A Darkness in My Soul

I

I found myself in Child's body, lying in a hospital bed with the barred sides raised to provide the illusion of a prison. The room was a private one, somewhere far up in the tower of Artificial Creation, no doubt. There was no light but that from a small blue bulb plugged directly into a floor socket. In that eerie glow, I could see that there was no nurse in attendance. How long had Child lain like this, dazed, almost comatose, unable to speak or see or hear anything of the real world as his madness kept him sealed in the analogue of his subconscious? Days or weeks? Perhaps even years?

Somewhat frantic at that last thought, I pushed up, weak and dizzy. My frail, bony arms felt as if they would crack, but they got me to the edge of the bed just the same. My short legs dangled a foot from the tiles after I got the barred slats down, and that measly twelve inches looked more like two or three miles. I built my courage, dropped, felt skinny legs buckle. I crashed forward on my face and lay there for a while, collecting my wits.

Was this what it was like for Child, this inability to cope with the inadequacies of his own body, this helplessness and dependence? No wonder his own search for a purpose and identity had been so much more thorough and extensive than my own.

I got on hands and knees and gripped the edge of the bed for support, gained my feet again. The door was but a dozen steps away. I toddled toward it, collapsed against it, holding on to the knob to keep from taking another serious fall.

Opening the door was a major chore, compounded by the fact that I wanted to do it quietly. I didn't want anyone to know that I was awake now and moving around. First, I wanted to find out a few things, attempt to discover how long I had been trapped in Child's mind.

And if I could somehow locate my own body-for, surely, they were keeping it somewhere close at hand, in another dark hospital room-and re-enter it before they were aware I had returned, I would be in a better position to take care of myself. I didn't trust Morsfagen or any other super-patriot professional soldier. The more ignorant I was about what had transpired since I had gone mad within Child, the further removed I was from my own body and, therefore, autonomy, the more power they would hold over me, the more they could demand and perpetrate.

The door finally opened and gave a view of an empty corridor that was painted a flat, unreflective blue. I stepped out of the room, closed the door, and hung by the wall, breathing heavily and trying to ignore the pain in the sunken chest of the mutant body which I inhabited.

I didn't care if I destroyed Child's body during this trek, for I had already destroyed Child himself by absorbing his psychic energy back there in that blue-floored room beneath the broken, ebony plain. He would never own his body again. I could feel his intellect, devoid of any personality now, within my own mind, magnifying my intelligence and perceptions. But that was the only minim of Child's real self that would ever survive.

Pushing away from the wall, I started down the corridor. I could not expect it to remain empty for long, and I would gain nothing by being seen here, before I had learned anything of my situation. I weaved from wall to wall, barely managing to keep my feet. And when the tall, uniformed man appeared at the head of the stairwell and shouted in surprise, I collapsed on my face

When I woke, I was in the same hospital room, in the same bed, with the metal slats raised around the sides to keep me from falling out. There were differences, though.

There was plenty of light, and there was a nurse, a buxom, gray-haired matron with a bland, pleasant face and a concerned look plastered all over it. There was a guard by the door, on the inside, his holster unsnapped.

Why I should be considered that much of a threat when I could hardly even walk, I did not know. Morsfagen and a white-smocked physician stood by the right side of my bed, looking down at me. The physician exhibited concern and professional interest. Morsfagen had a look of hatred and sheer animal cunning.

"Welcome back," he said.

"I'm thirsty," I croaked, realizing for the first time how parched my throat was.

The nurse brought me water, which I gulped eagerly.

The chips of ice rattled against my teeth, stung my gums.

But it was all quite good, better than expensive wine.

"No more water, no more anything until some questions are answered," the general said.

"Yes," I replied.

"What has happened to Simeon Kelly?"

For a moment, I was surprised. Then I realized that they had no way of knowing this wasn't Child who had awakened. It meant that there were other things they could not know, things which would give me the upper hand.

"I am Kelly," I said.

"No games," he snapped.

"This isn't."

He looked at me closely. "Maybe you had better explain."

So I told him about Child's investigation into the nature of God. He did not seem moved by the discovery that the universe held no purpose, that God is insane and always has been. Perhaps he did not believe me. I rather think that was the case with the doctor and the nurse and the guard by the door. But there was a crisp, cold gaze there that said Morsfagen did believe-and not only that he believed, but that he had come to the same conclusions himself some time ago, though he had simply lacked the proof that Child had managed to obtain. There was no room for God in Morsfagen's life, I realized. He had always operated outside a belief in heaven and hell and retribution for sin.

I carefully avoided mentioning that I had absorbed Child's energy, that he would never regain his body. If they thought that all could soon be returned to normal, they would be more eager to see me back in my own flesh, wherever it was kept.

When I was done, I asked: "How much time has passed?"

"A month," he said.

It was startling, yet it could have been worse. I had steeled myself to accept the word "years," and this was a blessing by comparison. A lot could have happened in a month. But Melinda might still be free, might still be waiting. Harry would be alive. My house would not have been sold to creditors. Yes, there was still time to regain normality.

"I want my own body," I said. That was the first step to that normality.

"Perhaps," Morsfagen said.

I looked around at the others to see whether they understood the cruelty in that tease. None of them seemed to pay any attention. Perhaps part of their jobs included paying no attention to such things.

"What is this-perhaps?" I asked.

Child's voice box made the words seem sinister when they were actually spoken in fear.

"Perhaps," he said, his face impassive, "it would be better for all of us if no one outside of this room ever discovered that you have regained sanity and are ready to return to your own body. It would be less trouble to get you doing work for us. We would not have to pay you anything. All in all, perhaps it would be a wise idea."

The nurse paid no attention. But her pleasant face mirrored her tacit agreement with Morsfagen.

The doctor took my pulse, listened at my chest with a stethoscope, checked my eyes and ears, ignoring what transpired around him.

The guard, by the door, had Morsfagen's impassive look.

I was alone.

Except for Child's intellect, which had expanded my own. There was a cunning about me now that I had not possessed before. Morsfagen would think he knew me: fast on the cutting remarks, but low on cleverness. But that had changed, and I was now every bit as devious as he.

"One problem," I said.

"What's that?"

"I've told you that it took me this full month to shake loose of my own madness and to free myself from Child's insanity. I nearly lost my mind again trying to find a way through his subconscious landscape. You scanning all this so far?" He indicated that he was by saying nothing.

"Now, if I'm trapped in this frame, welded so closely to his mind, I'm going to succumb to his insanity again-and this time it will be permanent. I couldn't stand the ordeal of recovery again." In that whispered, deathlike rattle of Child's, the words took on even more sincerity than I had tried to give them.

Morsfagen looked doubtful. It was almost as if he could sense the change in me, sense the expanded awareness and cunning. But he could not take the chance that I was not telling him the truth, and he knew that I had won. He was going to have to console himself with the fact that at least he now had me in full mind for future use; if he tried to play for full stakes and keep me locked in Child's body, he might very well wind up with nothing. And military careers are not built on blunders.

"Bring him along," he ordered the doctor. "We'll let him have his body back." He smiled at me, but it was not a pleasant smile. "But you'd better cooperate, Kelly. It's time of war now, and that rules out your brand of frivolity."

"I understand perfectly," I said, not without a touch of sarcasm.

"I'm sure you do."

And he left the room.

Minutes later, they wheeled me into the corridor to keep my rendezvous with my own coma-ridden flesh

All the while, I gloried in the thought that I was swiftly getting the upper hand and that before they realized what had happened, I would be in my former position of dominance. There were two minds' worth of energy within me, plus the complex intellect of Child now amplifying my own. They were mere men, I told myself, and they stood no chance at all.

I did not realize that I was making the same mistake that I had made twice before. In the old days, I had convinced myself that I was a god of sorts, the Second Coming, and my life had been disastrous because of that fantasy. In Child's subconscious, I had eagerly sought to be transformed into the mythic images of Tibetan wolves, into something transcending humanity, and that might have cost me my mind and my eventual recovery. And now, as I was wheeled down the corridor, I again looked at myself as more than a man, as a minor god soon to prove his power. Because I had never allowed myself to associate with "mere men," I did not understand them, or myself. And my latest delusions of grandeur were bound to lead to ultimate disaster

And did.

