped audibly, giving him something of the demeanor of a drug-crazed Haitian dancer. Most of the early morning pedestrians hurried by with averted eyes, but a few were stung to compassion and approached him with offers of money or help. Where possible he quickly sent them on their way with hoarse assurances of his well-being, but two persistent cases had to be frightened off by deliberately going into the voodoo routine with extra conviction. This was strangely easy to do, and before long he was forced to accept the idea that he could be suffering from pneumonia.

Death itself had begun to seem quite an attractive prospect, but the idea of it occurring before he had completed his mission filled him with alarm. Coaxing his limbs to make greater efforts, he speeded up his progress and eventually reached the quarter of the city wherein lay the headquarters of the Space Legion’s 203 Regiment. He turned into a mean and rather narrow street and saw before him a large redbrick building, reminiscent of a brewery, which bore a sign proclaiming it to be Fort Eccles. The structure in no way resembled Peace’s conception of a Legion establishment, but he had passed the stage of caring about such anomalies. He went along the side of the building, inspecting various doors until he reached one which had a plaque identifying it as the entrance to the recruiting office.

In spite of his chronic debility, Peace’s heart quickened as he realized that this was the exact location of his second birth a few crowded weeks earlier, and that the solution to the great mystery of his life was almost within reach.

A notice on the door yielded the information that the office would be open for business at 8.30 a.m. Peace no longer had a watch, but had passed a number of clocks in the district. He knew he was approximately an hour too early, and that waiting that length of time in the intense cold could easily be the last nail in his coffin. He glanced about him and almost sobbed with gratification as he espied an orange-lit bar directly across the street. Its steamy windows promised heat and sustenance, and furthermore would provide a vantage point from which he could monitor all arrivals at the recruiting office. Bitter experience had taught Peace that it was always when his fortunes appeared to be taking a turn for the better that disaster struck him yet another blow, but he was unable to repress a glow of simple pleasure at the prospect of a comfortable seat, heated air and pots of strong, scalding coffee. Clamping his arm against his damaged ribs, he shuffled across the street and went into the bar, which was almost empty at that hour of the day.

The bartender eyed him speculatively, but immediately became affable when he set a fifty monit note on the counter. A couple of minutes later, armed with a beaker of coffee stiffly laced with Bourbon, Peace made his way to the front of the narrow room and dropped into a chair at the window. He sipped his drink eagerly, holding the container in both hands, absorbing every calorie. So intent was he on the life-giving brew that half of it was gone before his eyes could focus on anything further away than the beaker’s rim. He found himself staring at another early-morning customer—a clean-shaven young man with a dull-pink face, wide mouth, blue eyes, and blond hair which was fashionably thinned above the forehead.

The young man, slumped in his seat, was the personification of a hangdog misery—exactly as Peace had last seen him, projected as an image on the wall of Captain Widget’s office.

A tidal wave of hot coffee washed around Peace’s nostrils as he realized he was looking at himself.

Not daring to think about the complexities which lay ahead, he got to his feet and limped to the other table. “Mind if I sit here, Norman?”

“I don’t mind.” His other self continued to stare into an empty glass.

Peace sat down.” Don’t you want to know how I know your name?”

“Couldn’t care less.” The young man raised his head and regarded Peace with mournful eyes which betrayed not the slightest trace of recognition. His gaze shifted to Peace’s grubby hands and disreputable clothing, and he took a crumpled ten-monit note from the pocket of his brown houndstooth jacket. “You should buy food with that—not booze.”

“I don’t want a handout.” Peace pushed the bill away, and decided to try shock tactics.

“Norman, what would you say if I told you that you and I are the same person?”

“I’d say you ought to lay off the vanilla extract for a while.”

The leaden indifference in his other selfs voice shocked Peace, but he pressed on. “It’s true, Norman—just look at me.”

Norman gave him a cursory glance. “You don’t even look like me.”

Peace opened his mouth to argue, and at the same instant caught a glimpse of himself in a wall mirror. He appeared ten years older than Norman, was much thinner, bearded, ragged, filthy, and had a swollen jaw which substantially altered the shape of his face. He also had a black eye, which he had not known about until that moment, and the harsh night of exposure had imparted to the rest of his skin the sort of blue-red hue normally acquired through a strict diet of cheap wine. Peace gulped and had to admit that Norman was right—they looked like two different people.

