Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said

7

Early in the gray of evening, before the cement sidewalks bloomed with nighttime activity, Police General Felix Buckman landed his opulent official quibble on the roof of the Los Angeles Police Academy building. He sat for a time, reading page-one articles on the sole evening newspaper, then, folding the paper up carefully, he placed it on the back seat of the quibble, opened the locked door, and stepped out.

No activity below him. One shift had begun to trail off; the next had not quite begun to arrive.

He liked this time: the great building, in these moments, seemed to belong to him. “And leaves the world to darkness and to me,” he thought, recalling a line from Thomas Gray’s Elegy. A long cherished favorite of his, in fact from boyhood.

With his rank key he opened the building’s express descent sphincter, dropped rapidly by chute to his own level, fourteen. Where he had worked most of his adult life.

Desks without people, rows of them. Except that at the far end of the major room one officer still sat painstakingly writing a report. And, at the coffee machine, a female officer drinking from a Dixie cup.

“Good evening,” Buckman said to her. He did not know her, but it did not matter: she—and everyone else in the building—knew him.

“Good evening, Mr. Buckman.” She drew herself upright, as if at attention.

“Be tired,” Buckman said.

“Pardon, sir?”

“Go home.” He walked away from her, passed by the posterior row of desks, the rank of square gray metal shapes upon which the business of this branch of earth’s police agency was conducted.

Most of the desks were clean: the officers had finished their work neatly before leaving. But, on desk 37, several papers. Officer Someone worked late, Buckman decided. He bent to see the nameplate.

Inspector McNulty, of course. The ninety-day wonder of the academy. Busily dreaming up plots and remnants of treason … Buckman smiled, seated himself on the swivel chair, picked up the papers.

TAVERNER, JASON. CODE BLUE.

A Xeroxed file from police vaults. Summoned out of the void by the overly eager—and overweight—Inspector McNulty. A small note in pencil: “Taverner does not exist.”

Strange, he thought. And began to leaf through the papers. “Good evening, Mr. Buckman.” His assistant, Herbert Maime, young and sharp, nattily dressed in a civilian suit: he rated that privilege, as did Buckman.

“McNulty seems to be working on the file of someone who does not exist,” Buckman said.

“In which precinct doesn’t he exist?” Maime said, and both of them laughed. They did not particularly like McNulty, but the gray police required his sort. Everything would be fine unless the McNultys of the academy rose to policy-making levels. Fortunately that rarely happened. Not, anyhow, if he could help it.

Subject gave false name Jason Tavern. Wrong file pulled of Jason Tavern of Kememmer, Wyoming, diesel motor repairman. Subject claimed to be Tavern, with plastic S. ID cards identify him as Taverner, Jason, but no file.

Interesting, Buckman thought as he read McNulty’s notes. Absolutely no file on the man. He finished the notes:

Well-dressed, suggest has money, perhaps influence to get his file pulled out of data bank. Look into relationship with Katharine Nelson, pol contact in area. Does she know who he is? Tried not to turn him in, but pol contact 1659BD planted microtrans on him. Subject now in cab. Sector N8823B, moving east in the direction of Las Vegas. Due 11/4 10:00 P.M. academy time. Next report due at 2:40 P.M. academy time.

Katharine Nelson. Buckman had met her once, at a polcontact orientation course. She was the girl who only turned in individuals whom she did not like. In an odd elliptical way he admired her; after all, had he not intervened, she would have been shipped on 4/8/82 to a forced-labor camp in British Columbia.

To Herb Maime, Buckman said, “Get me McNulty on the phone. I think I’d better talk to him about this.”

A moment later, Maime handed him the instrument. On the small gray screen McNulty’s face appeared, looking rumpled. As did his living room. Small and untidy, both of them.

“Yes, Mr. Buckman,” McNulty said, focusing on him and coming to a stiff attention, tired as he was. Despite fatigue and a little hype of something, McNulty knew exactly how to comport himself in relation to his superiors.

Buckman said, “Give me the story, briefly, on this Jason Taverner. I can’t piece it together from your notes.”

“Subject rented hotel room at 453 Eye Street. Approached pol contact 1659BD, known as Ed, asked to be taken to ID forger. Ed planted microtrans on him, took him to pol contact 1980CC, Kathy.”

“Katharine Nelson,” Buckman said.

“Yes, sir. Evidently she did an unusually expert job on the ID cards; I’ve put them through prelim lab tests and they work out almost okay. She must have wanted him to get away.”

“You contacted Katharine Nelson?”

“I met both of them at her room. Neither cooperated with me. I examined subject’s ID cards, but—”

“They seemed genuine,” Buckman interrupted.

“Yes, sir.”

“You still think you can do it by eye.”

“Yes, Mr. Buckman. But it got him through a random pol checkpoint; the stuff was that good.”

“How nice for him.”

McNulty bumbled on. “I took his ID cards and issued him a seven-day pass, subject to recall. Then I took him to the 469th Precinct station, where I have my aux office, and had his file pulled … the Jason Tavern file, it turned out. Subject went into a long song and dance about plastic S; it sounded plausible, so we let him go. No, wait a minute; I didn’t issue him the pass until—”

“Well,” Buckman interrupted, “what’s he up to? Who is he?”

“We’re following him, via the microtrans. We’re trying to come up with data-bank material on him. But as you read in my notes, I think subject has managed to get his file out of every central data bank. It’s just not there, and it has to be because we have a file on everyone, as every school kid knows; it’s the law, we’ve got to.”

“But we don’t,” Buckman said.

“I know, Mr. Buckman. But when a file isn’t there, there has to be a reason. It didn’t just happen not to be there: someone filched it out of there.”

“‘Filched,’ “Buckman said, amused.

“Stole, purloined.” McNulty looked discomfited. “I’ve just begun to go into it, Mr. Buckman; I’ll know more in twenty-four hours. Hell, we can pick him up any time we want. I don’t think this is important. He’s just some well-heeled guy with enough influence to get his file out—”

“All right,” Buckman said. “Go to bed.” He rang off, stood for a moment, then walked in the direction of his inner offices. Pondering.

In his main office, asleep on the couch, lay his sister Alys. Wearing, Felix Buckman saw with acute displeasure, skintight black trousers, a man’s leather shirt, hoop earrings, and a chain belt with a wrought-iron buckle. Obviously she had been drugging. And had, as so often before, gotten hold of one of his keys.

“God damn you,” he said to her, closing the office door before Herb Maime could catch a glimpse of her.

In her sleep Alys stirred. Her catlike face screwed up into an irritable frown and, with her right hand, she groped to put out the overhead fluorescent light, which he had now turned on.

Grabbing her by the shoulders—and experiencing without pleasure her taut muscles—he dragged her to a sitting position. “What was it this time?” he demanded. “Termaline?”

“No.” Her speech, of course, came out slurred. “Hexophenophrine hydrosulphate. Uncut. Subcutaneous.” She opened her great pale eyes, stared at him with rebellious displeasure.

Buckman said, “Why in hell do you always come here?” Whenever she had been heavily fetishing and/or drugging she crashed here in his main office. He did not know why, and she had never said. The closest she had come, once, was a mumbled declaration about the “eye of the hurricane,” suggesting that she felt safe from arrest here at the core offices of the Police Academy. Because, of course, of his position.

“Fetishist,” he snapped at her, with fury. “We process a hundred of you a day, you and your leather and chain mail and dildoes. God.” He stood breathing noisily, feeling himself shake.

Yawning, Alys slid from the couch, stood straight upright and stretched her long, slender arms. “I’m glad it’s evening,” she said airily, her eyes squeezed shut. “Now I can go home and go to bed.”

“How do you plan to get out of here?” he demanded. But he knew. Every time the same ritual unfolded. The ascent tube for “secluded” political prisoners got brought into use: it led from his extreme north office to the roof, hence to the quibble field. Alys came and went that way, his key breezily in hand. “Someday,” he said to her darkly, “an officer will be using the tube for a legitimate purpose, and he’ll run into you …

“And what would he do?” She massaged his short-cropped gray hair. “Tell me, please, sir. Muff-dive me into panting contrition?”

“One look at you with that sated expression on your face—”

“They know I’m your sister.”

Buckman said harshly, “They know because you’re always coming in here for one reason or another or no damn reason at all.”

Perching knees up on the edge of a nearby desk, Alys eyed him seriously. “It really bothers you.”

“Yes, it really bothers me.”

“That I come here and make your job unsafe.”

“You can’t make my job unsafe,” Buckman said. “I’ve got only five men over me, excluding the national director, and all of them know about you and they can’t do anything. So you can do what you want.” Thereupon he stormed out of the north office, down the dull corridor to the larger suite where he did most of his work. He tried to avoid looking at her.

“But you carefully closed the door,” Alys said, sauntering after him, “so that that Herbert Blame or Mame or Maine or whatever it is wouldn’t see me.”

“You,” Buckman said, “are repellent to a natural man.”

“Is Maime natural? How do you know? Have you screwed him?”

“If you don’t get out of here,” he said quietly, facing her across two desks. “I’ll have you shot. So help me God.”

She shrugged her muscular shoulders. And smiled.

“Nothing scares you,” he said, accusingly. “Since your brain operation. You systematically, deliberately, had all your human centers removed. You’re now a”—he struggled to find the words; Alys always hamstrung him like this, even managed to abolish his ability to use words—“you,” he said chokingly, “are a reflex machine that diddles itself endlessly like a rat in an experiment. You’re wired into the pleasure nodule of your brain and you push the switch five thousand times an hour every day of your life when you’re not sleeping. It’s a mystery to me why you bother to sleep; why not diddle yourself a full twenty-four hours a day?”

He waited, but Alys said nothing.

“Someday,” he said, “one of us will die.”

“Oh?” she said, raising a thin green eyebrow.

“One of us,” Buckman said, “will outlive the other. And that one will rejoice.”

The pol-line phone on the larger desk buzzed. Reflexively, Buckman picked it up. On the screen McNulty’s rumpled hyped-up features appeared. “Sorry to bother you, General Buckman, but I just got a call from one of my staff. There’s no record in Omaha of a birth certificate ever being issued for a Jason Taverner.”

Patiently, Buckman said, “Then it’s an alias.”

“We took fingerprints, voiceprints, footprints, EEG prints. We sent them to One Central, to the overall data bank in Detroit. No match-up. Such fingerprints, footprints, voiceprints, EEG prints, don’t exist in any data banks on earth.” McNulty tugged himself upright and wheezed apologetically, “Jason Taverner doesn’t exist.”

8

Jason Taverner did not, at the moment, wish to return to Kathy. Nor, he decided, did he want to try Heather Hart once again. He tapped his coat pocket; he still had his money, and, because of the police pass, he could feel free to travel anywhere. A pol-pass was a passport to the entire planet; until they APB-ed on him he could travel as far as he wanted, including unimproved areas such as specific, acceptable jungle-infested islands in the South Pacific. There they might not find him for months, not with what his money would buy in an open-area spot such as that.

I’ve got three things going for me, he realized. I’ve got money, good looks, and personality. Four things: I also have forty-two years of experience as a six.

An apartment.

But, he thought, if I rent an apartment, the rotive manager will be required by law to take my fingerprints; they’ll be routinely mailed to Pol-Dat Central … and when the police have discovered that my ID cards are fakes, they’ll find they have a direct line to me. So there goes that.

What I need, he said to himself, is to find someone who already has an apartment. In their name, with their prints.

And that means another girl.

Where do I find such a one? he asked himself, and had the answer already on his tongue: at a first-rate cocktail lounge. The kind many women go to, with a three-man combo playing fob jazzy, preferably blacks. Well dressed.

Am I well enough dressed, though? he wondered, and took a good look at his silk suit under the steady white-and-red light of a huge AAMCO sign. Not his best but nearly so … but wrinkled. Well, in the gloom of a cocktail lounge it wouldn’t show.

He hailed a cab, and presently found himself quibbling toward the more acceptable part of the city to which he was accustomed—accustomed, at least, during the most recent years of his life, his career When he had reached the very top.

A club, he thought, where I’ve appeared. A club I really know. Know the maître d’, the hatcheck girl, the flower girl … unless they, like me, are somehow now changed.

But as yet it appeared that nothing but himself had changed. His circumstances. Not theirs.

The Blue Fox Room of the Hayette Hotel in Reno. He had played there a number of times; he knew the layout and the staff backward and forward.

To the cab he said, “Reno.”

Beautifully, the cab peeled off in a great swooping righthand motion; he felt himself going with it, and enjoyed it. The cab picked up speed: they had entered a virtually unused air corridor, and the upper velocity limit was perhaps as high as twelve hundred m.p.h.

“I’d like to use the phone,” Jason said.

The left wall of the cab opened and a picphone slid out, cord twisted in a baroque 1oop.

He knew the number of the Blue Fox Room by heart; he dialed it, waited, heard a click and then a mature male voice saying, “Blue Fox Room, where Freddy Hydrocephalic is appearing in two shows nightly, at eight and at twelve; only thirty dollars’ cover charge and girls provided while you watch. May I help you?”

“Is this good old Jumpy Mike?” Jason said. “Good old Jumpy Mike himself?”

“Yes, this certainly is.” The formality of the voice ebbed. “Who am I speaking to, may I ask?” A warm chuckle.

Taking a deep breath, Jason said, “This is Jason Taverner.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Taverner.” Jumpy Mike sounded puzzled. “Right now at the moment I can’t quite—”

“It’s been a long time,” Jason interrupted. “Can you give me a table toward the front of the room—”

“The Blue Fox Room is completely sold out, Mr. Taverner,” Jumpy Mike rumbled in his fat way. “I’m very sorry.”

“No table at all?” Jason said. “At any price?”

“Sorry, Mr. Taverner, none.” The voice faded in the direction of remoteness. “Try us in two weeks.” Good old Jumpy Mike hung up.

Silence.

Jesus shit Christ, Jason said to himself. “God,” he said aloud. “God damn it.” His teeth ground against one another, sending sheets of pain through his trigeminal nerve.

“New instructions, big fellow?” the cab asked tonelessly.

“Make it Las Vegas,” Jason grated. I’ll try the Nellie Melba Room of the Drake’s Arms, he decided. Not too long ago he had had good luck there, at a time when Heather Hart had been fulfilling an engagement in Sweden. A reasonable number of reasonably high class chicks hung out there, gambling, drinking, listening to the entertainment, getting it on. It was worth a try, if the Blue Fox Room—and the others like it—were closed to him. After all, what could he lose?

Half an hour later the cab deposited him on the roof field of the Drake’s Arms. Shivering in the chill night air, Jason made his way to the royal descent carpet; a moment later he had stepped from it into the warmth-color-light-movement of the Nellie Melba Room.