II

My legs were cramped, and even a slight bit of movement made my shoulders ache, for the staff had not been exercising my body with the proper degree of enthusiasm during the month it had been vacant. I felt weak, and my stomach was a hard knot. Having been fed intravenously for some four weeks, the stomach had shrunk and felt like a clenched fist in there, squeezing my guts. Otherwise: fine. And since it was such a delight to be housed in my own flesh once again, I was willing to overlook the little aches and pains of readjustment to life. I didn't complain, and I tried not even to grimace.

Morsfagen seemed disappointed by that.

They wheeled Child's carcass out of the room. It would continue to live, though it would never exhibit intelligence again. It was a husk, nothing more. I still had not told them, for I was still not free of the AC complex and out of their immediate reach. Morsfagen would not take kindly to such a trick, and I didn't want to be around whenever he discovered it.

I showered, washed away the weeks of sickbed smell.

The hot water seemed to loosen my cramped muscles, and dressing was only half the ordeal I had expected. When I slipped into my jacket and checked my reflection in the mirror, Morsfagen said, "Your shyster is waiting downstairs."

I held back the witty reply designed to demolish him, for I knew that was exactly what he wanted. He was searching for some reason to slap me down, either with his fists or with a preventive detention arrest. Why we had hit it off so miserably from the start, and why our hatred for each other was now twice what it had been, I didn't know. True, we were altogether different types, but the antagonism we felt for each other was deeper and more unremitting than a mere clash of personalities.

"Thank you," I said, leaving him with nothing to attack. I walked to the door, opened it, and was halfway into the corridor before he replied.

"You're welcome."

I turned and looked at him and saw that he was smiling, that same cold smile of hatred which I had grown used to by then. He had said "you're welcome," but not with any seriousness-which meant that he understood me and knew that I understood him too.

"We'll contact you day after tomorrow," he said.

"There's a lot of work to do. But, after what you've been through, you deserve a little rest."

"Thank you," I said.

"You're welcome."

Again. And grinning this time too

I closed the door and walked down the hall to the bank of elevators with a dark-haired, blue-eyed, six-foot-fourinch guard as company. We didn't say much of anything to each other on our way downstairs, not so much out of any particular dislike for each other as out of a sheer lack of anything to say, like a nuclear physicist and an uneducated carpenter at the same cocktail party, neither exactly superior, but both separated by a mammoth communications gap.

Down

Harry was in the lobby, tearing his hat apart, and when the elevator doors opened, he gave the thing a particularly vicious mangling with his big hands and started toward us.

He was smiling the first genuine, friendly, uncomplicated smile I had seen since I had awakened in Child's body. He hugged me, living up to the image of the father figure, and he had tears in his eyes which he could not manage to conceal.

I was not concealing my own tears at all. I dearly loved this clumsy, pudgy, sloppily dressed Irishman, though most of my life had been spent in playing down that love. Maybe it was because I had learned early to hate and despise as self-protection. When Harry separated me from that world inside the AC complex and showed me what actual love was, I never lost my suspicion. And it is easier to act less involved so that if you're hurt later, the anguish doesn't show so much and give your adversary satisfaction. Now unchecked, evidence of that love flowed.

We hurried across the lobby to the second elevator bank and went down to the underground garage, where the attendant brought Harry's hovercar, accepted a tip, and stepped back as we drove out of that great, sparkling building. In the street, we both sighed, as if some weight had been lifted from us, and we began to talk for the first time, out of the range of those microphones which infest any government building.

"You'll tell me about it now," he said, his eyes flicking from the shifting layers of new snow on the street to where I sat against the far door. "They wouldn't let me up to see you but once a week, you know."

"You'd only have been looking at flesh and blood," I said. "All this time, I've been inside of Child, locked down there in his mind."

"As I figured," he said. "But those"-he jerked his thumb behind us, twisting his face up to look disgusted" those pretty boys in their uniforms, I just don't trust."

"They didn't exercise my body properly. And they didn't take any precautions against stomach shrinkage.

Otherwise, I'm fine."

He snorted. "So tell me,"

"You first. I've spent a month in that place, and I don't have the foggiest notion what has happened out here.

When I went in, war had all but been declared. The Chinese and the Japanese had crossed the Soviet border, maybe nuked a town…"

He looked grim, stared at the street unfolding before us for a long time before he said anything. It was dark, and the crisp blue arc lights sent fantastic shadows wriggling between the heavy fall of snowflakes. The streets seemed almost empty of traffic.

"War was declared two days later," he said.

"And we won?"

"Partly."

I looked around at the streets, all undamaged, all occupied by our own troops, our own police. Indeed, I saw now that the amount of occupation of our territory spelled some sort of trouble. Every other street corner contained coppers parked in squad-carrying howlers, surveying the dark boulevard. They watched us go by with quick, dark glances, though they offered no pursuit.

"Partly?" I asked.

As we flitted across the city, he summed up the developments of the month-long war:

The Chinese had indeed nuked Zavitaya, for there was nothing there any longer but powdered stone, splintered wood, and the ruins of a very few outlying structures. Of the moderately large population, there were six hundred survivors.

Belogorsk was taken, its laboratories seized and impressed into the service of the People's Army of China-a euphemism for the military strong-arm of the Peking dictatorship and its Japanese allies. Within a day, hover-trucks had taxied Chinese troops into Svobodnyy and Shimanovsk, thereby effectively isolating one small sector of the Soviet Union.

In this time, the Western Alliance had been making preparations and issuing stern warnings to the Chinese, who had ignored them imperiously, sparing no effort to make it apparent that they considered the West with scorn. The United Nations was petitioned by every Western Alliance nation, and the world organization replied by trade sanctions against China. These too were laughed off. The land of the dragon was feeling its muscle for the first time in many centuries, and its egotism threatened to carry it to the brink of world destruction and beyond. Yet the Alliance held off, well aware that the electronic shield envisioned by Child and later torn from Ms mind by my own extrasensory powers was reaching midpoint in its hasty construction. There was no sense, the strategists agreed, in helping to escalate a mini-war into a major conflagration until our side was immune to attack behind its shield generators and victory was assured the West.

Two weeks after the start of the war, the Chinese were still consolidating territorial gains, moving more troops into the captured Russian territory. All the while, they pointed to their Dragonfly and made lightly veiled threats.

They made false promises that this was all the land they Wanted. And they followed such worthless assurances with warnings that they could easily survive a nuclear-bacteriological war, for their population was so much greater than ours that it could not help but outlast us.

The Alliance, furious, bided time.

Then, unexpectedly, Japanese forces had landed on Formosa, coming in from the sea with destroyers and landing craft. While the guns and the forces were aimed at China, the back door was entered and the house secured by the enemy. The Alliance forces quartered on that strategic airbase were systematically slaughtered. Both the Chinese and the Japanese denied having anything to do with it.

But reconnaissance planes reported Japanese ships, sans the rising sun, harbored in the islands.

The following day, with even the peace criers united behind the government, the crash force working to erect electronic shields over all the strategic areas of the Western Alliance, the last of the invisible shells of stretched molecules in place and the generators backed with a second set to prevent disaster, the Alliance declared war on China and Japan.

We struck out with nuclear stockpiles at the major industrial centers of both enemy nations. In hours, billions in property and hundreds of thousands of lives were wiped out in gushes of mile-high flame. The enemy was prepared for this, and it retaliated with its own nuclear weaponry.

But the shields worked, the Alliance cities remained intact. Again and again, the People's Army rained missiles upon points in Russia, Europe, and North America. Not one of them did damage. Since all sides had long ago, for obvious strategic reasons concerned with occupying captured territory, gone to the construction of "clean" bombs, even the spill radiation did not kill people living in the countryside beyond the shelter of the unseen domes of molecules which had been stretched to stunningly large dimensions, their surface tension curiously increased and not decreased by that expansion.

In desperation, plague drops were made on the cities of the Alliance, but even these did not penetrate. In the countryside, people died, but even many of these were saved by immunization teams from the cities. Property damage, at this point, was zero.

The Chinese nuked the small, unprotected towns in a final spasm of fury, but they had little firepower left.

The Japanese had already surrendered in order to protect what little unmolested lands the home islands still contained.

The Chinese command center was discovered at last, destroyed with a vengeance, and the war brought to and end. Or so everyone thought

"Thought?" I asked.

"We have ambitious men for our military leaders,"

Harry explained. His tone was none too pleasant.

"Go on."

"We made a mistake with the voluntary, reformed military service laws," he said.

"How so?"