“All right,” he said, pouring sincerity into his voice. “I’ve been through a lot lately, but I tell you it’s true—you and I are the same person.”

A hint of amusement appeared briefly on Norman’s doom-laden countenance. “This is the weirdest come-on I’ve ever heard, and it’s being wasted—I’ve already given you the money.”

He pushed the note back across the table.

“I don’t want your money,” Peace said impatiently, wondering how he could ever have been so obtuse. “Are you going to listen to me, Norman?” Norman sighed and glanced at his watch.

“I suppose it will help to pass the last hour— conundrums instead of cognac. Why not? Let me see now, this must be like that old one about proving to somebody he isn’t here, except that I’ve to guess how you and I can be the same person. How about…?”

“You don’t have to guess anything—I’m going to tell you.” Peace sipped some coffee to hide his exasperation. “Supposing I tell you I’ve been in a time machine, and that…” He broke off as he saw that the fresher version of himself was dogmatically shaking his head.

“I wouldn’t believe you. Double-acting extroverters are illegal—especially here on Earth where there’s so much more history to be interfered with. Government detector vans go around all the time and root them out as soon as they’re switched on. I’ve heard they can even tell what year you’re tuned in to.”

“That’s the whole point,” Peace said triumphantly. He was on the verge of explaining that he was talking about an event which had occurred on Aspatria when a mind-quaking new thought stilled his voice. He had been so busy trying to bring this meeting about that there had been no time to plan what he was going to say, or in which to think about the possible consequences. Norman had been to Aspatria already, that much he knew, and if he now named the planet in evidence, convinced Norman he was speaking the truth, and went on to catalogue all the horrors and miseries of the last month—Norman could very well decide not to join the Legion.

And he, Warren Peace, was the individual who had come into existence as a direct result of Norman signing on for his thirty, forty or fifty years! Peace hurriedly swallowed some more coffee as he tried to sort out the paradoxes involved. If Norman changed his mind about entering the Legion, would Warren Peace cease to exist? Somehow the notion of being erased by a shift in probabilities was more terrible to Peace than that of facing a straightforward, old-fashioned death. A man who was dying normally had the consolation of knowing he would have some kind of memorial, even if it was only a heap of unpaid bills, but facing the possibility of never having existed at all was too much for anybody to…

“What’s the whole point?” Norman said. “Go on—you’ve got me interested.”

“That’s the point,” Peace replied lamely, his mind racing. “That I’ve got you interested. You weren’t interested at first, you see. And now you are.”

“So it was a come-on, after all.” The distracted look appeared in Norman’s eyes as he took out another bill and placed it beside the first. “That’s twenty you’ve got—do you mind if we call it quits now?”

Peace made to brush the money aside, then recalled that if he did so it was destined to end up in the hands of the predatory Captain Widget. He lifted the bills and crammed them into his pocket and tried to conceive a new approach to the main problem. Time was rushing by and he was no nearer to learning the guilty secret which was driving Norman, almost literally, to his wit’s end.

“Thank you,” he said. “It goes against the grain for an old legionary like me to accept a handout, but times are hard.”

“Legionary?” Norman looked at him with renewed curiosity. “But how did you get out?”

“Invalided.” Forgetting the state of his ribs, Peace banged himself on the side of the chest, gave a sharp cry and folded over the table, narrowly avoiding plunging his face into an ashtray.

“Are you all right?” Norman said anxiously.

“Just a twinge.” Peace straightened up, fearful of being evicted by the bartender. “It’s the weather that does it, you know. I’ll be all right in a minute.” To cover his confusion he raised his beaker and sipped more coffee.

Norman toyed for a moment with his glass. “Why did you join up?”

“Ah … I wanted to forget something.”

“What was it?”

“How would I know?” Peace could not understand how the conversational roles had become reversed. “I’ve forgotten it.”

“Of course—I’m sorry.” Norman nodded, and then—as if something had aroused a painful memory—his lower lip began to tremble.