The time: seven-thirty. The first show would begin soon. He glanced at the notice; Freddy Hydrocephalic was appearing here, too, but doing a lesser tape at lower prices. Maybe he’ll remember me, Jason thought. Probably not. And then, as he thought more deeply on it, he thought, No chance at all.

If Heather Hart didn’t remember him no one would.

He seated himself at the crowded bar—on the only stool left—and, when the bartender at last noticed him, ordered scotch and honey, mulled. A pat of butter floated in it.

“That’ll be three dollars,” the bartender said.

“Put it on my—” Jason began and then gave up. He brought out a five.

And then he noticed her.

Seated several seats down. She had been his mistress years ago; he had not seen her in a hell of a while. But she still has a good figure, he observed, even though she’s gotten a lot older. Ruth Rae. Of all people.

One thing about Ruth Rae: she was smart enough not to let her skin become too tanned. Nothing aged a woman’s skin faster than tanning, and few women seemed to know it. For a woman Ruth’s age—he guessed she was now thirtyeight or -nine—tanning would have turned her skin into wrinkled leather.

And, too, she dressed well. She showed off her excellent figure. If only time had avoided its constant series of appointments with her face … anyhow, Ruth still had beautiful black hair, all coiled in an upsweep at the back of her head. Feather-plastic eyelashes, brilliant purple streaks across her cheek, as if she had been seared by psychedelic tiger claws.

Dressed in a colorful sari, barefoot—as usual she had kicked off her high-heeled shoes somewhere—and not wearing her glasses, she did not strike him as bad-looking. Ruth Rae, he mused. Sews her own clothes. Bifocals which she never wears when anyone’s around … excluding me. Does she still read the Book-of-the-Month selection? Does she still get off reading those endless dull novels about sexual misdeeds in weird, small, but apparently normal Midwestern towns?

That was one factor about Ruth Rae: her obsession with sex. One year that he recalled she had laid sixty men, not including him: he had entered and left earlier, when the stats were not so high.

And she had always liked his music. Ruth Rae liked sexy vocalists, pop ballads and sweet—sickeningly sweet—strings. In her New York apartment at one time she had set up a huge quad system and more or less lived inside it, eating dietetic sandwiches and drinking fake frosty slime drinks made out of nothing. Listening forty-eight hours at a stretch to disc after disc by the Purple People Strings, which he abominated.

Because her general taste appalled him, it annoyed him that he himself constituted one of her favorites. It was an anomaly which he had never been able to take apart.

What else did he remember about her? Tablespoons of oily yellow fluid every morning: vitamin E. Strangely enough it did not seem to be a shuck in her case; her erotic stamina increased with each spoonful. Lust virtually leaked out of her.

And as he recalled she hated animals. This made him think about Kathy and her cat Domenico. Ruth and Kathy would never groove, he said to himself. But that doesn’t matter; they’ll never meet.

Sliding from his stool he carried his drink down the bar until he stood before Ruth Rae. He did not expect her to know him, but, at one time, she had found him unable to avoid … why wouldn’t that be true now? No one was a better judge of sexual opportunity than Ruth.

“Hi,” he said.

Foggily—because she did not have on her glasses—Ruth Rae lifted her head, scrutinized him. “Hi,” she rasped in her bourbon-bounded voice. “Who are you?”

Jason said, “We met a few years ago in New York. I was doing a walk-on in an episode of The Phantom Baller … as I recall it, you had charge of costumes.”

“The episode,” Ruth Rae rasped, “where the Phantom Baller was set upon by pirate queers from another time period.” She laughed, smiled up at him. “What’s your name?” she inquired, jiggling her wire-supported exposed boobs.

“Jason Taverner,” he said.

“Do you remember my name?”

“Oh yes,” he said. “Ruth Rae.”

“It’s Ruth Gomen now,” she rasped. “Sit down.” She glanced around her, saw no vacant stools. “Table over there.” She stepped super-carefully from her stool and careened in the direction of a vacant table; he took her arm, guided her along. Presently, after a moment of difficult navigation, he had her seated, with himself close beside her.

“You look every bit as beautiful—” he began, but she cut him off brusquely.

“I’m old,” she rasped. “I’m thirty-nine.”

“That’s not old,” Jason said. “I’m forty-two.”

“It’s all right for a man. Not for a woman.” Blearily she stared into her half-raised martini. “Do you know what Bob does? Bob Gomen? He raises dogs. Big, loud, pushy dogs with long hair. It gets into the refrigerator.” She sipped moodily at her martini; then, all at once, her face glowed with animation; she turned toward him and said, “You don’t look forty-two. You look all right! Do you know what I think? You ought to be in TV or the movies.”

Jason said cautiously, “I have been in TV. A little.”

“Oh, like the Phantom Baller Show.” She nodded. “Well, let’s face it; neither of us made it.”

“I’ll drink to that,” he said, ironically amused; he sipped at his mulled scotch and honey. The pat of butter had melted.

“I believe I do remember you,” Ruth Rae said. “Didn’t you have some blueprints for a house out on the Pacific, a thousand miles away from Australia? Was that you?”

“That was me,” he said, lying.

“And you drove a Rolls-Royce flyship.”

“Yes,” he said. That part was true.

Ruth Rae said, smiling, “Do you know what I’m doing here? Do you have any idea? I’m trying to get to see, to meet, Freddy Hydrocephalic. I’m in love with him.” She laughed the throaty laugh he remembered from the old days. “I keep sending him notes reading ‘I love you,’ and he writes typed notes back saying ‘I don’t want to get involved; I have personal problems.’ “ She laughed again, and finished her drink.

“Another?” Jason said, rising.

“No.” Ruth Rae shook her head. “I don’t drink anymore. There was a period”—she paused, her face troubled—“I wonder if anything like that has ever happened to you. I wouldn’t think so, to look at you.”

“What happened?”

Ruth Rae said, fooling with her empty glass, “I drank all the time. Starting at nine o’clock in the morning. And you know what it did for me? It made me look older. I looked fifty. Goddamn booze. Whatever you fear will happen to you, booze will make it happen. In my opinion booze is the great enemy of life. Do you agree?”

“I’m not sure,” Jason said. “I think life has worse enemies than booze.”

“I guess so. Like the forced-labor camps. Do you know they tried to send me to one last year? I really had a terrible time; I had no money—I hadn’t met Bob Gomen yet—and I worked for a savings-and-loan company. One day a deposit in cash came in … fifty-dollar-bill stuff, three or four of them.” She introspected for a time. “Anyhow, I took them and put the deposit slip and envelope into the shredder. But they caught me. Entrapment—a setup.”

“Oh,” he said.

“But—see, I had a thing going with my boss. The pols wanted to drag me off to a forced-labor camp—one in Georgia—where I’d be gang-banged to death by rednecks, but he protected me. I still don’t know how he did it, but they let me go. I owe that man a lot, and I never see him anymore. You never see the ones who really love you and help you; you’re always involved with strangers.”

“Do you consider me a stranger?” Jason asked. He thought to himself, I remember one more thing about you, Ruth Rae. She always maintained an impressively expensive apartment. No matter who she happened to be married to: she always lived well.

Ruth Rae eyed him questioningly. “No. I consider you a friend.”

“Thanks.” Reaching, he took hold of her dry hand and held it a second, letting go at exactly the right time.

9

Ruth Rae’s apartment appalled Jason Taverner with its luxury. It must cost her, he reasoned, at least four hundred dollars a day. Bob Gomen must be in good financial shape, he decided. Or anyhow was.

“You didn’t have to buy that fifth of Vat 69,” Ruth said as she took his coat, carrying it and her own to a self-opening closet. “I have Cutty Sark and Hiram Walker’s bourbon—”

She had learned a great deal since he had last slept with her: it was true. Emptied, he lay naked on the blankets of the waterbed, rubbing a broken-out spot at the rim of his nose. Ruth Rae, or rather Mrs. Ruth Gomen now, sat on the carpeted floor, smoking a Pall Mall. Neither of them had spoken for some time; the room had become quiet. And, he thought, as drained as I am. Isn’t there some principle of thermodynamics, he thought, that says heat can’t be destroyed, it can only be transferred? But there’s also entropy.

I feel the weight of entropy on me now, he decided. I have discharged myself into a vacuum, and I will never get back what I have given out. I goes only one way. Yes, he thought, I’m sure that is one of the fundamental laws of thermodynamics.

“Do you have an encyclopedia machine?” he asked the woman.

“Hell, no.” Worry appeared on her prunelike face. Prunelike—he withdrew the image; it did not seem fair. Her weathered face, he decided. That was more like it.

“What are you thinking?” he asked her.

“No, you tell me what you’re thinking,” Ruth said. “What’s on that big alpha-consciousness-type super-secret brain of yours?”

“Do you remember a girl named Monica Buff?” Jason asked.

“‘Remember her! Monica Buff was my sister-in-law for six years. In all that time she never washed her hair once. Tangled, messy, dark-brown ooze of dog fur hanging around her pasty face and dirty short neck.”

“I didn’t realize you disliked her.”

“Jason, she used to steal. If you left your purse around she’d rip you off; not just the paper scrip but all the coins as well. She had the brain of a magpie and the voice of a crow, when she talked, which thank God wasn’t often. Do you know that that chick used to go six or seven—sometimes, one time in particular—eight days without saying a word? Just huddled up in a corner like a fractured spider strumming on that five-dollar guitar she owned and never learned the chords for. Okay, she did look pretty in an unkempt messy sort of way. I’ll concede that. If you like gross tail.”

“How’d she stay alive?” Jason asked. He had known Monica Buff only briefly, and by way of Ruth. But during that time he and she had had a short, mind-blowing affair.

“Shoplifting,” Ruth Rae said. “She had that big wicker bag she got in Baja California … she used to stuff stuff into that and then go cruising out of the store big as life.”

“Why didn’t she get caught?”

“She did. They fined her and her brother came up with the bread, so there she was again, out on the street, strolling along barefoot—I mean it!—down Shrewsbury Avenue in Boston, tweaking all the peaches in the grocery-store produce sections. She used to spend ten hours a day in what she called shopping.” Glaring at him, Ruth said, “You know what she did that she never got caught at?” Ruth lowered her voice. “She used to feed escaped students.”

“And they never busted her for that?” Feeding or sheltering an escaped student meant two years in an FLC—the first time. The second time the sentence was five years.

“No, they never busted her. If she thought a pol team was about to run a spot check she’d quickly phone Pol Central and say a man was trying to break into her house. And then she’d maneuver the student outside and then lock him out, and the pols would come and there he’d be, beating on the door exactly as she said. So they’d cart him off and leave her free.” Ruth chuckled, “I heard her make one of those phone calls to Pol Central once. The way she told it, the man—”

Jason said, “Monica was my old lady for three weeks. Five years ago, roughly.”

“Did you ever see her wash her hair during that time?”

“No,” he admitted.

“And she didn’t wear underpants,” Ruth said. “Why would a good-looking man like you want to have an affair with a dirty, stringy, mangy freak like Monica Buff? You couldn’t have been able to take her anywhere; she smelled. She never bathed.”

“Hebephrenia,” Jason said.

“Yes.” Ruth nodded. “That was the diagnosis. I don’t know if you know this but finally she just wandered off, during one of her shopping trips, and never came back; we never saw her again. By now she’s probably dead. Still clutching that wicker shopping bag she got in Baja. That was the big moment in her life, that trip to Mexico. She bathed for the occasion, and I fixed up her hair—after I washed it half a dozen times. What did you ever see in her? How could you stand her?”

Jason said, “I liked her sense of humor.”

It’s unfair, he thought, comparing Ruth with a nineteen-year-old girl. Or even with Monica Buff. But—the comparison remained there, in his mind. Making it impossible for him to feel attraction toward Ruth Rae. As good—as experienced, anyhow—as she was in bed.

I am using her, he thought. As Kathy used me. As McNulty used Kathy.

McNulty. Isn’t there a microtrans on me somewhere?

Rapidly, Jason Taverner grabbed up his clothing, swiftly carried it to the bathroom. There, seated on the edge of the tub, he began to inspect each article.

It took him half an hour. But he did, at last, locate it. Small as it was. He flushed it down the toilet; shaken, he made his way back into the bedroom. So they know where I am after all, he realized. I can’t stay here after all.

And I’ve jeopardized Ruth Rae’s life for nothing.

“Wait,” he said aloud.

“Yes?” Ruth said, leaning wearily against the wall of the bathroom, arms folded under her breasts.

“Microtransmitters,” Jason said slowly, “only give approximate locations. Unless something actually tracks back to them locked on their signal.” Until then—He could not be sure. After all, McNulty had been waiting in Kathy’s apartment. But had McNulty come there in response to the microtransmitter, or because he knew that Kathy lived there? Befuddled by too much anxiety, sex, and scotch, he could not remember; he sat on the tub edge rubbing his forehead, straining to think, to recall exactly what had been said when he and Kathy entered her room to find McNulty waiting for them.

Ed, he thought. They said that Ed planted the microtrans on me. So it did locate me. But—Still, maybe it only told them the general area. And they assumed, correctly, that it would be Kathy’s pad.

To Ruth Rae he said, his voice breaking, “God damn it, I hope I haven’t got the pols oinking their asses after you; that would be too much, too goddamn much.” He shook his head, trying to clear it. “Do you have any coffee that’s super-hot?”

“I’ll go punch the stove-console.” Ruth Rae skittered barefoot, wearing only a box bangle, from the bathroom into the kitchen. A moment later she returned with a big plastic mug of coffee, marked KEEP ON TRUCKIN’. He accepted it, drank down the steaming coffee.

“I can’t stay,” he said, “any longer. And anyhow, you’re too old.”

She stared at him, ludicrously, like a warped, stomped doll. And then she ran off into the kitchen. Why did I say that? he asked himself. The pressure; my fears. He started after her.

In the kitchen doorway Ruth appeared, holding up a stoneware platter marked SOUVENIR OF KNOITS BERRY FARM. She ran blindly at him and brought it down on his head, her mouth twisting like newborn things just now alive. At that last instant he managed to lift his left elbow and take the blow there; the stoneware platter broke into three jagged pieces, and, down his elbow, blood spurted. He gazed at the blood, the shattered pieces of platter on the carpet, then at her.

“I’m sorry,” she said, whispering it faintly. Barely forming the words. The newborn snakes twisted continually, in apology.

Jason said, “I’m sorry.”

“I’ll put a Band-Aid on it.” She started for the bathroom. “No,” he said, “I’m leaving. It’s a clean cut; it won’t get infected.”

“Why did you say that to me?” Ruth said hoarsely.

“Because,” he said, “of my own fears of age. Because they’re wearing me down, what’s left of me. I virtually have no energy left. Even for an orgasm.”

“You did really well.”