"Try to envision these men, Sim. They're well-paid professionals. There hasn't been a draft within the Alliance for twenty-four years. They enlist because they like to be a part of a protective Big Brother sort of organization — and because combat and planning for combat excites them. We turned ourselves over to those who enjoy war, and we gave them the machines to wage it. Now, with all this hardware and all this education in the ways of dealing death, they had had to sit through fourteen years of cold war where guns were never fired. And before that, there were two decades of total peace, where nations hardly even exchanged angry words. They've never had the chance to prove themselves, and since they are basically the sort of men who need to prove themselves for their own benefit, they've been driven up the wall by brinksmanship and peace."

I felt ill, without exactly understanding why. The night seemed darker and colder, and I had a sudden and furious need for Melinda, for the touch of her and the warmth, the seeking together and the final closeness. It was such an intense desire that I grew dizzy with it.

"So?" I managed to ask.

"So, they didn't want to stop. They were moving, living their dreams, and loving it. They were on the edge of the thing they'd all fantasized about-conquering the world.

They could incorporate every nation into the Alliance, and then it would be over. All the plans and subplans, plots and counterplots and counter-counterplots came together in a marvelous mosaic, and they just couldn't resist. China was occupied, but the artillery was turned, next, on South America."

"They're neutral!"

"Mostly," he agreed. "But the Alliance generals were bothered by South America's autonomy, especially sines Brazil had been making that space effort of theirs pay or! with the mineral ships from Titan. The continent fell in slightly less than a week-yesterday, to be exact. They were either badly prepared militarily, or had oriented their armies toward the exploration of space. They've come under the banner of the Alliance-angrily, reluctantly, but under it."

"And all the countries already in the Alliance-they all went along with this?"

"Not all. But in Russia, the military had taken control of the government years before. France and Italy knuckled under to the popular sentiment of their people, of the common man. Spain is a military nation to start with-no problem there."

"But Britain and the U.S. wouldn't stand for it!" It sounded false.

"Britain did refuse, said she wouldn't supply her own men for the Alliance endeavor. But she gave tacit approval by continuing trade and diplomatic relationships with all her allies. She's too small to really buck them, and she could only maintain her military's integrity, nothing more.

Canada did the same, though Quebec declared independence and won it-or at least had the last time I heardand joined the militant ranks of the other Alliance nations. As for us, the U.S., we were in it from the moment the Soviet generals made the suggestion. The peace criers were right all along: a volunteer army can become a secondary government and can threaten the elected one if the time is ripe. The coup came two mornings after the Soviet proposal when it became obvious that the elected government was not going to agree to a world-wide campaign. We are now ruled by a police-army coalition, by a council of eighteen generals and admirals, and the warmeantime-goes on."

"Who now?"

"Australia," he said. "She has become self-sufficient, which the Alliance military advisors never have appreciated. Sydney was obliterated this afternoon and an ultimatum was delivered to the Australian government shortly thereafter."

Neither of us spoke for a while.

The snow continued to fall, faster than ever.

"Dictatorship then?" I asked.

"They won't call it that."

"Nazism?"

"It's a mistake to apply the terms of other eras. The same sense of chauvinism is there, and a roiling muck of nationalistic fantasies. You can bet the Alliance factions will break down in a monumental squabble once this war is over. The Russians against us, a real Armageddon. They have the taste of blood, and the old hates have been resurrected on all sides."

"And nothing can be done?"

He didn't answer me, aware that it was an unanswerable question. He just drove and looked morose and contributed to my flagging spirits.

This was the age of instant history. More could happen in a week than happened in a year in the previous century. Everything moved, relentlessly, determinedly, and we were all caught up by it, swept along, either to be drowned in the swell or carried to a foreign shore on the wave crests.

I had a feeling I was going to be one of those to drown.

I was valuable to the war machinery. And even when the war was over, I could serve the junta with my esp, help to oppress those at home who would not appreciate the beauty of a military nation. And I didn't know whether I could do that, for I might be one of those rebelling myself. All my life I had been floundering from one emotional disaster to another, drawing in and in and in upon myself. And then I had met Melinda, had been treated by my Porter-Rainey Solid-State headshrinker, and had opened myself to the world for the first time, had tasted pure freedom and enjoyed it. The loss of my sanity within Child's mind and the long attempt to get free of him had interrupted my enjoyment of that new-found peace. And now that I was back, now that Melinda and a pleasant future lay within my grasp, the world was in the hands of the madmen who threatened to tear it apart.

But I couldn't drown. I had to ride those wave crests, had to survive to keep Melinda surviving. Damn them and their bombs and their war lusts!

As we drove, I felt my rage grow, swell, encompass my entire mind. And I realized that it would not be good enough to ride those crests. At most, the two of us would come out alive, washed ashore after the apocalypse, with each other. But our world would be destroyed and useless, and we would have no freedom, then, at all. Life would be a constant battle for survival in a society thrown back to barbarism. No, what I was going to have to do was forget about riding the crests of the waves-and find some way to direct the tides of the entire damn ocean of our future!

"Not that I don't find your company perfectly marvelous," I told Harry, "but could you take me to Melinda's place instead of yours?"

He hesitated before he said it, but he said it just the same. "She isn't at her place, Sim. She's been arrested.

She's a political prisoner."

It took long seconds for the words to sink in. When they did, my rage became godly wrath, and I began to seek someone upon whom to vent it. I was not afraid for her safety. I basked in the certainty of my power. I still did not see that I was bound up in the same flawed philosophy that had brought me to ruin so many times before

III

I stood by the window of Harry's den, holding a glass of brandy which I had not yet tasted. Beyond the window: a copse of trees, snow-covered grass, white-bearded hedgerows. The stark, wintry vista matched my thoughts, as I considered what Harry had told me on the way over.

Melinda had become engaged in writing pamphlets for some revolutionary group and had been under surveillance. Upon the magazine publication of the first part of her biography of my life-the childhood years in the AC complex-she had been arrested for questioning in connection with the death of a copper and the destruction of a howler some two weeks before. Whether there had been any questioning or not, no one would know; she was still under arrest.

The magazine article had not merely been a biography, but had contained scorchingly anti-military, anti-AC anecdotes which neither of us had decided, before my entombment in Child's mind, whether we should risk using or not. She had risked it.

"When is the trial?" I asked him now. We had postponed further discussion until we were warm and comfortable in his den-at his insistence.

"A date has been docketed before the Military Court of Emergency. Next September."

"Seven and a half months!" I turned from the window, furious, slopping brandy over my wrist.

"When the act is labeled treason, there are laws that permit it."

"What's her bail?" I asked.

"There is none."

"Is none?"

"What I said."

"But the law allows-"

He held up his pudgy hand to stop me. He looked terrible, as if telling me this was worse on him than on me. "This is no longer a republic, remember. It is a military state where men like the junta councilmen decide what laws there shall be. For sedition, they now say, there is no bail, and the rule of preventive detention has been extended indefinitely."

"Fight them!" I bellowed. "You fought them for me when-"

"It's different now," he interrupted. "You still don't grasp the situation. I worked the law on them before to get you free. But now they are the law and they can change it to counter one. It's like dancing on quicksand."

I took a chair, and again I was afraid, just a little, down deep where it hardly showed. This was beginning to feel like the inner world of Child's mind, where everything was solid and tangible, but where nothing could be trusted, where solidity could disappear, where liquid could become solid ground beneath the feet.

"She's not the only one," he said, as if mass suffering made her individual plight less important. It only made it more important.

"Let me have the phone," I said, reaching for it.

"Who?"

"Morsfagen."

"This might be a mistake."

"If the sonofabitch wants my esp, wants my work, then he is just going to have to see that she gets out of the Tombs!"

I found the number in Harry's private directory of unlisted phones, dialed it, and waited while a soldier called a noncom to the phone-while the noncom went and got a major who stuttered-and while the major finally went and summoned Morsfagen.

"What is it?" he asked. Cold. Deadly. Forceful. The sound of the well-trained bill collector.

"There's a girl being kept in the Tombs, charged with sedition, for god knows what reason. She-"

"Melinda Thauser," he said, cutting me short. He seemed to enjoy that. Like putting thumbscrews on me.

"I see you're up on things all around. Well, catch this, then. I want her released, and I want all charges dropped against her."

"That's beyond my control," he said-he did.

"It better not be."

"It is."

"It better not be, because you've just lost yourself an esper if it is."

"Services that can be commandeered in time of warlike an esper's services-are never lost," he said. Color him infuriatingly calm, cool, and collected. I wanted to kick his damned teeth in. He probably would still have smiled at me with that smile.