Peace felt strangely guilty, but he sensed the time was right for him to make a move. “Norman,” he said gently, “you’re waiting to join the Legion, aren’t you?”

“I am! I am! Why don’t they open that cursed office? Why do they make us wait so long to lay down our burdens?”

“All in good time,” Peace soothed, glancing around anxiously in case Norman’s emotional outburst had disturbed other customers in the bar. “Listen, Norman, why don’t you tell me what’s on your mind?”

Norman looked at him with tortured eyes. “It was a terrible thing I did. I can’t talk about it.”

“Of course you can.” Peace placed his free hand over Norman’s. “You can tell me, Norman.

Get it off your chest. You’ll feel much better.”

“If only that were true.”

“It is. It is,” Peace said. “Tell it to me, Norman.”

“You’re sure you really want to hear?”

Peace swallowed nervously. “I do, Norman. I do.”

“All right,” Norman said, in slow, agonized tones. “My crime is…”

“Yes, yes.”

“My crime is …”

“Yes, Norman, yes!”

“… that I deserted from the Legion.”

There came an ear-splitting crash as Peace dropped his coffee beaker on the tiled floor. He gazed strickenly at the top of Norman’s bowed head, unable to speak, then found himself dragged to his feet by the bartender, who had vaulted over the counter.

“All right, youse two,” the barman said, “Outside! I been watching youse two since youse two came in here, and I don’t want the likes o’ youse two in here.”

“It was an accident, a pure accident.” Peace, his mind still in a downward spiral of disbelief, tucked the twenty monits he had taken from Norman into the barman’s shirt pocket and persuaded him to return to his post. The barman gathered up the pieces of ceramic, issued a final warning about holding hands, and shambled away with a number of distrustful backward glances. Peace sat down again and tapped the crown of Norman’s head with a single knuckle.

“Look at me, Norman,” he whispered. “You wouldn’t put me on, would you?”

“No. It’s the truth.”

“But, Norman! Being a deserter from the Legion is nothing to get worked up about.

Practically ever ranker in the outfit dreams of nothing else. It’s their one ambition in life.”

“That’s all right for rankers—it’s expected of them.” Norman raised his face which was crimson with shame. “But I was an officer.”

“An officer?” Peace fell silent, trying to fit the new information into the complex puzzle of his life, but Norman had got into his confessional stride and was speaking faster.

“… and not just any officer, you see. I was Lieutenant Norman Nightingale, only son of General Nightingale himself. My family has a distinguished record of service in the Legion that goes back two centuries. Two centuries! Two hundred years of generals and space marshals, campaigns and courage, medals and honours, glory and greatness. Can you imagine the burden—the unspeakable burden—that tradition placed on me?” Peace shook his head, partly because it was expected of him, partly because a fierce tingling sensation had developed behind his forehead.

“Almost from the minute I was born, certainly from the cradle, I was prepared and groomed for the Legion. My father never spoke to me about anything else. My mother never spoke to me about anything else. My life was totally committed to the Legion—and the terrible thing is that… that I had no love for it. I wanted to do other things.” Norman paused, obviously reflecting on his filial shortcomings.

Peace was glad of the break because the pins-and-needles had grown stronger, and his memory was throwing up images of a Southern-style white-columned house; a stern-faced, grey-haired man, immaculate in the uniform of a Legion staff officer; a pretty woman, reserved to the point of remoteness, whose upright posture was as militarily correct as that of her husband. These, he knew, were visions of his own childhood, and he began to understand why the memory eraser in the recruiting station had blanked out his entire past. If his whole life had been steeped in the tradition of Space Legion service, his guilt over betraying the family ideal would be equally all-pervading. Every incident stored in his memory, every last detail of his upbringing and early career would be a clue to the nature of his crime—and therefore the machine, with electronic scrupulousness, had deleted the lot.

One of his life’s great mysteries had been cleared up, but another had come forward in its place.

“I see the fix you’re in, Norman,” Peace said slowly. “Naturally, with a background like yours, you feel rotten about having gone AWOL—but why go back as a ranker? You don’t need to have any memories wiped out—as soon as you return to the Legion you’ll cease to be a deserter, and you’ll have nothing to feel guilty about. It’s as simple as that.”