“But it was the last,” he said. He made his way into the bathroom; there he washed the blood from his arm, kept cold water flowing on the gash until coagulation began. Five minutes, fifty; he could not tell. He merely stood there, holding his elbow under the faucet. Ruth Rae had gone God knew where. Probably to nark to the pols, he said wearily to himself; he was too exhausted to care.

Hell, he thought. After what I said to her I wouldn’t blame her.

10

“No,” Police General Felix Buckman said, shaking his head rigidly. “Jason Taverner does exist. He’s somehow managed to get the data out of all the matrix banks.” The police general pondered. “You’re sure you can lay your hands on him if you have to?”

“A downer about that, Mr. Buckman,” McNulty said. “He’s found the microtrans and snuffed it. So we don’t know if he’s still in Vegas. If he has any sense he’s hustled on. Which he almost certainly has.”

Buckman said, “You had better come back here. If he can lift data, prime source material like that, out of our banks, he’s involved in effective activity that’s probably major. How precise is your fix on him?”

“He is—was—located in one apartment of eighty-five in one wing of a complex of six hundred units, all expensive and fashionable in the West Fireflash District, a place called Copperfield II.”

“Better ask Vegas to go through the eighty-five units until they find him. And when you get him, have him air-mailed directly to me. But I still want you at your desk. Take a couple of uppers, forget your hyped-out nap, and get down here.”

“Yes, Mr. Buckman,” McNulty said, with a trace of pain. He grimaced.

“You don’t think we’re going to find him in Vegas,” Buckman said.

“No, sir.”

“Maybe we will. By snuffing the microtrans he may rationalize that he’s safe, now.”

“I beg to differ,” McNulty said. “By finding it he’d know we had bugged him to there in West Fireflash. He’d split. Fast.”

Buckman said, “He would if people acted rationally. But they don’t. Or haven’t you noticed that, McNulty? Mostly they function in a chaotic fashion.” Which, he mediated, probably serves them in good stead … it makes them less predictable.

“I’ve noticed that—”

“Be at your desk in half an hour,” Buckman said, and broke the connection. McNulty’s pedantic foppery, and the fogged-up lethargy of a hype after dark, irritated him always.

Alys, observing everything, said, “A man who’s unexisted himself. Has that ever happened before?”

“No,” Buckman said. “And it hasn’t happened this time. Somewhere, some obscure place, he’s overlooked a microdocument of a minor nature. We’ll keep searching until we find it. Sooner or later we’ll match up a voiceprint or an EEG print and then we’ll know who he really is.”

“Maybe he’s exactly who he says he is.” Alys had been examining McNulty’s grotesque notes. “Subject belongs to musicians’ union. Says he’s a singer. Maybe a voiceprint would be your—”

“Get out of my office,” Buckman said to her

“I’m just speculating. Maybe he recorded that new pornochord hit, ‘Go Down, Moses’ that—”

“I’ll tell you what,” Buckman said. “Go home and look in the study, in a glassine envelope in the center drawer of my maple desk. You’ll find a lightly canceled perfectly centered copy of the one-dollar black U.S. Trans-Mississippi issue. I got it for my own collection but you can have it for yours; I’ll get another. Just go. Go and get the damn stamp and put it away in your album in your safe forever. Don’t ever even look at it again; just have it. And leave me alone at work. Is that a deal?”

“Jesus,” Alys said, her eyes alive with light. “Where’d you get it?”

“From a political prisoner on his way to a forced-labor camp. He traded it for his freedom. I thought it was an equitable arrangement. Don’t you?”

Alys said, “The most beautifully engraved stamp ever issued. At any time. By any country.”

“Do you want it?” he said.

“Yes.” She moved from the office, out into the corridor. “I’ll see you tomorrow. But you don’t have to give me something like that to make me go; I want to go home and take a shower and change my clothes and go to bed for a few hours. On the other hand, if you want to—”

“I want to,” Buckman said, and to himself he added, Because I’m so goddamn afraid of you, so basically, ontologically scared of everything about you, even your willingness to leave. I’m even afraid of that!

Why? he asked himself as he watched her head for the secluded prison ascent tube at the far end of his suite of offices. I’ve known her as a child and I feared her then. Because, I think, in some fundamental way that I don’t comprehend, she doesn’t play by the rules. We all have rules; they differ, but we all play by them. For example, he conjectured, we don’t murder a man who has just done us a favor. Even in this, a police state—even we observe that rule. And we don’t deliberately destroy objects precious to us. But Alys is capable of going home, finding the one-dollar black, and setting fire to it with her cigarette. I know that and yet I gave it to her; I’m still praying that underneath or eventually or whatever she’ll come back and shoot marbles the way the rest of us do.

But she never will.

He thought, And the reason I offered her the one-dollar black was because, simply, I hoped to beguile her, tempt her, into returning to rules that we can understand. Rules the rest of us can apply. I’m bribing her, and it’s a waste of time—if not much much more—and I know it and she knows it. Yes, he thought. She probably will set fire to the one-dollar black, the finest stamp ever issued, a philatelic item I have never seen for sale during my lifetime. Even at auctions. And when I get home tonight she’ll show me the ashes. Maybe she’ll leave a corner of it unburned, to prove she really did it.

And I’ll believe it. And I’ll be even more afraid.

Moodily, General Buckman opened the third drawer of the large desk and placed a tape-reel in the small transport he kept there. Dowland aires for four voices… he stood listening to one which he enjoyed very much, among all the songs in Dowland’s lute books.

The first man, Buckman mused, to write a piece of abstract music. He removed the tape, put in the lute one, and stood listening to the “Lachrimae Antiquae Pavan.” From this, he said to himself, came, at last, the Beethoven final quartets. And everything else. Except for Wagner.

He detested Wagner. Wagner and those like him, such as Berlioz, had set music back three centuries. Until Karlheinz Stockhausen in his “Gesang der Junglinge” had once more brought music up to date.

Standing by the desk, he gazed down for a moment at the recent 4-D photo of Jason Taverner—the photograph taken by Katharine Nelson. What a damn good-looking man, he thought. Almost professionally good-looking. Well, he’s a singer; it fits. He’s in show business.

Touching the 4-D photo, he listened to it say, “How now, brown cow?” And smiled. And, listening once more to the “Lachrimae Antiquae Pavan,” thought:

Flow, my tears …

Do I really have pol-karma? he asked himself. Loving words and music like this? Yes, he thought, I make a superb pol because I don’t think like a pol. I don’t, for example, think like McNulty, who will always be—what did they used to say?—a pig all his life. I think, not like the people we’re trying to apprehend, but like the important people we’re trying to apprehend. Like this man, he thought, this Jason Taverner. I have a hunch, an irrational but beautifully functional intuition, that he’s still in Vegas. We will trap him there, and not where McNulty thinks: rationally and logically somewhere farther on.

I am like Byron, he thought, fighting for freedom, giving up his life to fight for Greece. Except that I am not fighting for freedom; I am fighting for a coherent society.

Is that actually true? he asked himself. Is that why I do what I do? To create order, structure, harmony? Rules. Yes, he thought; rules are goddamn important to me, and that is why Alys threatens me; that’s why I can cope with so much else but not with her.

Thank God they’re not all like her, he said to himself. Thank God, in fact, that she’s one of a kind.

Pressing a button on his desk intercom he said, “Herb, will you come in here, please?”

Herbert Maime entered the office, a stack of computer cards in his hands; he looked harried.

“You want to buy a bet, Herb?” Buckman said. “That Jason Taverner is in Las Vegas?”

“Why are you concerning yourself with such a funky little chickenshit matter?” Herb said. “It’s on McNulty’s level, not yours.”

Seating himself, Buckman began an idle colortone game with the picphone; he flashed the flags of various extinct nations. “Look at what this man has done. Somehow he’s managed to get all data pertaining to him out of every data bank on the planet and the lunar and Martian colonies … McNulty even tried there. Think for a minute what it would take to do that. Money? Huge sums. Bribes. Astronomical. If Taverner has used that kind of heavy bread he’s playing for big stakes. Influence? Same conclusion: he’s got a lot of power and we must consider him a major figure. It’s who he represents that concerns me most; I think some group, somewhere on earth, is backing him, but I have no idea what for or why. All right; so they expunge all data concerning him; Jason Taverner is the man who doesn’t exist. But, having done that, what have they achieved?”

Herb pondered.

“I can’t make it out,” Buckman said. “It has no sense to it. But, if they’re interested in doing it, it must signify something. Otherwise, they wouldn’t expend so much”—he gestured—“whatever they’ve expended. Money, time, influence, whatever. Maybe all three. Plus large slabs of effort.”

“I see,” Herb said, nodding.

Buckman said, “Sometimes you catch big fish by hooking one small fish. That’s what you never know: will the next small fish you catch be the link with something giant or”—he shrugged—“just more small fry to be tossed into the labor pool. Which, perhaps, is all Jason Taverner is. I may be completely wrong. But I’m interested.”

“Which,” Herb said, “is too bad for Taverner.”

“Yes.” Buckman nodded. “Now consider this.” He paused a moment to quietly fart, then continued, “Taverner made his way to an ID forger, a run-of-the-mill forger operating behind an abandoned restaurant. He had no contacts; he worked through, for God’s sake, the desk clerk at the hotel he was staying at. So he must have been desperate for ident cards. All right, where were his powerful backers then? Why couldn’t they supply him with excellent forged ID cards, if they could do all this else? Good Christ; they sent him out into the street, into the urban cesspool jungle, right to a pol informant. They jeopardized everything!”

“Yes,” Herb said, nodding. “Something screwed up.”

“Right. Something went wrong. All of a sudden there he was, in the middle of the city, with no ID. Everything he had on him Kathy Nelson forged. How did that come to happen? How did they manage to fuck up and send him groping desperately for forged ID cards, so he could walk three blocks on the street? You see my point.”

“But that’s how we get them.”

“Pardon?” Buckman said. He turned down the lute music on the tape player.

Herb said, “If they didn’t make mistakes like that we wouldn’t have a chance. They’d remain a metaphysical entity to us, never glimpsed or suspected. Mistakes like that are what we live on. I don’t see that it’s important why they made a mistake; all that matters is that they did. And we should be damn glad of it.”

I am, Buckman thought to himself. Leaning, he dialed McNulty’s extension. No answer. McNulty wasn’t back in the building yet. Buckman consulted his watch. Another fifteen or so minutes.

He dialed central clearing Blue. “What’s the story on the Las Vegas operation in the Fireflash District?” he asked the chick operators who sat perched on high stools at the map board pushing little plastic representations with long cue sticks. “The netpull of the individual calling himself Jason Taverner.”

A whirr and click of computers as the operator deftly punched buttons. “I’ll tie you in with the captain in charge of that detail.” On Buckman’s pic a uniformed type appeared, looking idiotically placid. “Yes, General Buckman?”

“Have you got Taverner?”

“Not yet, sir. We’ve hit roughly thirty of the rental units in—”

“When you have him,” Buckman said, “call me direct.” He gave the nerdish pol type his extension code and rang off, feeling vaguely defeated.

“It takes time,” Herb said.

“Like good beer,” Buckman murmured, staring emptily ahead, his mind working. But working without results.

“You and your intuitions in the Jungian sense,” Herb said. “That’s what you are in the Jungian typology: an intuitive, thinking personality, with intuition your main function-mode and thinking—”

“Balls.” He wadded up a page of McNulty’s coarse notations and tossed it into the shredder.

“Haven’t you read Jung?”

“Sure. When I got my master’s at Berkeley—the whole poli sci department had to read Jung. I learned everything you learned and a lot more.” He heard the irritability in his voice and disliked it. “They’re probably conducting their hits like garbage collectors. Banging and clanking … Taverner will hear them long before they reach the apartment he’s in.”

“Do you think you’ll net anyone with Taverner? Someone who’s his higher-up in the—”

“He wouldn’t be with anyone crucial. Not with his ID cards in the local precinct stationhouse. Not with us as close to him as he knows we are. I expect nothing. Nothing but Taverner himself.”

Herb said, “I’ll make you a bet.”

“Okay.”

“I’ll bet you five quinques, gold ones, that when you get him you get nothing.”

Startled, Buckman sat bolt upright. It sounded like his own style of intuition: no facts, no data to base it on, just pure hunch.

“Want to make the bet?” Herb said.

“I’ll tell you what I’ll do,” Buckman said. He got out his wallet, counted the money in it. “I’ll bet you one thousand paper dollars that when we net Taverner we enter one of the most important areas we’ve ever gotten involved with.”

Herb said, “I won’t bet that kind of money.”

“Do you think I’m right?”

The phone buzzed; Buckman picked up the receiver. On the screen the features of the nerdish Las Vegas functionary captain formed. “Our thermo-radex shows a male of Taverner’s weight and height and general body structure in one of the as yet unapproached remaining apartments. We’re moving in very cautiously, getting everyone else out of the other nearby units.”

“Don’t kill him,” Buckman said.

“Absolutely not, Mr. Buckman.”

“Keep your line to me open,” Buckman said. “I want to sit in on this from here on in.”

“Yes, sir.”

Buckman said to Herb Maime, “They’ve really already got him.” He smiled, chuckling with delight.

11

When Jason Taverner went to get his clothes he found Ruth Rae seated in the semi-darkness of the bedroom on the rumpled, still-warm bed, fully dressed and smoking her customary tobacco cigarette. Gray nocturnal light filtered in through the windows. The coal of the cigarette glowed its high, nervous temperature.

“Those things will kill you,” he said. “There’s a reason why they’re rationed out one pack to a person a week.”

“Fuck off,” Ruth Rae said, and smoked on.

“But you get them on the black market,” he said. Once he had gone with her to buy a full carton. Even on his income the price had appalled him. But she had not seemed to mind. Obviously she expected it; she knew the cost of her habit.

“I get them.” She stubbed out the far-too-long cigarette in a lung-shaped ceramic ashtray.

“You’re wasting it.”

“Did you love Monica Buff?” Ruth asked.

“Sure.”

“I don’t see how you could.”

Jason said, “There are different kinds of love.”

“Like Emily Fusselman’s rabbit.” She glanced up at him. “A woman I knew, married, with three kids; she had two kittens and then she got one of those big gray Belgian rabbits that go lipperty lipperty lipperty on those huge hind legs. For the first month the rabbit was afraid to come out of his cage. It was a he, we think, as best we could tell. Then after a month he would come out of his cage and hop around the living room. After too months he learned to climb the stairs and scratch on Emily’s bedroom door to wake her up in the morning. He started playing with the cats, and there the trouble began because he wasn’t as smart as a cat.”

“Rabbits have smaller brains,” Jason said.