"Services cannot be commandeered unless the craftsman can be found," I said.

"Is this a threat to withhold services from the government in a time of national crisis?" he asked, smiling through every word. Snapping turtle mouth there, looking for one of my incautious fingers.

"Look," I said, trying another tack, "suppose we let the charges ride for the time being. Suppose the only thing that you concede is the bail. A low bail, but she'll still stand trial."

"Out of my control," he said again. But the tone of his voice said that nothing was ever out of his control.

"Like hell!"

"I'm not on the junta, you know."

"Look, Morsfagen, suppose she also destroys the damn book. Now it's the book she's in trouble for, isn't it? The first part of it?"

"With or without the book," he said, "the trouble remains for us. The danger does not lie within the printed page, but within the mind of the man setting words to paper. Or woman, as the case may be. But there isn't any use discussing it. I haven't any say about it. Besides, I've seen her picture, and I'm certain you can wait seven months for that kind of stuff." Voice of the obscene telephone caller, yet still authoritarian. In the back of his throat: unvoiced laughter that will explode when I hang up.

"I know why you're in the military now," I said, my voice deceptively neutral.

"Why is that?" he asked, walking into it.

"When your own manhood is negligible, a gun must at least be a little consolation." And I hung up on the creep.

"That was definitely a mistake," my mentor said.

I picked my coat up and worked into it. "Maybe."

"No maybe about it. Where are you going now?"

"Home, pack some things, and get out. Look, I'll get a message to you so you'll know where I'm at. Wait. Scratch that. I've got a key to Melinda's apartment. If it's still unoccupied, I'll stay there. They'll check hotels right away, so maybe her place is safer. Maybe I'm not as potent a wedge as I think I am. Maybe they really don't need my esp. But I rather think they'll come crawling after a while; it's the only way I can help her."

"You love her?" he asked.

I nodded. I couldn't really say it. Maybe it was still a hangover from my delusions of godhood. Or maybe I was just afraid that her affection did not run as deep as mine.

Perhaps, in a month, she had forgotten me.

"Then hurry," he said. "You might not have much time."

I left his Tudor home under the trees, took one of his two hovercars, and pressed the accelerator half through the floor on the way home. The craft veered from one side of the road to the other as clouds of snow kicked up and stuttered through the blades of the air cushion mechanism, but I didn't hit anyone.

Perhaps the sole reason for Melinda's arrest was her own actions. But I thought not. It seemed too clever a hook in my side to hold me should I ever return from the noman's-land inside of Child. Melinda was the perfect insurance policy, they must have thought, against my temper and foolishness.

I parked the car on my patio and entered the house through the double glass doors, packed two suitcases, and folded the healthy amount of cash in my library lockbox into five different wads in five different pockets. It was all in Western Alliance poscreds, so the rise or fall of any one government could not much affect its value. I took two game pistols out of the collection in the shooting range downstairs, grabbed a box of ammunition for each, and put everything in the car.

As I drove off the patio and down the lane alongside the cliff which overlooks my segment of the Atlantic Ocean, the police made their appearance. At the foot of the drive, eight hundred feet below, a howler pulled into sight, lumbering upward in all its armored glory.

IV

I stopped the hovercar and watched the approaching vehicles, three in all: the howler which I had first seen, a crimelab truck full of detection equipment (though what they hoped to find here, I could not guess), and a regular patrol car with two plainclothesmen inside. They were sending heavy guns for a single man, and they had not wasted any time about it. I looked across the road at the woods, the sloping hill leading to other houses in the development, and knew the hovercar would never hold up on that terrain. The beaters need an even surface to work on. In hilly country, the four heavy blades would chew through a rise in the land, twist, slice up through the floor of the cabin and make it nasty for me, to say the least.

And if I went back, there was only my house to take refuge in, for that was at the top of the cliff, with no road down the other side. I had paid for isolation, and now it was working against me.

The howler siren came on, as if I had not seen the damn thing and didn't understand its purpose. It was no more than three hundred feet away now, its great blades setting up secondary air currents which were beginning to rock my own hovercar.

Morsfagen was taking no chances. If I was under house arrest, locked up in the AC complex, there was no doubt that I would work for them, and there was no chance that I could stir up any sort of hornet's nest about Melinda Thauser. Perhaps it was the general himself in the last vehicle, come to smile that smile of his while they loaded me into the howler and took me quietly away.

But, bullheaded as I am, I was not about to make it that easy for them.

Call me heroic. Call me daring. Call me adventurous and devil-may-care. Actually, what I called myself at the time, under my breath, was "fool" and "congenital idiot" and "raving madman," but that is neither here nor there.

Turning the hovercar sideways to the lumbering howler, I backed across the narrow lane, aimed the nose of my craft at the brink of the cliff. For a moment, I almost lost my nerve, but my insanity (or heroism, if you will) took hold again, and I tramped the accelerator to the floor.

The drifting craft whined pitifully, shuddered as the blades roared with the flush of power. Then the hesitation was replaced by a burst of power, and the little car shot forward at top rev, cleared the edge of the cliff, and hung three hundred feet over the beach, a piece of delicate dandelion fluff-which turned abruptly into a lump of lead and dropped down, down, down like a goddamned stone.

I kept the accelerator to the floor, building a solid air cushion beneath. But I held the horizontal controls back against full stop so that none of the power could be used to drive the craft forward or backward-it all went straight down. The car pitched and yawed, but I pumped the correction pedal furiously, compensating for that.

The white sand rose, as if the beach moved while I hung in the same spot. If I had tried this maneuver a hundred feet closer to the house, there would not have been beach below, but great, shattered boulders. And the story would have ended much differently indeed.

The last thirty feet, the building column of air under the car began to slow me. I braced myself for the jolt of contact, and hoped the blades would not be damaged too much. Then the rubber rim of the oval vehicle slewed into the sand, the blades whirled frantically and bit through the grainy earth. Showers of sand exploded into the air, blinded me on all sides with a white, rattling curtain. Then the blades kicked the craft off the earth and held it ten feet above, whirling madly. There was a ratcheting noise somewhere below, but it could not be that serious if the car still flitted and if I were still alive. I cut back on acceleration, and settled down to two feet above the flat beach.

Taking the car out next to the curling waves that foamed along the snow-layered shore, I looked up at the cliff to see what was transpiring there-and was just in time to watch the howler leap into the air in a blind rush to follow me.

Take a howler: five tons of armored vehicle; made to ram through walls if necessary, with huge blades that rev four times faster than a small car's blades ever can; extra compressed air jets placed around the rubber landing rim to add extra boost if the time should come when they are needed. Like now. And howlers make leaps off ten-foot embankments all the time when in pursuit of a man on foot or on a wheeled vehicle like a motorcycle. But ten-foot embankments in no way resemble three-hundredfoot cliffs. If my car had dropped like a stone, the huge howler fell like a mountain.

In three hundred feet, it was building so much speed and force that the blades at full and the compressed air jetting wildly would do nothing to stop its descent. I could see the drivers coming to the same conclusion. Behind the armored glass windscreen, they were screaming.

The fall seemed to take forever, though it could only have been seconds. The boom of the mammoth blades smashed along the cliff and cracked out across the sea like cannon volley. The compressed air jets whooshed with a decibel range that threatened to crack even the safety glass in the windows of my hovercar. I didn't want to see what was going to happen, but I could not take my eyes off that fascinating descent no matter how much I wanted to.

Down

And down

Sand exploded upward as the howler reached the beach.

But the thing wasn't slowed.

It struck the earth with a terrifying explosion of sound, with a screech of metal shredding, twisting, buckling in upon itself. The cab snapped off the cargo hold, leaped toward the water, plowed into the sand at more than forty miles an hour, carrying the dead drivers. It bulled its way thirty feet into the sea before coming awash in the water.

At the point of impact, the gas tank under the cargo section had split and the leaking fluid had touched some hot parts. There was a whoosh of red and yellow, and flames spiraled a hundred feet in that first moment of ignition. On the sand, coppers and parts of coppers who had been riding in the rear of the howler lay everywhere, burning as the fuel washed them and ignited on them.

They were all dead already anyway, from the terrific impact of the crash.

Overhead, the crimelab truck and the hovercar perched by the edge of the cliff, their occupants looking down and gesticulating. None of them seemed interested in coming down, though the car with the plainclothes agents would have had every bit as good a chance of making it as I had had, even if that chance was not really so good at all.