“As simple as that, he says!” Norman gave a sardonic laugh, indicative of a soul in torment.

“Well, isn’t it?”

“If only you knew.”

“For God’s sake!” Peace fought back his impatience, remembering that his former self was in dire mental straits. “Tell me all about it, Norman.”

“The trouble is,” Norman said, gripping his glass in an agitated manner, “That I didn’t just go AWOL. I deserted in the face of the enemy—out of sheer cowardice—and even for a general’s son, that’s serious.”

“It’s pretty serious,” Peace agreed, “but nothing that out… your father couldn’t square for you.”

Norman shook his head. “You just don’t understand—though, as you haven’t had my sort of upbringing, I couldn’t expect you to. There’s simply no way to wipe out the disgrace I’ve brought on the family name. In any case, that’s not my big problem—it’s guilt that’s my problem. My own personal, monogrammed, hand-made guilt over the circumstances in which I deserted.”

“Tell me about it,” Peace said, ignoring a clammy touch of unease.

“I can’t do that. I don’t think I could ever speak to anybody about that.”

This time Norman’s reticence made Peace feel relieved rather than angry. “Okay. So you deserted in the face of the enemy—what happened next?”

Norman took a shaky breath. “We were fighting on Aspatria at the time. Have you ever been there?”

“Let me see.” Peace pretended to search his memory. “I think I spent some leave there once.”

“That must have been after the rebellion ended. When I was there in ‘83 the fighting was still going on, and everything was a bit chaotic. I managed to make my way down to Touchdown City and hide out for a while. The military police were looking for me, of course, but I had no trouble dodging them. It was an easy life for a while, because I had plenty of money—and then some alien beings they call Oscars showed up, and they started haunting me. Have you heard about the Oscars?” A constriction seemed to form around Peace’s heart. “I’ve heard of them. Why did they come after you?”

“Beats me,” Norman said in a distant voice. “They just seemed to know I’d done something bad—personally I think they can read minds. It was the weirdest thing ever, because it was dark when I first ran into them, and they just seemed to look right inside me with those awful eyes they’ve got.”

“You say this happened in ‘83?” Peace frowned as he did some mental juggling with dates.

“But this is 2386—you don’t look like you’ve been on the run for three years.”

“I haven’t.” Norman gave Peace an enigmatic smile. “But the explanation is so fantastic you’ll never believe it.”

“I will. I’ll believe anything! Tell it to me, Norman.”

“Well, I’d stayed in my room all day—because usually I only went out at night—and I’d developed quite an appetite, so I decided to have a real blow-out at a sort of restaurant-cum-nightclub called the Blue Toad. It’s very expensive, but the food is quite good. Except for the seafood, that is. You’ll probably never be there, but if you are, don’t order the lobster.”

“I won’t,” Peace assured him. “Was this the night you saw the Oscars?”

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you,” Norman reproved. “I paid for my meal, was given a nasty little souvenir, came out of the restaurant, and as I’d been cooped up in my room all day I decided not to go straight back to it. There was a movie house nearby—one of those multiple projection places—so I went to see what was showing. I had a look at the posters outside, but lost interest when I saw the sort of programme it was. Blatant pornography! Women in the nude!

“Naturally I didn’t want to see anything like that, and was just about to go somewhere else when—you’ll hardly believe this—a boy of about ten approached me and offered me money if I would take him inside and swap strobe-glasses with him. You know, let him see the so-called adult movies.”

“What did you do?” Peace said apprehensively, recalling earlier qualms about his sexual preferences.

“What do you think? I grabbed the brat by the ear and told him I was taking him straight home to his parents.”

“Good for you!” Peace felt a load lift from his mind. “You did the right thing.”

“That’s what I thought, but the evil little swine kicked up a fuss.” A shocked expression appeared on Norman’s face as he thought about the incident. “Would you believe that he told people I’d made certain suggestions to him?”

“My God!”

“It’s quite true. He knew exactly what to say— probably makes a habit of hanging around there. Then some manageress woman came out and started shouting at me and blew a whistle.