Ruth Rae said, “Hard by. Anyhow, he adored the cats and tried to do everything they did. He even learned to use the catbox most of the time. Using tufts of hair he pulled from his chest, he made a nest behind the couch and wanted the kittens to get into it. But they never would. The end of it all—nearly—came when he tried to play Gotcha with a German shepherd that some lady brought over. You see, the rabbit learned to play this game with the cats and with Emily Fusselman and the children where he’d hide behind the couch and then come running out, running very fast in circles, and everyone tried to catch him, but they usually couldn’t and then he’d run back to safety behind the couch, where no one was supposed to follow. But the dog didn’t know the rules of the game and when the rabbit ran back behind the couch the dog went after him and snapped its jaws around the rabbit’s rear end. Emily managed to pry the dog’s jaws open and she got the dog outside, but the rabbit was badly hurt. He recovered, but after that he was terrified of dogs and ran away if he saw one even through the window. And the part of him the dog bit, he kept that part hidden behind the drapes because he had no hair there and was ashamed. But what was so touching about him was his pushing against the limits of his—what would you say?—physiology? His limitations as a rabbit, trying to become a more evolved life form, like the cats. Wanting all the time to be with them and play with them as an equal. That’s all there is to it, really. The kittens wouldn’t stay in the nest he built for them, and the dog didn’t know the rules and got him. He lived several years. But who would have thought that a rabbit could develop such a complex personality? And when you were sitting on the couch and he wanted you to get off, so he could lie down, he’d nudge you and then if you didn’t move he’d bite you. But look at the aspirations of that rabbit and look at his failing. A little life trying. And all the time it was hopeless. But the ra6bit didn’t know that. Or maybe he did know and kept trying anyhow. But I think he didn’t understand. He just wanted to do it so badly. It was his whole life, because he loved the cats.”

“I thought you didn’t like animals,” Jason said.

“Not anymore. Not after so many defeats and wipeouts. Like the rabbit; he eventually, of course, died. Emily Fusselman cried for days. A week. I could see what it had done to her and I didn’t want to get involved.”

“But stopping loving animals entirely so that you—”

“Their lives are so short. Just so fucking goddamn short. Okay, some people lose a creature they love and then go on and transfer that love to another one. But it hurts; it hurts.”

“Then why is love so good?” He had brooded about that, in and out of his own relationships, all his long adult life. He brooded about it acutely now. Through what had recently happened to him, up to Emily Fusselman’s rabbit. This moment of painfulness. “You love someone and they leave. They come home one day and start packing their things and you say, ‘What’s happening?’ and they say, ‘I got a better offer someplace else,’ and there they go, out of your life forever, and after that until you’re dead you’re carrying around this huge hunk of love with no one to give it to. And if you do find someone to give it to, the same thing happens all over. Or you call them up on the phone one day and say, ‘This is Jason,’ and they say, ‘Who?’ and then you know you’ve had it. They don’t know who the hell you are. So I guess they never did know; you never had them in the first place.”

Ruth said, “Love isn’t just wanting another person the way you want to own an object you see in a store. That’s just desire. You want to have it around, take it home and set it up somewhere in the apartment like a lamp. Love is”—she paused, reflecting—“like a father saving his children from a burning house, getting them out and dying himself. When you love you cease to live for yourself; you live for another person.”

“And that’s good?” It did not sound so good to him.

“It overcomes instinct. Instincts push us into fighting for survival. Like the pols ringing all the campuses. Survival of ourselves at the expense of others; each of us claws his way up. I can give you a good example. My twenty-first husband, Frank. We were married six months. During that time he stopped loving me and became horribly unhappy. I still loved him; I wanted to remain with him, but it was hurting him. So I let him go. You see? It was better for him, and because I loved him that’s what counted. See?”

Jason said, “But why is it good to go against the instinct for self-survival?”

“You don’t think I can say.”

“No,” he said.

“Because the instinct for survival loses in the end. With every living creature, mole, bat, human, frog. Even frogs who smoke cigars and play chess. You can never accomplish what your survival instinct sets out to do, so ultimately your striving ends in failure and you succumb to death, and that ends it. But if you love you can fade out and watch—”

“I’m not ready to fade out,” Jason said.

“—you can fade out and watch with happiness, and with cool, mellow, alpha contentment, the highest form of contentment, the living on of one of those you love.”

“But they die, too.”

“True.” Ruth Rae chewed on her lip.

“It’s better not to love so that never happens to you. Even a pet, a dog or a cat. As you pointed out—you love them and they perish. If the death of a rabbit is bad—” He had, then, a glimpse of horror: the crushed bones and hair of a girl, held and leaking blood, in the jaws of a dimly-seen enemy outlooming any dog.

“But you can grieve,” Ruth said, anxiously studying his face. “Jason! Grief is the most powerful emotion a man or child or animal can feel. It’s a good feeling.”

“In what fucking way?” he said harshly.

“Grief causes you to leave yourself. You step outside your narrow little pelt. And you can’t feel grief unless you’ve had love before it—grief is the final outcome of love, because it’s love lost. You do understand; I know you do. But you just don’t want to think about it. It’s the cycle of love completed: to love, to lose, to feel grief, to leave, and then to love again. Jason, grief is awareness that you will have to be alone, and there is nothing beyond that because being alone is the ultimate final destiny of each individual living creature. That’s what death is, the great loneliness. I remember once when I first smoked pot from a waterpipe rather than a joint. It, the smoke, was cool, and I didn’t realize how much I had inhaled. All of a sudden I died. For a little instant, but several seconds long. The world, every sensation, including even the awareness of my own body, of even having a body, faded out. And it didn’t like leave me in isolation in the usual sense because when you’re alone in the usual sense you still have sense data coming in even if it’s only from your own body. But even the darkness went away. Everything just ceased. Silence. Nothing. Alone.”

“They must have soaked it in one of those toxic shit things. That used to burn out so many people back then.”

“Yes, I’m lucky I ever got my head back. A freak thing—I had smoked pot a lot of times before and that never happened. That’s why I do tobacco, now, after that. Anyhow, it wasn’t like fainting; I didn’t feel I was going to fall, because I had nothing to fall with, no body … and there was no down to fall toward. Everything, including myself, just”—she gestured—“expired. Like the last drop out of a bottle. And then, presently, they rolled the film again. The feature we call reality.” She paused, puffing on her tobacco cigarette. “I never told anyone about it before.”

“Were you frightened about it?”

She nodded. “Consciousness of unconsciousness, if you dig what I mean. When we do die we won’t feel it because that’s what dying is, the loss of all that. So, for example, I’m not at all scared of dying anymore, not after that pot bad trip. But to grieve; it’s to die and be alive at the same time. The most absolute, overpowering experience you can feel, therefore. Sometimes I swear we weren’t constructed to go through such a thing; it’s too much—your body damn near self-destructs with all that heaving and surging. But I want to feel grief. To have tears.”

“Why?” He couldn’t grasp it; to him it was something to be avoided. When you felt that you got the hell out fast.

Ruth said, “Grief reunites you with what you’ve lost. It’s a merging; you go with the loved thing or person that’s going away. In some fashion you split with yourself and accompany it, go part of the way with it on its journey. You follow it as far as you can go. I remember one time when I had this dog I loved. I was roughly seventeen or eighteen—just around the age of consent, that’s how I remember. The dog got sick and we took him to the vet’s. They said he had eaten rat poison and was nothing more than a sack of blood inside and the next twenty-four hours would determine if he’d survive. I went home and waited and then around eleven P.M. I crashed. The vet was going to phone me in the morning when he got there to tell me if Hank had lived through the night. I got up at eight-thirty and tried to get it all together in my head, waiting for the call. I went into the bathroom—I wanted to brush my teeth—and I saw Hank, at the bottom left part of the room; he was slowly in a very measured dignified fashion climbing invisible stairs. I watched him go upward diagonally as he trudged and then at the top right margin of the bathroom he disappeared, still climbing. He didn’t look back once. I knew he had died. And then the phone rang and the vet told me that Hank was dead. But I saw him going upward. And of course I felt terrible overwhelming grief, and as I did so, I lost myself and followed along with him, up the fucking stairs.”

Both of them stayed silent for a time.

“But finally,” Ruth said, clearing her throat, “the grief goes away and you phase back into this world. Without him.”

“And you can accept that.”

“What the hell choice is there? You cry, you continue to cry, because you don’t ever completely come back from where you went with him—a fragment broken off your pulsing, pumping heart is there still. A nick out of it. A cut that never heals. And if, when it happens to you over and over again in life, too much of your heart does finally go away, then you can’t feel grief any more. And then you yourself are ready to die. You’ll walk up the inclined ladder and someone else will remain behind grieving for you.”

“There are no cuts in my heart,” Jason said.

“If you split now,” Ruth said huskily, but with composure unusual for her, “that’s the way it’ll be for me right then and there.”

“I’ll stay until tomorrow,” he said. It would take at least until then for the pol lab to discern the spuriousness of his ID cards.

Did Kathy save me? he wondered. Or destroy me? He really did not know. Kathy, he thought, who used me, who at nineteen knows more than you and I put together. More than we will find out in the totality of our lives, all the way to the graveyard.

Like a good encounter-group leader she had torn him down—for what? To rebuild him again, stronger than before? He doubted it. But it remained a possibility. It should not be forgotten. He felt toward Kathy a certain strange cynical trust, both absolute and unconvincing; one half of his brain saw her as reliable beyond the power of the telling of it, and the other half saw her as debased, for sale, and fucking up right and left. He could not put it together into one view. The two images of Kathy remained superimposed in his head.

Maybe I can resolve my parallel conceptions of Kathy before I leave here, he thought. Before morning. But maybe he could stay even one day after that … it would be stretching it, however. How good really are the police? he asked himself. They managed to get my name wrong; they pulled the wrong file on me. Isn’t it possible they’ll fuck up all down the line? Maybe. But maybe not.

He had mutually opposing conceptions of the police, too. And could not resolve those either. And so, like a rabbit, like Emily Fusselman’s rabbit, froze where he was. Hoping as he did so that everyone understood the rules: you do not destroy a creature that does not know what to do.

12

The four gray-wrapped pols clustered in the light of the candlelike outdoor fixture made of black iron and cone of perpetual fake flame flickering in the night dark.

“Just two left,” the corporal said almost soundlessly; he let his fingers speak for him as he drew them across the rental lists. “A Mrs. Ruth Gomen in two eleven and an Allen Mufi in two twelve. Which’ll we hit first?”

“The Mufi man’s,” one of the uniformed officers said; he smacked his plastic and shot nightstick against his fingers, eager in the dim light to finish it up, now that the end had at last come into sight.

“Two twelve it is,” the corporal said, and reached to stroke the door chimes. But then it occurred to him to try the doorknob.

Good. One chance out of several, a minor possibility but suddenly, usefully true. The door was unlocked. He signaled silence, grinned briefly, then pushed the door open.

They saw into a dark living room with empty and nearly empty drink glasses placed here and there, some on the floor. And a great variety of ashtrays overfilled with crushed cigarette packages and ground-out butts.

A cigarette party, the corporal decided. Broken up, now. Everyone went home. With the exception perhaps of Mr. Mufi.

He entered, shone his light here and there, shone it at last toward the far door leading deeper into the over-priced apartment. No sound. No motion. Except the dim, distant, muted chatter of a radio talk show at minimal volume.

He trod across the wall-to-wall carpet, which depicted in gold Richard M. Nixon’s final ascent into heaven amid joyous singing above and wails of misery below. At the far door he trod on God, who was smiling a lot as He received his Second Only Begotten Son back into His bosom, and pushed open the bedroom door.

In the big double bed, pulpy-soft, a man asleep, shoulders and arms bare. His clothes heaped on a handy chair. Mr. Allen Mufi, of course. Safe and home in his own private double bed. But—Mr. Mufi was not alone in his very own private bed. Involved with the pastel sheets and blankets a second indistinct shape lay curled up, asleep. Mrs. Mufi, the corporal thought, and shone his light toward her, with mannish curiosity.

All at once Allen Mufi—assuming it was he—stirred. He opened his eyes. And instantly sat bolt upright, staring fixedly at the pols. At the light of the flashlight.

“What?” he said, and he rasped with fear, a deep, convulsive release of shaking breath. “No,” Mufi said, and then snatched for some object on the table beside his bed; he dove into the darkness, white and hairy and naked, for something invisible but precious to him. Desperately. He sat back up then, panting, clutching it. A pair of scissors.

“What’s that for?” the corporal asked, shining the light into the metal of the scissors.

“I’ll kill myself,” Mufi said. “If you don’t go away and—leave us alone.” He stuck the closed blades of the scissors against his hair-darkened chest, near his heart.

“Then it isn’t Mrs. Mufi,” the corporal said. He returned the circle of light to the other, huddled up, sheet-covered shape. “A wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am one-time gangbang? Turning your foxy apartment into a motel room?” The corporal walked to the bed, took hold of the top sheet and blankets, then yanked them back.

In the bed beside Mr. Mufi lay a boy, slender, young, naked, with long golden hair.

“I’ll be darned,” the corporal said.

One of his men said, “I’ve got the scissors.” He tossed them onto the floor by the corporal’s right foot.

To Mr. Mufi, who sat trembling and panting, his eyes startled with terror, the corporal said, “How old is this boy?”

The boy had awakened now; he gazed fixedly up but did not stir. No expression appeared on his soft, vaguely formed face.

“Thirteen,” Mr. Mufi said croakingly, almost pleadingly. “Legal age of consent.”

To the boy the corporal said, “Can you prove it?” He felt intense revulsion now. Acute physical revulsion, making him want to barf. The bed was stained and damp with half-dried sweat and genital secretions.

“ID,” Mufi panted. “In his wallet. In his pants on the chair.”

One of the team of pols said to the corporal, “You mean if this juve’s thirteen there’s no crime involved?”

“Hell,” another pol said indignantly. “It’s obviously a crime, a perverted crime. Let’s run them both in.”

“Wait a minute. Okay?” The corporal found the boy’s pants, rummaged, found the wallet, got it out, inspected the identification. Sure enough. Thirteen years old. He shut the wallet and put it back in the pocket. “No,” he said, still half enjoying the situation, amused by Mufi’s naked shame but becoming each moment more and more revolted by the man’s cowardly horror at being disclosed. “The new revision of the Penal Code, 640.3, has it that twelve is the age of consent for a minor to engage in a sexual act either with another child of either sex or an adult also of either sex but with only one at a time.”

“But it’s goddamn sick,” one of his pols protested.

“That’s your opinion,” Mufi said, more bravely now.

“Why isn’t it a bust, a hell of a big bust?” the pols standing beside him persisted.

“They’re systematically taking all victimless crimes off the books,” the corporal said. “That’s been the process for ten years.”

“This? This is victimless?”

To Mufi, the corporal said, “What do you find about young boys that you like? Let me in on it; I’ve always wondered about scans like you.”

“‘Scans,’ “Mufi echoed, his mouth twisting with discomfort. “So that’s what I am.”