The howler's descent, however, had been a good object lesson and the point had sunk in instantaneously.

I turned the car along the beach in the direction of the city, where I knew I could regain the highway before long.

In a very few minutes, they would have an alert out for me. I drove fast and tried to forget that war makes killers of all men, whether directly or indirectly. For isn't it true that every citizen who roots for "our side" to "kill the gooks" is as responsible for every death as the man wielding the gun? Isn't it true that none of us can escape responsibility for the madness of our species? Even those of us who live in carefully constructed shells, even we constantly affect the lives of others for evil. Existentialism?

Maybe. But there on the afternoon beach, it helped me to recover my wits as I sped away from the flaming corpses behind.

As I drove, I grew more and more infuriated with myself, for I had been so smug about dealing with themand yet I had not put any of that sense of assurance to work for me. It was time to stop feeling sorry for myself, time to make my anger into something more formidable than emotion.

I was superman, and it was time to act like one.

Or so I thought and so it seemed to be

V

In the large apartment complexes such as the one in which Melinda maintained her home, there is every convenience of modern living that one could wish for-all under a single roof. There are supermarkets and there are special "ethnic" food centers; there are clothing stores and beauty salons, bookstores and theaters, garages for hovercars and banks for money, bars for drinking and restaurants for nights out of the kitchen, office supply stores and car shops, electricians and plumbers and carpenters, legal prostitutes and drugbars for the purchase of approved chemical stimulants.

To connect all these facilities and to make them all accessible in minutes from every reach of the three-blocksquare structure (and when you consider that with eighty floors and nine square blocks per floor, there are 720 square blocks, you can easily envision how distant some points of the complex can be from others), there is a maze of express elevators, slow elevators, descending and ascending escalators, horizontal pedways with belts moving at a variety of speeds, and stairs-though very few of the last. Near any of the main shopping plazas within the structure, one needs only to stand close to any wall to hear the thrumming arteries of transportation moving ceaselessly, efficiently, like blood behind the plastic and the plaster.

It is possible to live in one such complex without ever finding the need to leave for wider spaces. If the urge to divorce oneself from civilization and its mad pace becomes too urgent, there are the underground parks with false sunlight and real trees and four floors of convoluted paths and bubbling, fresh brooks. There are butterflies and small animals and birds. If one happens to be a sports aficionado, there are arenas where various games are played out weekly. Some housewives who seek no career beyond that of running their home may be married in the complex church, return from a honeymoon, and perhaps live the next ten years in eighty floors, each nine square blocks. Husbands who work at stores within the complex and not at professions that take them into other parts of the city, may spend an equal length of time without ever seeing the real sky and the real world except through their windows-which usually exhibit other apartment complexes built nearby.

And no one seems to mind.

In fact, this sort of existence is advertised as a blessing, as something all of us should desire.

For instance:

Crime, the realtors point out, is all but nonexistent within the confines of the apartment area. All corridors are monitored by a full-time staff of police from central scanning depots within the structure. Anyone bent on illegal activity against the residents would find that it is utterly impossible to get into the complex without a plastic identicard full of computer nodes which activate the automatically locked doors. And only residents are carefully screened guests may have the use of such cards. Since everyone with a card has his fingerprints, retinal pattern, blood type, odor index, hair type, and encephalographic readouts on file with the structure's police bureau, it is difficult, if not impossible, to commit a crime from within and escape detection and retribution. Compared to the outside world, with its juvenile gangs, organized rackets, and political dissidents, such a style of crime-free living is quietly attractive.

Pollution, the same realtors say, is a serious problem outside the complexes. Man never really seriously stopped fouling his air and his water until the early 1980s. Then, some of the European and Asian countries had still not seen the light. Pollution had not totally ceased until the mid 1990s, after the complexes were being built. Outside, the air had still not been purified. The death rate for lung cancer, beyond the complex walls, among those unfortunate enough not to have seen the wisdom of such compact mini-cities, was three times that for complex dwellers. The same for all respiratory diseases. The realtors could go on and on. And they often did. The complexes had elaborate filtration systems, and this selling point was never overlooked.

Inflation, the salesmen will tell you, is far less noticeable in a complex apartment, for the companies who own the mammoth structures also do the buying from the smaller stores within. A company owning a hundred complexes, buying for a thousand grocery stores and hundreds of thousands of citizens can obtain lower wholesale rates and pass the savings on to the residents.

A community sense of togetherness, the realtors insist, has all but died in the regular life style, in the cities and the suburbs. There, they say with great sincerity, there is a dog-eat-dog, every-man-for-himself attitude. In the great complexes, this is not so. There is a camaraderie, a sense of group achievement, a community pride and identity that makes life more like it used to be: "Back When." No man need be an island, but a part of a great continent.

Trumpets. Drums. End of the ad.

Why don't I live in one, then? Why build a house by the sea, set in its own isolation of pine trees? Well, there are lots of reasons.

For instance:

Crime, it seems to me, is nothing more than a necessary evil, an offshoot of freedom and liberty. When you give a man a list of rights, things that he should expect to be able to do according to his standing as a member in the human community, you are providing the unscrupulous man with a list to stretch to his own ends. You are giving the clever man something to look over in search of loopholes. And, in the end, you have criminals making the free-enterprise system work for them, their way, as they understand it. So you arrest them and you punish them, but you learn to live with them. Unless you would prefer restricting those liberties everyone enjoys. You could shorten the list of rights or do away with it altogether, thus giving the unscrupulous ones less to stretch, less things to find loopholes in. Everyone suffers, of course, when the list is destroyed. And the cleverest and most intelligent of the unscrupulous manage to end up at the top of the pile anyway-or maybe they were the ones who eliminated the list of rights to begin with, in order to cut down on competition from amateurish punks. They call themselves "city government" and steal legally. And with their surveillance of the corridors, their bugging of elevators and escalators and pedways and stairs, their files on every resident, which grow thicker with data each year, the apartment complexes do not foster liberty, but slowly absorb it from their residents.

Pollution? Well, maybe I'll die of lung cancer sooner than a complex dweller. But I can breathe the smell of the sea, the smell of wet earth after a rain, the ozone produced by lightning. My air has not been so filtered and cleaned as to become flat and unexciting.

Inflation? Perhaps things are cheaper in the complexes, and perhaps that's because the companies really want to give their residents a fair shake in every way possible. But there is something frightening, to me at least, about depending on one conglomerate entity for your food, your drink, your entertainment, your clothing, your necessities, and your luxuries. I stopped being dependent on Harry, my father image, by the time I was halfway through adolescence. I don't yearn to be fathered or mothered to death by some team of accountants and cost-projecting computers.

A community sense of togetherness, they say, makes life much more fun in the giant apartment structures. But I don't want to have to be friends with anyone merely because I happen to live near them. I don't enjoy the high school rah-rah, go-team unison of small minds or the brittle-fingered canasta desperation of old people seeking companionship in their last days. Besides, last night, I saw an example of that community togetherness which banded the "innocent" citizens of that complex.across the street into a spying, ruthless creature which could report neighbors to the police to have them slaughtered. Community togetherness can lead to a consensus outlook that seeks and destroys any dissident element, no matter how small and really harmless.

Thanks but no thanks.

I'll take my sea.

And my pine trees.

And even my damned polluted air.

Her apartment was as it had been. It did not look as if it had even been searched-a strange fact if they truly had thought her involved with revolutionary elements. I got some food in a plaza supermarket and returned to her place, fixed myself a solid meal, and ate until my shriveled stomach was somewhat back to normal size.

After that, I turned on the television and was instantly glad I had taken so many precautions getting here. I had driven to the airport, abandoned my hovercar, and had brought my luggage back here on a bus. If I had not been so quick and careful, I might now be jailed, for I was a television star it seemed, my face a portrait on the wideangle tube.

On the news, they showed coppers at my house, looking busy as they attended complex machinery. They found signs of traitorous activities-signs which they had planted since my escape. They had uncovered a "secret room" and such nefarious things as a photo-printer and stacks of antiAlliance, anti-military booklets I was alleged to have written with-they pointed out-the aid of Melinda Thauser, who had already been taken into custody. There were even weapons caches and a small bomb assembly bench. I was wanted on a warrant for sedition. Very neat indeed.

But there was another warrant as well.

The second one was for murder.