I tell you, it was a ghastly experience. Under the circumstances, being a wanted man and so forth, I decided to get out of there in a hurry, so I made a run for it—and that’s when the damned Oscars showed up. I don’t know how they managed to appear on the scene so quickly, but two of them made a grab for me, and I only escaped by running up an alley.”

Tingling waves were sweeping over Peace’s brain. “How did you get away from them?”

“This is the really fantastic bit. I thought I could move pretty fast, but the Oscars would have run me into the ground in no time. They’d have caught me if I hadn’t noticed a door leading into an old factory building. I shot through it, ran upstairs in the darkness—not knowing where I was— blundered into a toilet, fell over the seat, and … you’ll never guess what happened next.”

“You went backwards in ti…” Peace, who had become carried away with the narrative, cut the fateful word short.

Norman looked at him curiously. “What were you saying?”

“You went backwards. Into the wall.”

“That wasn’t what happened at all,” Norman said, annoyed at having his story interrupted at a crucial point. “Look, do you want to hear this, or don’t you?”

“I’m sorry. Please go on.”

“All right—but no more interruptions.”

“I promise.”

“Now, as I was saying—you’ll never be able to guess what happened next.”

“I’ll never be able to guess,” Peace said dutifully. “That wasn’t an interruption—I was just agreeing with you that I’ll never be able to guess.”

“I know you’ll never,” Norman said animatedly, “because the toilet was actually a time machine—an extroverter—and I went backwards in time!”

“My God!”

“It’s true! I went right back to the year 2290. The place had just ceased operating as a raincoat factory at that time, but there was a mad character called Legge there who rented an upstairs apartment in it. Funny little man, he was … all round and red and rubbery … looked like he was constructed from inner tubes. Kept repeating words at the ends of sentences, too, as if there was a ratchet slipping. I didn’t take to him much as a person, but I was fascinated by the fact that he was trying to earn a living as an inventor in the electronics field.

“That’s the sort of thing I’d always wanted to do, you see. I’ve got a natural gift for theoretical and applied science, and I can read circuit diagrams the way other people read comic strips, but my family had always made me concentrate on military skills like flying and marksmanship. As far as I could see, Legge had absolutely no talent as an inventor—he was wasting his time trying to build a contraption for making people tell the truth—but he was quick to see that I had some ideas that were worth exploiting, and we formed a kind of partnership. I was almost happy there for a while. I suppose I would actually have been happy if it hadn’t been for my guilt feelings, and for the presence of Cissy.”

“Was that his daughter?”

“Yes.” Norman looked puzzled again. “How did you know?”

“Ah … mad scientists always have daughters,” Peace said, cursing himself for the verbal slip.

“Pretty little thing, was she?”

“You wouldn’t ask that if you’d seen her,” Norman replied fervently, a haunted look appearing in his eyes. “She kept making advances to me, and I kept fighting her off, and the worst of it was that old Legge had the wrong idea about the whole thing. He was convinced I was some kind of rabid sex maniac who was trying to steal his daughter’s virtue right out from under his nose.”

“Funny place to keep it,” Peace said absently.

“Don’t be vulgar.” Norman gave him a reproachful glance. “I hope that service as a ranker won’t coarsen me the way it has coarsened you, my friend.”

“I’m sure it won’t,” Peace said, making a final vow to keep his mouth shut. “Go on with the story.”

“As I was saying—I was tortured by memories of my guilt, and it was the same guilt which gave me what I thought was a wonderful idea. I see now that it was a terrible sacrilege, because remorse is a divine scourge. But in my blind arrogance I went ahead and built the infernal machine.”

Peace gripped the edge of the table as instinct and half-formed memory warned him of awful revelations to come. Dark chasms, previously unsuspected, were opening in his mind.

“It took me less than a week to build the prototype of the memory eraser,” Norman continued in a hollow voice.