“It’s a category,” the corporal said. “Those who prey on minors for homosexual purposes. Legal but still abhorred. What do you do during the day?”

“I’m a used-quibble salesman.”

“And if they, your employers, knew you were a scan they wouldn’t want you handling their quibbles. Not after what those hairy white hands have been handling outside the workday. Right, Mr. Mufi? Even a used-quibble salesman can’t get away morally with being a scan. Even if it’s no longer on the books.”

Mufi said, “It was my mother’s fault. She dominated my father, who was a weak man.”

“How many little boys have you induced to go down on you during the last twelve months?” the corporal inquired. “I’m serious. Are these all one-night stands, is that it?”

“I love Ben,” Mufi said, staring fixedly ahead, his mouth barely moving. “Later on, when I’m better off financially and can provide, I intend to marry him.”

To the boy Ben, the corporal said, “Do you want us to take you out of here? Return you to your parents?”

“He lives here,” Mufi said, grinning a little.

“Yeah, I’ll stay here,” the boy said sullenly. He shivered. “Cripes, could you give me the covers back?” He reached irritably for the top blanket.

“Just keep the noise level down in here,” the corporal said, moving away wearily. “Christ. And they took it off the books.”

“Probably,” Mufi said, with confidence now that the pols were beginning to depart from his bedroom, “because some of those big overweight old police marshals are screwing kids themselves and don’t want to get sent up. They couldn’t stand the scandal.” His grin grew into an insinuating leer.

“I hope,” the corporal said, “that someday you do commit a statute violation of some kind, and they haul you in, and I’m on duty the day it happens. So I can book you personally.” He hawked, then spat on Mr. Mufi. Spat into his hairy, empty face.

Silently, the team of pols made their way through the living room of cigarette butts, ashes, twisted-up packs, half-filled drink glasses, to the corridor and porchway outside. The corporal yanked the door shut, shivered, stood for a moment, feeling the bleakness of his mind, its withdrawal, for a moment, from the environment around him. He then said, “Two eleven. Mrs. Ruth Gomen. Where the Taverner suspect has to be, if he’s anywhere around here at all, it being the last one.” Finally, he thought.

He knocked on the front door of 211. And stood waiting with his plastic and shot nightstick gripped at ready, terribly and completely all at once not caring shit about his job. “We’ve seen Mufi,” he said, half to himself. “Now let’s see what Mrs. Gomen is like. You think she’ll be any better? Let’s hope so. I can’t take much more of that tonight.”

“Anything would be better,” one of the pols beside him said somberly. They all nodded and shuffled about, preparing themselves for slow footsteps beyond the door.

13

In the living room of Ruth Rae’s lavish, lovely, newly built apartment in the Fireflash District of Las Vegas, Jason Taverner said, “I’m reasonably sure I can count on forty-eight hours on the outside and twenty-four on the inside. So I feel fairly certain that I don’t have to get out of here immediately.” And if our revolutionary new principle is correct, he thought, then this assumption will modify the situation to my advantage. I will be safe.

THE THEORY CHANGES—

“I’m glad,” Ruth said wanly, “that you’re able to remain here with me in a civilized way so we can rap a little longer. You want anything more to drink? Scotch and Coke, maybe?”

THE THEORY CHANGES THE REALITY IT DESCRIBES.

“No,” he said, and prowled about the living room, listening … to what he did not know. Perhaps the absence of sounds. No TV sets muttering, no thump of feet against the floor above their heads. Not even a pornochord somewhere, blasting out from a quad. “Are the walls fairly thick in these apartments?” he asked Ruth sharply.

“I never hear anything.”

“Does anything seem strange to you? Out of the ordinary?”

“No.” Ruth shook her head.

“You damn dumb floogle,” he said savagely. She gaped at him in injured perplexity. “I know,” he grated, “that they have me. Now. Here. In this room.”

The doorbell bonged.

“Let’s ignore it,” Ruth said rapidly, stammering and afraid. “I just want to sit and rap with you, about the mellow things in life you’ve seen and what you want to achieve that you haven’t achieved already…” Her voice died into silence as he went to the door. “It’s probably the man from upstairs. He borrows things. Weird things. Like two fifths of an onion.”

Jason opened the door. Three pols in gray uniforms filled the doorway, with weapon tubes and nightsticks aimed at him. “Mr. Taverner?” the pol with the stripes said.

“Yes.”

“You are being taken into protective custody for your own protection and welfare, effective immediately, so please come with us and do not turn back or in any way remove yourself physically from contact with us. Your possessions if any will be picked up for you later and transferred to wherever you will be at the time.”

“Okay,” he said, and felt very little.

Behind him, Ruth Rae emitted a muffled shriek.

“You also, miss,” the pol with the stripes said, motioning toward her with his nightstick.

“Can I get my coat?” she asked timidly.

“Come on.” The pol stepped briskly past Jason, grabbed Ruth Rae by the arm, and dragged her out the apartment door onto the walkway.

“Do what he says,” Jason said harshly to her.

Ruth Rae sniveled, “They’re going to put me in a forced-labor camp.”

“No,” Jason said. “They’ll probably kill you.”

“You’re really a nice guy,” one of the pols—without stripes—commented as he and his companions herded Jason and Ruth Rae down the wrought-iron staircase to the ground floor. Parked in one of the slots was a police van, with several pols standing idly around it, weapons held loosely. They looked inert and bored.

“Show me your ID,” the pol with stripes said to Jason; he extended his hand, waiting.

“I’ve got a seven-day police pass,” Jason said. His hands shaking, he fished it out, gave it to the pol officer.

Scrutinizing the pass the officer said, “You admit freely of your own volition that you are Jason Taverner?”

“Yes,” he said.

Two of the pols expertly searched him for arms. He complied silently, still feeling very little. Only a half-assed hopeless wish that he had done what he knew he should have done: moved on. Left Vegas. Headed anywhere.

“Mr. Taverner,” the pol officer said, “the Los Angeles Police Bureau has asked us to take you into protective custody for your own protection and welfare and to transport you safely and with due care to the Police Academy in downtown L.A., which we will now do. Do you have any complaints as to the manner in which you have been treated?”

“No,” he said. “Not yet.”

“Enter the rear section of the quibble van,” the officer said, pointing at the open doors.

Jason did so.

Ruth Rae, stuffed in beside him, whimpered to herself in the darkness as the doors slammed shut and locked. He put his arm around her, kissed her on the forehead. “What did you do?” she whimpered raspingly in her bourbon voice, “that they’re going to kill us for?”

A pol, getting into the rear of the van with them from the front cab, said, “We aren’t going to snuff you, miss. We’re transporting you both back to L.A. That’s all. Calm down.”

“I don’t like Los Angeles,” Ruth Rae whimpered. “I haven’t been there in years. I hate L.A.” She peered wildly around.

“So do I,” the pol said as he locked the rear compartment off from the cab and dropped the key through a slot to the pols outside. “But we must learn to live with it: it’s there.”

“They’re probably going all through my apartment,” Ruth Rae whimpered. “Picking through everything, breaking everything.”

“Absolutely,” Jason said tonelessly. His head ached, now, and he felt nauseated. And tired. “Who are we going to be taken to?” he asked the pol. “To Inspector McNulty?”

“Most likely no,” the pol said conversationally as the quibble-van rose noisily into the sky. “The drinkers of intoxicating liquor have made you the subject of their songs and those sitting in the gate are concerning themselves about you, and according to them Police General Felix Buckman wants to interrogate you.” He explained, “That was from Psalm Sixty-nine. I sit here by you as a Witness to Jehovah Reborn, who is in this very hour creating new heavens and a new earth, and the former things will not be called to mind, neither will they come up into the heart. Isaiah 65:13, 17.”

“A police general?” Jason said, numbed.

“So they say,” the obliging young Jesus-freak pol answered. “I don’t know what you folks did, but you sure did it right.”

Ruth Rae sobbed to herself in the darkness.

“All flesh is like grass,” the Jesus-freak pol intoned. “Like low-grade roachweed most likely. Unto us a child is born, unto us a hit is given. The crooked shall be made straight and the straight loaded.”

“Do you have a joint?” Jason asked him.

“No, I’ve run out.” The Jesus-freak pol rapped on the forward metal wall. “Hey, Ralf, can you lay a joint on this brother?”

“Here.” A crushed pack of Goldies appeared by way of a gray-sleeved hand and arm.

“Thanks,” Jason said as he lit up. “You want one?” he asked Ruth Rae.

“I want Bob,” she whimpered. “I want my husband.”

Silently, Jason sat hunched over, smoking and meditating. “Don’t give up,” the Jesus-freak pol crammed in beside him said, in the darkness.

“Why not?” Jason said.

“The forced-labor camps aren’t that bad. In Basic Orientation they took us through one; there’re showers, and beds with mattresses, and recreation such as volleyball, and arts and hobbies; you know—crafts, like making candles. By hand. And your family can send you packages and once a month they or your friends can visit you.” He added, “And you get to worship at the church of your choice.”

Jason said sardonically, “The church of my choice is the free, open world.”

After that there was silence, except for the noisy clatter of the quibble’s engine, and Ruth Rae’s whimpering.

14

Twenty minutes later the police quibble van landed on the roof of the Los Angeles Police Academy building.

Stiffly, Jason Taverner stepped out, looked warily around, smelled smog-saturated foul air, saw above him once again the yellowness of the largest city in North America … he turned to help Ruth Rae out, but the friendly young Jesus-freak pol had done that already.

Around them a group of Los Angeles pols gathered, interested. They seemed relaxed, curious, and cheerful. Jason saw no malice in any of them and he thought, When they have you they are kind. It is only in netting you that they are venomous and cruel. Because then there is the possibility that you might get away. And here, now, there is no such possibility.

“Did he make any suicide tries?” a L.A. sergeant asked the Jesus-freak pol.

“No, sir.”

So that was why he had ridden there.

It hadn’t even occurred to Jason, and probably not to Ruth Rae either … except perhaps as a heavy, shucky gesture, thought of but never really considered.

“Okay,” the L.A. sergeant said to the Las Vegas pol team. “From here on in we’ll formally take over custody of the two suspects.”

The Las Vegas pols hopped back into their van and it zoomed off into the sky, back to Nevada.

“This way,” the sergeant said, with a sharp motion of his hand in the direction of the descent sphincter tube. The L.A. pols seemed to Jason a little grosser, a little tougher and older, than the Las Vegas ones. Or perhaps it was his imagination; perhaps it meant only an increase in his own fear.

What do you say to a police general? Jason wondered. Especially when all your theories and explanations about yourself have worn out, when you know nothing, believe nothing, and the rest is obscure. Aw, the hell with it, he decided wearily, and allowed himself to drop virtually weightlessly down the tube, along with the pols and Ruth Rae.

At the fourteenth floor they exited from the tube.

A man stood facing them, well dressed, with rimless glasses, a topcoat over his arm, pointed leather Oxfords, and, Jason noted, two gold-capped teeth. A man, he guessed, in his mid-fifties. A tall, gray-haired, upright man, with an expression of authentic warmth on his excellently proportioned aristocratic face. He did not look like a pol.

“You are Jason Taverner?” the man inquired. He extended his hand; reflexively, Jason accepted it and shook. To Ruth, the police general said, “You may go downstairs. I’ll interview you later. Right now it’s Mr. Taverner I want to talk to.”

The pols led Ruth off; he could hear her complaining her way out of sight. He now found himself facing the police general and no one else. No one armed.

“I’m Felix Buckman,” the police general said. He indicated the open door and hallway behind him. “Come into the office.” Turning, he ushered Jason ahead of him, into a vast pastel blue-and-gray suite; Jason blinked: he had never seen this aspect of a police agency before. He had never imagined that quality like this existed.

With incredulity, Jason a moment later found himself seated in a leather-covered chair, leaning back into the softness of styroflex. Buckman, however, did not sit down behind his top-heavy, almost clumsily bulky oak desk; instead he busied himself at a closet, putting away his topcoat.

“I intended to meet you on the roof,” he explained. “But the Santana wind blows like hell up there this time of night. It affects my sinus passages.” He turned, then, to face Jason. “I see something about you that didn’t show up in your 4-D photo. It never does. It’s always a complete surprise, at least to me. You’re a six, aren’t you?”

Waking to full alertness, Jason half rose, said, “You’re also a six, General?”

Smiling, showing his gold-capped teeth—an expensive anachronism—Felix Buckman held up seven fingers.

15

In his career as a police official, Felix Buckman had used this shuck each time he had come up against a six. He relied on it especially when, as with this, the encounter was sudden. There had been four of them. All, eventually, had believed him. This he found amusing. The sixes, eugenic experiments themselves, and secret ones, seemed unusually gullible when confronted with the assertion that there existed an additional project as classified as their own.

Without this shuck he would be, to a six, merely an “ordinary.” He could not properly handle a six under such a disadvantage. Hence the ploy. Through it his relationship to a six inverted itself. And, under such recreated conditions, he could deal successfully with an otherwise unmanageable human being.

The actual psychological superiority over him which a six possessed was abolished by an unreal fact. He liked this very much.

Once, in an off moment, he had said to Alys, “I can outthink a six for roughly ten to fifteen minutes. But if it goes on any longer—” He had made a gesture, crumpling up a black-market cigarette package. With two cigarettes in it. “After that their overamped field wins out. What I need is a pry bar by which I can jack open their haughty damn minds.” And, at last, he had found it.

“Why a ‘seven’?” Alys had said. “As long as you’re shucking them why not say eight or thirty-eight?”

“The sin of vainglory. Reaching too far.” He had not wanted to make that legendary mistake. “I will tell them,” he had told her grimly, “what I think they’ll believe.” And, in the end, he had proved out right.

“They won’t believe you,” Alys had said.

“Oh, hell, will they!” he had retorted. “It’s their secret fear, their bête noire. They’re the sixth in a line of DNA reconstruction systems and they know that if it could be done to them it could be done to others in a more advanced degree.”

Alys, uninterested, had said faintly, “You should be an announcer on TV selling soap.” And that constituted the totality of her reaction. If Alys did not give a damn about something, that something, for her, ceased to exist. Probably she should not have gotten away with it for as long as she had … but sometime, he had often thought, the retribution will come: reality denied comes back to haunt. To overtake the person without warning and make him insane.

And Alys, he had a number of times thought, was in some odd sense, in some unusual clinical way, pathological.

He sensed it but could not pin it down. However, many of his hunches were like that. It did not bother him, as much as he loved her. He knew he was right.

Now, facing Jason Taverner, a six, he developed his shuck ploy.

“There were very few of us,” Buckman said, now seating himself at his oversize oak desk. “Only four in all. One is already dead, so that leaves three. I don’t have the slightest idea where they are; we retain even less contact among ourselves than do you sixes. Which is little enough.”