They exhibited, in ludicrous detail, the demolished howler at the foot of the cliff, the charred corpses of the men who had been riding in the back of it. They had fished the detached cab from the sea, and the drivers were laid side by side, horribly mutilated by the broken windscreen and the crumpled roof of their vehicle. According to the news, I had run the howler off the narrow cliff road. I had charged it directly, and when it was obvious I was going to hit them, the drivers of the mammoth rig had swerved off the road to avoid killing me. Quite gallant of them.

I waited for the reporter to say how I had managed to make my escape with still another cop car ahead of me, but he talked around it without letting the home audience in on the way I had dived over the cliff myself.

KELLY KILLER, COPS SAY! That was the headline the papers would carry, surely. Those boys always went for alliteration.

I spent most of the evening working over a plan in my head. Just remaining on the loose did not seem enough, any longer, not while Melinda was in the women's quarters of the Tombs, down there in dark, cold stones without me.

Somewhere around nine in the evening, my thinking was interrupted by the whine of sirens and the sinister rattle of gunfire.

I stood, listening intently, wondering if they were now surrounding the building, now getting wise to my sudden disappearance. But they would hardly be firing out in the streets. And there would be no need for sirens. Indeed, sirens would warn me, and such a building as this provided a great many hiding places.

Turning to the broad picture window, I looked down into the street eight floors below. Three howlers curbed in front of the building across the street, and uniformed coppers poured out of them like insects from a broken hive. From the fourth floor of that building, a number of men opened fire with small arms, pitifully insufficient against such organized and deadly police.

What followed was a bloody, desperate battle which carried no reason nor purpose to it, so far as I could see.

Obviously, the people on the fourth floor were considered enemies of the state, for there was also an army car down there, with what appeared to be high brass directing the operation. But why tear gas was not used, why bullets were chosen instead, I could not understand.

I watched, terrified and fascinated.

In the end, as those on the fourth floor surrendered, tossing guns and ammunition down to the street, the most chilling scene of all occurred. Searchlights now illuminated the rooms beyond the shattered fourth-floor windows, showed the men and women there, dejected and defeated.

Almost simultaneously, the inside doors to the building's corridors burst open, and uniformed coppers stepped into the rooms. They carried what appeared to be machine pistols, and they used them expertly, slaughtering the thirty or so human beings who had already surrendered. A tall, willowy blonde twirled gracefully and fell across the windowsill. Her long fingers scrabbled at the wooden frame, while her mouth went slack and her face contorted hideously with the knowledge of impending death. Another eruption of gunfire behind her sent her lunging through the window, tearing her arms on projections of broken glass. She tumbled sixty feet to the street, turning lazily, her waist-long yellow hair sprayed around her like a halo

At last I turned away from the window.

What I had just seen was a sample of that "community camaraderie" the real estate agents spoke of. The neighbors of those dead men and women had turned them in, surely, in righteous indignation that a cell of revolutionaries should exist in their building.

The consensus had killed them as surely as the bullets.

The consensus, I would have to soon learn, was a living, breathing creature that could attack in vicious rage.

And the molders of the consensus had Melinda in a cell where they could get to her at any moment.

VI

At a quarter to three in the morning, after a short nap and a quick snack of cheese and crackers, I dressed and slipped both loaded pistols into the pockets of the heavy coat I was wearing. Through a series of pedways, escalators, and elevators, I reached the ground level of the west wall of the apartment complex and went outside. For a moment, I savored the cool air, then turned right and walked briskly toward the center of the city. I held my chin high and made my step firm but not rushed. I tried to look as little like a fugitive as possible. In ten minutes, I passed a dozen other pedestrians without getting a second glance from any of them, and I thought the ruse was working.

Twenty-five minutes from her apartment complex, the squat, round surface portion of the Tombs hove into sight.

This was the administrative wing, containing offices and files. Light burned in some of the long, narrow window slits. Below this modest and attractive nubbins, bored for dozens of levels into the earth, were the cells and the interrogation chambers. The place had been designed, originally, as a modern progressive prison. But slowly, through the years since the cold war had been renewed, it was converted into something quite less than progressive by those reactionaries who branded change as part of any enemy plot, labeled disagreement as subversion. The ideal of rehabilitation was abandoned by those who thought punishment was better than converting to usefulness. Frustration and boredom and rage were the companions of those locked within these walls.

And Melinda was there now.

There were three howlers parked along the curb, all of them empty and locked. At the four corners of the intersection, there were piles of snow which had not yet been removed. Streetlights threw long shadows against the circular structure. There was no other person in sight, and the scene was almost like still-life painting into which I had walked through some unknown magic.

I had both guns shoved into my overcoat pockets, though I prayed to an insane and unheeding God that I would not have to use them. Indeed, I didn't think I could use them if the occasion arose. But, clutched in my hands, they gave me a sense of determination, as the dying Catholic must feel when his fingers grip his crucifix and he doesn't feel so bad about meeting the end.

Stepping from the curb, I crossed the icy street toward the main entrance of the building.

The doors opened and two coppers came out, walked to the last of the three howlers, and got in.

I kept moving. Up on the other curb, across the sidewalk, up the long flight of gray steps, my heart pounding and my mouth dry. I pushed through the double doors into the well-lighted lobby of the place, took it all in as I walked across it, went down the main corridor to the elevator, which I took down to the cell levels. The doors opened on a guard sitting at a desk, and I received my first challenge.

"Yeah?" he asked, looking up from the magazine of undressed girls and overdressed fiction.

I probed out, struck into the center of his mind, fishing through the currents of thoughts there, seeking the fragments of scenery from his past and from the future he imagined for himself. I had not done this thing since I had been a child in the AC complex and they had made me do it in experiments. It was distasteful and painful, to me as well as to my victim. But I found the worst of his thoughts, the deepest id dreams which would horrify him and which would make him cringe with shame. The one I chose was of him and his eleven-year-old sister-a whip and a chain and all the horrors of sexual perversion those symbols represented. And I pushed them up into his conscious mind with such force that they became reality for him, so that he lost sight of me for only a split second and fell back, reeling, under the force of the ugliness which had welled up from the center of him.

Then I got out of there.

He was bent over the desk, clutching the corner of it, gagging, shaking his head, moaning to dispel the vision which he refused to believe could be his. I stepped forward, producing a pistol from my pocket, and struck him across the side of the head. He went down, hard, and stayed there. I wrestled him behind the desk, took off his jacket, ripped the arms loose, tied his ankles and wrists. I stuffed his handkerchief in his mouth, rolled the bulk of the jacket up, and tied the handkerchief in place.

And then I took his keys and opened the prisoner file, found her cell number. It was eight floors further down.

Committed to this insanity now, I used another of his keys to open the restricted elevator which led to the lower levels. I went down.

When the elevator doors opened again, there was another guard waiting, though this one was more alert than the first. He looked at me and saw that I had not come with an escort, even though I was obviously not a regular traveler in these halls. He unsnapped his holster with a clean, swift move, slipped fingers over the butt of his gun with the reactions of a trained fighter.

I pried open his mind and found his id.

I wallowed in it.

I dredged up a vision of his own basic blood lust, a gruesome, mad match that even he would never have known existed inside him. It involved his unvoiced, unrealized, unknown desire to-as an adolescent boy-rise up in the middle of the night and slaughter both his parents in their bed. There were spraying blood, harsh and strangled screams, terrified faces of two gentle people, the boy's hands wielding an ax whose blade gleamed wickedly in the thin light which streamed through the bedroom window from the iron street lamp beyond

When I got out of his head, he had dropped his pistol and had turned to the wall, where, screaming, spitting, on the verge of losing his sanity, he smashed his fists into unyielding, gray concrete. I clubbed him mercifully with one of my pistols. The vision would not return when he woke, and he would probably not even remember what had given him his fit. But knowing that didn't make me feel any more heroic.

When he was tied and gagged, I took the cell block keys from the desk and went after Melinda.

She was sitting in her cell; her reading lamp was on, and she was absorbed in some propaganda literature she was permitted to read. I rattled the key in the lock and swung the door open before she looked up. When she saw it was me, she let her mouth hang loose some while before closing it and taking a much needed breath.

"If I'm interrupting a good book, I'll come back later,"

I said, nodding at the propaganda.

She threw it down. "That drivel is really fascinating," she said. "The guy who writes it is either the biggest con man in existence or he believes it himself-in which case he has to be a mongoloid idiot, no question."

"Aren't you glad to see me?" I asked. "Aren't you going to hug and kiss the hero in your midst?"