“My plan was to use it on myself, to cleanse my soul of guilt, and then destroy it—but Legge had plans of his own. I had hardly finished soldering the last connection when he came into the room with one of the pork pies he was always eating and offered me a section. I should have guessed he was up to something, because he was a greedy little brute, and had never given me so much as a crumb before. Ate them straight off a newspaper, he did. Revolting habit! I was always telling him at least to use a plate, but he…”

Norman stopped speaking as he became aware of the expression on Peace’s face. “I can see from your eyes, my friend, that you’ve guessed what I’m going to say. Yes, it’s quite true—I am the originator of the memory eraser which is used today in every Space Legion recruiting station throughout the inhabited galaxy!”

Peace shook his head and gripped Norman’s wrist, trying to stem the flow of words, but to no avail.

“The pork pie was drugged, of course,” Norman continued, “and as soon as I became groggy that fiend Legge hustled me downstairs, opened the toilet door—a female toilet door, I might add—and threw me inside. I fell on to the seat, and the next thing I knew I was in Touchdown City of 2386.1 had overshot my departure point in time by three years—the time machine must have been in a phase of increasing oscillations.”

“Not damping oscillations,” Peace said numbly.

“I said increasing oscillations, didn’t I?” The momentary irritation faded from Norman’s face.

“I’m sorry—I realize I’ve give you quite a shock. You never expected to meet face to face with the man who invented the very machine which was used on you when you joined up, did you?”

“Not really,” Peace murmured.

“Of course, you didn’t. Perhaps now you can imagine how I felt when I learned the truth. At first I was quite pleased at finding myself in 2386—the fighting was over, and the military police seemed to have forgotten about me. I was curious to discover what Legge had been up to, so I went to a newspaper office and looked through their old files. They’re all on microfilm, of course—I was told the actual old newspapers are worth their weight in diamonds—so it was easy to turn up a complete biography on Legge.”

“What did it say?”

“That he had died in 2321, rich and famous as the inventor of the Space Legion’s memory eraser. There were no other inventions to his credit, which proves the little toad had no talent, but he’d even been given a science chair at the Aspatrian Military Academy on the strength of the eraser. Professor Legge, can you imagine? Huh!”

“Wait a minute.” Peace was desperately trying to ground himself in new realities. “You can’t blame yourself for the memory eraser. I mean it was in widespread use in 2383, and you must have known about it before you went back in time, so…”

“That doesn’t change anything. I’d heard about the eraser, naturally, but I didn’t know when it was invented. And when I got back to 2290 I was too wrapped up in my own selfish schemes to check around and find that the device was unknown at that time. Legge must have been bowled over when I proposed the idea, but he was too cunning to let me see that. He bears some responsibility, of course, but I was the prime mover—I am the arch-criminal.”

“You invented a machine to alleviate mental suffering,” Peace argued. “That wasn’t a criminal act.”

“Wasn’t it?” Norman’s lips twisted in a wan smile. “What use has that machine been put to?

Thousands of young men are lured into the Legion by the promise of forgetfulness—and what happens to them? They get killed. They die young— and now I can’t even pretend it’s in a good cause. “I was brought up to believe that the Legion exemplified everything that is fine and noble in our society. When I was a small child I used to dream about crusading through the galaxy in a tall golden ship—not realizing that the Legion’s chief function is to force people on other worlds to buy Earth’s surplus production of television sets and electric toothbrushes.”

“This is terrible,” Peace quavered, feeling the onset of a gloom which made his former state of mind seem enviable.

“It’s all right for you,” Norman said. “Try to imagine how I feel, knowing that I’m so much to blame. I know I should try to live with my guilt, accept the punishment I brought down on myself, but I just can’t go on like this any longer. As soon as I learned the full extent of what I’d done in the past, and added it to what I’d done in the present, I realized there was only one thing to do—join the Legion. To forget. Ironic, isn’t it?”

“You’re telling me,” Peace said. His head was throbbing violently with the pain of recaptured memory. Virtually his whole past was accessible to him now, and it was worse than he had feared, but most frightening of all was the realization that there was one depth he had yet to plumb. There was a black hole, a Stygian well of guilt and horror, beckoning to him. Norman had refused to discuss it, but the corrosive stains of memory were spreading into every compartment of Peace’s mind… “That was two days ago,” Norman was saying. “I didn’t want to try joining the Legion on Aspatria because there was too big a risk of somebody there recognizing me, so I bought a ticket to Earth.”