“Who was your muter?” Jason asked.

“Dill-Temko. Same as yours. He controlled groups five through seven and then he retired. As you certainly know, he’s dead now.”

“Yes,” Jason said. “It shocked us all.”

“Us, too,” Buckman said, in his most somber voice. “Dill-Temko was our parent. Our only parent. Did you know that at the time of his death he had begun to prepare schema on an eighth group?”

“What would they have been like?”

“Only Dill-Temko knew,” Buckman said, and felt his superiority over the six facing him grow. And yet—how fragile his psychological edge. One wrong statement, one statement too much, and it would vanish. Once lost, he would never regain it.

It was the risk he took. But he enjoyed it; he had always liked betting against the odds, gambling in the dark. He had in him, at times like this, a great sense of his own ability. And he did not consider it imagined … despite what a six that knew him to be an ordinary would say. That did not bother him one bit.

Touching a button, he said, “Peggy, bring us a pot of coffee, cream and the rest. Thanks.” He then leaned back with studied leisure. And surveyed Jason Taverner.

Anyone who had met a six would recognize Taverner. The strong torso, the massive confirmation of his arms and back. His powerful, ramlike head. But most ordinaries had never knowingly come up against a six. They did not have his experience. Nor his carefully synthesized knowledge of them.

To Alys he had once said, “They will never take over and run my world.”

“You don’t have a world. You have an office.”

At that point he terminated the discussion.

“Mr. Taverner,” he said bluntly, “how have you managed to get documents, cards, microfilm, even complete files out of data banks all over the planet? I’ve tried to imagine how it could be done, but I come up with a blank.” He fixed his attention on the handsome—but aging—face of the six and waited.

16

What can I tell him? Jason Taverner asked himself as he sat mutely facing the police general. The total reality as I know it? That is hard to do, he realized, because I really do not comprehend it myself.

But perhaps a seven could—well, God knew what it could do. I’ll opt, he decided, on a complete explanation.

But when he started to answer, something blocked his speech. I don’t want to tell him anything, he realized. There is no theoretical limit to what he can do to me; he has his generalship, his authority, and if he’s a seven … for him, the sky may be the limit. At least for my self-preservation if for nothing else I ought to operate on that assumption.

“Your being a six,” Buckman said, after an interval of silence, “makes me see this in a different light. It’s other sixes that you’re working with, is it?” He kept his eyes rigidly fixed on Jason’s face; Jason found it uncomfortable and disconcerting. “I think what we have here,” Buckman said, “is the first concrete evidence that sixes are—”

“No,” Jason said.

“‘No’?” Buckman continued to stare fixedly at him.

“You’re not involved with other sixes in this?”

Jason said, “I know one other six. Heather Hart. And she considers me a twerp fan.” He ground out the words bitterly.

That interested Buckman; he had not been aware that the well-known singer Heather Hart was a six. But, thinking about it, it seemed reasonable. He had never, however, come up against a female six in his career; his contacts with them were just not that frequent.

“If Miss Hart is a six,” Buckman said aloud, “maybe we should ask her to come in too and consult with us.” A police euphemism that rolled easily off his tongue.

“Do that,” Jason said. “Put her through the wringer.” His tone had become savage. “Bust her. Put her in a forced-labor camp.”

You sixes, Buckman said to himself, have little loyalty to one another. He had discovered this already, but it always surprised him. An elite group, bred out of aristocratic prior circles to set and maintain the mores of the world, who had in practice drizzled off into nothingness because they could not stand one another. To himself he laughed, letting his face show, at least, a smile.

“You’re amused?” Jason said. “Don’t you believe me?”

“It doesn’t matter.” Buckman brought a box of Cuesta Rey cigars from a drawer of his desk, used his little knife to cut off the end of one. The little steel knife made for that purpose alone.

Across from him Jason Taverner watched with fascination. “A cigar?” Buckman inquired. He held the box toward Jason.

“I have never smoked a good cigar,” Jason said. “If it got out that I—” He broke off.

“‘Got out’?” Buckman asked, his mental ears pricking up. “Got out to whom? The police?”

Jason said nothing. But he had clenched his fist and his breathing had become labored.

“Are there strata in which you’re well known?” Buckman said. “For example, among intellectuals in forced-labor camps. You know—the ones who circulate mimeographed manuscripts.”

“No,” Jason said.

“Musical strata, then?”

Jason said tightly, “Not anymore.”

“Have you ever made phonograph records?”

“Not here.”

Buckman continued to scrutinize him unblinkingly; over long years he had mastered the ability. “Then where?” he aske4, in a voice barely over the threshold of audibility. A voice deliberately sought for: its tone lulled, interfered with identification of the words’ meaning.

But Jason Taverner let it slide by; he failed to respond. These damn bastard sixes, Buckman thought, angered—mostly at himself. I can’t play funky games with a six. It just plain does not work. And, at any minute, he could cancel my statement out of his mind, my claim to superior genetic heritage.

He pressed a stud on his intercom. “Have a Miss Katharine Nelson brought in here,” he instructed Herb Maime. “A police informant down in the Watts District, that ex-black area. I think I should talk to her.”

“Half hour.”

“Thanks.”

Jason Taverner said hoarsely, “Why bring her into this?”

“She forged your papers.”

“All she knows about me is what I had her put on the ID cards.”

“And that was spurious?”

After a pause Jason shook his head no.

“So you do exist.”

“Not—here.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know.”

“Tell me how you got those data deleted from all the banks.”

“I never did that.”

Hearing that, Buckman felt an enormous hunch overwhelm him; it gripped him with paws of iron. “You haven’t been taking material out of the data banks; you’ve been trying to put material in. There were no data there in the first place.”

Finally, Jason Taverner nodded.

“Okay,” Buckman said; he felt the glow of discovery lurking inside him, now, revealing itself in a cluster of comprehensions. “You took nothing out. But there’s some reason why the data weren’t there in the first place. Why not? Do you know?”

“I know,” Jason Taverner said, staring down at the table; his face had twisted into a gross mirror-thing. “I don’t exist.”

“But you once did.”

“Yes,” Taverner said, nodding unwillingly. Painfully.

“Where?”

“I don’t know!”

It always comes back to that, Buckman said to himself. I don’t know. Well, Buckman thought, maybe he doesn’t. But he did make his way from L.A. to Vegas; he did shack up with that skinny, wrinkled broad the Vegas pols loaded into the van with him. Maybe, he thought, I can get something from her. But his hunch registered a no.

“Have you had dinner?” Buckman inquired.

“Yes,” Jason Taverner said.

“But you’ll join me in the munchies. I’ll have them bring something in to us.” Once more he made use of the intercom. “Peggy—it’s so late now … get us two breakfasts at that new place down the street. Not the one we used to go to, but the new one with the sign showing the dog with the girl’s head. Barfy’s.”

“Yes, Mr. Buckman,” Peggy said and rang off.

“Why don’t they call you ‘General’?” Jason Taverner asked.

Buckman said, “When they call me ‘General’ I feel I ought to have written a book on how to invade France while staying out of a two-front war.”

“So you’re just plain ‘Mister’.”

“That’s right.”

“And they let you do it?”

“For me,” Buckman said, “there is no ‘they.’ Except for five police marshals here and there in the world, and they call themselves ‘Mister,’ too.” And how they would like to demote me further, he thought. Because of all that I did.

“But there’s the Director.”

Buckman said, “The Director has never seen me. He never will. Nor will he see you either, Mr. Taverner. But nobody can see you, because, as you pointed out, you don’t exist.”

Presently a gray uniformed pol woman entered the office, carrying a tray of food. “What you usually order this time of night,” she said as he set the tray down on Buckman’s desk. “One short stack of hots with a side order of ham; one short stack of hots with a side order of sausage.”

“Which would you like?” Buckman asked Jason Taverner.

“Is the sausage well cooked?” Jason Taverner asked, peering to see. “I guess it is. I’ll take it.”

“That’s ten dollars and one gold quinque,” the pol woman said. “Which of you is going to pay for it?”

Buckman dug into his pockets, fished out the bills and change. “Thanks.” The woman departed.

“Do you have any children?” he asked Taverner.

“No.”

“I have a child,” General Buckman said. “I’ll show you a little 3-D pic of him that I received.” He reached into his desk, brought out a palpitating square of three-dimensional but nonmoving colors. Accepting the picture, Jason held it properly in the light, saw outlined statically a young boy in shorts and sweater, barefoot, running across a field, tugging on the string of a kite. Like the police general, the boy had light short hair and a strong and impressive wide jaw. Already.

“Nice,” Jason said. He returned the pic.

Buckman said, “He never got the kite off the ground. Too young, perhaps. Or afraid. Our little boy has a lot of anxiety. I think because he sees so little of me and his mother; he’s at a school in Florida and we’re here, which is not a good thing. You say you have no children?”

“Not that I know of,” Jason said.

“‘Not that you know of’?” Buckman raised an eyebrow. “Does that mean you don’t go into the matter? You’ve never tried to find out? By law, you know, you as the father are required to support your children in or out of wedlock.”

Jason nodded.

“Well,” General Buckman said, as he put the pic away in his desk, “everyone to his own. But consider what you’ve left out of your life. Haven’t you ever loved a child? It hurts your heart, the innermost part of you, where you can easily die.”

“I didn’t know that,” Jason said.

“Oh, yes. My wife says you can forget any kind of love except what you’ve felt toward children. That only goes one way; it never reverts. And if something comes between you and a child—such as death or a terrible calamity such as a divorce—you never recover.”

“Well, hell, then”—Jason gestured with a forkful of sausage—“then it would be better not to feel that kind of love.”

“I don’t agree,” Buckman said. “You should always love, and especially a child, because that’s the strongest form of love.”

“I see,” Jason said.

“No, you don’t see. Sixes never see; they don’t understand. It’s not worth discussing.” He shuffled a pile of papers on his desk, scowling, puzzled, and nettled. But gradually he calmed down, became his cool assured self once more. But he could not understand Jason Taverner’s attitude. But he, his child, was all-important; it, plus his love of course for the boy’s mother—this was the pivot of his life.

They ate for a time without speaking, with, suddenly, no bridge connecting them one to the other.

“There’s a cafeteria in the building,” Buckman said at last, as he drank down a glass of imitation Tang. “But the food there is poisoned. All the help must have relatives in forcedlabor camps. They’re getting back at us.” He laughed. Jason Taverner did not. “Mr. Taverner,” Buckman said, dabbing at his mouth with his napkin, “I am going to let you go. I’m not holding you.”

Staring at him, Jason said, “Why?”

“Because you haven’t done anything.”

Jason said hoarsely, “Getting forged ID cards. A felony.”

“I have the authority to cancel any felony charge I wish,” Buckman said. “I consider that you were forced into doing that by some situation you found yourself in, a situation which you refuse to tell me about, but of which I have gotten a slight glimpse.”

After a pause Jason said, “Thanks.”

“But,” Buckman said, “you will be electronically monitored wherever you go. You will never be alone except for your own thoughts in your own mind and perhaps not even there. Everyone you contact or reach or see will be brought in for questioning eventually … just as we’re bringing in the Nelson girl right now.” He leaned toward Jason Taverner, speaking slowly and intently so that Taverner would listen and understand. “I believe you took no data from any data banks, public or private. I believe you don’t understand your own situation. But”—he let his voice rise perceptibly—“sooner or later you will understand your situation and when that happens we want to be in on it. So—we will always be with you. Fair enough?”

Jason Taverner rose to his feet. “Do all you sevens think this way?”

“What way?”

“Making strong, vital, instant decisions. The way you do. The way you ask questions, listen—God, how you listen!—and then make up your mind absolutely.”

Truthfully, Buckman said, “I don’t know because I have so little contact with other sevens.”

“Thanks,” Jason said. He held out his hand; they shook. “Thanks for the meal.” He seemed calm now. In control of himself. And very much relieved. “Do I just wander out of here? How do I get onto the street?”

“We’ll have to hold you until morning,” Buckman said. “It’s a fixed policy; suspects are never released at night. Too much goes on in the streets after dark. We’ll provide you a cot and a room; you’ll have to sleep in your clothes … and at eight o’clock tomorrow morning I’ll have Peggy escort you to the main entrance of the academy.” Pressing the stud on his intercom, Buckman said, “Peg, take Mr. Taverner to detention for now; take him out again at eight A.M. sharp. Understood?”

“Yes, Mr. Buckman.”

Spreading his hands, smiling, General Buckman said, “So that’s it. There is no more.”

17

“Mr. Taverner,” Peggy was saying insistently. “Come along with me; put your clothes on and follow me to the outside office. I’ll meet you there. Just go through the blue-and-white doors.”

Standing off to one side, General Buckman listened to the girl’s voice; pretty and fresh, it sounded good to him, and he guessed that it sounded that way to Taverner, too.

“One more thing,” Buckman said, stopping the sloppily dressed, sleepy Taverner as he started to make his way toward the blue-and-white doors. “I can’t renew your police pass if someone down the line voids it. Do you understand? What you’ve got to do is apply to us, exactly following legal lines, for a total set of ID cards. It’ll mean intensive interrogation, but”—he thumped Jason Taverner on the arm—“a six can take it.”

“Okay,” Jason Taverner said. He left the office, closing the blue-and-white doors behind him.

Into his intercom Buckman said, “Herb, make sure they put both a microtrans and a heterostatic class eighty warhead on him. So we can follow him and if it’s necessary at any time we can destroy him.”

“You want a voice tap, too?” Herb said.

“Yes, if you can get it onto his throat without him noticing.

“I’ll have Peg do it,” Herb said, and signed off.

Could a Mutt and Jeff, say, between me and McNulty, have brought any more information out? he asked himself. No, he decided. Because the man himself simply doesn’t know. What we must do is wait for him to figure it out … and be there with him, either physically or electronically, when it happens. As in fact I pointed out to him.

But it still strikes me, he realized, that we very well may have blundered onto something the sixes are doing as a group—despite their usual mutual animosity.

Again pressing the button of his intercom he said, “Herb, have a twenty-four-hour surveillance put on that pop singer Heather Hart or whatever she calls herself. And get from Data Central the files of all what they call ‘sixes.’ You understand?”

“Are the cards punched for that?” Herb said.

“Probably not,” Buckman said drearily. “Probably nobody thought to do it ten years ago when Dill-Temko was alive, thinking up more and weirder life forms to shamble about.” Like us sevens, he thought wryly. “And they certainly wouldn’t think of it these days, now that the sixes have failed politically. Do you agree?”

“I agree,” Herb said, “but I’ll try for it anyhow.”

Buckman said, “If the cards are punched for that, I want a twenty-four-hour surveillance on all sixes. And even if we can’t roust them all out we can at least put tails on the ones we know.”

“Will do, Mr. Buckman.” Herb clicked off.