"You can't be in my midst, because I'm only one person, not a multitude. Though this goddamned prison baggies do make me look like more than one woman."

She pulled at the uniform, shrugged. "You're here. I never expected you, don't know how you managed it, and doubt if we'll get back out. Like I said, the prison baggies here…"

I pulled jeans, sweater, and thin windbreaker from under my overcoat, all of which I had secreted there before leaving her apartment. "Do me the honor of a striptease?" I asked.

She grinned, stripped without asking me to turn my back (which I would have refused to do anyway), and dressed in the clothes I had brought.

I felt every inch the hero, all the while my mind was yelling "Fool" at top volume.

As she pushed past me to leave the cell, she stood on her toes a moment and kissed me, then turned quickly away again. Before she could take two steps, I grabbed her and turned her around. What I thought I had seen was in her eyes: tears.

"Hey," I said, feeling the male stupidity that cannot cope with tears. "Hey." Really stupid.

"Let's go," she said.

"Something wrong?"

"I've been wondering if you were alive, wondering if even you were whether you would care enough to come for me."

"But of course-"

"Shush," she said, stopping the tears. "We haven't time for this, have we?"

We closed the cell door and locked it, went up and past the other cubbyholes. Each was separated from the other by cement walls, but the fronts were all bars through which we could see the occupants. None of them, however, seemed to care much about us.

We went up in the first elevator, passed the first and second unconscious guards. When the second elevator opened on the main ground floor corridor, we walked briskly into the lobby, pushed open the glass doors and breathed in the cold night air. No one in the lobby or at any of the work desks paid the least bit attention to us. I took Melinda's arm, and we walked down the steps-just in time to confront General Alexander Morsfagen and four young and dedicated men with guns in their hands!

"Good evening," he said, bowing to us.

The four men with guns did not bow.

"I do believe you're surprised, Mr. Kelly. I didn't expect to see your cool broken like that." But whether or not he expected it, he certainly did enjoy it. His face was split with a grin you seldom see outside of mental wards.

"Who is he?" Melinda asked.

"Morsfagen."

"The title too, please," he said. But he was not just being humorous. His voice was stiff and deadly beneath the surface delight.

"General Morsfagen," I told her.

"And you're under arrest, of course," he said.

The four guards advanced on us, efficient but somehow less wary than they had been at first. It would have been possible, perhaps, to use my two pistols on the lot of them. They did not seem to expect that I might be armed, and with both my hands in my pockets and wrapped around the sweat-slicked butts of the weapons, they might have bought it but good before they realized what was happening.

Might have.

But nothing is certain.

Besides, the back of my mind played with the memory of those flaming corpses on the beach, with the picture of the howler drivers screaming as they fell to sudden death.

I didn't want more blood on my hands.

I contemplated using my esp on them. But the problem was that I could only invade one mind at a time. I knew I could not work fast enough to incapacitate all of them before one of those four boys panicked and put a few rounds of hard steel into Melinda and me.

What had happened to the god?

What was this? Mere men overpowering me and outthinking me, me a god?

"This way, please," Morsfagen said.

We followed him.

VII

Morsfagen had directed the placement of armed soldiers in the storm drains under and within four blocks of the Tombs. He had positioned a man behind every one of the slit windows of the administration building where I might possibly be able to force entrance. Even in the maze of aluminum air-conditioning ducts which wound through the great structure, a hundred men waited in silence with their narcotics pistols drawn and their nerves honed to crisp attention. With all of this waiting for me, I had walked up the front steps and through the lobby as brazen as a man could be. But even that had been planned for, and a watch had been kept from one of the apparently empty howlers parked before the Tombs entrance. They had watched me go in, had identified me, had let me get the girl, had let me bring her out, and then had nailed us.

Perhaps Morsfagen let it go on that long so that he could level charges of jailbreak against both of us on top of what the government already had drummed up. But I half thought that he wanted to humiliate me as much as anything. And he had.

They put us in a howler, took us through snowy streets to the AC complex. They took Melinda away to a separate preventive detention apartment and placed me in another, where there were no sharp instruments or windows.

"General Morsfagen will see you tomorrow," the guard told me as he left.

"Can't wait," I said.

The door closed, the lock snapped, and quiet descended.

I flopped onto the bed and listened to the springs whine, and I thought about what a stupid, fumbling idiot I had been, even with Child's intellect integrated with my own. I had gone back to the house to pack, even when I should have realized that they would be coming for me.

That had ended in the deaths of an entire howler crew, smashed and burning on my beach. Then I had gone to the prison after Melinda, with my brilliant plan of boldness, though I should have known that they would have been expecting the unexpected. Perhaps part of the plan was based on Child's cleverness-but another part was based on my own impetuousness, and Morsfagen knew my personality like the back of his hand-or better.

Look at yourself, Kelly, I yammered inside my head.

The only esper in the world, amplified by a partial absorption of the psychic energies of the most complete genius-and still a failure. Still charging around with delusions that invariably trip you up.

Before my meeting with Child and my therapy in the mechanical psychiatrist, I had been going on the assumption that I was some holy character, some bright and shining product of godly grace, the Second Coming. Basically, I had been nothing more than a man, and I had only suffered by my refusal to understand that. I blundered into things acting like a god, and when I got hurt or frightened, I couldn't cope. I had never prepared myself against hurt and fear, for I could not see where either commodity would impinge upon a god.

Now, with Child, I had unconsciously begun to accept the god role again. Smug in the knowledge that I was esper with a genius inside me, I slipped back into the habit of looking on lesser mortals with contempt. And in my self-assurance, I had failed to use all my talents and intellect, had underestimated my enemy as the first CroMagnons underestimated the Neanderthals for a while.

For a while.

I stood up, suddenly less angry than I had been, and more determined. Okay, so I was not a god. I was not omniscient and omnipotent and superior to the military. I could not excuse past stupidity, but I could improve my outlook until I was able to be something which they could not cope with. The reason Morsfagen and other men could trip me up was simple to see: they were less powerful men, but they were fully developed, capable, and sure and confident. And I was fractured and unsteady and filled with doubts beneath the sheen of smugness. It was time to get to know myself, understand what I was and what I could expect to accomplish. After countless circuits of the main room of the apartment, I sat down on the bed again and relaxed. And that night, I came to know myself better than I ever had in my life.

I turned esp fingers back among the streaming thoughts of my own conscious mind. It was something I had never attempted before, though it now seemed the most natural exercise in the world. Perhaps I had always felt that I knew what I WPS thinking, that I was aware of myself.

But, of course, like every man, I hadn't the faintest damn idea of what was going on inside my head. Head-tripping in countless other minds, I had left the territory of my own thoughts sacrosanct. Perhaps because I was afraid of what I might find.

In those rambles, stirring down into my own id and ego and superego, I found that I was purer, cleaner, less rotted than I might even have hoped for. There were things, of course, that terrified me and revolted me. But I took heart in that they indicated my basic humanness, my basic brotherhood with men, despite the fact I was made from chemical sperm and chemical ovum.

In that one long night, I finally understood the nature of society as I never had before. I had wrongly judged men. I had labeled them as inferior to me, when this was not the case. Some were inferior, some my equal, some even my superior in ways. Each minim of intelligent life on this planet was such an individual spark, such a varying quantity and quality that no sweeping comparison could ever be made. What I had always sensed and what I had misinterpreted was that society was inferior to me. No man. Society.

Society was an agglomeration of individuals equaling less than its separate parts. In governments and institutions, the men chosen to rule, chosen to make policy and enforce decision, were those elected by the society that supported them-and because each member of society is different, because some median must be reached through the ballot, mediocre men assume office. The very intelligent vote for the intelligent candidates, but no one else does, for everyone else distrusts intellect. The reactionary and blind vote for their own slogan shouters, but no one else does. In the end, the people in the middle range elect their people, simply because they are in the majority. We get the mediocre. And because the mediocre are ill-gifted to deal with the problems of all factions of society, they make bad government and bad institutions. They distrust the intellectual and do not rely upon his wisdom. They fear the reactionary and the blind because such people threaten progress (a commodity the middle has been told to embrace all its life). They repress the intellectuals and the reactionaries and embrace their own people. But because they are mediocre, their own people are not served well, and corruption flourishes. Where each individual of society may be capable of governing his own sphere, the agglomerate government is incapable of governing anything except through intimidation and pure luck.