“You didn’t run into any Oscars?”

“Not this time. I was lucky.” Norman touched the wood of the table. “Perhaps they were too busy hounding some other poor sod—if so, I feel sorry for him.”

Peace nodded, scarcely listening. Two names had sprung into his mind—Ozzy Drabble and Hec Magill. Associated with the unusual names were two faces. They were thin, weather-beaten faces, stamped with the rueful expression of the Space Legion ranker, but they also contained individuality and humour. Those faces, he knew, had been important to him at some stage of his life—and there was only one slot into which they could be fitted. They had to be part of the mystery surrounding his desertion in the face of the enemy. The veils surrounding that incident were steadily being drawn aside by the forces at work inside his brain, and Peace shuddered with apprehension as he realized there was nothing he could do now to forestall the final revelation.

“Listen, Norman,” he said, seeking distraction, “aren’t you worried about anybody in the recruiting office guessing who you are? I mean, Nightingale is one of the most famous names in the Legion.”

Norman shook his head. “I’ve already taken care of that. I’m changing my name to Leo Tolstoy.”

“Tolstoy?” Peace blinked at him in surprise.

“Yes. He’s my favorite among the great Russian authors, and I’m in a gloomy Russian mood, so it seems an appropriate choice.”

“But… How does this name-changing business work?”

Norman glanced over his shoulder to make sure there were no unwanted listeners. “Lots of people who want to shake off their pasts change their names when they join the Legion. But you can’t just give a false name when you go in, because the Legion medics put you into an hypnotic trance for the memory eraser and electropsycho response conditioning, and in that state you wouldn’t respond to the alias.”

“So what do you do?”

“You go to a professional name-changer, which is another way of saying you go to a hypnotist who implants your chosen alias under deep hypnosis. It’s an illegal practice, of course, but you usually find one or two specialists in that sort of thing near every recruiting station. There’s one just along the block from here. Tomlinson, you call him—he operates under cover of being a barber, but I think he makes most of his money out of hypnotizing fugitives. That’s where I’m going in a few minutes— it’s all set up.” Norman rubbed a small clear patch in the condensation on the window beside him and peered out.

“I think I saw some lights go on over in the fort. I’d better be on my way.”

“Wait a minute,” Peace said, reluctant to be left alone with his thoughts, and still puzzled about the discrepancy in names. “Are you sure nothing can go wrong during the name-changing operation?”

“Thinking of going through it yourself, eh?” Norman gave Peace a speculative stare. “There’s no need to worry about anything going wrong— Tomlinson says his system is foolproof. He does the hypnosis with a machine. The way it works is that you print the name you want to have on a piece of paper, and you just keep staring at it while the machine puts you into the right sort of trance. It couldn’t be simpler.”

“Have you got your new name written down?”

“I’ve gone one better—I’ve got it printed, in big letters, so that my mind can’t wander.”

Norman took a thick paperback novel out of his jacket pocket and tapped it with his finger.

“It’s right here on the front of his book.”

“Are you sure that’s a good idea?” Peace said, wondering if he was wise to interfere. “I mean, you might stare at the wrong part of the book. Sort of accidentally.”

“What a silly suggestion! I’m not going to christen myself War And Peace, am I?”

“I meant accidentally.”

“I’m rather accident prone, my friend, but not to that extent.” Norman stood up with an air of finality, put his book away and extended his hand to Peace. “It wasn’t fair of me to burden a complete stranger with all my worries—but thanks for being such a good listener.”

“It’s all right.” Peace shook his hand. “Perhaps you’ll do the same for me some day.”

“I doubt if our paths will ever cross again,” Norman said. He went out of the bar and a few seconds later his blurred outline—moving at a funereal pace appropriate to its load of care—passed across the misted window and was lost to view. Peace stared for a moment at the blank grey screen of glass, and suddenly his imagination illuminated it with a scene from another world and another time. He pressed both hands to his temples as, amid a crescendo of pain, his memory was made complete, and he knew the full, unspeakable extent of his shame.