18

“Goodbye and good luck, Mr. Taverner,” the pol chick named Peg said to him at the wide entrance to the great gray academy building.

“Thanks,” Jason said. He inhaled a deep sum of morning air, smog-infested as it was. I got out, he said to himself. They could have hung a thousand busts on me but they didn’t.

A female voice, very throaty, said from close by, “How now, little man?”

Never in his life had he been called “little man”; he stood over six feet tall. Turning, he started to say something in answer, then made out the creature who had addressed him.

She too stood a full six feet in height; they matched in that department. But in contrast to him she wore tight black pants, a leather shirt, red, with tassle fringes, gold hooped earrings, and a belt made of chain. And spike heeled shoes. Jesus Christ, he thought, appalled. Where’s her whip?

“Were you talking to me?” he said.

“Yes.” She smiled, showing teeth ornamented with gold signs of the zodiac. “They put three items on you before you got out of there; I thought you ought to know.”

“I know,” Jason said, wondering who or what she was.

“One of them,” the girl said, “is a miniaturized H-bomb. It can be detonated by a radio signal emitted from this building. Did you know about that?”

Presently he said, “No. I didn’t.”

“It’s the way he works things,” the girl said. “My brother … he raps mellow and nice to you, civilizedly, and then he has one of his staff—he has a huge staff—plant that garbage on you before you can walk out the door of the building.”

“Your brother,” Jason said. “General Buckman.” He could see, now, the resemblance between them. The thin, elongated nose, the high cheekbones, the neck, like a Modigliani, tapered beautifully. Very patrician, he thought. They, both of them, impressed him.

So she must be a seven, too, he said to himself. He felt himself become wary, again; the hackles on his neck burned as he confronted her.

“I’ll get them off you,” she said, still smiling, like General Buckman, a gold-toothed smile.

“Good enough,” Jason said.

“Come over to my quibble.” She started off lithely; he loped clumsily after her.

A moment later they sat together in the front bucket seats of her quibble.

“Alys is my name,” she said.

He said, “I’m Jason Taverner, the singer and TV personality.”

“Oh, really? I haven’t watched a TV program since I was nine.”

“You haven’t missed much,” he said. He did not know if he meant it ironically; frankly, he thought, I’m too tired to care.

“This little bomb is the size of a seed,” Alys said. “And it’s embedded, like a tick, in your skin. Normally, even if you knew it was there someplace on you, you still could never find it. But I borrowed this from the academy.” She held up a tubelike light. “This glows when you get it near a seed bomb.” She began at once, efficiently and nearly professionally, to move the light across his body.

At his left wrist the light glowed.

“I also have the kit they use to remove a seed bomb,” Alys said. From her mailpouch purse she brought a shallow tin, which she at once opened. “The sooner it’s cut out of you the better,” she said, as she lifted a cutting tool from the kit.

For two minutes she cut expertly, meanwhile spraying an analgesic compound on the wound. And then—it lay in her hand. As she had said, the size of a seed.

“Thanks,” he said. “For removing the thorn from my paw.” Alys laughed gaily; she replaced the cutting tool in the kit, shut the lid, returned it to her huge purse. “You see,” she said, “he never does it himself; it’s always one of his staff. So he can remain ethical and aloof, as if it has nothing to do with him. I think I hate that the most about him.” She pondered. “I really hate him.”

“Is there anything else you can cut or tear off me?” Jason inquired.

“They tried—Peg, who is a police technician expert at it, tried—to stick a voice tap on your gullet. But I don’t think she got it to stick.” Cautiously, she explored his neck. “No, it didn’t catch; it fell off. Fine. That takes care of that. You do have a microtrans on you somewhere; we’ll need a strobe light to pick up its flux.” She fished in the glove compartment of the quibble and came up with a battery-operated strobe disc. “I think I can find it,” she said, setting the strobe light into activity.

The microtrans turned out to be in residence in the cuff of his left sleeve. Alys pushed a pin through it, and that was that.

“Is there anything else?” Jason asked her.

“Possibly a minicam. A very small camera transmitting a TV image back to academy monitors. But I didn’t see them wind one into you; I think we can take a chance and forget that.” She turned, then, to scrutinize him. “Who are you?” she asked. “By the way.”

Jason said, “An unperson.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning that I don’t exist.”

“Physically?”

“I don’t know,”—he said, truthfully. Maybe, he thought, if I had been more open with her brother the police general … maybe he could have worked it out. After all, Felix Buckman was a seven. Whatever that meant.

But still—Buckman had probed in the right direction; he had brought out a good deal. And in a very short time—a period punctuated by a late-night breakfast and a cigar.

The girl said, “So you’re Jason Taverner. The man McNulty was trying to pin down and couldn’t. The man with no data on him anywhere in the world. No birth certificate; no school records; no—”

“How is it you know all this?” Jason said.

“I looked over McNulty’s report.” Her tone was blithe. “In Felix’s office. It interested me.”

“Then why did you ask me who I am?”

Alys said, “I wondered if you knew. I had heard from McNulty; this time I wanted your side of it. The antipol side, as they call it.”

“I can’t add anything to what McNulty knows,” Jason said.

“That’s not true.” She had begun to interrogate him now, precisely in the manner her brother had a short time ago. A low, informal tone of voice, as if something merely casual were being discussed, then the intense focus on his face, the graceful motions of her arms and hands, as if, while talking to him, she danced a little. With herself. Beauty dancing on beauty, he thought; he found her physically, sexually exciting. And he had had enough of sex, God knew, for the next several days.

“Okay,” he conceded. “I know more.”

“More than you told Felix?”

He hesitated. And, in doing so, answered.

“Yes,” Alys said.

He shrugged. It had become obvious.

“Tell you what,” Alys said briskly. “Would you like to see how a police general lives? His home? His billion-dollar castle?”

“You’d let me in there?” he said, incredulous. “If he found out—” He paused. Where is this woman leading me? he asked himself. Into terrible danger; everything in him sensed it, became at once wary and alert. He felt his own cunning course through him, infusing every part of his somatic being. His body knew that here, more than at any other time, he had to be careful. “You have legal access to his home?” he said, calming himself; he made his voice natural, devoid of any unusual tension.

“Hell,” Alys said, “I live with him. We’re twins; we’re very close. Incestuously close.”

Jason said, “I don’t want to walk into a setup hammered out between you and General Buckman.”

“A setup between Felix and me?” She laughed sharply. “Felix and I couldn’t collaborate in painting Easter eggs. Come on; let’s shoot over to the house. Between us we have a good deal of interesting objects. Medieval wooden chess sets, old bone-china cups from England. Some beautiful early U.S. stamps printed by the National Banknote Company. Do stamps interest you?”

“No,” he said.

“Guns?”

He hesitated. “To some extent.” He remembered his own gun; this was the second time in twenty-four hours that he had had reason to remember it.

Eying him, Alys said, “You know, for a small man you’re not bad-looking. And you’re older than I like … but not much so. You’re a six, aren’t you?”

He nodded.

“Well?” Alys said. “Do you want to see a police general’s castle?”

Jason said, “Okay.” They would find him wherever he went, whenever they wanted him. With or without a microtrans pinned on his cuff.

Turning on the engine of her quibble, Alys Buckman spun the wheel, pressed down on the pedal; the quibble shot up at a ninety-degree angle to the street. A police engine, he realized. Twice the horsepower of domestic models.

“There is one thing,” Alys said as she steered through traffic, “that I want you to get clear in your mind.” She glanced over at him to be sure he was listening. “Don’t make any sexual advances toward me. If you do I’ll kill you.” She tapped her belt and he saw, tucked within it, a police-model weapon tube; it glinted blue and black in the morning sun.

“Noticed and attended to,” he said, and felt uneasy. He already did not like the leather and iron costume she wore; fetishistic qualities were profoundly involved, and he had never cared for them. And now this ultimatum. Where was her head sexually? With other lesbians? Was that it?

In answer to his unspoken question, Alys said calmly, “All my libido, my sexuality, is tied up with Felix.”

“Your brother?” He felt cold, frightened incredulity. “How?”

“We’ve lived an incestuous relationship for five years,” Alys said, adroitly maneuvering her quibble in the heavy morning Los Angeles traffic. “We have a child, three years old. He’s kept by a housekeeper and nurse down in Key West, Florida. Barney is his name.”

“And you’re telling me this?” he said, amazed beyond belief. “Someone you don’t even know?”

“Oh, I know you very well, Jason Taverner,” Alys said; she lifted the quibble up into a higher lane, increased velocity. The traffic, now, had thinned; they were leaving greater L.A. “I’ve been a fan of yours, of your Tuesday night TV show, for years. And I have records of yours, and once I heard you sing live at the Orchid Room at the Hotel St. Francis in San Francisco.” She smiled briefly at him. “Felix and I, we’re both collectors … and one of the things I collect is Jason Taverner records.” Her darting, frenetic smile increased. “Over the years I’ve collected all nine.”

Jason said huskily, his voice shaking, “Ten. I’ve put out ten LPs. The last few with light-show projection tracks.”

“Then I missed one,” Alys said, agreeably. “Here. Turn around and look in the back seat.”

Twisting about, he saw in the rear seat his earliest album: Taverner and the Blue, Blue Blues. “Yes,” he said, seizing it and bringing it forward onto his lap.

“There’s another one there,” Alys said. “My favorite out of all of them.”

He saw, then, a dog-eared copy of There’ll Be a Good Time with Taverner Tonight. “Yes,” he said. “That’s the best one I ever did.”

“You see?” Alys said. The quibble dipped now, spiraling down in a helical pattern toward a cluster of large estates, tree– and grass-surrounded, below. “Here’s the house.”

19

Its blades vertical now, the quibble sank to an asphalt spot in the center of the great lawn of the house. Jason barely noticed the house: three story, Spanish style with black iron railings on the balconies, red-tile roof, adobe or stucco walls; he could not tell. A large house, with beautiful oak trees surrounding it; the house had been built into the landscape without destroying it. The house blended and seemed a part of the trees and grass, an extension into the realm of the manmade.

Alys shut off the quibble, kicked open a balky door. “Leave the records in the car and come along,” she said to him as she slid from the quibble and upright, onto the lawn.

Reluctantly, he placed the record albums back on the seat and followed her, hurrying to catch up with her; the girl’s long black-sheathed legs carried her rapidly toward the huge front gate of the house.

“We even have pieces of broken glass bottles embedded in the top of the walls. To repel bandits … in this day and age. The house once belonged to the great Ernie Till, the Western actor.” She pressed a button mounted on the front gate before the house and there appeared a brown-uniformed private pol, who scrutinized her, nodded, released the power surge that slid the gate aside.

To Alys, Jason said, “What do you know? You know I’m—”

“You’re fabulous,” Alys said matter-of-factly. “I’ve known it for years.”

“But you’ve been where I was. Where I always am. Not here.”

Taking his arm, Alys guided him down an adobe-and-slate corridor and then down a flight of five brick steps, into a sunken living room, an ancient place in this day, but beautiful.

He did not, however, give a damn; he wanted to talk to her, to find out what and how she knew. And what it signified.

“Do you remember this place?” Alys said.

“No,” he said.

“You should. You’ve been here before.”

“I haven’t,” he said, guardedly; she had thoroughly trapped his credulity by producing the two records. I’ve got to have them, he said to himself. To show to—yes, he thought; to whom? To General Buckman? And if I do show him, what will it get me?

“A cap of mescaline?” Alys said, going to a drug case, a large hand-oiled walnut cabinet at the end of the leather and brass bar on the far side of the living room.

“A little,” he said. But then his response surprised him; he blinked. “I want to keep my head clear,” he amended.

She brought him a tiny enameled drug tray on which rested a crystal tumbler of water and a white capsule. “Very good stuff. Harvey’s Yellow Number One, imported from Switzerland in bulk, capsuled on Bond Street.” She added, “And not strong at all. Color stuff.”

“Thanks.” He accepted the glass and the white capsule; he drank the mescaline down, placed the glass back on the tray. “Aren’t you having any?” he asked her, feeling—belatedly—wary.

“I’m already spaced,” Alys said genially, smiling her gold baroque tooth smile. “Can’t you tell? I guess not; you’ve never seen me any other way.”

“Did you know I’d be brought to the L.A. Police Academy?” he asked. You must have, he thought, because you had the two records of mine with you. Had you not known, the chances of your having them alone are zero out of a billion, virtually.

“I monitored some of their transmissions,” Alys said; turning, she roamed restlessly off, tapping on the small enameled tray with one long fingernail. “I happened to pick up the official traffic between Vegas and Felix. I like to listen to him now and then during the time he’s on duty. Not always, but”—she pointed toward a room beyond an open corridor at the near side—“I want to look at something; I’ll show it to you, if it’s as good as Felix said.”

He followed, the buzz of questions in his mind dinning at him as he walked. If she can get across, he thought, go back and forth, as she seems to have done—“He said the center drawer of his maple desk,” Alys said reflectively as she stood in the center of the house’s library; leather-bound books rose up in cases mounted to the high ceiling of the chamber. Several desks, a glass case of tiny cups, various early chess sets, two ancient Tarot card decks … Alys wandered over to a New England desk, opened a drawer, peered within. “Ah,” she said, and brought out a glassine envelope.

“Alys—” Jason began, but she cut him off with a brusque snap of her fingers.

“Be quiet while I look at this.” From the surface of the desk she took a large magnifying glass; she scrutinized the envelope. “A stamp,” she explained, then, glancing up. “I’ll take it out so you can look at it.” Finding a pair of philatelic tongs she carefully drew the stamp from its envelope and set it down on the felt pad at the front edge of the desk.

Obediently, Jason peeped through the magnifying lens at the stamp. It seemed to him a stamp like any other stamp, except that unlike modern stamps it had been printed in only one color.

“Look at the engraving on the animals,” Alys said. “The herd of steer. It’s absolutely perfect; every line is exact. This stamp has never been—” She stopped his hand as he started to touch the stamp. “Oh no,” she said. “Don’t ever touch a stamp with your fingers; always use tongs.”

“Is it valuable?” he asked.

“Not really. But they’re almost never sold. I’ll explain it to you someday. This is a present to me from Felix, because he loves me. Because, he says, I’m good in bed.”

“It’s a nice stamp,” Jason said, disconcerted. He handed the magnifying glass back to her.

“Felix told me the truth; it’s a good copy. Perfectly centered, light cancellation that doesn’t mar the center picture, and—” Deftly, with the tongs, she flipped the stamp over on its back, allowed it to lie on the felt pad face down. All at once her expression changed; her face glowed hotly and she said, “That motherfucker.”

“What’s the matter?” he said.