It may have been something that most people understand early in life, but it was a revelation to me. To win the games of existence, one must not attempt to fight by society's rules, because in most cases, one is fighting individuals, and not society. To win, one must attack the game on individual terms-not against a stereotype, not against a societal image, but against the other man, the single adversary.

The way to deal with Morsfagen was not as a tendril of the military plant, but as a man. His weaknesses did not lie in his adherence to the consensus-the consensus was too huge ever to be weak at all-but with himself, in his own human psyche.

Still, my problem was not solved. If I was not god, not the superior creature I had thought I was, how could I act at all? How could I function as an ordinary man? From birth, I had come to think of myself as something special, something sacred and superhuman. The attempt, now, to operate as just another man, would run against the grain of a lifetime of smug theory and self-delusion.

And then, quite suddenly, I knew what I had to do. It came like the nick of a razor in the morning, making me jerk with more surprise than it deserved. I should have understood what had to be done some time ago. I had to, finally, become the supreme being, the god, that I had always thought I was!

I began pacing the room again. My feet swished on the thick carpet. A clock ticked in the wall. Otherwise: heavy silence.

Be God.

God lay inside Child's mutant body, insane as He had always been, trapped as Child and I had been for that month. And though I did not want His madman's personality, I could make a great deal of use of His psychic energy. It was there to be tapped, the power that had made worlds, had generated galaxies and universes, that had established the infinitely fine balance of the cosmic scale. I could delve back into Child's twisted body and find the core of God's being, absorb Him and dissipate Him throughout my own mind, as I had Child. God would be part of me, a deeply threaded part without His own identity. I would, indeed, for all purposes, be God.

I could not sleep for the rest of that night. I wanted to see Morsfagen, wanted to try to work him as a human being long enough to have him get me to Child. Then, once he had done that, I would not have to deal with him on a man-to-man basis. I would be above that.

I was frightened that night, seeing hulking creatures in every shadow. In God's mind, down in that colossal id and ego, what would things be like? Would I be able to handle them, or would I be swamped and driven down, consumed? I forced the latter possibility from my mind and thought more positively. But the fear remained. It was not unlike the fear a child feels the first time he enters a great cathedral and sees the towering, somewhat menacing figures of the saints carved in great pillars of marble.

Morsfagen came at nine o'clock, smiling. "I thought you'd like to hear today's schedule," he said.

I said nothing, playing the role I had decided on.

"We start with a press release about the gun battle you had with the police last night. Did you know that you were seriously injured in that, perhaps fatally injured?"

He wanted some response that he could slap me down for, but I didn't give him the satisfaction. I accepted.

"Later in the day, we'll release some film of that shootout," he said. "We've already staged it. Looks very real with lots of blood. We found a fairly good double for your part, and we kept him mostly in the shadows so that it's hard to tell, really, who he is."

I said nothing.

He shuffled the papers in his hand, went on. "According to the reports, three officers will have died under your guns. We've made up life histories for them, all very touching. Two of them had large families and one had a brother who was a priest We've put together composite photographs of various real officers to release to the press.

Later tonight, word will be flashed to an outraged nation that you have died on the operating table. Even though you slaughtered the howler crew and three other policemen, we were trying to save you, see? Now, the first order of business today is for you to come along and help us film the operating room sequences. A double won't work in bright lights. I hope you can die convincingly, or at least pretend to look dead while you're lying there.

Otherwise, you'll have to be drugged for it.

He stopped, watching me. It was time for my part, and my lines were crystal clear to me. "Look, how about a bargain," I said. I sounded fairly desperate.

He smiled. He was eating this up. Morsfagen's weakness was not in his rigid acceptance of military codes and consensus views, but in his need for power over other human beings, his delight at being on top of another man.

I was giving him exactly what he wanted.

Maybe he would just hang himself with it.

"I fail to see," he said, "just what you have to bargain with." He motioned around at the windowless walls.

"Something you don't know," I said. "Something that, if you knew, would help you a great deal."

He frowned, smiled again. "And what would you want for this valuable piece of information?"

"My freedom. Melinda's freedom. We'd stay in the city.

I'd do whatever you want."

"Oh, I hardly believe you would," he said.

"Look, Morsfagen, I'm not kidding you. I have something to tell you that could make a very big difference to the Alliance. I am not lying, and you must believe that."

"I'd love to hear it," he said, dragging this out to relish every moment of my groveling. "But you must choose some other reward besides your freedom."

"Let the girl and me live here together. At least don't keep us in separate apartments."

He smiled, seemed to consider it. "All right. She is some nice piece, I'll tell you. That ought to be a big enough reward. Now tell me what this secret is?"

I started to speak, then stopped abruptly, just as I had planned, examining him with a great deal of suspicion. I must have looked pathetic, hunched there on the edge of the bed, unshaven, trying to bargain for petty favors that would come without question to a free man. It was the image I wanted him to have of me. "How do I know I can trust you?" I asked. "How do I know you'll keep your promise?"

He laughed sharply, deeply. "You don't."

"But that's not right!" I said. There was just the edge of a whine in my voice. I was a broken man, yes I was. I was just so many pieces for him to break further into dust.

"Fairness doesn't apply here," he said. "You'll just have to trust me. Or forget it all."

I hesitated. "I have nothing to lose, I guess," I said. "So I'll tell you." I hesitated again. Then I spoke: "I lied to you when I saw it was dangerous for me to go back into Child's mind. I just said that to get back into my own body and to get out of the AC complex. I can go back into him any time that I want, and I can bring a great deal of valuable data out to you."

He burst into loud, almost uncontrolled laughter, his face growing red. He slapped his sides with his hands, almost dropping the sheaf of papers, and finally the laughter turned into a choking cough. When he looked up at me again, he said, "I thought that much all along. I hadn't yet decided to risk sending you back, 'cause you're too valuable to lose. In a police state, an esper has more duties hunting the enemy at home than abroad. Now I can take the risk and clean out that freak's mind too. I thank you for your kind assistance in this decision." He nodded sarcastically.

"When will the girl be brought to me?" I asked, though I knew the answer already.

"You trusted me," he said. "I appreciate that. It shows that we will be getting along better than anticipated."

"I hope so."

"But there is one thing I think you should learn, for your own good," he said. He waited until there was no alternative but for me to ask him what that lesson was.

"What's that?" I asked.

"Trust no one," he said. "The girl will remain in a separate apartment."

I made a lunge for him, and the guard beside him slapped me across the face with the butt of a rifle. It was a deal more than I had bargained for. My jaws snapped together, banging my teeth painfully into my gums. I saw stars, multicolored one with a thousand points each, and crashed back onto the bed.

I tasted blood, spat it on the sheets. It was curiously bright there, glistening.

"Have you learned the lesson?" he asked.

"You lied," I said.

"I guess you've learned the lesson, then."

"That all military men are emasculated power freaks who can't make it with a woman but dig beating up on other men with guns."

"Keep it up," he warned.

"Sexless bastard!" I hissed.

"Larry," he called to the young soldier. The boy stepped forward, holding his rifle ready. Morsfagen motioned to me, quite the cavalier, and conveyed the necessity of what must be done.

Larry took two more paces, stepped in front of me, drew the rifle over his head-all of this happening so slowly, so measuredly that it seemed like a ballet-and brought the square butt down on my left shoulder so hard that I felt tissue separating.

I did not see the pretty stars at all this time, only a velvety and total darkness

When I woke up, it was to the acrid odor of smelling salts which I rebelled against, gagging and pushing back from the stuff. But aside from that quite natural rejection, I offered no opposition. For the moment, Morsfagen was convinced he knew me. He suspected nothing and thought my anger was genuine.

I followed docilely to the corridor, the elevator, and the filming studios, where I played dead for them. Quite convincingly, he told me. They even let me bleed a little for them

By late afternoon, the films had been made. There was a team waiting to rush the product to the city's main broadcasting facilities, where it would be shown for the edification and entertainment of the consensus citizenry sitting safe at home this night.

From there, we went to Child's room, where nothing had changed: lights dim, bedclothes rumpled, the mutant husk still lying there in the smell of sickness, antiseptics, and starch.

"Are you ready?" Morsfagen asked.

I'm not only ready, but anxious! I thought. But I did not say anything. It seemed the time to be petulant, snippy, moody. And he seemed to relish my performance.

The lights were dimmed, the recorders started, Child raised a little in his bed, and I was at last within reach of the godhood I had been seeking all my life