“A thin spot.” She touched a corner of the stamp’s back side with the tongs. “Well, you can’t tell from the front. But that’s Felix. Hell, it’s probably counterfeit anyhow. Except that Felix always somehow manages not to buy counterfeits. Okay, Felix; that’s one for you.” Thoughtfully, she said, “I wonder if he’s got another one in his own collection. I could switch them.” Going to a wall safe, she twiddled for a time with the dials, opened the safe at last, and brought out a huge and heavy album, which she lugged to the desk. “Felix,” she said, “does not know I know the combination to that safe. So don’t tell him.” She cautiously turned heavy-gauge pages, came to one on which four stamps rested. “No one-dollar black,” she said. “But he may have hidden it elsewhere. He may even have it down at the academy.” Closing the album, she restored it to the wall safe.

“The mescaline,” Jason said, “is beginning to affect me.” His legs ached: for him that was always a sign that mescaline was beginning to act in his system. “I’ll sit down,” he said, and managed to locate a leather-covered easy chair before his legs gave way. Or seemed to give way; actually they never did: it was a drug-instigated illusion. But all the same it felt real.

“Would you like to see a collection of chaste and ornate snuff boxes?” Alys inquired. “Felix has a terribly fine collection. All antiques, in gold, silver, alloys, with cameo engravings, hunting scenes—no?” She seated herself opposite him, crossed her long, black-sheathed legs; her high-heeled shoe dangled as she swung it back and forth. “One time Felix bought an old snuff box at an auction, paid a lot for it, brought it home. He cleaned the old snuff out of it and found a spring-operated lever mounted at the bottom of the box, or what seemed to be the bottom. The lever operated when you screwed down a tiny screw. It took him all day to find a tool small enough to rotate the screw. But at least he got it.” She laughed.

“What happened?” Jason said.

“The bottom of the box—a false bottom with a tin plate concealed in it. He got the plate out.” She laughed again, her gold tooth ornamentation sparkling. “It turned out to be a two-hundred-year-old dirty picture. Of a chick copulating with a Shetland pony. Tinted, too, in eight colors. Worth, oh, say, five thousand dollars—not much, but it genuinely delighted us. The dealer, of course, didn’t know it was there.”

“I see,” Jason said.

“You don’t have any interest in snuff boxes,” Alys said, still smiling.

“I’d like—to see it,” he said. And then he said. “Alys, you know about me; you know who I am. Why doesn’t anybody else know?”

“Because they’ve never been there.”

“Where?”

Alys massaged her temples, twisted her tongue, stared blankly ahead, as if lost in thought. As if barely hearing him. “You know,” she said, sounding bored and a little irritable. “Christ, man, you lived there forty-two years. What can I tell you about that place that you don’t already know?” She glanced up, then, her heavy lips curling mischievously; she grinned at him.

“How did I get here?” he said.

“You—” She hesitated. “I’m not sure I should tell you.”

Loudly, he said, “Why not?”

“Let it come in time.” She made a damping motion with her hand. “In time, in time. Look, man; you’ve already been hit by a lot; you almost got shipped to a labor camp, and you know what kind, today. Thanks to that asshole McNulty and my dear brother. My brother the police general.” Her face had become ugly with revulsion, but then she smiled her provocative smile once again. Her lazy, gold-toothed, inviting smile.

Jason said, “I want to know where I am.”

“You’re in my study in my house. You’re perfectly safe; we got all the insects off you. And no one’s going to break in here. Do you know what?” She sprang from her chair, bounding to her feet like a superlithe animal; involuntarily he drew back. “Have you ever made it by phone?” she demanded, bright-eyed and eager.

“Made what?”

“The grid,” Alys said. “Don’t you know about the phone grid?”

“No,” he admitted. But he had heard of it.

“Your—everybody’s—sexual aspects are linked electronically, and amplified, to as much as you can endure. It’s addictive, because it’s electronically enhanced. People, some of them, get so deep into it they can’t pull out; their whole lives revolve around the weekly—or, hell, even daily!—setting up of the network of phone lines. It’s regular picturephones, which you activate by credit card, so it’s free at the time you do it; the sponsors bill you once a month and if you don’t pay they cut your phone out of the grid.”

“How many people,” he asked, “are involved in this?”

“Thousands.”

“At one time?”

Alys nodded. “Most of them have been doing it two, three years. And they’ve deteriorated physically—and mentally—from it. Because the part of the brain where the orgasm is experienced is gradually burned out. But don’t put down the people; some of the finest and most sensitive minds on earth are involved. For them it’s a sacred, holy communion. Except you can spot a gridder when you see one; they look debauched, old, fat, listless—the latter always between the phone-line orgies, of course.”

“And you do this?” She did not look debauched, old, fat, or listless to him.

“Now and then. But I never get hooked; I cut myself out of the grid just in time. Do you want to try it?”

“No,” he said.

“Okay,” Alys said reasonably, undaunted. “What would you like to do? We have a good collection of Rilke and Brecht in interlinear translation discs. The other day Felix came home with a quad-and-light set of all seven Sibelius symphonies; it’s very good. For dinner Emma is preparing frog’s legs … Felix loves both frog’s legs and escargot. He eats out in good French and Basque restaurants most of the time but tonight—”

“I want to know,” Jason interrupted, “where I am.”

“Can’t you simply be happy?”

He rose to his feet—with difficulty—and confronted her. Silently.

20

The mescaline had furiously begun to affect him; the room grew lit up with colors, and the perspective factor altered so that the ceiling seemed a million miles high. And, gazing at Alys, he saw her hair come alive … like Medusa’s, he thought, and felt fear.

Ignoring him, Alys continued, “Felix especially likes Basque cuisine, but they cook with so much butter that it gives him pyloric spasms. He also has a good collection of Weird Tales, and he loves baseball. And—let’s see.” She wandered off, a finger tapping against her lips as she reflected. “He’s interested in the occult. Do you—”

“I feel something,” Jason said.

“What do you feel?”

Jason said, “I can’t get away.”

“It’s the mes. Take it easy.”

“I—” He pondered; a giant weight lay on his brain, but all throughout the weight streaks of light, of satori-like insight, shot here and there.

“What I collect,” Alys said, “is in the next room, what we call the library. This is the study. In the library Felix has all his law books … did you know he’s a lawyer, as well as a police general? And he has done some good things; I have to admit it. Do you now what he did once?”

He could not answer; he could only stand. Inert, hearing the sounds but not the meaning. Of it.

“For a year Felix was legally in charge of one-fourth of Terra’s forced-labor camps. He discovered that by virtue of an obscure law passed years ago when the forced-labor camps were more like death camps—with a lot of blacks in them—anyhow, he discovered that this statute permitted the camps to operate only during the Second Civil War. And he had the power to close any and all camps at any time he felt it to be in the public interest. And those blacks and the students who’d been working in the camps are damn tough and strong, from years of heavy manual labor. They’re not like the effete, pale, clammy students living beneath the campus areas. And then he researched and discovered another obscure statute. Any camp that isn’t operating at a profit has to be—or rather had to be—closed. So Felix changed the amount of money—very little, of course—paid to the detainees. So all he had to do was jack up their pay, show red ink in the books, and barn; he could shut down the camps.” She laughed.

He tried to speak but couldn’t. Inside him his mind churned like a tattered rubber ball, sinking and rising, slowing down, speeding up, fading and then flaring brilliantly; the shafts of light scampered all through him, piercing every part of his body.

“But the big thing Felix did,” Alys said, “had to do with the student kibbutzim under the burned-out campuses. A lot of them are desperate for food and water; you know how it is: the students try to make it into town, foraging for supplies, ripping off and looting. Well, the police maintain a lot of agents among the students agitating for a final shootout with the police … which the police and nats are hopefully waiting for. Do you see?”

“I see,” he said, “a hat.”

“But Felix tried to keep off any sort of shootout. But to do it he had to get supplies to the students; do you see?”

“The hat is red,” Jason said. “Like your ears.”

“Because of his position as marshal in the pol hierarchy, Felix had access to informant reports as to the condition of each student kibbutz. He knew which ones were failing and which were making it. It was his job to boil out of the horde of abstracts the ultimately important facts: which kibbutzim were going under and which were not. Once he had listed those in trouble, other high police officers met with him to decide how to apply pressure which would hasten the end. Defeatist agitation by police finks, sabotage of food and water supplies. Desperate—actually hopeless—forays out of the campus area in search of help—for instance, at Columbia one time they had a plan of getting to the Harry S Truman Labor Camp and liberating the detainees and arming them, but at that even Felix had to say ‘Intervene!’ But anyhow it was Felix’s job to determine the tactic for each kibbutz under scrutiny. Many, many times he advised no action at all. For this, of course, the hardhats criticized him, demanded his removal from his position.” Alys paused. “He was a full police marshal, then, you have to realize.”

“Your red,” Jason said, “is fantidulous.”

“I know.” Alys’s lips turned down. “Can’t you hold your hit, man? I’m trying to tell you something. Felix got demoted, from police marshal to police general, because he saw to it, when he could, that in the kibbutzim the students were bathed, fed, their medical supplies looked after, cots provided. Like he did for the forced-labor camps under his jurisdiction. So now he’s just a general. But they leave him alone. They’ve done all they can to him for now and he still holds a high office.”

“But your incest,” Jason said. “What if?” He paused; he could not remember the rest of his sentence. “If,” he said, and that seemed to be it; he felt a furious glow, arising from the fact that he had managed to convey his message to her. “If,” he said again, and the inner glow became wild with happy fury. He exclaimed aloud.

“You mean what if the marshals knew that Felix and I have a son? What would they do?”

“They would do,” Jason said. “Can we hear some music? Or give me—” His words ceased; none more entered his brain. “Gee,” he said. “My mother wouldn’t be here. Death.”

Alys inhaled deeply, sighed. “Okay, Jason,” she said. “I’ll give up trying to rap with you. Until your head is back.”

“Talk,” he said.

“Would you like to see my bondage cartoons?”

“What,” he said, “that’s?”

“Drawings, very stylized, of chicks tied up, and men—”

“Can I lie down?” he said. “My legs won’t work. I think my right leg extends to the moon. In other words”—he considered—“I broke it standing up.”

“Come here.” She led him, step by step, from the study and back into the living room. “Lie down on the couch,” she told him. With agonizing difficulty he did so. “I’ll go get you some Thorazine; it’ll counteract the mes.”

“This is a mess,” he said.

“Let’s see … where the hell did I put that? I rarely if ever have to use it, but I keep it in case something like this … God damn it, can’t you drop a single cap of mes and be something? I take five at once.”

“But you’re vast,” Jason said.

“I’ll be back; I’m going upstairs.” Alys strode off, toward a door located several distances away; for a long, long time he watched her dwindle—how did she accomplish it? It seemed incredible that she could shrink down to almost nothing—and then she vanished. He felt, at that, terrible fear. He knew that he had become alone, without help. Who will help me? he asked himself. I have to get away from these stamps and cups and snuffboxes and bondage cartoons and phone grids and frog’s legs I’ve got to get to that quibble I’ve got to fly away and back to where I know back in town maybe with Ruth Rae if they’ve let her go or even back to Kathy Nelson this woman is too much for me so is her brother them and their incest child in Florida named what?

He rose unsteadily, groped his way across a rug that sprang a million leaks of pure pigment as he trod on it, crushing it with his ponderous shoes, and then, at last, he stumbled against the front door of the unsteady room.

Sunlight. He had gotten outside.

The quibble.

He hobbled to it.

Inside he sat at the controls, bewildered by legions of knobs, levers, wheels, pedals, dials. “Why doesn’t it go?” he said aloud. “Get going!” he told it, rocking back and forth in the driver’s seat. “Won’t she let me go?” he asked the quibble.

The keys. Of course he couldn’t fly it no keys.

Her coat in the back seat; he had witnessed it. And also her large mailpouch purse. There, the keys in her purse. There.

The two record albums. Taverner and the Blue, Blue Blues. And the best of them all: There’ll be a Good Time. He groped, managed somehow to lift both record albums up, conveyed them to the empty seat beside him. I have the proof here, he realized. It’s here in these records and it’s here in the house. With her. I’ve got to find it here if I’m going to. Find it. Nowhere else. Even General Mr. Felix What-Is-He-Named? he won’t find it. He doesn’t know. As much as me.

Carrying the enormous record albums he ran back to the house—around him the landscape flowed, with whip, tall, tree-like organisms gulping in air out of the sweet blue sky, organisms which absorbed water and light, ate the hue into the sky … he reached the gate, pushed against it. The gate did not budge. Button.

He found no.

Step by step. Feel each inch with fingers. Like in the dark. Yes, he thought. I’m in darkness. He set down the much-too-big record albums, stood against the wall beside the gate, slowly massaged the rubber-like surface of the wall. Nothing. Nothing.

The button.

He pressed it, grabbed up the record albums, stood in front of the gate as it incredibly slowly creaked its noisy protesting way open.

A brown-uniformed man carrying a gun appeared. Jason said, “I had to go back to the quibble for something.”

“Perfectly all right, sir,” the man in the brown uniform said. “I saw you leave and I knew you’d be back.”

“Is she insane?” Jason asked him.

“I’m not in a position to know, sir,” the man in the brown uniform said, and he backed away, touching his visored cap.

The front door of the house hung open as he had left it. He scrambled through, descended brick steps, found himself once more in the radically irregular living room with its million-mile-high ceiling. “Alys!” he said. Was she in the room? He carefully looked in all directions; as he had done when searching for the button he phased his way through every visible inch of the room. The bar at the far end with the handsome walnut drug cabinet … couch, chairs. Pictures on the walls. A face in one of the pictures jeered at him but he did not care; it could not leave the wall. The quad phonograph.

His records. Play them.

He lifted at the lid of the phonograph but it wouldn’t open. Why? he asked. Locked? No, it slid out. He slid it out, with a terrible noise, as if he had destroyed it. Tone arm. Spindle. He got one of his records out of its sleeve and placed in on the spindle. I can work these things, he said, and turned on the amplifiers, setting the mode to phono. Switch that activated the changer. He twisted it. The tone arm lifted; the turntable began to spin, agonizingly slowly. What was the matter with it? Wrong speed? No; he checked. Thirty-three and a third. The mechanism of the spindle heaved and the record dropped.

Loud noise of the needle hitting the lead-in groove. Crackles of dust, clicks. Typical of old quad records. Easily misused and damaged; all you had to do was breathe on them.

Background hiss. More crackles.

No music.

Lifting the tone arm, he set it farther in. Great roaring crash as the stylus struck the surface; he winced, sought the volume control to turn it down. Still no music. No sound of himself singing.

The strength the mescaline had over him began now to waver; he felt coldly, keenly sober. The other record. Swiftly he got it from its jacket and sleeve, placed it on the spindle, rejected the first record.

Sound of the needle touching plastic surface. Background hiss and the inevitable crackles and clicks. Still no music.

The records were blank.